I'll be honest, I don't give a flying crap about the so-called „Art NFTs“ (or as I prefer to call them - retart NTFs (yes, I know it's spelled with a "d" - but writing it like that would render the transition to "art" noticeably less smooth). Why? Well, [rant alert] in my opinion, links to JPEGs (I suppose on-chain (instead of links) PNGs (instead of JPEGs) like Mordinals are a better, but only barely-marginally) are nothing but a waste of blockspace. They are useless. What am I supposed to do with a badly drawn picture of a depressed monkey? The NFT „owner“ doesn't even hold the copyright most of the time; the only thing you can do with an NFT image is change your Twitter profile picture into a gem (instead of a circle, which you'd be stuck with if you simply screenshot an NFT) - so that you can show off just how much money you wasted. ...Unless you were lucky enough to sell it to a greater fool. Yup - greater fool. It's a greater-fool-scam! „Art NFTs“ are nothing but a s speculative bubble at best, and a scam at worst.). However, I care A LOT about functional NFTs. And I'm fairly confident the same goes for the broader Monero community. Currently, a great portion of its members are fairly hostile to Mordinals. But if they were presented with an actual use case for this protocol, maybe some would be more accepting? Take NFT domains, for instance. They've been a thing for a while. But they're usually tied to a wallet adress that registered them within a smart contract (ie. it's not private). Monero community loves privacy (duh, obviously) and doesn't exactly care about smart contracts. Being able to register a domain using purely network-native protocols (I'm aware calling Mordinals network-native is a controversial statement, but that's just how I perceive this technology), all while maintaining privacy and anonymity, is something a lot of Monero folks might be interested in. Combine it with, say, an ability to make your domain redirect to TOR addresses (perhaps via a TXT record, or something) instead of just IPv4/v6 like the regular DNS protocol and voilà - we've got a pretty solid use case for NFTs on Monero!

Of course, applications for NFTs extend far beyond domain names. I'm the type of person who believes practical NFTs can have essentially unlimited uses. Concert tickets, digitally physical media (that might sound somewhat contradictory, so let me clarify: you don't own modern digital media. Even if one "purchased" a game/movie/song/book/whatever digitally instead of accessing it through a subscription, most contracts state that it's simply a rental that (while it doesn't have to ever expire, unlike a physical rental) can still be terminated any time (eg. when the publisher pulls out of a platform). Using NFTs, this dangerous trend could be stopped, making your digital media as "ownable" as its physical counterpart (hence the name - digitally physical media). Of course, this would be very challenging to implement in practice while also maintaining anti-piracy measures on a non-smart-contract blockchain like Monero, but I'm only speculating about potential uses for NFTs at the moment (not writing a whitepaper, or anything), so I believe it's OK for me to be somewhat overly optimistic), copyright management, tokenisation of physical goods, various certificates, etc. But in practice, it'd undoubtedly take AGES for use cases like that to materialise. I believe that starting off with something that might potentially appeal to the Monero community (ie. private domains) is more than good enough.

But whether it's domains, or concert tickets - one thing is for sure. They're not images. Unfortunately, it seems like it's only possible to inscribe PNGs at the moment. Is it? Or am I missing something? If so, how do I turn other data types into a Mordinal? Also, if I am not missing anything, and it is, in fact, impossible to inscribe arbitrary data (as the "main payload", at least. I'm aware that one can embed metadata via a text file, but unfortunately, metadata is not checked for duplicates - that effectively renders it useless for things like domain names, etc. which by their very nature must be unique) - is there a plan to make it possible one day?