[HN Gopher] NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap
___________________________________________________________________
NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap
Author : josephscott
Score : 684 points
Date : 2021-03-07 04:22 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (seths.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (seths.blog)
| soulofmischief wrote:
| > BUYERS of NFTs may be blind to the fact that there's no limit
| on the supply. In the case of baseball cards, there are only so
| many rookies a year. In the case of art, there's a limited number
| of famous paintings and a limited amount of shelf space at
| Sotheby's. NFTs are going to be more like Kindle books and
| YouTube videos.
|
| Well, this is just flat out wrong. You can mint limited editions.
| And there are unlimited worthless paintings in real life which do
| not affect .
|
| The author got so swept up in the NFT craze, wanting to write a
| trendy blog post that rides the hype wave while pretending not
| to, that they didn't actually do their due research before trying
| to distill a topic and worse, paint a biased, negative portrait.
|
| > Let's walk away from this one.
|
| Let's not write ill-researched analytical blog posts with a
| narrative in mind before getting familiar with the subject, and
| then try and convince others to stay behind so we aren't the only
| ones missing out.
| eriktrautman wrote:
| This represents a reasonable-sounding surface view but is mostly
| off the mark. There are valid _concerns_ but insufficient logic
| to justify a _dangerous trap_.
|
| O/P TLDR:
|
| 1. Art is silly too but it's ok for Real Art because we've done
| it that way for a long time
|
| 2. It'll become a soulless money-grab
|
| 3. Buyers don't understand scarcity
|
| 4. It's killing the environment
|
| re #1 (Art):
|
| > You either own this thing or you don't.
|
| This logic just doesn't make sense and seems backwardly purist.
| Status conveyed by owning original editions of physical art
| doesn't just come from having it sitting on your wall where you
| can show it to 3 people a week, it's from making sure people know
| you own an original edition (art as flex, art as humble brag). In
| the digital world there is tons of status to claim using mediums
| beyond that narrow view and that's fine.
|
| And the point:
|
| > Owning a Honus Wagner card doesn't mean you own Honus Wagner.
| Or a royalty stream or anything else but the card itself.
|
| Why should you limit your thinking on what art can be and why
| it's valuable to people based on an old model? The "other stuff"
| which can be layered in increases its value substantially to some
| segments of buyers and there's no reason the artist shouldn't
| benefit from this.
|
| re #2 (Paying creators):
|
| > CREATORS may rush to start minting NFTs as a way to get paid
| for what they've created.
|
| Why shouldn't creators get paid!? This is a very top-down,
| privileged argument. The biggest impediment for most creatives to
| creating their creations is usually worrying about monetization!
| Why shouldn't we try to get them paid as much as possible with as
| little work as possible so they can go back to making the things
| we love?
|
| Chris Dixon had a good post [https://a16z.com/2021/02/27/nfts-
| and-a-thousand-true-fans/] about how NFTs allow more fine-tuned
| segmentation among different fan groups, allowing artists to gain
| more from their work while simultaneously satisfying the market.
| Seth is a marketer who understands segmentation intimately, so I
| have to imagine this is an oversight.
|
| The embedded fear here is that we'll corrupt the purity of art by
| finally allowing creators to have a business model, and to be
| fair it's one that will probably see some crazy bubble dynamics
| and abuses. But that's well worth it if the world becomes a more
| creative place by introducing better tools to monetize creation
| and community.
|
| re #3 (buyers don't get scarcity):
|
| > BUYERS of NFTs may be blind to the fact that there's no limit
| on the supply.
|
| And buyers of stock may be blind to the fully diluted EPS of the
| shares they're buying... what's the point? Again, there's a
| reasonable embedded fear that we'll get over our skiis and
| convince people or imply things that aren't true, resulting in
| consternation, but this isn't sufficient to call NFTs a
| "Dangerous Trap"
|
| re #4 (Environment):
|
| > They use an astonishing amount of electricity to create and
| trade.
|
| This is a fully Ethereum-centric view of the world but today
| Ethereum isn't the only chain. Ethereum is only used for NFT
| minting right now because it had years to build up tooling but it
| is unsuitable for creators because transaction fees run in the
| $50 range just to transfer tokens and >$100 to mint, so obviously
| creators are desperately looking for alternatives. And they're
| out there -- I work on the NEAR project (near.org) which is Proof
| of Stake, has purchased offsets to become fully carbon neutral,
| and is cheap enough to test in prod. Look where the ball is
| going, not where it is today!
|
| Sorry for the rant. We need the biggest voices to present a more
| nuanced case for this technology.
| TimJRobinson wrote:
| This is on the assumption that the original buyers are only
| buying to make a profit.
|
| What if NFTs are simply patreon for whales? In that context I
| think they're a great idea, allowing people with plenty of spare
| money to support creators they love while having a token they can
| use to show how big of a fan they are.
