Indie store itch.io comes out swinging against NFTs

That is calling the child by its name. With so many big publishers pushing for NFTs I hope that they will fail completely and go shipwreck with that.

Give us good games with actual value, not another way to spend even more money on somethinh with no real value.

itch.io has been my go to place now this just makes it all the better.


Last edited by Mezron on 9 February 2022 at 2:02 pm UTC

Quoting: const

Quoting: PublicNuisanceI still have no idea what NFT's really are but if they're causing stupid people and their money to be parted then they're ok in my book.

If it was just about stupid, they could be ignored, but they are highly unethical for various reasons. Enabling fraud on top of ponzi - hurting people believing in it, destroying the environment while abusing and possibly hurting artists that aren't even actively participating. They can also make stupid people rich, depending on luck and timing, if that helps with your decision.

I seem to be doing a good job of ignoring them, I still have no idea what they even are. Pictures ? Loot ? I have no idea and even a wesb search didn't answer my question. Seems to me the only people being "hurt" by them is consumers partaking in this nonsense. If that is true then seems to me the logical response is to not to use them, buy them, etc.

Quoting: Pendragon

Quoting: ertuquequeAt the risk of being boring or even worse, making people angry, I'll try to give my take on NFTs, what they are and how they have been exploited for bad things today…

^^This... using tokens on a cryptographic block chain has a use.. .just not a scammy money-making scheme that it seems to be used as these days.

I ask this in all seriousness... what use do NFTs have that would (at minimum) offset the negatives inherent in their creation and add tangible value to those purchasing them? A piggyback question would be, for whatever answer there exists to the first question, how has that not been utilized in over a year?

Quoting: jrtValve does not make money by trading items outside of the steam market.

Revaluation of cost and speculation you do not take into account, of course?

Ask yourself a simple question: can an item cost $ 100 on the Steam trading platform when it is resold for $ 1000 on another platform? And then you will understand how Valve makes money on this.

Quoting: ObsidianBlk

Quoting: Pendragon

Quoting: ertuquequeAt the risk of being boring or even worse, making people angry, I'll try to give my take on NFTs, what they are and how they have been exploited for bad things today…

^^This... using tokens on a cryptographic block chain has a use.. .just not a scammy money-making scheme that it seems to be used as these days.

I ask this in all seriousness... what use do NFTs have that would (at minimum) offset the negatives inherent in their creation and add tangible value to those purchasing them? A piggyback question would be, for whatever answer there exists to the first question, how has that not been utilized in over a year?

Let me start with a couple of basics…

First of all, the simplest analogy I could come up to explain NFTs to a friend is: Imagine Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, but with a "skin" to make it "unique" or different from the other ones".

Now, following that same over-simplified concept, an NFT is a "coin" stored in a blockchain… So the usefulness of an NFT depends more or less on 3 things:

1.- What cryptocurrency is being used to "mint" that NFT. The more reliable and decentralized the cryptocurrency, the more reliable that NFT could (I stress the word COULD) be.
2.- Who is creating, promoting and delivering that NFT. Again, the more "serious" and reliable the entity, the more reliable the NFT.
3.- What's the purpose of that said NFT… An NFT could be as useless as a monkey avatar, or as useful as a certificate of ownership for a house!

So let's assume all 3 points are good:
1.- The NFT is based on something like the Ethereum blockchain (Bitcoin still doesn't support the creation of NFTs, not yet).
2.- The entity creating those NFTs is a well known real estate company that is fully compliant with all legal duties in the jurisdictions it operates.
3.- Those NFTs are digital certificates that are legally bonded to a real life property (let's say a house in Beverly Hills!).

As you can imagine, for NFTs to be really useful in real life, there needs to be a legal framework supporting them, which is something that as far as I know, doesn't exists anywhere yet… but I'm sure we'll get there; with NFTs, another iteration of the concept or something different, but still based in an open, decentralized, borderless and censorship resistant blockchain.

