Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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NFT's never made much sense to me, at least in the way people attempted to use them.
Maybe they'd be useful as additional proof of ownership of a physical object? Like if they issued one when you bought a car, and you could use it as proof of ownership if you lost your title. That's probably a bad example as I imagine there's already safeguards in place for this in most places. And probably some other issues that haven't occurred to me. Still, conceptually I think it makes sense.
That's their intended purpose, but idiots made a bunch of images and sold them for stupid amounts of money to other idiots and that's the ONLY aspect 99.99% of humanity will ever know about it because the media went full fucking bore to convince everyone, every day, every hour, that that's all they are.
No they're shit at that too.
Proof of ownership is this big complicated thing with lots of safeguards. If someone steals your title, you still own your car, and you can get this fixed.
If someone steals your nft, it's gone. The entire point of the Blockchain is there's no central authority that you can appeal to who will do the work to check that transactions are legitimate.
Anything that happened stays happened, unless the entire community explicitly roles back the Blockchain.
NFTs are stupid AF for most of the tasks people currently use them for and definitely shouldn't be used as proof of ownership of physical assets.
However, I think NFTs make a lot of sense as proof of ownership of purely digital assets, especially those which are scarce.
For example, there are several projects for domain name resolution based on NFT ownership (e.g you look up crypto.eth, your browser checks that the site is signed by the owner of the crypto.eth NFT, then you are connected to the site), as it could replace our current system, which has literally 7 guys that hold a private key that is the backbone of the DNS system and a bunch of registrars you have to go through to get a domain. This won't happen anytime soon but it is an interesting concept.
Then I think an NFT would also be good as a decentralized alternative to something like Google sign in, where you sign up for something with the NFT and sign in by proving your ownership of it.
In general though I find NFTs to be a precarious concept. I mean the experience I've had with crypto is you literally have a seed phrase for your wallet, and if it gets stolen all your funds are drained. And then for an NFT, if you click on the wrong smart contract, all your monkeys could be gone in an instant. There is in general no legal recourse to reverse crypto transactions, and I think that is frankly the biggest issue with the technology as it stands today.