NFT Replicas: An app to mint a replica of virtually any NFT

I don't really consider it solved, has Ticketmaster solved festival passes in a way everyone likes? When organizers aren't using ticketmaster, is transferring the ticket solved or is it rife with scams and abuse and arbitrary restrictions and guesswork. The tertiary benefit is also not something NFT's are aiming to solve. You asked and got an answer about what people are doing. Not what it was created to do.

There is nothing stopping you from using a Twitter photo. Also not something an NFT was claiming to solve. This is just a viral strawman where other people created a use case that wasn't presented and then criticized that use case to discredit the other thing. If you want to pretend to own something valuable or be part of a community you can still do that. I don't really understand what that means to you. I guess that's a good follow up question, what does that mean to you?

There is nothing wrong with speculation. This is not exclusive to the NFT space either when it comes to art or any collectible. I'm really having trouble with all the higher standards you are procedurally generating for this one space.

In any case, membership is actually a good example. If NYTimes stopped making infinite memberships, paid monthly, and instead limited it to, say, 100,000 memberships and some of their operation was funded by a portion of royalties when one of the membership was traded, what would the memberships cost? What would people be willing to pay? What would NYTimes have to do to make people willing to pay for access to their investigative journalism? All that's happening is that you are seeing price discovery in a place where there was none. Replace NYTimes with one of the finance ones like WSJ, if that's easier. or with Soho House memberships.

- stocks and real estate: people use "objective" metrics like discounting cash flow. But the time preference for discounting cash is subjective.

- precious metals and commodities: there are "objective" stock-to-flow metrics, but they all assume people will still desire precious metals, commodities, and the resulting products. This desire is subjective.

Then why can't they just be the arbiter of what the real JPEG is and skip a whole step?

Discounted cash flows, etc, are all ways people use to come to their ‘subjective’ conclusions.

It ends up being circular though - yes, human judgement is ultimately part of the equation, but that judgment end up being based on a prediction of future value, and often we can use understanding of markets or the intrinsic value of commodities to industrial processes to assess this.

Many people are arguing that the value of NFTs is in fact not based on an intrinsic value to future processes, and is purely a subjective bubble.

Arguing that all valuations have a component of human judgement and that people may just continue to like NFTs is not a counterargument.

A counterargument would be to explain how that will continue to be valuable independent of the subjective component.

Generally people seem to dodge this, and instead just say ‘everything is subjective’, i.e. the postmodern view.

But yeah I think of NFTs as a novel way to support digital art. Not much else, just pay the artist. Same as buying a painting really, except you don’t really own the painting anymore.

The idea that buying art is anything BUT supporting an artist is pretty funny. It’s as if we’ve normalised art as either an investment or a museum that we can’t touch. Buying art was always meant to just let the artist do his thing!

Selling digital art before NFTs was a complete pain! Before them you had to go with an agency or gallery, they took a cut, they had to like your stuff. It was absolutely painful, full of gate keeping and bullshit I (and many others) hated. Now you just mint (hopefully on a low carbon chain) and off you go, you tweet about it, get some attention, make some money. It’s simple. The fact that there’s a secondary market for it, well there always was one for art.

It certainly attracted a bunch of rubes who buy ape JPEGs but there is an honest revolution in digital art happening right now. Look into FXhash on tezos, I’ve lost count of the amount of generative art on that market and it’s really really mind blowing. People are coding amazing stuff on there and selling it, something which used to be virtually impossible without a gallery and a rep and a bunch of nonsense.

I think an NFT is a form of DRM that doesn’t enforce scarcity - ie you own A license to that artwork but that doesn’t give you the right to it. That license can be bought and sold, maybe eventually that will have value (my personal favourite is that NFTs should allow you to remix the artwork into your own art, but who knows).