NFT Canon

NFTs just happen to be the token du jour, and it&#x27;s a bit sad that a16z is peddling them. There&#x27;s nothing of value here, and no one will care in 4 years. Remember Crypto Kitties[1]? Don&#x27;t worry, no one else does either. The idea of &quot;proof of ownership&quot; makes no sense in a digital context, anyway, and the best way forward (if actually trying to solve this problem) isn&#x27;t with some pump-and-dump token, but rather with DRM-style certificates.<p>But no one&#x27;s <i>really</i> trying to solve the problem of digital ownership, provenance, chain of custody, or original verifiability, they&#x27;re just trying to get rich.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;CryptoKitties&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;CryptoKitties&#x2F;</a>

It might be covered in one of the resources, but when people talk about NFTs, they just mean some token on Ethereum that the issuer of said coin say is &quot;the&quot; product. For instance, the NFT for &quot;the first tweet&quot; that sold is just someone created an Ethereum token and said &quot;this one is the first tweet&quot;, presumably w&#x2F; some text in the token that states the tweet.<p>In that regard, its kind of centralized. There can be multiple NFTs that claim to be tweets. There&#x27;s no naturally definitive &quot;twitter&quot; token, unless it&#x27;s managed by Twitter itself. But you&#x27;re relying on the issuer of the coin to say &quot;I am the NFT coin&quot; and everyone to agree.<p>Real world NFTs (e.g. art and collectibles) are unique in that there is no dispute about what the original is. The art was created by the artist or its a forgery. In that regard NFTs rely on some issuing entity that bestows upon itself an arbitrary form of ownership. I can make my own Twitter token and if I get someone to buy a coin for an absurd amount (insider dealing?), and convince reports to write about it, I can be &quot;the twitter nft&quot;<p>Or am I thinking of this incorrectly?

This makes it clear to me that a16z are in the same league as penny stock pumping grifters. It does seem obvious in retrospect.

&quot;It&#x27;s time to build&quot; sitting prominently at the top of the page is just adding insult to injury, here.

Uhhh this isn’t a canon so much as a cannon for a VC to inject their own financial incentives into your thinking. Even if they’re wrong about what they cite, any conversation or discussion just draws more attention to them versus the competition. If you want to learn about NFTs, do you own research. Don’t lend your critical thinking resources to an investor unless they’re paying handsomely.

The only way that NFTs make sense to me is in some sort of impossible to implement DRM-like system where ONLY the current owners of the media can display it or utilize it. If buying an NFT of a piece of art meant that I could digitally display the file in full resolution, or if it otherwise afforded me some tangible benefit during the period of ownership, I could see it making sense.<p>As of right now NFTs are basically donations to the artist with more steps and about 1000x the carbon footprint.

I don&#x27;t think I would have ever have predicted that having control over a line of data in a shared database running on just 8,000 computers would be so valuable.<p>&quot;See this database entry? It&#x27;s yours. In order to change it, you need this little JSON file and a password. Got it? Great. That will be $69 million please.&quot;

“A man who is rich but ignorant he called a sheep with golden fleece.” —Diogenes the Cynic: Sayings and Anecdotes, with Other Popular Moralists by Robin Hard, §326.

&quot;It&#x27;s time to build... Or make NFTs or whatever.&quot;

NFT are null pointers with a random price tag

NFTs are bullshit.

Absolutely delighted that cryptocurrency has spawned this larger conversation of digital ownership and proof of work, proof is stake, etc.<p>This is great stuff to read other people discuss and curate on the internet now 10 or 11 years in.