Speaking of, any of you betting on the Derby this year? I'm about to start my research into my picks.
That's... not true at all. Digital assets have ownership rights. Just because people can technically reproduce something, doesn't mean they're legally allowed to do so, and it does mean that the owner is allowed to pursue legal action. There's a reason why knock-off NFL merchandise is primarily available only from other countries. Is it going to stop Disaster Girl from getting posted on Reddit? Of course not. But if the NFT was used to confer ownership or legal rights over the image/copyright, now the person who bought it can use the meme to make money, and can send cease and desist letters to people attempting to do the same. A quick search for "disaster girl t-shirt" shows that lots of people are trying to cash in on this. In addition, the ecosystem is basically nonexistent now. It's just a bunch of people flailing around. But an example might be if you own a Magic NFT card (or whatever they're called, I don't know if the game has a term for them), you can only play with that card if you can prove you own the NFT. Or, as mentioned above, you may be the only person who can legally display a particular image on your website and all others can be served with C&D letters. I own the digital photographs I take and publish to my website, even if they're easy to reproduce. That ownership has meaning and legal rights. Of course some of this stuff is ridiculous (did I read that the NBA was literally taking footage from their games, assigning it an NFT, and letting people buy little clips? To what end?) but that doesn't mean it's a stupid concept.
So, I'm catering a private party for a group that has a Kentucky Derby party every year (last year got cancelled due to the 'Rona) and they have a cool setup where they auction off each horse for Win, Place, and Show. Obviously the favorites go for a lot more than the long-shots, but it's fun watching a bunch of drunk middle aged people throwing out obscene amounts of money on a 2:00 race. They also have an auction for the DFL (dead fucking last) horse on my suggestion a few years ago, which has now grown into the actual highest betting pool. As far as the actual race itself, I have no idea about any of the horses running this year.
Bo Burnham has announced that he spent the last year filming a new special entirely alone without a crew or audience. While the rest of the comedy world was complaining about being unable to perform at venues and hone their craft, Burnham was like "You merely adopted filming yourself in your room without an audience. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see a stage with an audience until I was already a man." Going back to his YouTube roots.
Maria Bamford did things that years ago too. Her first comedy special she nixed a theatrical audience and performed it for her parents in their living room. Comedy is a dying art. If it’s not being attacked for being offensive, it’s being taken over by shitty identity narcissists like Cameron Esposito and Hannah Gadsby.
Apparently one of our neighbors, whom I thought was a respectable, retired doctor, is a huge pervert that will hump a woman's leg when their husbands aren't around. The old bastard dropped off some newspaper for a project and went for hug as he was leaving and thrust his pelvis against my wife. She went inside, locked the doors, and he came back peering into the house.
Hug rhymes with fug, right? But seriously, wtf? He came back and peered in? You might need to go scare some Jesus into Dr Love.
What you're describing is just... copyright. Registering your work with the US Copyright Office is far more effective. There's also the fact that NFT's don't necessarily transfer copyright, nor are they even created by the person who holds the copyright a lot of the time. They're digital "certificates of authenticity" for things that no one cares about authenticity, issued by whoever the fuck feels like issuing them.
The “value” of anything held by Person A is relative to how much Person B is willing to pay for it. NFTs matter in terms of art in a similar way. Sure, you can print out a copy of an original Babe Ruth card, but a real Babe Ruth card is the one people are willing to pay for. Memes are not rare baseball cards, but they’re not entirely different either. Case in point: Disaster Girl was able to cash in on the sale of the original image.
NFT's are just like art, in my opinion... the value is in the eye of the beholder. Personally, no fucking way would I do anything with an NFT. Just don't see any value in it. But... if you were a patron of the arts, and wanted to support an artist? I could totally see spending gobs of money on an artist's NFT offering. Case in point: Spoiler alert, it's a click bait title... she didn't sell shit, but she's offering it up just in case someone wants to buy it. Ali has been making art for years... decades... and gives it away. For free. She lives and breathes art/music, and if she could wrap up the sum total of all of her works to date, and get a 6 figure payday out of it? More power to her.... and kudos to the person who supported her. To me, THAT is the real value. It's more like digitally signed bragging rights. You're not going to stop anyone else from having access, but you can say, "I was the one who really helped".
Well, I'd say that part of your point must be objectively wrong, since clearly some people care about authenticity, since NFTs have a market. QED. I'm only pointing out that the fact that something can be copied is not a good reason to assume the thing has no value. That's it. Frankly, the same is true for your last point - the fact that someone can generate an NFT against any digital content they want isn't a good argument that NFTs aren't useful. Fraudulent contracts get drawn up all the time for people to sell things that aren't theirs to sell. Contracts are still useful. The whole underpinning of internet domain security runs on certificates, which literally anyone can generate at any time for any domain they want, and yet we implemented a framework that makes it functional. An NFT isn't copyright. It is, however, a reliable and secure way to prove ownership. The Disaster Girl meme got sold to someone who is now free to do Things with it, whatever those are. Interestingly, the NFT was also set up so that Disaster Girl gets 10% of future proceeds if that NFT ever gets sold again. Anyway, none of this is to say that NFT's can't be used in stupid ways. Of course they can. But they can also be implemented in useful and interesting ways, and one of those ways is the ability to transfer and instantly prove ownership over assets that would previously be very difficult to do so (or require lawyers). To me, that makes them Not Retarded. I also think my investment account is generally a good thing, despite the chimps at wallstreetbets dumping their life savings into $6000 calls of GME or whatever.