The equivalent of painting reproductions with unique IDs on the back.
The whole things feels like a scam to me. Taking the best part about digital goods (that they’re non-rival) and attempting to hack on scarcity for the purpose of exploiting a psychological flaw.
I used to hate veblen goods, until I learned to appreciate the "fool and his money" aspect. Now when I see some $100k handbag I'm glad that person gave away a bunch of actual societal influence (money) for a bit of temporary status.
The most charitable interpretation is that it's a way to reward artists for creating digital art in a new way.
The HN article for this comment thread shows the risk here though. If the monetary incentives become pushing these tokens, then the most successful 'creators' will be the people that can maximize getting people to pay for these dumb tokens. The incentives are bad and you end up with the 'artists' being mostly ICO style scammers.
It's like the corrupting influence of ads on media, tokens value will be a similar but different corrupting influence.
You could argue how is this different than monetizing anything? I think it's because of the pseudo-value/speculation driving people to spend more on the hope of a future return. That's the psychological hack of fake scarcity.
Pokemon cards, collectors card, Fortnite skins, art, watches and I could go on. All these and many many more things are thing people pay money for without any conspiracy behind.
These tokens are already diversified beyond anyones control.
Arguably in app purchases have already corrupted a lot of the game space into slot machines.
Tokens take that a step further and make it worse.
Incentives create the world. On one side you have Apple Arcade trying to align incentives for a better global outcome/end state. On the other you have in-app purchases, loot boxes, and NFTs - trying to maximize profit for the house.
again you cant take the human minds tendency to attach value to things in their life and to operate in hierarchies. NFTs were inevitable as tokens of value because they function as physical objects. You can say thats a scam but all ypu are saying is that you dont yet attach value to NFTs. Anecdotes are not the way to validate your claim though.
The whole things feels like a scam to me. Taking the best part about digital goods (that they’re non-rival) and attempting to hack on scarcity for the purpose of exploiting a psychological flaw.