| gabordemooij wrote:
| As many others here have pointed out, we stumble upon a
| fundamental issue with blockchains here. The thing that's inside
| the blockchain can be verified but as long as it points to
| something in the physical world or to be more precise, outside
| the chain, you have a weak link. People can ignore to respect the
| NFT, or simply choose to reject it. Tokens in themselves have no
| intrinsic value, unlike a painting, a commodity (like gold or
| even uranium). Of course, there is one exception to this; money.
| That's why bitcoin was a slightly better idea (but it suffers
| from different problems in my opinion). The ultimate conclusion
| for me at least is this one, ownership, art, justice (legal
| blockchains, smart contracts), these are all social problems and
| they cannot be solved with mere technology. Technology may help
| of course, but in the end I strongly believe that social problems
| require social solutions, not technical ones. For instance,
| consider bitcoin, with a 51% attack you could gain control over
| the chain, with PoS big stakers have control, this means you just
| traded the bankers of today with some other bankers. In the case
| of NFT, you could have a token that indicates you're the owner of
| a painting, but if that painting is stolen and sold by people who
| don't care about your NFT, what's the point? Stealing, in this
| case is a social problem, not a technological one.
| danfritz wrote:
| Don't forget that this is just a social construct. Without
| anything tangeable (physical) we just have to agree that a NFT is
| unique / original.
|
| Compare it with paper notes, they are worthless but sociaty gives
| it value. If we all agree paper notes are worthless it is
| worthless.
|
| I can see easily how this becomes worthless in a couple of years
| when the bubble bursts and the hype is over
| egypturnash wrote:
| Somehow I feel like the message of this article is:
|
| cryptocurrency is bad
|
| and nfts are double bad because _artists_ are the ones making a
| lot of money off of the absurdity of cryptocurrency instead of
| blockchain fanciers
|
| maybe I'm just sleepy and cranky
| electriclove wrote:
| So much FUD. If the author tokenizes their blog posts they may
| come to find out they cannot sell them for much whereas Jack's
| first tweet tokenized is definitely worth something to people.
|
| Digital collectibles can be transacted much more easily that
| trying to sell your old baseball cards (store, list, ship, etc).
|
| ETH is moving to PoS and FLOW (which is used for NBA Top Shots)
| uses PoS. The energy complaint is short sighted.
|
| Check out eulerbeats.com for a model that allows owners of
| originals to generate income and owners of prints to easy recoup
| 90% of their cost (all built into the smart contract).
|
| If I could buy an NFT of my favorite YouTuber's piano video, I
| would do it in a heartbeat. It would support them directly and
| allow me as a fan to 'own' something valuable to me (proof of
| that support).
|
| Yes, there will be many who lose money and like anything else, we
| build up a lot of hype for something new, but it is early days
| and there is so much potential.
| voceboy521 wrote:
| NFT NFT NFT wtf is an NTF
| pjdemers wrote:
| Anything that is marketed as a collectable is not a good
| investment. The thing must have some other use, a use that causes
| some (hopefully most) of them to be damaged or destroyed. The one
| exception to this seems to be sports trading cards, because, as
| the article says, there are only so many rookies every year. And
| even fewer who become superstars.
| mrborgen wrote:
| I'm curious as to how NFTs will compare to a sales contract from
| a legal point of view.
|
| E.g. if say an artist sells the rights to a digital artwork via
| both an NFT and via a normal sales contract. Both buyers claim
| ownership to the artwork and end up in court.
|
| Who wins? And what implications will a legal presedence have for
| the vaule of NFTs one way or the other?
| exporectomy wrote:
| If the artist sells the same exclusive right to two people,
| he's committing fraud and could do that without NFTs.
| mrborgen wrote:
| Yes, indeed. My question is if the NFT will be treated as a
| valid proof of ownership in a legal battle. I'm guessing it
| would hold some validity, but lose against a well-written
| sales contract.
| growse wrote:
| What if the person who buys the art/NFT off the artist then
| sells the art to someone else but doesn't sell the NFT?
| distances wrote:
| Why would owning the NFT give you any rights over the goods? If
| I've understood correctly, you just own a token. It has no
| inherent value by itself anf you basically own a link to
| something.
| mrborgen wrote:
| The NFTs are meant to prove ownership over digital items,
| aren't they?
|
| Not ownership as in <<I am the only one who can share this
| GIF in Facebook>>, but as in <<I own the copyright to this
| GIF>>.
| detaro wrote:
| No, not really. (without license terms saying so not even
| the former, but those can be a thing)
| mrborgen wrote:
| If so, then it would actually be legally and morally ok
| for the artist to do a <<double sell>> as I describe in
| my original comment. It would be like i.e. selling a
| signed copy of a book to one person (the NFT) and the
| underlying copyright (the sales contract) to another
| person.
