I stumbled across this thread, and whilst it’s interesting, eloquent and thorough, I think its also slightly naive.
The writer states – “the entire point of NFTs is to make content FREE while making ownership scarce.”
Which seems like an interesting and utopian ideal, but demonstrates some of the flaws in the current iteration of NFT technology (as it stands today)
Theres a paradox in this logic when we consider the capitalist aims of generating revenue from the exchange in value, if access to an NFT content (e.g. a song file or an image) is free, then what is the value of the ownership? If we add to this thats there’s nothing restricting the replication of an NFT at this stage (e.g. you could just copy/paste an NFT Jpeg) then we are further undermining (devaluing) the value of “ownership” – why own something that can be so easily replicated, where original ownership in of itself is of limited value?
The concept of an NFT having value, I think, at this stage, using the writers statement only really applied to a scenario where the ownership in-of-itself, IS the valued asset.
What I mean by this, is the NFT is a virtual-physical ‘tangible’ ‘certificate of ownership’ of an asset, the NFT itself doesn’t hold the value, its simply the certificate confirming the ownership of the asset itself.
So if we agree, that NFTs are a certificate of ownership, then this only matters in scenarios where confirming (*authentic*) ownership matters. Do I care if you own a real or fake Jpeg of an image or Mp4 song file? Not really. On the other hand, do I care if you own a real Monet? Or the diamond you’re selling me is real? Or if you’re property deeds are real… absolutely.
These scenarios give some value to NFTs, imagine how easy it would be to buy and sell a property if the deeds were NFTs , or imagine if Sothebys and the British museum tied NFTs to each art work or antique. We can see NFTs being applicable. But the paradox is, there are already ‘technologies’ that exist to cater for this, IP documents, certificates of authenticity.
And this is the issue w/NFTs, they are a technical feature, looking for a use case.
The writer states –
“nobody is forcing you to pay for an NFT, you can still enjoy it FOR FREE alongside everybody else.”
So, the question still remains, “then why would I buy the NFT”? The fallacy is in the assumption that the value is in the ownership. When in reality, value is in access (in this case, to the music of this artist)