[Finance] Non Fungible Tokens - NFTs

[Littlemo]

I work in a Web3 consultancy, and a lot of people do not understand it and go down the fear model route of explaining it. Like online shopping is the norm now, Web3, blockchain, and NFTs will be the future.
There is a lot more to it than an expensive digital image in a mobile wallet.

Going off a NSC Tuesday morning poll is probably not the demographic for information on a unique digital identifier stored in the blockchain.

You seem to be looking at it from the position of some working class battler buying an NFT.

I agree with that, broadly speaking they do not. But neither did the first eComm stores and you can read the binfest on here when we went to a digital season ticket. It's natural for humans to fear what they do not understand.

Most of these messages illustrate to me
why I don’t think they are any use, the majority of people don’t know enough about them, don’t necessarily have any real desire to know much about them and wouldn’t know how to purchase/use/keep them secure. Its not a criticism, I know I don’t.

Yet these people are exactly the people you need to reach and to understand it if you want to start using them for match tickets or club fundraising stuff. Clubs always need things to reach the majority of fans and anything that is challenging will be an issue. It’s bad enough with digital tickets.

 

[Tyrone Biggums]

Thank you for responding. I’m afraid I remain profoundly unconvinced.

On the day that my club decides that my regular exchangeable currency of the realm is no longer good enough for it, I will look again at NFTs.

Until such a time, I wish those who are investing in such items good fortune, be careful out there.

That's fine. There's plenty more work to be done in the space to show people how things work and why it has it's place in different sectors.

Anything in its infancy will always face such push back from traditionalists.

I don't invest in NFTs personally. I will use them though as a practical feature of a system if I have to.

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

people will have NFTs as virtual art in their virtual houses.

If I was to buy one, how would I live in my virtual house?

 

[Tyrone Biggums]

Most of these messages illustrate to me
why I don’t think they are any use, the majority of people don’t know enough about them, don’t necessarily have any real desire to know much about them and wouldn’t know how to purchase/use/keep them secure. Its not a criticism, I know I don’t.

Yet these people are exactly the people you need to reach and to understand it if you want to start using them for match tickets or club fundraising stuff. Clubs always need things to reach the majority of fans and anything that is challenging will be an issue. It’s bad enough with digital tickets.

Clubs are moving in this direction to bring in the younger fans. The fans overseas.

It's a world game. The things that are important to you are probably not important to our ever growing world wide fan base.

As you mention digital tickets, to the younger fans these are a very simple thing to use and it's all part of their whole lives being able to be maintained through a smart phone.

Cash is a perfect example of the younger generations not seeing it as something they need to use anymore.

 

[Tyrone Biggums]

If I was to buy one, how would I live in my virtual house?

VR.

It's already here.

 

[JetsetJimbo]

For some reason I can't find the "it's obviously a scam, numbnuts" option on the poll

 

[sparkie]

For some reason I can't find the "it's obviously a scam, numbnuts" option on the poll

I was looking for the "Ponzi scheme" option as well. Lol.

 

[Pevenseagull]

I was looking for the "Ponzi scheme" option as well. Lol.

I was looking for the 'How do I get a picture of Trump wrestling a dinosaur ' option.

 

[Neville's Breakfast]

These kinds of industries have been around for a long time now.

Photographers have been selling their images to businesses since the dawn of photography as an example.

You seem to be looking at it from the position of some working class battler buying an NFT.

Big business are who will buy a lot of the future NFTs with monetization value. So yes, they have all the resources in the world just as they do now to go after copyright infringements.

Asset digitalization is happening. They will digitalize and tokenize all kinds of things whether the rank and file can understand it or not.

Larry Fink of BlackRock Inc. is on record as promoting such a future. And if you don't know who they are, they are the world's largest asset manager with over 8 trillion in asset management.

Err yeah I’ve come across Black Rock in my 30 year career as a derivative trader.

 

[Neville's Breakfast]

Trading shares in private equities. Currently involves multiple parties, physical paper, fees.

Sure, there are advantages to the technology itself. Its application in trade finance can create efficiencies in commodity trading although it hasn’t really taken off yet. That side of it was the part that drew my interest. The problem comes with unregulated secondary markets and the opaqueness of those involved. That’s the part that can’t be properly fixed without regulation. Anything unregulated will always be cheaper.

 

[Neville's Breakfast]

Clubs are moving in this direction to bring in the younger fans. The fans overseas.

It's a world game. The things that are important to you are probably not important to our ever growing world wide fan base.

