Also this post is ridiculous, movies, tv shows and music get their value from their entertainment value, NFTs get their value because some dudes say they have value and spent money on it. It's all a fucking get rich quick scheme that will eventually blow up in someone's face.
I don't think anyone's issue is with the existence of the technology but how it's being applied currently. I think you'll be hard pressed to find people who take issue with a digital record of ownership existing for a real world asset sometime in the future. People are just annoyed with evangelists talking about how smart they were for paying 6 grand for a hash value confirming they own a picture to some butt ugly art, access to a discord server and promises orders of magnitude sketchier than the mighty number 9 kickstarter.
Sure, I get the annoyance. But look around. Many people take issue with the existance of the technology because they principally refuse to look into it and equate blockchain with Bitcoin and NFT with jpg's.
Look I'm super old and dumb, so this is a real question and not trolling.
How is this any different from something like the Steam Inventory in sayyyyy, Team Fortress 2. In case if you don't play it:
* players can acquire copies of items that are attached to their accounts by playing the game or spending either real money or steam wallet on them in a store.
* these items are a combination of art and gameplay content as they give you access to weapons or cosmetics in the game but can be displayed on your Steam Profile.
* these items can be sold/traded for Steam Wallet cash (which can be traded out for real world cash on some websites by gifting stuff in exchange for paypal) or other items with other players.
* the original creators of that item get a special Self Made version so everyone knows/can find out who made the actual item, so the original is different from the copies.
* uses fuck all energy to do any of this
Because for the life of me I can't wrap my head around how NFT's are any different...and if they aren't then uhhh, why use so much energy to do something that can already be replicated in a much more energy efficient way. It's not like it's particularly hard to identify a piece of digital content as an original and assign it to someone with an account based system while everyone else can only get a slightly different version of it.
Okay, so first of all, NFT's are non-fungible tokens. They use a blockchain, which is a decentralized ledger (much like a torrents). Neither NFT's or blockchains need to have any monetary value, nor do they need to use energy. It's just that bitcoin was the first implementation of a blockchain and is used to store monetary value and to keep the ledger alive, people need to mine. It's called proof of work, where your computer verifies everything that happens on the blockchain and adds new information onto it (lets compare it to seeding to keep a torrent alive), it needs to solve a complicated code. Solving this code uses your computer, and it needs energy so you get awarded a bit of money as compensation for your costs and as a reward of keeping the network alive.
It's important to note that in essence, the blockchain technology, and by extension, NFT's, do not equal bitcoin. For instance, many newer blockchains don't use proof-of-work anymore but proof of stake, where participating in the network gives you rewards through staking. So in simple terms, instead of the 'seeding' analogy, it's more akin of setting up my pc as a checkpoint and validate data. To set up a checkpoint, or 'node', I need to proof I have a stake in the network I'm keeping up, so I need to lock some value into it, and as a return I'll receive interest on the value I locked up into it. Locking up value means I can't sell it, so it keeps the value of whatever token stabile. That's really to just really sum it up in a simplified way.
Since a blockchain is a decentralized ledger of public (!) data, it can be used for anything. In the case of NFT's, you can publicly say 'I own this' and it gets put in the ledger. If everyone participating in the network (be it Proof of work or stake), then it gets added to the ledger and become public information.
Most NFT's are on the ethereum blockchain, which is a programmable blockchain. This means it can execute code which gets triggered in certain circumstances. For instance, like with the house deed example I used in a previous post, I can create an NFT of my house deed and the public ledger confirms that I indeed own my house and there's no discussion about it. It will be registered in perpetuity. I can choose to sell my house, and transfer the NFT to a different person, and make sure there is a code executed that they won't receive the deed of ownership until they have paid fully. Or I can make a smart contract saying that they need to pay 20% of the worth now, they get the NFT now, and then need to pay the rest of the 80% over a period of five years. In essence, this circumvents banks (though in reality, what's already happening is that banks are starting to switch to blockchain to track transactions of all their products, remember: they can set up their own private blockchains! - though they aren't very decentralized).
Ethereum being programmable also allows layers to be built on top of it which are blockchains by itself. For instance, that bank can built it own blockchain to track transactions, and use the security of the Ethereum network and its validators to make it work. Because the bank uses the Ethereum network for security, it has to pay the validators who do all the work of securing (Visa is already moving in that direction for instance).
In short, the difference between doing something like TF2 content and an NFT is very much a behind the scenes thing. It's technology. Steam, for instance, could change from a centralized server model to a decentralized blockchain. They could use a blockchain that is proof-of-stake and thus uses very little energy. The blockchain would keep track of all users, which items they have, how much real money or steam gift cards they have on their accounts, what games they have in their library and all that. And Steam also wouldn't need to store this on a server, it would be on a decentralized ledger much like how torrents aren't hosted 'anywhere'.
If Steam would allow it, users could also be able to transfer their data to a different blockchain, or sell it to users on the same blockchain. With smart contracts, Valve for instance could make sure it gets a 40% cut on everything you sell on the blockchain and the rest goes to you. If developers and publishers work together, you could in theory transfer data and assets from one game to another. But this is heading into very speculative territory and is unlikely to happen.
But the gist of it is that blockchain in itself is a technology to publicly store any form of data, and more advanced versions of the tech allows you to program it and build unto it. In its essence its agnostic and is not owned by a corporation but by anyone participating in the blockchain. A good working blockchain is secure, unhackable and makes it easy to track all transactions. (Disclaimer: since it's still a bit the wild west, not all blockchains are working good)
So in the case of Steam, we all trust Steam. I get that there's little issue taken with Steam doing all the things you described. But servers can be hacked, corporations can go bankrupt, in the end most profits go to one party. Blockchain allows more freedom to transfer items, value, data,... (but the creator of the blockchain has to allow it, Steam wouldn't) and instead of all data being owned by Valve, it wouldn't be owned by anyone. Your data would be owned by you.
To be clear, it's still early tech, and alot of experimentation is happening. In the end, my personal conviction is that blockchain will be largely invisble and no one will interact directly with it. You use a bank? Transactions are stored on a blockchain owned by the international banking system. Sell a house? Transaction is stored on a blockchain run by the government. You buy solar panels? Create a blockchain with your neighborhood to sell your extra power and settle your bills between each other. In each of these examples, the application is a 'layer' running on top of a central blockchain, which is secured by decentralized validators and allows for freedom of movement between layers. But we're absolutely not there yet. We're currently in something akin to the command line era of personal computer, and the goal is to get to easy-of-use of smartphones. Will we ever get there? I don't know.
If you're curious of a list of blockchain applications that are currently being worked on you can check this
link.
Disclaimer before I'm declared a 'shill': I'm unaffiliated with any type of blockchain and I don't mine, I don't validate, I don't sell anything, I have never cared about the current use of NFT's. I am interested in the tech though, and I'm very cynical of the current state and privatization of the internet. While I'm unsure in how things will evolve, I am curious about how it will evolve since there is potential for increased personal ownership of your data and the elimination of a lot of middlemen.
