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TL;DR: my best guess (based on not much reading about this) is that perhaps they pitch NFTs as an inter-company form of people paying twitch to send messages to everyone watching the stream?

Specifically, beyond all the delusion of the metaverse as discussed in the article... are these people seriously pitching that average (or even top 1%) people will create content, and people will pay not to view the content, but just to be listed in the blockchain database that says that they own that content?

That sounded crazy to me before I wrote it, but I just realized: apparently Twitch (the video game streaming site) makes quite a bit of money from people paying just to send a message to all the other people watching the same stream. I don't understand this and haven't been able to get into Twitch, but maybe that's what they mean.

Still though, it seems dishonest to call that buying an "NFT". At that point you're bidding on being seen by all the other people watching the stream, not just to be listed as the "owner" of some digital content.

Then again, devil's advocate, people used to say that the internet had no applications for regular people. All it would take for NFTs to become important is for everyone to agree that they are important, and for some reason choose to read the stuff written by whoever buys the NFTs.

That seems crazy to me now, but I suppose it's not too far off from paying to send messages in a twitch stream. Maybe if all the companies agree to integrate viewing the NFT purchases with viewing the stream, then it would work? People also voluntarily read comments, so maybe NFTs would simply be the way of having an HN/reddit style comment tree on twitch streams, substituting karma for cryptocurrencies.

This gives me very unsettling vibes, but maybe the world would be a better place if you needed to pay 10 cents to make a comment, and if the content producer received that money for creating popular and engaging content. (Ugh, new dystopian idea: someone being able to make a living by posting articles that start flame wars)




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