I feel that most people who speak very badly or very well about NFTs and crypto in general don't really understand it.

In simple terms what the Blockchain technology solves is a way to have an append only database with no centralized authority. This is a HUGE accomplishment, but you very likely don't care about it.

In short, this means that Blockchain provides a way to exchange "tokens" without any user needing to trust each other or a third party. If you can trust the other person, or can trust a third party to be impartial then you don't really need a Blockchain.

A Token is a representation of something, for currencies a token is a representation of value, and value is a fungible attribute, I.e. 1 of them is the same as any other, like coins, where you can replace a coin for another of the same denomination and they're worth the same.

However tokens can be non-fungible, which means that one token is not the same as another, think for example house deeds, if someone takes your house deed they can't just give you a different house deed and be the same.

We use non-fungible tokens a lot on our society, some examples are steam keys, vehicle registrations, or certifications of ownership for expensive pieces of art. We usually can trust valve, the government and whoever issued the art certificate to be impartial when someone tries to sell a game, car or art. But what if you couldn't? How would you safely validate ownership without having to trust anyone?

That's what crypto NFT bring to the table, someone had the idea to create a platform where artists could create tokens of authenticity for their art, and sell that to people giving them a way to own digital art in the same way that someone owns a painting. Then crypto bros started pumping that to sell their tokens for a higher price and a lots of people fell for it and started buying tokens representing ownership of things they didn't wanted or understood to try to sell for s higher price later.

Obviously that scheme fell, but that doesn't mean the technology is useless or untrustworthy. But for most cases crypto is not needed as most people can trust their government or some other centralized authority.

NFTs provide provenance for artwork and allows for a specific person to designate some digital objects as originals while all other equivalent digital objects are copies. The original market burned out because people were spending large amounts of money for artwork with artificial scarcity, not because provenance isn’t a problem.

NFTs were (is?) to copyright what Cryptocurrency is to money. A decentralised system, without requiring a central organiser.

With cryptocurrency, the token was the money, and inseparable from the Blockchain. With NFTs it was the equivalent of a recept, not the item.

Basically, NFTs tried to replace copyright etc. However, they have no enforcement ability beyond that of local copyright enforcement. At that point, you might as well just use local copyright directly. No need for a middle man.

what they were: paying for the receipt, and proudly flashing the receipt around. Meanwhile you never actually got the "product" that the receipt claimed that you own and the seller could take the content itself offline after the fact.

At best, they were a money laundering/ponzi scheme. The value cratered, and now we don't hear about them anymore.

The blockchain (think notepad, with non erasable sharpie) had an entry that would link that item to you. You could sell it to someone by writing their name below yours. It didnt tangibly transfer anything though, and the items were all very easy to duplicate, so ownership meant nothing.

The Greater Fool game finally ended.

The current game: AI.

After AI: Quantum computing.

They were too ridiculous even for money laundering.

NFTs, like blockchain in general, are public write-only databases. The only difference is that NFTs also contains references to things such as media (pictures).

They're still around, but like all other fads that are poorly camouflaged ~~pondicherry~~ ponzi schemes (ducking autocorrect), they're practically worthless.

An NFT doesn't dictate ownership, neither de jure nor de facto.

While I find the concept of public write-only databases interesting feom a technological standpoint, an actual use case has yet to be discovered.

Simply put, "Fungibility" is the ability of a thing to be just like any other thing. Like how a dollar bill is just like every other dollar bill, even though it has a serial number which makes it special.

Cryptocurrenties were designed to be fungible, even though all they are is really large random numbers protected cryptographically by other large numbers. The NFT folks realized that you can add context to those random numbers to make them "one of a kind" - Non-Fungible. Kind of like how some Pokemon cards are more expensive than others (of the same rarity) because of what's printed on them.

That's it! That's all it is. No clue why they got to be worth a thing more than a Pikachu.

You hit the nail on the head with the problem in your question. Other than a website that has a text banner that says “This person owns this” there’s nothing binding to prove that. Sure, there’s the actual computer work that goes into generating the token just like Bitcoin, but that’s only as useful as someone respecting its value.

It’s literally a badge that the outside world has to decide is valuable for it to mean anything.

Once Kevin Rose got into it it all went to shit.

For that we can all thank him.

The token would have a designated link stored on the blockchain (public ledger) that pointed to what you "owned".

So you bought a monkey or whatever, you received a token. When you looked up that token on the block explorer it would have a link to the "original" jpg that you "owned".

Why do this? Cause people are stupid and you can sell monkey pictures for big money (back then). What happened to them? People realized how stupid NFT pictures of monkeys were.

There was a possibility to use a decentralized proof of ownership of digital goods for something not stupid but that never materialized. I still somewhat like the idea of a NFT concert ticket that can be sold and transferred without needing a third party middle man like stubhub. The receiver would be able to verify they were receiving the ticket they were buying was what they wanted and the seller wouldn't be able to counterfeit the ticket due to the non fungible nature.

But yea that never happened and NFTs got the hate they deserved and people moved off of them to the next get rich quick scheme

What were NFTs? Uhhhhh.......stupid, and a scam. That's the best way I can describe them.

I understand the scam angle and I agree with it, but I think I can provide some additional insight in this thread. NFTs are also called “smart contracts”. Banks and non-bank institutions use them and smart contract engineering jobs are still available. People may now be completely unaware that they are interacting with NFTs (or rather, the institution is for them).

They are a unique crypto entity with one owner, rather than a coin which can be exchanged for any other coin. The ape image thing also tried to tie ownership to admittance at some event but I don’t think that panned out and it was a scam. This is a good idea in theory, since you can fight counterfeiting and scalpers.

NFTs may contain code, be interactive or have animations, point to images on websites or embed images on-chain, and can be verified with zero-knowledge trust methods. Just like with crypto, don’t go buying it lol.

~~Retrospect.~~

Here is an empirical study on the matter.

Like any market item it only has what value anyone is willing to pay for it.

It's an interesting concept from a proof of ownership standpoint, same way you can 'own' a piece of crypto by holding a specific key.

Of any practical use though, say someone wanted to put the deed to a house as an owned token, the adoption across jurisdictions, the costs to maintain this ledger, the risk of electronic theft that simply doesn't exist with paper records, it all makes real use more complicated than it needs to be.