Comment by babelchips | Hacker News Reader

Comment by babelchips | Hacker News Reader

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Those original internet services didn't solve problems for the vast majority of business (or people) immediately! The technology was solid from the start, but the adoption curve was far, far slower than you suggest. By a long shot.

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.

> Those original internet services didn't solve problems for the vast majority of business (or people) immediately! The technology was solid from the start, but the adoption curve was far, far slower than you suggest. By a long shot.

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!

I’m old, I’ve been using the internet since the late 1980’s.

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.

I too am old. I hear you. But just because you could do those things back then doesn't prove your point. Businesses took the large part of the 90s, at the very least, to really get on board with those technologies. And it wasn't though lack of desire - a lot of other factors need to come together to make the web viable in the mainstream (broadband, browser standards, TLS, countless components). None of which happened overnight.

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.

> 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.

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.

Yeah you could write early internet use cases on a cocktail napkin:

“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.

Yeah, I had a ton of people who were basically switching from “we take orders/provide support over the phone/mail” to “over the internet”. It wasn’t the kind of stuff which gets you on the cover of Wired as a visionary but it sure outlasted a lot of that because it was instantly recognizable as a good move.

- The instantaneous transfer of value between two parties, without an intermediary.

- 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.

> - The instantaneous transfer of value between two parties, without an intermediary.

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.

Here’s a discussion on the subject of the benefits of NFTs and the broader concept of tokenisation as it applies to supply chains and finance.

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.

I wasn’t conspicuously avoiding anything. I didn’t see you’d asked earlier. Examples given.

You’ve linked to a company’s press releases, which rather verbosely tell us that they’re doing “tokenization” or selling shares like people have been doing for centuries. What’s omitted are the benefits from doing so – a company switching from mail/phone to internet ordering, for example, could easily show how they were saving money and shipping orders faster. For this, I’d expect to see favorable metrics for customers enjoying lower costs.

The press release was the first one that came up in my search that explained things clearly enough for the uninitiated. There are many other articles elsewhere covering these things if you care to look.

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