Today's iteration of NFTs are just attempts of using a really cool technology… in the most idiotic and incompetent way.

The technology just need to mature and evolve for another 5 to 10 years, hopefully people will come around and accept that is the future.

Quoting: mphuZ

Quoting: jrtValve does not make money by trading items outside of the steam market.

Revaluation of cost and speculation you do not take into account, of course?

Ask yourself a simple question: can an item cost $ 100 on the Steam trading platform when it is resold for $ 1000 on another platform? And then you will understand how Valve makes money on this.

That's a stupid argument, imho. This would imply that the one blockchain trading site is responsible for the market price. There are multiple, large, and way older item trading sites that don't use a blockchain. So you could spin this argument in the other direction as well. This is a normal market effect with multiple large and small players, at what point ends this “support” for a platform? Do you support crime because you use a currency that is also used by crime? You keep the currency at a specific value because you (and a lot of other people participating) exchange it for a good with a value (like food) and trust in the ability to do so in the future.

QuoteWe need to go all the way: not only to ban NFT on our site, but also to stop supporting others who sell NFT items.

If they are like you say, supporting them by taking a cut on their unrelated platform due to market effects and that needs to stop, what is your proposed solution?
The obvious solution is to disable trades between users and restrict it to the steam market. That would also result in a lot of unwanted side effects (e.g. players can't exchange items they have twice with someone who has something else twice)

Are the Steam Trading Cards a form of NFTs?

Good news. NFTs and cryptocurrencies can't die fast enough, as far as I am concerned. What a waste of resources for something that doesn't serve any real purpose, except fuelling people's greed.

I must say I watched the whole Video now, and still have no clue why they think NFTs are the "next big thing".

What it did was to strenghten my view that it's either a scam or a tool for exploitation of others to get rich if you have the money to invest in the first place.

Quoting: ertuqueque

Quoting: ObsidianBlk

Quoting: Pendragon

Quoting: ertuquequeAt the risk of being boring or even worse, making people angry, I'll try to give my take on NFTs, what they are and how they have been exploited for bad things today…

^^This... using tokens on a cryptographic block chain has a use.. .just not a scammy money-making scheme that it seems to be used as these days.

I ask this in all seriousness... what use do NFTs have that would (at minimum) offset the negatives inherent in their creation and add tangible value to those purchasing them? A piggyback question would be, for whatever answer there exists to the first question, how has that not been utilized in over a year?

Let me start with a couple of basics…

First of all, the simplest analogy I could come up to explain NFTs to a friend is: Imagine Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, but with a "skin" to make it "unique" or different from the other ones".

Now, following that same over-simplified concept, an NFT is a "coin" stored in a blockchain… So the usefulness of an NFT depends more or less on 3 things:

1.- What cryptocurrency is being used to "mint" that NFT. The more reliable and decentralized the cryptocurrency, the more reliable that NFT could (I stress the word COULD) be.
2.- Who is creating, promoting and delivering that NFT. Again, the more "serious" and reliable the entity, the more reliable the NFT.
3.- What's the purpose of that said NFT… An NFT could be as useless as a monkey avatar, or as useful as a certificate of ownership for a house!

So let's assume all 3 points are good:
1.- The NFT is based on something like the Ethereum blockchain (Bitcoin still doesn't support the creation of NFTs, not yet).
2.- The entity creating those NFTs is a well known real estate company that is fully compliant with all legal duties in the jurisdictions it operates.
3.- Those NFTs are digital certificates that are legally bonded to a real life property (let's say a house in Beverly Hills!).

As you can imagine, for NFTs to be really useful in real life, there needs to be a legal framework supporting them, which is something that as far as I know, doesn't exists anywhere yet… but I'm sure we'll get there; with NFTs, another iteration of the concept or something different, but still based in an open, decentralized, borderless and censorship resistant blockchain.

Today's iteration of NFTs are just attempts of using a really cool technology… in the most idiotic and incompetent way.

The technology just need to mature and evolve for another 5 to 10 years, hopefully people will come around and accept that is the future.

