NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

The frustration those of us who are skeptical of this use case of NFTs -- creating artificial digital scarcity -- has with responses like yours and Exporectomy's is that you're pretty much saying "you're clearly not thinking about this deeply enough, because anyone who thought about this correctly would surely agree with us." This is not only not a very convincing argument, it's a little bit of an insulting one.

The objection I mentioned in my previous comment was that the original copyright holder of a creative work is the only person who can transfer any ownership rights. But let me restate this without invoking copyright: if I have the legal right to transfer ownership of a digital file in any legally recognized sense to you -- whether that file is a piece of software that I bought on physical media I am conveying to you, or artwork I created that is being digitally transferred to you -- an NFT is only useful as a proof of ownership if we have contractually stipulated that it does. That contract exists independently of the NFT, incorporating the NFT only by reference, just like the NFT itself only incorporates the digital file it tokenizes by reference. The NFT itself has no legal authority -- it's just a transactional record. As I mentioned in my previous comment, it's possible to easily create "bogus" NFTs of digital files whose creators or rights holders haven't authorized it. Furthermore, since there are multiple blockchains that handle NFTs, an NFT is just unique on that blockchain, so again there needs to be a framework outside the blockchain to truly establish ownership.

So the question has to arise: do you need the NFT in this transaction at all? Why can't the original contract incorporate the digital file directly by reference itself? The NFT doesn't really do much to support "proof of ownership," while instead clearly creating opportunities for scammers taking advantage of people who don't understand that just because you have an NFT for a digital file doesn't mean you necessarily have any legal authority to sell any kind of right whatsoever, copy or otherwise, in that file.

Maybe you don't see it that way -- clearly a lot of people don't -- but please do not imply I haven't taken a moment to think about this more deeply. I've thought about it a lot, in fact, and so far I haven't found a convincing response to the concerns I've expressed about this particular use case for NFTs.

1. I am artist X 2. I have an Ethereum wallet and even own the ENS name X.eth 3. I mint an NFT that represents ownership of one of my digital works

That NFT cannot be duplicated, because the Ethereum network enforces unique IDs for each ERC 721 token and prevents the double spend problem. What's more, I can look at the NFT and determined that it was indeed minted by artist X because it was his address that created it.

The artist can later mint duplicate NFTs but everyone will still know which NFT came first.

> This is not only not a very convincing argument, it's a little bit of an insulting one.

My apologies if I came across as insulting, but I do feel a sense of frustration with some of the arguments provided in discussions like these, and I think we can agree that some of the language critiquing NFTs here does not scream "open minded".

First, let me correct a misconception that may give you a slightly different perspective. You write "since there are multiple blockchains that handle NFTs, an NFT is just unique on that blockchain". It is worse than that! There is nothing that enforces uniqueness of an NFT within a single blockchain; not in a way that would make such a duplicate any different than a duplicate on a different chain. You couldn't prevent such duplicates, even if you wanted to. First, artists may on purpose create multiple copies; second, the only way such unique could be detected would be hashes, which can easily be fooled. Third, a scammer minting an NFT of an image belonging to an artist, would then block that artist from being able to mint the NFT themselves. It sounds bad, but it really doesn't matter for the concept to work. People scamming by pretending they are selling art pieces they did not create is a problem, but it is not a problem NFTs set out to solve (and indeed cannot).

The NFT does not confer any legal rights, correct. But what legal authorities would you want it to confer to the owner? There are a couple that are really useful: The right to download a copy of the art piece from a website. Yes. The right to use the art piece as a profile picture on Twitter. Sure! And artists do often provide license agreements along those lines. (If they don't provide any license information, I believe an owner could try to argue that there is an implied license, and may or may not succeed in that claim.) Some artists put their work even into the public domain.

I would agree that owning an NFT which you do not have the permission to copy to your hard-drive, or which you cannot see on OpenSea because the artist refuses to allow OpenSea to show that image, seems quite degraded. It will probably be not very popular. And yet, some people just might pay for it anyway, because the ownership of the token on a blockchain is what matters in the end. If a popular artist such as beeple were to publish an NFT, explicitly denying that the owner has any rights to even make a copy of the image, there is no doubt someone would buy it. Call it conceptual art. There is no legal system required, because like you say correctly, the NFT itself does not confer any legal rights. The blockchain is the definitive record of ownership, because legal modes of ownership are basically orthogonal.

Consider the example of Mitchell F. Chan's Digital Immaterial Zones (I recommend the blue paper: https://github.com/mitchellfchan/IKB/blob/master/Digital-Zon...), which explicitly is a token without any visual media attached; there is nothing that exists outside of the blockchain that you even could own. It is the pure distillation of this idea.

There is a difference between an artist saying "you have the right to download my file" and the artist saying "I consider you the owner of this immaterial piece that I created, I will only acknowledge 10 owners maximum, and also all of you have the right to download the file".

The latter kind of agreement can certainly be modeled with a conventional contract, and indeed that has been done in the art world, but it is just so much easier on a blockchain to track those 10 owners, verify that the person selling to you is an authentic owner and that they sell their claim only once, and so on.

NFTs are all about owning, in fact they are more about owning than almost anything on earth. The ONLY advantage you get from owning an NFT is the knowledge that you own it. Everyone, owner or not, can enjoy looking at the jpeg in the same way. That's not really true for anything else.

So, far from representing the move away from ownership, they are a distillation of the ownership concept.

Just one thing - you can always write a separate contract which subdivides an otherwise indivisible asset on the blockchain.

For example, with NFTs, you could make a DAO that pools together capital to purchase an NFT and can trade their share of ownership of the NFT on the open market.