NFTs used for pictures of monkeys etc are now effectively worthless.
NFTs as a technology, for tokenizing real world assets, is the far more interesting and useful part.
https://www.ledgerinsights.com/abrdn-tokenize-money-market-f...
Watching NFTs from afar and thinking it’s all just JPGs means you only have 5% of the story.
https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/2023/04/to...
https://www.cryptowisser.com/news/redswan-cre-builds-its-tok...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/quarter-fractional-home-equit...
There are many other projects in various states, touching entertainment (AAA gaming), supply chain, integration remittance, carbon markets.
Reading below it’s clearly a perception problem.
The fundamental concept of NFTs is profoundly useful. The fact a trivial use case (to represent ownership of JPGs) is all anyone here knows or talks about is the real problem.
NFT art didn’t work. NFTs in games didn’t work. NFT shares of things didn’t work.
Enjoy your intangible beanie baby. At least those had a (small) intrinsic worth.
But to entirely dismiss the category because you are only privy to slow & expensive implementations or trivial use cases is like saying no one will fly across the Atlantic or be able to transport heavy goods because the Wright Flyer can barely do 30mph.
There is a fundamental technology here that goes beyond trivial collectibles. If you need examples just ask rather than throw the baby out with the bath water.
NFTs haven’t had that because they solve a problem almost nobody actually has: complete trust less processing of transactions small and slow enough to be handled on a blockchain. Most real world applications necessitate trusted third parties and at that point you can use a much simpler system at considerably lower cost.
The difference with NFTs is the concept is sound - trusted, immutable transactions recorded on a public ledger without a third-party intermediary. The difficult part is making it work efficiently and securely. Until very recently NFTs have been slow and expensive (in cost and energy) to transact. The most visible use cases being trivial (proof of ownership of JPGs). But the answer to those technical limitations IS already here and getting better, speed and costs are not a problem if you stop referring to Bitcoin and Ethereum.
The problem is, most people dismiss the entire venture (tokenisation and the larger benefits of public DLTs) because they are only looking at the mainstream projects and agreeing with lazy journalism to have their biases validated.
The web was spectacularly useful right from the beginning. You could look up airline schedules and buy tickets instead of going downtown to a travel agent. You could email someone instead of sending a letter or making an expensive long distance call. And like a million other things.
NFTs on the other hand are fucking useless. Unless you’re counting “scam others out of money with bullshit stories” to be a use case.
Reading all the comments here, the sentiment over NFTs is clearly reductionist ("just monkey JPGs") and based on a very limited understanding of the fundamental benefits of the technology. Most of the real world benefits are overshadowed by this kind of sentiment and shows a clear lack of knowledge and research from the wider community.
If you truly are technically literate, you'll know the mainstream view of any nascent technology is always very weak and sensationalist (the headline in the OP a good example). If you were well versed in NFTs and DLT technology you'll know there is new ground being broken here. Your last sentence tells me that you are not well informed on the subject. If you were, you would not be saying such things and understand the computer science behind the core concepts.
So yes, whilst the NFT space is largely full of scams and is apparently useless, that doesn't mean there isn't a viable technology at play which has major benefits in multiple industries.
This is the key difference: you have been conspicuously unable to provide examples of a competitive service. Nobody in the 90s internet struggled to do that, and they rarely were asked to because there were so many cases where the internet did something useful that even a casual follower of the news would be aware of. There were plenty of dodgy companies but they weren’t the only ones, and existing major businesses were also jumping on board.
“Buy plane tickets”
“Find rare books”
“See movie showtimes”
“Sell unwanted items”
And so on.
You can’t do that with NFTs because the whole thing is bullshit.
- The ability to publicly and immediately prove ownership (chain of provenance) to a third party.
- Multi-signatories, the ability for one or more parties to have joint cryptographic ownership over the token. For a pre-defined number of those owners (majority, 2 of 5, all members etc) to be able revoke, change, transfer the token as required, again without an intermediary.
https://youtu.be/kNgTR5lii4M?t=25m33s
This is just one clip but the point is, referring back to the OP, the idea that NFTs have failed, that they are useless, that it’s just a load of bullshit is just another way of saying you have a very narrow understanding of tokenisation in the main.
This is the only one that isn't nonsense word salad. But it's simply not true.
The intermediary for a blockchain transaction is the group of people who run that blockchain.
The intermediary of PayPal is the group of people who run PayPal.
And so on. You can tell they are intermediaries because without them you can't transfer the value. There's no way to do it just between the two of you, you need this loosely organized group of people in between the two of you.
And that loosely organized group of people, it turns out, is WAY less reliable than basically every other option.
I was there and, no, it wasn’t. It’s true that it wasn’t universally accessible on day one but that actually makes the comparison even less favorable for NFTs because even with far lower barriers to entry they’ve had far lower adoption. Businesses got online because it was profitable within months, not decades!
In this way, we can take a US$100 million private equity asset, tokenise it, and turn it into 100 million US$1 tokens. These tokens can then be listed on a regulated digital securities exchange to trade on a secondary market. By doing this, the minimum investment is now affordable to the smallest investor, while the secondary market creates liquidity."
https://www.abrdn.com/en-gb/corporate/news-and-insights/expa...
This doesn’t seem any different, at least not spiritually, from fractional ownership. What do NFTs do in this regard that we can’t already do?
Read more about Abrdn and Toko if you want to learn more.