An NFT is just a digital certificate stored on a blockchain. It's certainly not a scam and has perfectly legit uses.
For a variety of reasons, everything related to blockchain is ridiculously overhyped. What should be boring accounting technology is suddenly a pop culture fad, and that birthed thousands of get-rich-quick schemes.
It's a flaw in human behavior though, not a problem with NFTs or cryptocurrencies.
In theory, yes.
> It's a flaw in human behavior though, not a problem with NFTs or cryptocurrencies.
If you find another lifeform besides humans to market NFTs and cryptocurrencies to I'll buy this argument.
Just because scammers jumped all over it, and even if most NFTs are scams, that does nothing to overwrite the fact that there's a useful technology here, albeit with a niche purpose.
The problem is that people are using the hype to scam, that's human behavior, not an issue with NFTs themselves, which are just boring certificates.
For NFT's this is even worse, because they not only claim to be magic internet money, they also (often) claim to represent a real world object or artwork, so you basically have two overvalued markets reinforcing one another. An NFT does not represent a ownership over anything more than the NFT itself unless it also comes with legal and/or physical possession of the thing it supposedly represents. If it comes with legal or physical possession then the NFT is not the core of the transaction, is it?
In theory an NFT is just anything on a blockchain that cannot be equally substituted. In practice it is a way to hype and scam.
Of course, you buy a house, not a deed. The fact that people are hideously misinformed about NFTs isn't a problem with NFTs though. It doesn't make any sense to me to blame the technology for people's ignorance.
The question I was asking (and perhaps I should have been more clear): If I'm not buying the house (I can't live in it), and I'm not buying the mortgage (as in a bank would), and I'm not buying a picture of the house (as in having exclusive rights to an image), but I am buying a hash of a specific image of the house, is that not a bit crazy?
And if you think it is but think there are better usecases for NFTs then I'd advise changing the acronym for your use-case because for me and a lot of other people NFT equals either scam or bubble. The term is tainted.
I know it's possible, but I haven't seen any.
But hey, many have seen their friends have success in crypto while they've remained on the sidelines.. and they don't like it.
They'll defame blockchain & nfts to no end rather than attempt to seek understanding.
Intermediary-less digital ownership is incredibly powerful & will only grow in usage & utility by open-source evolving nature, perhaps exponentially.
Bitcoin was technically interesting. Whatever your stance on all the negatives in the real world, everybody agrees its elegant in theory. It combined problems to create a solution. That's what real innovation looks like.
NFT's as 'investments' are a scam. Claiming Git commit hashes as property is not valuable, innovative, or game-changing. From the bottom to the top of the pyramid its people who are salty they didn't make more money in 'crypto' and are afraid of missing out twice in their lives.
I can show an nft that represents a role, access to an event, a cross-game asset, as a property title, as a binding contract, rights to use intellectual property etc.