Yes... but you are still basing NFTs usefulness to crypto currency. Crypto currency, itself, still has not gained any true functionality and that has existed for over a decade of time. The oldest crypto, (to my knowledge, Bitcoin) hasn't even established itself as a truly legitimate currency. Those few businesses that even attempted to utilize Bitcoin for it's supposed purpose have stopped leaving, for the most part, shady dealers and investors. ~Functionally~, Bitcoin is dead (and I say this as someone who has capital in the crypto)

So, I come back to the original question I posed...
what use do NFTs have that would (at minimum) offset the negatives inherent in their creation and add tangible value to those purchasing them?

From what I've been able to gather, you cannot buy NFTs without crypto (a method of obtaining an item, I may add, that's not unlike the shady practice in video games of requiring players to purchase "premium currency" to obtain a skin, booster, or other game item that developers of such games have come out and said these items "have no inherent value"). For the "average" user, this would make the process of even obtaining an NFT not worth the hassle. If as person cannot see an item and make a simple transaction to obtain it, most won't. This leaves the majority of buyers as those who already owns crypto currency to begin with, or is technologically savvy enough and willing enough to deal with the conversion process. In short, this would be like telling someone in the US looking to purchase an item from, say, Aliexpress, that they first have to go to the bank and exchange their USD to Renminbi (I hope that's right. I had to look up the name of the money in China), and only THEN can they make a purchase on Aliexpress... most people wouldn't bother.

Hypothetically, NFTs *do* allow for the purchase of some form of unique digital asset that can be transferred between (as an example I'd been given before) digital worlds such as Meta's worlds, or online games, however, this would only work if all such developers collaborated developed their games to BE inter-compatible with such content, but, seeing as that would require all participating developers to share a marketplace, I seriously doubt multiple game/world development companies will collaborate in such a manner. Instead they'd keep to their own islands, making the digital NFT useless outside of said island (much like cosmetics and boosters are already, without the need of NFTs)

Furthermore, the NFTs do not prevent digital content from being copied, or deleted. All of the digital artwork, for example, can easily be duplicated with a simple "Save Image As", for the most part... one of the biggest black eyes to NFTs, in fact, it the "minting" of such tokens against artwork not owned or copyrighted by the NFT minter and without the knowledge of such owner. This damaging much, if any legitimacy of NFTs to most.

I do not understand using NFTs as receipts for owning land, or concert tickets, given the current mechanisms do that, more or less, work just fine without the power consumptive overhead of NFT generation or their comparatively long transaction times.

So, once again... I totally understand you believe in NFTs (or, it seems you do). What use does an NFT give that has tangible value that is either not possible at present, or that NFTs do better than current systems?

Quoting: ertuqueque

Quoting: ObsidianBlk

Quoting: Pendragon

Quoting: ertuquequeAt the risk of being boring or even worse, making people angry, I'll try to give my take on NFTs, what they are and how they have been exploited for bad things today…

^^This... using tokens on a cryptographic block chain has a use.. .just not a scammy money-making scheme that it seems to be used as these days.

I ask this in all seriousness... what use do NFTs have that would (at minimum) offset the negatives inherent in their creation and add tangible value to those purchasing them? A piggyback question would be, for whatever answer there exists to the first question, how has that not been utilized in over a year?

Let me start with a couple of basics…

First of all, the simplest analogy I could come up to explain NFTs to a friend is: Imagine Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, but with a "skin" to make it "unique" or different from the other ones".

Now, following that same over-simplified concept, an NFT is a "coin" stored in a blockchain… So the usefulness of an NFT depends more or less on 3 things:

1.- What cryptocurrency is being used to "mint" that NFT. The more reliable and decentralized the cryptocurrency, the more reliable that NFT could (I stress the word COULD) be.
2.- Who is creating, promoting and delivering that NFT. Again, the more "serious" and reliable the entity, the more reliable the NFT.
3.- What's the purpose of that said NFT… An NFT could be as useless as a monkey avatar, or as useful as a certificate of ownership for a house!

