babelchips

Link is fine for me

I am not interested in collectibles, I am talking about something much more interesting and practical.

But to entirely dismiss the category because you are only privy to slow & expensive implementations or trivial use cases is like saying no one will fly across the Atlantic or be able to transport heavy goods because the Wright Flyer can barely do 30mph.

There is a fundamental technology here that goes beyond trivial collectibles. If you need examples just ask rather than throw the baby out with the bath water.

The press release was the first one that came up in my search that explained things clearly enough for the uninitiated. There are many other articles elsewhere covering these things if you care to look.

*international remittance

Here’s a discussion on the subject of the benefits of NFTs and the broader concept of tokenisation as it applies to supply chains and finance.

https://youtu.be/kNgTR5lii4M?t=25m33s

This is just one clip but the point is, referring back to the OP, the idea that NFTs have failed, that they are useless, that it’s just a load of bullshit is just another way of saying you have a very narrow understanding of tokenisation in the main.

-The complete removal of intermediaries (resilience, trust, immutability) -Instantaneous transfer

Read more about Abrdn and Toko if you want to learn more.

- The instantaneous transfer of value between two parties, without an intermediary.

- The ability to publicly and immediately prove ownership (chain of provenance) to a third party.

- Multi-signatories, the ability for one or more parties to have joint cryptographic ownership over the token. For a pre-defined number of those owners (majority, 2 of 5, all members etc) to be able revoke, change, transfer the token as required, again without an intermediary.

I wasn’t conspicuously avoiding anything. I didn’t see you’d asked earlier. Examples given.

"How tokenisation could benefit investors The benefits of tokenisation extend to large investors as well, providing increased liquidity and the potential for additional value through asset fractionalisation.

In this way, we can take a US$100 million private equity asset, tokenise it, and turn it into 100 million US$1 tokens. These tokens can then be listed on a regulated digital securities exchange to trade on a secondary market. By doing this, the minimum investment is now affordable to the smallest investor, while the secondary market creates liquidity."

https://www.abrdn.com/en-gb/corporate/news-and-insights/expa...

Mostly Hedera spearheading IMO, but yes:

https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/2023/04/to...

https://www.cryptowisser.com/news/redswan-cre-builds-its-tok...

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/quarter-fractional-home-equit...

There are many other projects in various states, touching entertainment (AAA gaming), supply chain, integration remittance, carbon markets.

I too am old. I hear you. But just because you could do those things back then doesn't prove your point. Businesses took the large part of the 90s, at the very least, to really get on board with those technologies. And it wasn't though lack of desire - a lot of other factors need to come together to make the web viable in the mainstream (broadband, browser standards, TLS, countless components). None of which happened overnight.

Reading all the comments here, the sentiment over NFTs is clearly reductionist ("just monkey JPGs") and based on a very limited understanding of the fundamental benefits of the technology. Most of the real world benefits are overshadowed by this kind of sentiment and shows a clear lack of knowledge and research from the wider community.

If you truly are technically literate, you'll know the mainstream view of any nascent technology is always very weak and sensationalist (the headline in the OP a good example). If you were well versed in NFTs and DLT technology you'll know there is new ground being broken here. Your last sentence tells me that you are not well informed on the subject. If you were, you would not be saying such things and understand the computer science behind the core concepts.

So yes, whilst the NFT space is largely full of scams and is apparently useless, that doesn't mean there isn't a viable technology at play which has major benefits in multiple industries.

Those original internet services didn't solve problems for the vast majority of business (or people) immediately! The technology was solid from the start, but the adoption curve was far, far slower than you suggest. By a long shot.

The difference with NFTs is the concept is sound - trusted, immutable transactions recorded on a public ledger without a third-party intermediary. The difficult part is making it work efficiently and securely. Until very recently NFTs have been slow and expensive (in cost and energy) to transact. The most visible use cases being trivial (proof of ownership of JPGs). But the answer to those technical limitations IS already here and getting better, speed and costs are not a problem if you stop referring to Bitcoin and Ethereum.

