Fraud-filled crypto marketplace Cent stops trading its own NFTs

It’s just putting a URL on a blockchain. If the URL points to a tweet, then you’ve just NFTified a tweet. Congratulations.

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i never thought that the leopards would nft my face !!

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You can link to it, I suppose, and package the link as a NFT so that the owner can be sure that is the unique copy of that link.
Then you can make another link and package that as a separate NFT…

I was given to understand that the key rationale for Bitcoins is their finite supply, so that their value will always reflect demand. Not sure how that works for NFTs, where the supply is infinite, so giving them any value requires you to convince potential buyers that your pet rock virtual Beanie Baby NFT is special, and more collectible than all the rivals.

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Yeah, seems pretty fungible to me. The separate NFT would have a different uniqueID, but, well, banknotes have serial numbers on them too, and they’re pretty fungible.

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The truly bizarre thing about NFTs is that, if you strip away a planet’s worth of horseshit, the very very most basic concept is… well, not all that interesting, but you could imagine mildly neat applications.

Like, Iet’s say I’ve prepaid a subscription for some streaming service for a year. Cash value $100. But I only wanted it for a show that was released in the first month. If I could “tokenize” my rights to that streaming service (which would require their cooperation, but never mind) and sell it, maybe I could make back $80. The almighty power of the indelible blockchain (total overkill here but again, never mind) would ensure that the service would know that I had irrevocably transferred it, and the new owner of the “token” could now use it exclusively. And so forth.

Of course, streaming services offer monthly subscriptions precisely so that they don’t have to go through all that nonsense just to get people to sign up. But wait, what if I wanted to buy partial control of the whole company… well, I guess that’s just buying stock, which again works just fine with a few people recording the transactions and no blockchain. But… anyway, there are probably a few edge cases where it’d be just the ticket.

But instead it’s all static .jpgs of clip art. Well, have fun, kids.

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Is an NFT of content that does belong to us any more legitimate, if we can easily make multiple NFTs “of” the same content and if buyers are not getting any rights to the content for their money?

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And completely different marketplaces were set up explicitly for making NFTs based on tweets (other people’s tweets, to be clear). Some people were also minting NFTs from images of tweets. So there was never even the remote possibility of scarcity, even if particular marketplaces prevented minting multiple NFTs from the same link (which they don’t necessarily do).

Also the actual producers of the tweets in question were getting annoyed enough to delete their tweets, so the NFTs pointed to nothing.

Sure, because at least then the “buyer” is supporting the actual creator of that content, even if they’re not really getting anything in return except the bragging rights that they gave support of a certain value (which is, for some small number of NFT enthusiasts, the appeal).

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So basically with a NFT, you do not “own X” (for some intangible X - a number, or a colour, or a tweet, or a scan of someone else’s artwork). You “own an ownership”.

It may not be the only ownership, for other people may also acquire “ownership of X”, but those will be different ownerships.

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Not only overkill, but totally redundant. If the streaming service wants people to be able to transfer their subscriptions they already have a perfectly good record of all their subscribers and can change that one wihtout a block chain.

The only situation where a block chain might be useful is where you want to avoid trusting a single party to keep track of records.

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https://nitter.net/jbtuason/status/1440377649658949635#m

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People have touched on this above in many ways, but I thought I’d restate it again for better clarity:

The key problem with NFTs is that people are using the wrong metaphor for them. They believe it represents “ownership” of something, like the title to a car. That’s not what they are. It’s a receipt, like to prove you bought something at a 7-11. That’s all it is. Proof you had something in your possession at some point in the past. It’s an electronic version of the tiny square of paper that the cashier gives you when you buy something, and serves the same purpose- proof you bought/transacted something, and if anyone cares that said transaction occurred (such as if the store is deciding whether to take it back) then it has tiny value in that moment. It has no other value.

It’s not like when you sell a DVD player on craigslist that you have to give the new owner the original receipt from Best Buy from 12 years ago to prove it’s really their DVD player now. But that is (bafflingly) how people are treating NFTs in usage and in the press. People really really want it to be a thing that it isn’t.

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Yeah, I tend to think of NFTs purely as receipts - for themselves. What it’s actually linked to is functionally irrelevant. (Which makes the whole “non-fungible” aspect a joke.)

Which is pretty much the case for most of the uses for NFTs. Like the online games using them - they already require accounts, and the blockchain doesn’t eliminate the need for them, so all you’re doing is adding another step (or three) to something that works perfectly fine without NFTs in the first place.

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At least with the Star registry you used to get a physical paper certificate you could frame. So you got something for your money.

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“This has not stopped other star naming companies from setting up similar registries and selling similar products.[12]

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The difference is dividends. When you buy a stock, you are purchasing all the future dividends between now and the time the company goes bankrupt. The problem is that those dividends, especially when you discount them for time, in no way support typical equity prices. So NFTs can go to zero, while Wall Street is unlikely to fall more than ~80% from current prices.

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The problem is that a non fungible token does not change the fungible nature of digital goods.

but even the DVD receipt proves we bought a DVD player, whereas an NFT is only a receipt for itself, a piece of paper that recursively documents that we paid money for that same piece of paper

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