I mean, you are certainly right that, again, an NFT is just a blockchain ledger entry, and there could be other kinds of ledger entries. Some examples include:
- Paper certificates of ownership of ideas/ingantible works, which have been used for art in the past going back some decades, and maybe somewhat more common now with certain conceptual / digital art pieces.
- A centralized leger, as the folks from Blain|Southern tried to do with seditionart.com.
- Or, maybe you can do something with federation, as you suggest?
That is just a tech argument of whether a blockchain (say Proof of Stake-based to avoid the energy argument) or something else is better, but note: It changes nothing about what the NFT is (and we can still call it that for simplicity). It would seem to do nothing to alleviate the concerns of people who don't understand paying for a pointer to a media file; since that is still what the federated ledger tracks, right?
If people feel a federated system works better for this, they can certainly build it. But Twitter is just Instagram from a purely technical perspective. There is more to product-market fit than the underlying database.
The whole thing came together with blockchains, maybe because you need an easy way to buy that stuff too, because there was a bunch of rich crypto people actually willing to spend money (when no one before was much interested in paying digital artists for their work), maybe cause the tech was there.
In general, I don't see what the argument is about; the ledger works quite well on a blockchain, and would work less well in a federated system from a trust perspective. I.e. your analysis about the trust vectors involved making the chain useless is wrong. Sure, platforms can choose not to show certain NFTs, and OpenSea has some dominance in the space, but when OpenSea kicked off a Cryptopunk Clone project no one lost their tokens, they continued to be traded elsewhere, and the community still chose to value their possessions, even if it maybe inhibited their growth.
There is really nothing centralized at the center of it in the end. Artists publish work on their own websites and their own contracts all the time, and if deafbeef posts on Twitter about his new NFT on this website, I will trust the existing social verification system (my friend telling me about it, his Twitter account being a known-entity).
This is distinct from Twitter avatar verification, which I predict a) will not happen and b) is indeed useless unless Twitter wants to be in the business of deciding which Punk-derivative project is looking too much like the real thing, which I doubt it wants to do.
If the argument is that tokens in general have a use-case, then I agree with you, they do. My concern is specifically with NFTs (not the general concept, the specific example that springs to mind when most people say the word). I have problems with:
A) the technology
B) the average consumer's understanding of the technology
I think we need art-tokens to be on a blockchain, and in a lot of ways the blockchain might even make this kind of stuff even harder. It's often desirable when working with non-fungible tokens to be able to easily update their metadata, block them, or link them together. NFTs are slowly making movement in this direction, but they're moving very slowly, and it's not clear how the blockchain is helping with any of those features.
I also think it's worth asking why this scene exploded specifically with NFTs even though the systems to make it work existed long before NFTs were on the scene. Frankly, I don't believe you that the average NFT investor understands that the ledger is just a ledger. I've talked to people who are involved in casual NFT collection, and they think the technology is magic. They think that the blockchain magically makes their tokens valuable.
> but when OpenSea kicked off a Cryptopunk Clone project no one lost their tokens, they continued to be traded elsewhere, and the community still chose to value their possessions, even if it maybe inhibited their growth.
It's not really the blockchain that makes this happen though; federated systems can split from each other and route around each other just as easily. If a federated ledger tries to remove tokens, communities can still choose to recognize those tokens and either fork the ledger or run in parallel alongside it.
What you're seeing with OpenSea and clone projects is the social side of this, not the blockchain part.
- Paper certificates of ownership of ideas/ingantible works, which have been used for art in the past going back some decades, and maybe somewhat more common now with certain conceptual / digital art pieces.
- A centralized leger, as the folks from Blain|Southern tried to do with seditionart.com.
- Or, maybe you can do something with federation, as you suggest?
That is just a tech argument of whether a blockchain (say Proof of Stake-based to avoid the energy argument) or something else is better, but note: It changes nothing about what the NFT is (and we can still call it that for simplicity). It would seem to do nothing to alleviate the concerns of people who don't understand paying for a pointer to a media file; since that is still what the federated ledger tracks, right?
If people feel a federated system works better for this, they can certainly build it. But Twitter is just Instagram from a purely technical perspective. There is more to product-market fit than the underlying database.
The whole thing came together with blockchains, maybe because you need an easy way to buy that stuff too, because there was a bunch of rich crypto people actually willing to spend money (when no one before was much interested in paying digital artists for their work), maybe cause the tech was there.
In general, I don't see what the argument is about; the ledger works quite well on a blockchain, and would work less well in a federated system from a trust perspective. I.e. your analysis about the trust vectors involved making the chain useless is wrong. Sure, platforms can choose not to show certain NFTs, and OpenSea has some dominance in the space, but when OpenSea kicked off a Cryptopunk Clone project no one lost their tokens, they continued to be traded elsewhere, and the community still chose to value their possessions, even if it maybe inhibited their growth.
There is really nothing centralized at the center of it in the end. Artists publish work on their own websites and their own contracts all the time, and if deafbeef posts on Twitter about his new NFT on this website, I will trust the existing social verification system (my friend telling me about it, his Twitter account being a known-entity).
This is distinct from Twitter avatar verification, which I predict a) will not happen and b) is indeed useless unless Twitter wants to be in the business of deciding which Punk-derivative project is looking too much like the real thing, which I doubt it wants to do.