I don’t really care about fad stuff so I never bought any but also I never really understood how they worked practically. Like if I bought a famous tweet or jpg or what ever, how would I use the token to verify owner ship of the thing or sell it?
I don’t really care about fad stuff so I never bought any but also I never really understood how they worked practically. Like if I bought a famous tweet or jpg or what ever, how would I use the token to verify owner ship of the thing or sell it?
Dan Olson made one of his fun documentaries about this exact subject. If you have the time, watch it.
If you want my cheap boil-down of the idea:
NFTs are representations of ownership of a digital asset stored on a blockchain. However, as with any digital thing, the represented object can usually just be duplicated, making ownership essentially lacking in the aspect of ‘control’ one usually associates with other forms of ownership, and as with many fad purchases, the value of such things was massively distorted. There was and probably still is no legal structure for that ‘ownership,’ so it’s a bit like ‘owning’ your Lemmy account. As long as you have the password and no one else does, you can control it, if anyone gets the credentials, they can take control and there is little to no legal recourse. So, if you can’t stop other people using duplicates and you can have it taken as easily as any other account, it’s hard to really call it ownership. It’s just a mark in a ledger that says your account is associated with some entry, which is also what registering a title/deed does but with the legal force of the government reinforcing it.