So let's assume all 3 points are good:
1.- The NFT is based on something like the Ethereum blockchain (Bitcoin still doesn't support the creation of NFTs, not yet).
2.- The entity creating those NFTs is a well known real estate company that is fully compliant with all legal duties in the jurisdictions it operates.
3.- Those NFTs are digital certificates that are legally bonded to a real life property (let's say a house in Beverly Hills!).

As you can imagine, for NFTs to be really useful in real life, there needs to be a legal framework supporting them, which is something that as far as I know, doesn't exists anywhere yet… but I'm sure we'll get there; with NFTs, another iteration of the concept or something different, but still based in an open, decentralized, borderless and censorship resistant blockchain.

Today's iteration of NFTs are just attempts of using a really cool technology… in the most idiotic and incompetent way.

The technology just need to mature and evolve for another 5 to 10 years, hopefully people will come around and accept that is the future.

Arguing against NFTs isn't per se arguing against digital contracts and immutable logs in blockchains. There is potential in the latter (like transparent logging of supply chains or keeping track of ownership of real objects that usually don't have certificates, like bicycles) but I highly doubt current NFTs will help with reaching that goal.
Without the backing of governments and an official, legal binding protocol... it's just meaningless or will only work where you can trust everyone involved with the investment you give - without any claim in court or real responsibility. I highly doubt any government will back any existing blockchains, they will try to build their own.


Last edited by const on 7 February 2022 at 10:20 pm UTC

Well. I watched that whoooole video. It was good. Seems both cryptocurrency in general and NFTs in specific are significantly worse than I thought. Which is impressive since I didn't think much of them. I mean, I used to think cryptocurrencies were things that didn't work as currency and have therefore become mere empty vehicles for speculation. And it turns out that's just at best . . . there's all the layers of scams, failure to function, dominance by the richest and earliest, and a certain inherent Ponziness due to the inability to cash out unless new people are bringing cash in. Not to mention that the tech base is poorer than I thought, and probably fundamentally incapable of operating at the scale of real currencies.

Meanwhile, I thought NFTs were just, y'know, ridiculous and stupid in the sense that they're giving someone "ownership" of an image or something that anyone can just copy. I didn't realize, for instance, that you generally don't even get the original, it's hosted some random place and what you've bought is a url. And I didn't realize the depth of scamminess and gullibility. And I didn't realize how useless the other potential functions seem to be, given the really bad security. And I didn't realize how deep the inherent lack of privacy was. This stuff isn't just amusing, it's toxic.

Looking at the hypothetical best case of using an NFT to hold, like, a deed to property or something. We already have deeds to property. This would be solving a problem I don't have. Just, solving it very badly. To take just one basic problem: NFTs are unique . . . within one particular blockchain. So, every different cryptocurrency supporting NFTs can apparently have its own separate "unique" example of the same thing. So, if I had an Ethereum based deed to property X, someone else could have an Ethereum-Variant-A based deed to the same property, and someone else could have an Ethereum-Variant-B based one, and there are a lot of Ethereum variants . . . Plus, the actual deed to the property probably would not be in the NFT token thingie itself, it would be hosted somewhere else, and if someone got access to that somewhere else and swapped the "deed" file out for one that said "Thanks for the nice house, sucker!" why, that would be what my NFT now gave me ownership of.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 7 February 2022 at 10:30 pm UTC

Quoting: ObsidianBlk

Quoting: ertuqueque

Quoting: ObsidianBlk

Quoting: Pendragon

Quoting: ertuquequeAt the risk of being boring or even worse, making people angry, I'll try to give my take on NFTs, what they are and how they have been exploited for bad things today…

^^This... using tokens on a cryptographic block chain has a use.. .just not a scammy money-making scheme that it seems to be used as these days.

I ask this in all seriousness... what use do NFTs have that would (at minimum) offset the negatives inherent in their creation and add tangible value to those purchasing them? A piggyback question would be, for whatever answer there exists to the first question, how has that not been utilized in over a year?

