this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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Something that is fungible is not unique.
An NFT is essentially a number tied to another number in a block chain that establishes ownership.
It provides a history of who owns it to. It's very useful when validating contracts and preventing fraud. Somehow it got turned into little graphics exchanged for money and I still don't understand how that happened.
So, for instance, since the owners of the NFTs know that the wallet is compromised, the recipients of the NFTs after this point in the block chain are recipients of stolen goods. So anyone tracing the validity of an NFT knows that these are now all worthless.
I mean, they were worthless before...
What do you mean, I shook my magic 8-ball and it clearly said I was correct in valuing my stick figure at 50b USD. I was completely bankrupted when my kid ripped my paper in half
50 billionth of a USD sounds about right.
Worthless on their own, yes. It's very valuable as a technology in terms of trackability and transparency, and establishing ownership.
Tied to a graphic? That's just stupid and anyone who spent money on them deserved what they got.
We had ways to do trackability, transparency, and establishing ownership before NFTs came along. They solve nothing.
Please, for the love of fuck, don't say Ticketmaster. That argument is the worst.
Yes, plenty of ways, but none that didn't have flaws. The idea behind it is that it leveraged a publicly viewable history.
Something like a Title Search for a home purchase would be done looking at the token's history. It's also not a database so there's no way to edit it after the transaction has been performed.
In the instance of equities exchange it can also be used to prove who has and historically had ownership. In the care of, say, a broker, no one actually owns the stocks, the broker does and gives you an IOU for the stock. This means they can do whatever they want with the stock while it shouldn't be touched since it's yours.
I don't know how Ticketmaster plays into this?
There's nothing there that can't be done with a standard, public database. What's lacking is the political will to modernize these systems. NFTs don't solve that.
I brought up Ticketmaster because it's a common thing to bring up for NFT replacement. A dumb thing to bring up, because while everyone hates Ticketmaster, people don't understand why venues are beholden to them and how NFTs won't solve that.
For classical databases there is always someone with root access, who could modify whatever they want.
In practice, for important stuff, there is a good chance enough people were observing to make a case based on witnesses, but it isn't exactly ideal.
You don't often get banks running with your money or some storage facility selling your stuff illegally, but it could happen. And that is enough for some (paranoid) people. Maybe some day there might even be applications that would not otherwise be feasible due to fear of scams.
There is a usecase for crypto currencies, so why not the highly related NFTs where the only difference is that the stuff you own is a unique thing (like a title) instead of a bunch of non-unique things (like currency).
There are audit trails and compliance for this stuff. It's a solved problem. Techbros just don't understand what's already there and think it needs to be fixed with something that happens to make them rich.
You can't be 100% sure about organizations following these practices, to the degree that blockchains allow. Organizations aren't fully transparent, and people are fallible.
I still prefer https over all the secrecy we managed to get in letters before the digital era, even if our audit systems to ensure secrecy of communications then were impressive.
Even with a perfect audit trails and merge requirements, convincing a small group of people part of the same organization is easier than convincing a larger cryptographically-herded pool of who-knows who.
You can argue about how likely that is to ever be relevant for practical applications, but it is a system that is perfect in ways its "predecessors" aren't.
OP is about NFTs failing due to an Instagram account being hacked. No, it is very much not perfect.
The fact that banks aren't running off with people's life savings is empirical evidence that the system works. They might try to find legal loopholes, like reordering transactions to make overdraft fees come out higher, but they are strongly incentivized to never fuck with the audit system. This stuff gets written down.
It's not failing in the technical sense, in the same way tech-support-scams aren't a failure of online-banking.
You can consider the unfixable nature of such scams an inherent flaw of the system, I suppose it is. An inevitable tradeoff for the automated nature such a system has, where a central authority would have the ability to roll things back.
On the other hand, plenty of online financial scams are not able to be rolled back, often enough banks simply pay you out of an insurance pool. The same could be implemented for blockchains I suppose. Or on top as a regular insurance specialized for "blockchain trading" or whatever. You could also enforce transaction locks, similar to a lot of bank transactions, though that would slow purchases in the same way.
About banks not running off with stuff, I mean rarely they are but usually not yes. There is a reason the core audience of blockchain technologies are paranoid people.
The legitimate usecases for fungible blockchain (crypto currencies) is countries (and corporations) regulting and limiting anonymity and even ability of transactions. That has applications from drug purchases (meth) to drug purchases (hormone therapy under anti-lgbt regimes).
The usecase of blockchain contracts for example is for simple digital trade, currently I can only think of crypto currency exchange, since this fundamentally only makes sense for goods that are themselves on a blockchain.
The legitimate usecase of non-fungible blockchain (nft) is
I might be incorrect, but databases can always be updated to affect existing data.
That's what an audit trail is for.
And what happens when the audit doesn't get written to, because there is a "delay" when the transaction happens? Or maybe it doesn't happen at all.
In the NFT design, the transaction is it's own audit entry. It's federated because that's how block chains work. No one can argue that the transaction didn't happen, and everyone knows who it belongs to.
The fact that banks generally aren't running off with your money suggests the system works.
The fact that hacking an Instagram account can let you social engineer yourself into the NFT system shows that system does not work.
I'm fairly certain financial institutions don't use it because of that anti-laundring application.
They don't usually want their transactions publicly known anyway.
No it's not useful at all
The best part is that for 99% of NFTs, that graphic isn't stored on the blockchain. It's just a standard internet URL. So you are relying on the TLD to be alive in ICANN, the TLD to be registered to the same party that originally sold the NFTs, the DNS servers the TLD uses to be registered and function as expected, and finally the servers that are privately owned by somebody else to be hosting the stupid graphic at the URL the NFT is registered to.
So then they aren't even NFTs
The NFT is just the receipt for a URL isn't it?
NFTs, as implemented on a block chain are a unique number. A URL to that transaction can be generated, but a URL itself does not establish anything.the NFT needs to be in your block chain wallet. "Not your keys, not your wallet, not your crypto" applies here as well.
Which is why the whole graphic -> nft thing didn't make a lot of sense to me.
Great. You own the number assigned to a graphic. You own that graphic. You can still copy the pixels of that graphic too.
So useful in fact that no company in existence that I know of uses it.
Don't know of a single bank, fortune 500 or any financial institution that uses it.
Wonder why.
Yeah, I dont think you can go from worthless to worthless.
Step 1: Say blockchain to an investor
Step 2: Tell them you will use it to sell a new thing.
Step 3: Tell them that no one has ever done it before, and it'll be the next hot thing.
What if we took the art market, where prices can be whatever, so it's really easy to launder money. Then we let people easily set up multiple accounts for wash trading. And we supported currencies held in stupidly large amounts by people who can't legally use them for anything useful.
It's all fun and games until they're prosecuting you under the RICO act ;)
Then you just pay the president for a pardon. No worries.