NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

> Perhaps I am not thinking creatively enough

Perhaps, but its ok either way, it's not really limiting the DAO or the places leveraging the DAO to pursue this stuff.

> Using your hotel example, you will end up at the hotel where they can choose to honor your ticket in the same way as their traditional booking system. There was no need for this to be on a distributed ledger as the asset (a hotel stay) was between you and the hotel.

Its not just about honoring the ticket for the duration of any particular booking, but also mitigating the risk between multiple parties and being able to easily integrate such information with as many decentralized protocols are needed for the parties involved without extra dev overhead to connect them.

For some places, you need to have a card on file in case of damages (this is where the decentralized escrow/dispute and resolution protocol come in) and rely soley on visa/mastercard and the hotel unilaterally being able to say that you were the cause of an issue that may come up or being able to decided whether or not you are on the hook.

Incentivized actors (these need not be people, it could be automated, but since everything has an address, no one can tell the difference) of those other protocols on chain need visibility with the address that held the nft. So yes, its trust the protocols and incentives associated with them around handling dispute and resolution and non custodial locking of collateral in escrow (or allowing another protocol to time lock collateral on ones behalf).

And this assumes that the place someone buys an nft stay has the in house capability to do all that without using a particualr nft stay protocol (which alot of places dont esp for random bnb) or ok with giving a large cut to airbnb/booking.com/visa etc if they don't.

> You are not cutting out the middle man of some SaaS provider, you are substituting them.

Yes, for code that can take a lot less of the cut than existing SaaS providers (if any at all). A protocol != SaaS provider, even though a SaaS provider could manage a protocol[0], or a protocol can just be an set of immutable contracts deployed on chain, or anything in between.

[0] https://aws1.discourse-cdn.com/standard21/uploads/shinedao/o...

Youtube suggested a video to me about what's going on in the collectable video game market. The claim was that there's some collusion between a major auction site and a grader, and some of those players were running a pump and dump.

Unless you know who the buyers and sellers are or transaction fees are high (like an auction at Christie's), you have no idea if the sales are real, so it's pretty easy to make it look like the asset is appreciating when it's really just manufactured hype.

> however, one benefit is clear and compelling: decentralized royalty capture and IP management.

Bzzt. No. This is what NFTs claim they do, not what they actually do.

How do you know that the person creating a NFT has the right to do that? The NFT tracks the chain of ownership for the NFT itself, if the initial person creating the NFT did not own the copyright for the art in question, then the NFT itself is useless.

Second, there is no way for the NFT chain to enforce off-chain actions. If you have the NFT for a copyrightable piece of work and you believe someone is infringing your rights, you must still go to the regular legal courts and sue over it. The NFT itself cannot enforce your IP or collect royalties on your behalf.

Crypto hasn’t improved our digital world. It’s made it measurably worse through (among other things) making it trivial to profit from ransomware and DDOS-for-hire services. And of course there’s the indefensible environmental impacts and the destabilizing effect on the market for consumer computing hardware like GPUs.

I don’t doubt there exist people whose lives have been improved (for the time being) by the existence of cryptocurrency, but the overwhelming impact has been a disaster.