Let me start with a couple of basics…

First of all, the simplest analogy I could come up to explain NFTs to a friend is: Imagine Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, but with a "skin" to make it "unique" or different from the other ones".

Now, following that same over-simplified concept, an NFT is a "coin" stored in a blockchain… So the usefulness of an NFT depends more or less on 3 things:

1.- What cryptocurrency is being used to "mint" that NFT. The more reliable and decentralized the cryptocurrency, the more reliable that NFT could (I stress the word COULD) be.
2.- Who is creating, promoting and delivering that NFT. Again, the more "serious" and reliable the entity, the more reliable the NFT.
3.- What's the purpose of that said NFT… An NFT could be as useless as a monkey avatar, or as useful as a certificate of ownership for a house!

So let's assume all 3 points are good:
1.- The NFT is based on something like the Ethereum blockchain (Bitcoin still doesn't support the creation of NFTs, not yet).
2.- The entity creating those NFTs is a well known real estate company that is fully compliant with all legal duties in the jurisdictions it operates.
3.- Those NFTs are digital certificates that are legally bonded to a real life property (let's say a house in Beverly Hills!).

As you can imagine, for NFTs to be really useful in real life, there needs to be a legal framework supporting them, which is something that as far as I know, doesn't exists anywhere yet… but I'm sure we'll get there; with NFTs, another iteration of the concept or something different, but still based in an open, decentralized, borderless and censorship resistant blockchain.

Today's iteration of NFTs are just attempts of using a really cool technology… in the most idiotic and incompetent way.

The technology just need to mature and evolve for another 5 to 10 years, hopefully people will come around and accept that is the future.

Yes... but you are still basing NFTs usefulness to crypto currency. Crypto currency, itself, still has not gained any true functionality and that has existed for over a decade of time. The oldest crypto, (to my knowledge, Bitcoin) hasn't even established itself as a truly legitimate currency. Those few businesses that even attempted to utilize Bitcoin for it's supposed purpose have stopped leaving, for the most part, shady dealers and investors. ~Functionally~, Bitcoin is dead (and I say this as someone who has capital in the crypto)

So, I come back to the original question I posed...
what use do NFTs have that would (at minimum) offset the negatives inherent in their creation and add tangible value to those purchasing them?

From what I've been able to gather, you cannot buy NFTs without crypto (a method of obtaining an item, I may add, that's not unlike the shady practice in video games of requiring players to purchase "premium currency" to obtain a skin, booster, or other game item that developers of such games have come out and said these items "have no inherent value"). For the "average" user, this would make the process of even obtaining an NFT not worth the hassle. If as person cannot see an item and make a simple transaction to obtain it, most won't. This leaves the majority of buyers as those who already owns crypto currency to begin with, or is technologically savvy enough and willing enough to deal with the conversion process. In short, this would be like telling someone in the US looking to purchase an item from, say, Aliexpress, that they first have to go to the bank and exchange their USD to Renminbi (I hope that's right. I had to look up the name of the money in China), and only THEN can they make a purchase on Aliexpress... most people wouldn't bother.

Hypothetically, NFTs *do* allow for the purchase of some form of unique digital asset that can be transferred between (as an example I'd been given before) digital worlds such as Meta's worlds, or online games, however, this would only work if all such developers collaborated developed their games to BE inter-compatible with such content, but, seeing as that would require all participating developers to share a marketplace, I seriously doubt multiple game/world development companies will collaborate in such a manner. Instead they'd keep to their own islands, making the digital NFT useless outside of said island (much like cosmetics and boosters are already, without the need of NFTs)

Furthermore, the NFTs do not prevent digital content from being copied, or deleted. All of the digital artwork, for example, can easily be duplicated with a simple "Save Image As", for the most part... one of the biggest black eyes to NFTs, in fact, it the "minting" of such tokens against artwork not owned or copyrighted by the NFT minter and without the knowledge of such owner. This damaging much, if any legitimacy of NFTs to most.