As you mention digital tickets, to the younger fans these are a very simple thing to use and it's all part of their whole lives being able to be maintained through a smart phone.

Cash is a perfect example of the younger generations not seeing it as something they need to use anymore.

Digital tickets are paid for with conventional money.
Cash is being replaced by credit and debit cards. Bills for these are paid with conventional money.

 

[Wardy's twin]

VR.

It's already here.

doesn't keep out the cold and rain though does it..

 

[dsr-burnley]

I know a bit about them, personally have no interest but can see how they will very possibly take off through sports and football. As a simple example, tickets for games held in an NFT wallet (all technology that already exists) become unique collectables with resale value in the same way paper tickets of the past were.

One area of value for a club comes in offering different NFTs for different games - a pre-season friendly that only attracts 8,000 fans normally might now attract 20,000 if every ticket comes with a Mitoma collectable NFT with potential high resale value, or just from people that want to collect a set by going to every game in a season. Now tie that in with something like FIFA - go to a game and get a Mitoma NFT that boosts his speed in a game by X points and again the use cases grow...NFTs support the original creators also getting revenue from the secondary market. I don't play FIFA, I sell my Mitoma-boost NFT for £10 on the NFT marketplace and the club could get a % of that too.

There's a lot of stuff about films too - download a film on Prime or Sky and you don't own it once your subscription ends. An NFT would mean you could continue owning it because it'd be a unique copy assigned to you, and you could re-sell it too, recreating the secondary market of physical DVDs. The film industry will love this because an NFT would also support them getting some of the revenue from that ongoing sale.

I'm not far off 50 and see no appeal at all to it for me. I don't doubt for a second the market is there though. There's around a billion USD a month in sales already and most of us don't even have any exposure to them yet. Characters in Fortnite that anyone can create and sell without losing control of it and finding it copied everywhere, skins for games, music - there's a lot that's going to be changed by NFTs over the next few years.

A quick check on ebay shows that a paper ticket from the 1950 FA Cup final is on sale for £20. I doubt that a computer picture of a similar ticket is going to sell for the same amount even if you do hold it for 70 years.

There is no freebie on earth that has no intrinsic value that will attract 12,000 extra people to a pre-season friendly. You can't get value by dishing out 20,000 collectible items, because when there are so many of them, they aren't collectible. If everyone has one, there is no scarcity premium.

 

[HeaviestTed]

You're not going to like the future then.

It will be fine as NFT’s aren’t going to be used like this.

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

A quick check on ebay shows that a paper ticket from the 1950 FA Cup final is on sale for £20. I doubt that a computer picture of a similar ticket is going to sell for the same amount even if you do hold it for 70 years.

If a paper ticket is worth 20 bucks, why cant a digital ticket be worth something? It's exactly the same principle, just a different medium ....is it not?

 

[chickens]

If a paper ticket is worth 20 bucks, why cant a digital ticket be worth something? It's exactly the same principle, just a different medium ....is it not?

But here, if an asset becomes valuable due to its historical importance, we become reliant on tech companies being benign and backwardly compatible. There’s a lot of moving parts.

I could, if I buggered about a bit, persuade my modern computer to play Commodore 64 games, provided I had the game files. If my game file was stored on tape though, (as it originally was) it would have long since degraded beyond usability, and be useless to me due to lack of a tape deck and/or interface between. Similar with a lot of physical media.

Even modern tech has a shelf life. I’m sure the cold wallets that crypto fans use is deliberately over engineered for longevity, but what when the USB port is just a distant memory and adapters have long since ceased to be sold? Or the WiFi protocol has changed so fundamentally that backward compatibility past a certain cutoff is no longer possible.

There’s an ever changing variety of hardware, software, file systems and interacting protocols like wireless/Bluetooth standards that have to be recognised by both devices in any transfer. They tend to build in backward compatibility, but only so far.

Could I easily retrieve a document written in a word processor on the BBC micro or Amstrad CPC?

Add to that the various forms of encryption that have gone from leading edge, to deprecated, to no longer included in the build, and cold storage isn’t quite as straightforward as it seems if you’re genuinely “holding for the long term”. Not impossible, but not hassle free.

When the company that built your cold wallet went bust 10 years ago, and there’s no current app by which to retrieve its contents, who do you trust to unlock it for you?

Are there standard, agreed upon, file formats for NFTs? Will company X’s be recognised in Company Y’s app?

