Remember when NFTs sold for millions of dollars? 95% of the digital collectibles are now probably worthless.::NFTs had a huge bull run two years ago, with billions of dollars per month in trading volume, but now most have crashed to zero, a study found.
NFTs are like a ticket roll, they can be quite useful, but that requires having an event or service that those tickets apply to. NFTs so far completely failed to create that. To justify the decentralized nature of NFTs you’d further have to make that ticket apply to multiple different services. That didn’t happen either.
Buying your hats in a game with NFTs is pointless as long as those hats only work in that one singular game, centralized services can handle that better. On the other side, if you’d use NFTs to sell the digital games themselves, they could be quite useful and breaks through established online-store monopolies. But that of course would require different online shops to accept the same NFT, e.g. buy NFT for a game on Steam, but download it through EPIC. That’s something NFTs could allow, but it would require the whole industry to play along, which due to everybody competing against each other is rather unlikely.
But NFTs are not necessary to make that work. The reason it has never been done wasn’t technical, it was that it simply wasn’t a good idea.
It might be overkill, but the whole point is that you want to have a distributed record of ownership. Something that no single company can control and that can survive companies going out of business and disappearing. There aren’t very many alternatives that can accomplish that and even less that are ready to use right now and not just hypothetical.
Why distributed? Ownership is ultimately up to governments, as it’s something that would be decided in a court. So, what’s the advantage to having distributed records instead of just a government database?
That distributed database exists and has been up and running for years. That government database is purely hypothetical. There would also be the question of which government is going to run it? Does each government run their own? Does one get exclusive control over the database that contains all digital purchases?
But is an environmental catastrophe and has no legal value.
Every government would have to run their own, because every government gets to decide ownership within their own borders. Think of patents. Who owns the worldwide international patent database? Nobody, there is no such thing because each country decides on the validity of patents within their own borders. Now, there are patent treaties and things, but fundamentally if a patent dispute happens in France, it’s the French courts who decide using the French patents database.