I do not understand using NFTs as receipts for owning land, or concert tickets, given the current mechanisms do that, more or less, work just fine without the power consumptive overhead of NFT generation or their comparatively long transaction times.

So, once again... I totally understand you believe in NFTs (or, it seems you do). What use does an NFT give that has tangible value that is either not possible at present, or that NFTs do better than current systems?

Ok, to answer some of your questions or comments, I'd have to give my personal opinions on cryptocurrencies or NFTs and that's something I don't do on public spaces, but I'll try to give a couple of points nonetheless...

First of all, cryptocurrencies are not (yet) mainstream because most 1st world countries don't have any significant problem with their money (yet) and 1st world countries' opinion are the ones that matter between themselves... You don't have to explain the usefulness of cryptocurrencies to an Argentinian, Venezuelan or a Greek, they very well know that cryptocurrencies are far better than their FIAT money and their government cannot seize it as they can do with USD and other FIAT money.

Now, on NFTs... NFTs are even more garbage if they don't rely in cryptocurrencies, that's what gives them at least the potential of credibility... If tomorrow someone like Ubisoft comes with their own "NFT" thing, which is not based in a true decentralized cryptocurrency, I wouldn't come close to those things even with a 10-foot long stick. There's A LOT of nuances in this statement, but it would be a rather long explanation, and as usual, it ends boiling down to personal opinions, experiences and the country/government where you've lived.

QuoteIn short, this would be like telling someone in the US looking to purchase an item from, say, Aliexpress, that they first have to go to the bank and exchange their USD to Renminbi (I hope that's right. I had to look up the name of the money in China), and only THEN can they make a purchase on Aliexpress... most people wouldn't bother.

Cryptocurrencies are not useful for EEUU citizens, nor UK folks or Canadian champs... They all have all the comfort in the world to transact money, buy goods and everything as long as it's between themselves (again, 1st world countries)... but if one day they need to send money to a Venezuelan, Argentinian, Philippine or Nigerian, by far the easiest way of doing so is with cryptocurrencies... For them, exchanging their FIAT money to other currencies is a daily thing, a necessary thing. With cryptocurrencies they can send money to their family from abroad with fees that can be just a couple of cents (an important thing if you can only afford to send 10 or 20 bucks), with just minutes or a few hours of delay and 24/7... So I repeat, cryptocurrencies are not for the 1st world... yet.

Oh... another couple of things to address other comments...

We can all agree that NFTs in today's incarnation are pretty useless...

But the idea is pretty good, the concept. It just need to evolve and mature for 5 - 10 more years.

Other people are mixing NFTs with the "play to earn" model of the new scammy games that are coming out... NFTs and cryptocurrencies are just the tool they are using to facilitate their activities... But there can be a "play to earn" game that uses NFTs and is not scammy... there are other "play to earn" models that don't rely on a quasi-ponzi schemes, is just a matter of time for those games to appear and hopefully the mainstream opinion will start to shift to a more positive view... It'll take time, though.

Now, for those who saw the other video and say cryptos and blockchain technology is garbage... do yourself a favor and watch this video to have "the other point of view":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1si5ZWLgy0

Quoting: ObsidianBlk

Quoting: ertuqueque

Quoting: ObsidianBlk

Quoting: Pendragon

Quoting: ertuquequeAt the risk of being boring or even worse, making people angry, I'll try to give my take on NFTs, what they are and how they have been exploited for bad things today…

^^This... using tokens on a cryptographic block chain has a use.. .just not a scammy money-making scheme that it seems to be used as these days.

I ask this in all seriousness... what use do NFTs have that would (at minimum) offset the negatives inherent in their creation and add tangible value to those purchasing them? A piggyback question would be, for whatever answer there exists to the first question, how has that not been utilized in over a year?

Let me start with a couple of basics…

First of all, the simplest analogy I could come up to explain NFTs to a friend is: Imagine Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, but with a "skin" to make it "unique" or different from the other ones".