We’re still at the point in the tech world of one games console not playing another games console’s games. Imagine if when CDs had come out only CDs released by Sony Music would play on Sony’s CD Players? I’d say the odds of long term interoperability are a long way off unless governments get involved and force tech to play nicely with each other, and the past.

Nothing about the way the tech world works atm makes me think that any of this is mature or stable enough to be unleashed on the consumer market.

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

But here, if an asset becomes valuable due to its historical importance, we become reliant on tech companies being benign and backwardly compatible. There’s a lot of moving parts.

I could, if I buggered about a bit, persuade my modern computer to play Commodore 64 games, provided I had the game files. If my game file was stored on tape though, (as it originally was) it would have long since degraded beyond usability, and be useless to me due to lack of a tape deck and/or interface between. Similar with a lot of physical media.

Even modern tech has a shelf life. I’m sure the cold wallets that crypto fans use is deliberately over engineered for longevity, but what when the USB port is just a distant memory and adapters have long since ceased to be sold? Or the WiFi protocol has changed so fundamentally that backward compatibility past a certain cutoff is no longer possible.

There’s an ever changing variety of hardware, software, file systems and interacting protocols like wireless/Bluetooth standards that have to be recognised by both devices in any transfer. They tend to build in backward compatibility, but only so far.

Could I easily retrieve a document written in a word processor on the BBC micro or Amstrad CPC?

Add to that the various forms of encryption that have gone from leading edge, to deprecated, to no longer included in the build, and cold storage isn’t quite as straightforward as it seems if you’re genuinely “holding for the long term”. Not impossible, but not hassle free.

When the company that built your cold wallet went bust 10 years ago, and there’s no current app by which to retrieve its contents, who do you trust to unlock it for you?

Are there standard, agreed upon, file formats for NFTs? Will company X’s be recognised in Company Y’s app?

We’re still at the point in the tech world of one games console not playing another games console’s games. Imagine if when CDs had come out only CDs released by Sony Music would play on Sony’s CD Players? I’d say the odds of long term interoperability are a long way off unless governments get involved and force tech to play nicely with each other, and the past.

Nothing about the way the tech world works atm makes me think that any of this is mature or stable enough to be unleashed on the consumer market.

I get what you say, but why cant you migrate the NFT to a new platform when the current one becomes obsolete? The sector I work in has a lot of historical data knocking about which gets migrated when platforms and/or systems change or are not supported anymore. Further, if you have something really valuable why not set up your own archive?

Your argument seems to use the advancement of tech as a limiting factor to the advancement of tech?

I truly have no experience or knowledge of this; these are genuine questions to help me better understand.

 

[chickens]

I get what you say, but why cant you migrate the NFT to a new platform when the current one becomes obsolete? The sector I work in has a lot of historical data knocking about which gets migrated when platforms and/or systems change or are not supported anymore. Further, if you have something really valuable why not set up your own archive?

Your argument seems to use the advancement of tech as a limiting factor to the advancement of tech?

I truly have no experience or knowledge of this; these are genuine questions to help me better understand.

Well as I said, it’s possible but not hassle free. The point is that while the technology of all investments changes over time, tech’s advances move so fast that there is going to be a greater degree of grief involved in holding NFTs long-term in order to ensure they’re easily retrievable when needed.

Without a standardised agreed framework/format for NFTs, the risk of ending up with something in what is considered an obsolete/unsupported format is just another reason to avoid at consumer level.

 

[Littlemo]

I get what you say, but why cant you migrate the NFT to a new platform when the current one becomes obsolete? The sector I work in has a lot of historical data knocking about which gets migrated when platforms and/or systems change or are not supported anymore. Further, if you have something really valuable why not set up your own archive?

Your argument seems to use the advancement of tech as a limiting factor to the advancement of tech?

I truly have no experience or knowledge of this; these are genuine questions to help me better understand.

People forget or don’t realise that things have gone. There are plenty of people who don’t know a file can’t be opened until they try it, unless you use a preservation format or system, then it might be gone before you go back to check.

It’s also the case that actually, if you are dealing with things kept in digital wallets or where the purpose is that it cannot be moved or changed, then I don’t see that the owners really have any preservation options available.

I do remember looking at a site who hosted crypto-wallets and there was literally no mention of ongoing preservation. They need to have some guarantees that if someone is buying NFTs for future value, that it’ll be there and function in the future.

 

[Tyrone Biggums]

doesn't keep out the cold and rain though does it..

Actually it does.