The Tinkerbell Griftopia

> Why is Disney worth $275B despite all of their movies hitting The Pirate Bay immediately upon their release?

Merchandise, theme parks, movie tickets, cruises, live shows (eg "Disney on Ice"), and so on. You're typically not going to find an HD quality pirated movie the second it hits theaters, only once it's released to the home or sent out as a screener. That's only a tiny slice of their diversified pie. For the record, I'm not usually one to defend Disney as a corporation.

> I can Google Image search pictures of the Mona Lisa with zero effort. Thus, the original is worthless?

It's not worthless. :) The original is the original physical painting that you can touch and feel, and your Google Image results are a bunch of pixels of photos/scans of the painting. On the other hand, if you create an original .jpg and sell it as an NFT, every other .jpg of that NFT is literally identical to the original, something you cannot achieve with your Mona Lisa comparison.

There are several major issues with NFTs but I don't think this article identifies any of them:

- NFTs are not durable. All of the implementations I've seen are trading "ownership" of URLs that rely on DNS and WHOIS. URL is nice for convenience feature, but they should at least include file hashes, ideally multiple perceptual hashes as well. If there is a central point of failure in a web service, the benefits of decentralization are null. If OpenSea goes down, your NFT is effectively gone: so what is the effective distinction from OpenSea hosting a centralized database?

- Scarcity is entirely illusory across ecosystems. A given NFT within one ecosystem may be scarce, but there is nothing preventing duplicate NFTs of the exact same content (or minor pixel changes). That's why perceptual and file hashes would be useful: currently there is little to stop someone from taking popular NFTs on one ecosystem and selling the same images on another ecosystem. Ecosystems have a financial incentive to ignore enforcing duplicated content from other ecosystems: it makes them more money and hurts their competitors at the cost of possible minor reputation risk. Each NFT ecosystem is effectively a separate competing namespace system. Imagine if opensea://google.com and rarible://google.com were entirely independent and routed to servers controlled by competing organizations: chaos.

- There is no validation of copyright upon NFT creation. I can find someone else's art, make an NFT and sell it. NFT ecosystems need to evolve into becoming more like auction houses: their brand's value should be based on the trust that the art sold is not counterfeit, and are being sold by the true owner.

- NFTs have not succeeded in a test within the courts (afaik, lmk if you have an example of this). NFTs grant no legal rights to the holder. If NFTs granted the exclusive right to license that content AND courts enforced that right, they could be immensely valuable. There is no unified "IP Registry" that I can find a picture/audio/video on the internet and look up who the current owner is to contact for licensing. This is the killer app for NFTs IMO, but whether courts will play along with code-as-law has not been legally validated yet.

Fortunately for NFTs, non of these are technically insurmountable. Maybe there are some smaller ecosystems that have better designs, but it seems the big players are all taking the easy path and building a fragile foundation for ownership.

> What’s stopping any of these companies from simply buying 51% of the tokens to a decentralized DAO, for example?

Smaller coins, sure. Its a legitimate concern.

But it becomes far harder as coins get bigger. Up to a local maxima of general global use and investment. Even harder as companies compete against one-another to do the same thing. What's stopping Chase Bank from buying up tons of coins and mining power to control Bitcoin? Well, every other human who owns Bitcoin, not to mention Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

Company interest in doing this will naturally correlate with usage. Which means, companies & governments simply wont do it until its too late and they can't. And if they did; if they jumped the shark; the coin's value would drop as users recognize this, and their investment would be ruined. Suicide-bombing is not in the self-interest of most corporations. The GDP of the US, the single richest cohesive entity on the planet, is still only ~25% the GDP of Planet Earth.

This sort of co-option of a currency won't happen, because a currency would either be so big that no entity could afford to do it, or a currency is so small that taking control would destroy its market and their investment.

> But the more time I spend around the space ...

The more you get sucked in to the reality distortion field. I've been there, get out.

"NFT is literally identical to the original" Youre so close here! Literally identical except for the fact that people are willing to pay millions of dollars for one, and not the other! Perhaps there is something else that makes them different too.....