Now, following that same over-simplified concept, an NFT is a "coin" stored in a blockchain… So the usefulness of an NFT depends more or less on 3 things:

1.- What cryptocurrency is being used to "mint" that NFT. The more reliable and decentralized the cryptocurrency, the more reliable that NFT could (I stress the word COULD) be.
2.- Who is creating, promoting and delivering that NFT. Again, the more "serious" and reliable the entity, the more reliable the NFT.
3.- What's the purpose of that said NFT… An NFT could be as useless as a monkey avatar, or as useful as a certificate of ownership for a house!

So let's assume all 3 points are good:
1.- The NFT is based on something like the Ethereum blockchain (Bitcoin still doesn't support the creation of NFTs, not yet).
2.- The entity creating those NFTs is a well known real estate company that is fully compliant with all legal duties in the jurisdictions it operates.
3.- Those NFTs are digital certificates that are legally bonded to a real life property (let's say a house in Beverly Hills!).

As you can imagine, for NFTs to be really useful in real life, there needs to be a legal framework supporting them, which is something that as far as I know, doesn't exists anywhere yet… but I'm sure we'll get there; with NFTs, another iteration of the concept or something different, but still based in an open, decentralized, borderless and censorship resistant blockchain.

Today's iteration of NFTs are just attempts of using a really cool technology… in the most idiotic and incompetent way.

The technology just need to mature and evolve for another 5 to 10 years, hopefully people will come around and accept that is the future.

Yes... but you are still basing NFTs usefulness to crypto currency. Crypto currency, itself, still has not gained any true functionality and that has existed for over a decade of time. The oldest crypto, (to my knowledge, Bitcoin) hasn't even established itself as a truly legitimate currency. Those few businesses that even attempted to utilize Bitcoin for it's supposed purpose have stopped leaving, for the most part, shady dealers and investors. ~Functionally~, Bitcoin is dead (and I say this as someone who has capital in the crypto)

So, I come back to the original question I posed...
what use do NFTs have that would (at minimum) offset the negatives inherent in their creation and add tangible value to those purchasing them?

From what I've been able to gather, you cannot buy NFTs without crypto (a method of obtaining an item, I may add, that's not unlike the shady practice in video games of requiring players to purchase "premium currency" to obtain a skin, booster, or other game item that developers of such games have come out and said these items "have no inherent value"). For the "average" user, this would make the process of even obtaining an NFT not worth the hassle. If as person cannot see an item and make a simple transaction to obtain it, most won't. This leaves the majority of buyers as those who already owns crypto currency to begin with, or is technologically savvy enough and willing enough to deal with the conversion process. In short, this would be like telling someone in the US looking to purchase an item from, say, Aliexpress, that they first have to go to the bank and exchange their USD to Renminbi (I hope that's right. I had to look up the name of the money in China), and only THEN can they make a purchase on Aliexpress... most people wouldn't bother.

Hypothetically, NFTs *do* allow for the purchase of some form of unique digital asset that can be transferred between (as an example I'd been given before) digital worlds such as Meta's worlds, or online games, however, this would only work if all such developers collaborated developed their games to BE inter-compatible with such content, but, seeing as that would require all participating developers to share a marketplace, I seriously doubt multiple game/world development companies will collaborate in such a manner. Instead they'd keep to their own islands, making the digital NFT useless outside of said island (much like cosmetics and boosters are already, without the need of NFTs)

Furthermore, the NFTs do not prevent digital content from being copied, or deleted. All of the digital artwork, for example, can easily be duplicated with a simple "Save Image As", for the most part... one of the biggest black eyes to NFTs, in fact, it the "minting" of such tokens against artwork not owned or copyrighted by the NFT minter and without the knowledge of such owner. This damaging much, if any legitimacy of NFTs to most.

I do not understand using NFTs as receipts for owning land, or concert tickets, given the current mechanisms do that, more or less, work just fine without the power consumptive overhead of NFT generation or their comparatively long transaction times.

