I think the NFT skepticism is understandable. All attention seems be going out to a very low amount of questionable art going around for a few 100K or even millions.
Browse actual NFT sites and you'll notice there's zero bids on the typical NFT. Clearly, it's not really working as a new market model. Yet.
Further, not really securing copyrights to the art itself I consider a design flaw. Without it, your ownership is make-belief.
All of that said, I'd still advocate to zoom out a little and keep an open mind to the idea. The way I see it, these are some of the first experiments in applying digital scarcity to the creative space. This first version being admittedly terrible.
Fast forward a few years and it may very well have evolved into something more sustainable and normalized. The reason I would hope for that to happen is that it may slash some very powerful gatekeepers.
When you're a photographer, right now you may need to license your work to Getty images, for pennies, them fully dictating the terms. When you're a small musician, you need to get on Spotify, them fully dictating the terms.
In theory, and hopefully in practice, next-gen NFTs can provide an alternative, a more fair market-based approach not depending on middlemen. Or at least less so.
The other advantage comes from digital property being programmable. For example, when minting an NFT, you can indicate there to be 5 copies, and you want 10% of any future resale of the piece.
You can't do that in any practical way using old school copyrights. Digital property is superior in that sense.
And there's the potential of cross pollination. Say a popular game commits to supporting NFTs. And in this war game your tank has a unique skin, that nobody else has. Instead of the game maker deciding on all skins, anybody can make them and sell them.
That would be another gate keeper slashed, and power returned to the community. Just this silly idea alone could create an enormous new market. There would be many more such new markets if/when NFTs become interoperable, instead of isolated.
We really need to leave behind this thought that when it's digital, it's worthless. Our lives are digital now. In the future, you have a digital wallet on your phone containing lots of items. Your money. Digital creative works. Maybe tokens from your favorite football club. Who knows?
Last, I find it really ironic how on an article like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28274026
...consensus is that it's a very bad thing that 5 companies own all of the digital landscape. Uniform agreement. Whilst at the same time, rejecting anything "crypto".
Crypto is the only technology and movement that I can think of to have a chance at breaking down oversized gate keepers. Half of hackernews is complaining about big tech: tracking, lack of free speech, milking users, oversized power, creators that can't monetize, killing competition by acquiring small players, hording patents, the list goes on.
Can or will crypto fix all of this? No. Probably not even close. But it's the best chance we got.
I'd like my downvotes now, please, am going to mint it.