The problem is, most people dismiss the entire venture (tokenisation and the larger benefits of public DLTs) because they are only looking at the mainstream projects and agreeing with lazy journalism to have their biases validated.

Because it’s happening slowly and people aren’t paying attention.

You’re referring to Proof Of Work (PoW). There are other methods which aren’t energy sinks.

How come?

Yes that is the actual benefit of NFTs. It's happening.

Indeed! On that note, if Douglas Adams were still alive he’d have cleared this entire situation up years ago. And it’s NOT that NFTs are themselves worthless…

Reading below it’s clearly a perception problem.

The fundamental concept of NFTs is profoundly useful. The fact a trivial use case (to represent ownership of JPGs) is all anyone here knows or talks about is the real problem.

Yes.

Incorrect.

NFTs used for pictures of monkeys etc are now effectively worthless.

NFTs as a technology, for tokenizing real world assets, is the far more interesting and useful part.

https://www.ledgerinsights.com/abrdn-tokenize-money-market-f...

Watching NFTs from afar and thinking it’s all just JPGs means you only have 5% of the story.

I saw this video clip recently and it looks like people are building the infrastructure in the background.

Reliable ground based sensors are an important area being addressed.

https://twitter.com/thehbarbull/status/1659167041062944770/m...

Just like the market for tablets before the iPad and the market for smartwatches before the Apple Watch?

The way Datomic handles facts, accumulating them and providing point-in-time queries, is very effective.

Facts can contradict each other. Old facts are not lost. Querying requires a notion of time - “as of”.

No, today we have servers with some form of leader or centralised point of failure.

With a properly decentralised network any node can be taken down without taking down the entire network.

Not all public DLTs are born equal however. Leaderless networks which are not vulnerable to DDOS attacks are the dream.

Others can run the nodes. The point is the network of nodes are distributed and no node is more important than any other. They are all just peers.

Under 10 transactions per second globally is why Bitcoin isn’t used in retail.

Micropayments and nanopayments require thousands and tens of thousands TPS. There are newer generations of crypto that can do that and with none of the energy consumption problems of Bitcoin and other Proof of Work systems.

When you can’t tell the difference between something that “feels like a cryptocurrency advocate pretending to write as if they were a skeptic” and something that’s maybe actually got a point, maybe rather than just dismiss it outright how about heeding the advice in the article?

Afterall, isn’t the point of the article about setting aside knee-jerk reactions and consider that there maybe something going on here? (Hint: There really is. There’s a lot of bullshit too but what’s the saying “don’t throw the baby out with the bath water”).

The problem with that article is it confuses NFTs with NFTs being used as collectibles.

It’s like criticising the JPG file format because a lot of people use it to just store pictures of cats.

The practical use-cases for NFTs, tokenisation of real world items, identities, proofs, certificates etc., goes far beyond the collectibles market.

NFTs are going to play a massive role in our lives in the future. Criticising them because of one trivial (albeit lucrative) aspect is missing the forest for the trees.

Exactly this.

There is a much bigger use-case for NFTs and tokenisation than just buying and selling JPGs.

It was a reply to the previous comment: “So far, all the consensus mechanisms that I know of employ a game of chance to select who gets to append the data.”

Which seems to be the typical sentiment in comments when it comes to Blockchain technologies and DLTs in general. I’m not surprised considering the amount of questionable technology and news associated with the space.

But clearly there are technologies out there. I thought it was important to address that. Most people obviously don’t know about the newer technologies in this space and remain in the dark.

As to your points on decentralisation - I agree they’ve got their work cut-out to prove us otherwise. Time will tell. But if you’re going to make a genuinely useful public ledger that can act as a layer of trust, you better make damn sure it’s safe from bad actors and is future-proof. Their route to decentralisation certainly seems like a good way of achieving that. They’re playing the long game by the looks of things.

To your last point regarding not seeing a particular innovation here for securing decentralised consensus relative to other POS systems…

This is a key, and I believe a unique feature, of the Hashgraph algorithm:

https://help.hedera.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000674097-What-...

Then you haven’t heard of Hedera Hashgraph. Concensus with finality. No mining.

https://www.hedera.com/learning/what-is-hashgraph-consensus