So, once again... I totally understand you believe in NFTs (or, it seems you do). What use does an NFT give that has tangible value that is either not possible at present, or that NFTs do better than current systems?

Bitcoin alredy established as legitimate curency. It's legal tender in El Salvador. Another country reportedly make it legal tender this year. What you want more then country acepting bitcoin as curency?

For NFT, there are legitimate purposes for usage. For example game account for online games respecting privacy and transfeereble between servers. Right now is in development RGB, with it you can create decoupled ownership data (on BTC blockchain) and token data (in json file). You have your privkey so you can proof that you own account stored with all data on json file which you has on disk.

So with this, server get your data only when you play (your file) it and they can give you actuallisation transaction which you commit to network and also they can discard all your data when you are offline. More privacy for you. On blockchain is just 1 small transaction with hash.
Another use case is, that, you can have game with opensource server with transfer option. In this case you have offical server and also couple of unofficial servers, so you can grab youre 90lvl paladin and go to play on unoficial server. If official server trust that unofficial they can use your progress when you upload your character file or they can just use last trusted state.


Last edited by Arten on 8 February 2022 at 12:59 am UTC

Quoting: ertuquequeFirst of all, cryptocurrencies are not (yet) mainstream because most 1st world countries don't have any significant problem with their money (yet) and 1st world countries' opinion are the ones that matter between themselves... You don't have to explain the usefulness of cryptocurrencies to an Argentinian, Venezuelan or a Greek, they very well know that cryptocurrencies are far better than their FIAT money and their government cannot seize it as they can do with USD and other FIAT money.

Uhhh . . . the fiat currency of Greece is the Euro, which is a serious problem for Greece's economy in various ways, but I wouldn't think would be a problem for individual Greeks, or have any weird problems with transaction costs or anything.

I will agree that cryptocurrencies are useful if you're trying, as either a government or an individual/business, to get around American sanctions, which is certainly the case for Venezuela. But I suspect that advantage is going to seriously attenuate soon. The effectiveness of American sanctions in the first place is based on the single point of control that is the Swift international transaction system, which is controlled by the Americans. But it seems like various actors who are getting increasingly worried about that, such as China and Russia, are in the process of making systems that can bypass/duplicate Swift. If countries can use those, they might not have nearly as much use for crypto.

Quoting: ArtenBitcoin alredy established as legitimate curency. It's legal tender in El Salvador. Another country reportedly make it legal tender this year.

Yeah, I heard about the El Salvador thing. So . . . does anyone actually use it as legal tender? Go into the supermarket and pay with crypto? Lay a smidgen of a bitcoin on a street vendor for some tacos?
A loopy president can declare anything he wants. Doesn't make the problems with trying to use Bitcoin for normal transactions disappear.

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: ArtenBitcoin alredy established as legitimate curency. It's legal tender in El Salvador. Another country reportedly make it legal tender this year.

Yeah, I heard about the El Salvador thing. So . . . does anyone actually use it as legal tender? Go into the supermarket and pay with crypto? Lay a smidgen of a bitcoin on a street vendor for some tacos?
A loopy president can declare anything he wants. Doesn't make the problems with trying to use Bitcoin for normal transactions disappear.

As I understand it, the crypto thing in El Salvador hasn't exactly been running smoothly. Which seems to be par for the course, to be honest.

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: ArtenBitcoin alredy established as legitimate curency. It's legal tender in El Salvador. Another country reportedly make it legal tender this year.

Yeah, I heard about the El Salvador thing. So . . . does anyone actually use it as legal tender? Go into the supermarket and pay with crypto? Lay a smidgen of a bitcoin on a street vendor for some tacos?
A loopy president can declare anything he wants. Doesn't make the problems with trying to use Bitcoin for normal transactions disappear.

Yes, they use it. Not everywhere yet, but you can go to some malls, street vendors, even McDonalds, or ride a taxi... It's batter chance to use bitcoin than credit card what i know.