Kind of seems like dogecoin or other meme/shitcoins? You own a digital asset that you think will go up in value. Coins are currency while NFTs are more like.. rights to a song?
I'm wondering why we don't get rid of the digital asset itself and replace it with a 1x1 pixel gif... it would accelerate the bubble since one doesn't have to spend time creating fake 'art'.
My take is that most of the bigger collectors are probably wealthy folks that have $xsx,xxx - $x,xxx,xxx budgets in "investing" in this emerging economy of NFTs. They are creating the market by collecting. That's all fine, but the really promising piece of all of this is that it acts as a type of "patreon" for artists, especially digital artists.
Not sure I even touched on answering your question, but I think it's great that people of means suddenly have an easy way to support artists far and wide, instead of say buying from a gallery, or buying from the guy you walk by on the street when you're on vacation.
This new space has allowed folks to feel like artists, and some of the more talented people that got attention early have even been able to remove themselves from poverty.
People spend money to buy things for many reasons. I think that anyone collecting NFT art because they are "investing" is walking a dangerous tightrope, but it's a great way to support artists you like, especially if you believe "digital ownership" is something that will be moving forward in our culture.
It's obviously a bit tenuous because of the digital only nature. A real Banksy that physically exists with proof of originality affords control and exclusivity over it's access. A digital Banksy is provably yours as an NFT, but doesn't actually prevent others from viewing it trivially and perfect copies obfuscate the nature of "original". So you own it, and assumedly have exclusive rights to sell it, but it's also very easy to copy and distribute.
I'd be very interested to see if the recent push to artificially inflate the price of NFT's in order to set a precedence for what people should expect as their innate value works.
And this is also questionable. I mean, anyone can make a perfect copy and sell it. They cannot get that sale recorded on some blockchain, but who cares? There are no legal ramifications, because the legal system does not recognize some random blockchain as authoritative regarding ownership, instead most jurisdictions have their own (central) database about registered/copyrighted works.
TL;DR - NFTs help prove ownership without needing a central authority (which is a big deal) e.g. have you ever been misled and bought a fake concert ticket? It's also huge for the collectibles market which is plagued with high-levels of fraud (which is a billion dollar industry).
- NFTs can also make fractionalized ownership more accessible. So using your analogy, as an artist I release a song but I sell fractions of my song as NFTs to my audience and when I receive royalties it automatically gets distributed to all the nft song owners.
There will be meme NFTs of course (the cat that got sold for $600k), it is a speculative asset that people are experimenting with but I think eventually things will reset and the useful NFTs will remain. They can have real utility whether for a virtual or physical world.
The same artwork or membership card or movie ticket can be wrapped in multiple NFT, each living on a different blockchain or on the same blockchain but in different contracts.
Hence you still need the central authority saying which chain is the true one. For example if the NFT represent a plot of virtual land, the game or software managing that land acts as the central authority.
If that is a sincere comment, you’re missing the point.
Where is the added value from NFTs? From my perspective, the only "value" from an NFT is the concept that a digital item that is indistinguishable from an identical digital item may now be tagged with a token that proves ownership (but only of that one digital item) and which may be bought and sold. This is unnecessary for things like insurance policies, land deeds, equity, intellectual property, and domain names. All of these items have meta-information that allows proof of ownership (land deeds are recorded; IP is registered with the USPTO; equity ownership is registered with brokers and trades are recorded with the SEC; etc.). There are already functioning systems setup to record, register, and transact these items.
Youtube has its content-id system.
And the library of congress has a copyright system for digital books as well.
A big difference is that NFTs do not come with any legal rights, outside of “owning” the NFT itself. You don’t own the underlying asset or the copyright, just the NFT of the asset.
But who honestly wants to own a digital copy (without underlying rights) of something that can't be consumed like a movie or book? We're supposed to now pay for an image I can view freely? Where's the benefit in owning the NFT of an asset? Perhaps if a device manufacturer comes out with a device to display ultra-high resolution art images in an attractive frame and you can only obtain a compatible copy of the ultra high-res image if you buy the corresponding NFT, this could be an attractive offering if executed properly but I'm not aware of any devices that create such value for NFTs.
NFTs are somewhat interesting but I strongly suspect there is market manipulation (most likely by players with investments in NFT-adjacent entities) going on with some of these NFT sales.