| distances wrote:
| If there's no legally binding contract attached that you
| won't do it, then it should be just fine to sell as many
| instances as you want, no? In the absence of a contract
| you're just buying a unique tag, not the work itself.
| detaro wrote:
| Morally is complicated if they are not transparent about
| that from the start - the social expectations around this
| are not fully developed yet, but preventing the holder of
| the NFT from displaying the work (by selling an exclusive
| license to somebody else) would probably be seen as
| wrong.
| EGreg wrote:
| I remember growing up and seeing a very active "Warez" scene
| online, with cracks being distributed of all sorts of licensed
| software. Companies have since tried to make the programs "phone
| home" in order to check the licensec or turn them into SAAS to
| get revenue, but that is anathema to decentralized assets.
|
| I haven't looked too deeply into NFTs but it seems clear to me
| that:
|
| 1) NFTs are not for read access, but rather write access to a
| certain thing. Think Earth2 or MillionDollarHomePage or buying a
| domain name or some other namespace.
|
| 2) Ethereum and blockchains are entirely overkill for NFTs,
| because they are designed for arbitrary balances. If you want
| NFTs you can just have non divisible files that are collectively
| managed on MaidSAFE or something like that.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Two misconceptions in this article:
|
| 1) proof of work is not the only way to do blockchains. You can
| do NFTs on e.g. Stellar or soon on Ethereum 2.0 and it would make
| sense to do that as it would be cheap to transact. That is in
| fact the main motivation to create ethereum 2.0: transacting
| needs to become cheaper. Some companies seem to have some success
| tokenizing e.g. supply chains, energy markets, art ownership
| changes, etc. The resulting tokens are typically not intended for
| speculative trading. Proof of stake solutions are optimal for
| this since making money of the transactions is not a goal here
| typically.
|
| 2) supply can actually be constrained quite easily. E.g. on
| Stellar you would issue a limited supply of whatever token from
| an issuing account (stellar tokens are identified by their
| issuing account) and then lock that account forever by increasing
| the account thresholds to be higher than the weight of the
| account signers (stellar supports multi sig accounts). That
| effectively is the last transaction that can ever happen on that
| account. No more tokens can be issued from then on. On ethereum,
| you'd be able to do something similar with smart contracts. I use
| stellar as an example, because I've used it to create a token.
| Creating tokens on Stellar is super easy and requires no
| programming. An NFT is basically a token with a supply of 1.
|
| NFTs make sense in any kind of scenario where a group of
| stakeholders wants to agree on who owns what without relying on a
| trusted third party like a bank or government agency. If it's
| cheap and easy to use them; why not use them?
|
| You can get your own stellar account by putting in enough xlm to
| cover the base fees. About 5 XLM should be enough to create a
| handful of accounts + trustlines that you would neeed to create
| your own token. Stellar laboratory provides you all the tools to
| do this if you want to practice this on their testnet:
| https://laboratory.stellar.org/#account-creator?network=test. You
| click your own token together in a few minutes. Simply switch to
| the mainnet to do it for real. If you are serious about this, the
| legal work is going to be most of the effort.
| You-Are-Right wrote:
| NFTs real value is "BS identifier" and "crypto market cleanup".
| iambateman wrote:
| Consider baseball cards. I own 5000 cards with a total value of
| about $50.
|
| A few NFT's will be very very valuable. The first one George
| Clooney sells. The first one ever created. The 6 Banksy sells
| under a pseudonym that no one realizes for a year. The song
| Taylor Swift limits to 1 copy.
|
| But almost all of them will be worthless.
|
| The difference between baseball cards and NFT's is that for
| generations, no one really cared about baseball cards. It wasn't
| until the 80's that people realized they had significant
| collectible value. By comparison, NFT's have tremendous cultural
| hype.
|
| Some people will do very well with this bubble, as a few do in
| every bubble. But it will be very few.
| krsdcbl wrote:
| I'd agree for a lot of the "random things getting NFT'd" - but
| it's definitely different in the art market, where right now
| quite some moderately known artists are making okay money from
| digital art through nfts. Not Mona Lisa kind of money, but it
| definitely does open up the art market for digital creators in
| a beneficial way.
|
| A picture isn't inherently worth anything, it's worth what
| someone will pay for it and doesn't depend on some kind of
| novelty character
| electriclove wrote:
| As a fellow former card collector, I can emphasize although I
| don't think the result will be as extreme as you've laid out.
| It all comes to supply and demand. If Taylor Swift could create
| 1,000 NFT prints for $10 each for each of her songs, they would
| be sold immediately.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| linked in the article: cryptoart.wtf
|
| Just insane... what a completely indefensible ecological cost for
| such a trivial and absurd use.
| samim wrote:
| NFT's are Bullshit: https://samim.io/p/2021-03-05-non-fungible-
| tokens-nft-are-bu...
|
| In Summary: 1. The NFT doubles down on the worst of copyright,
| the property metaphor, & tries to impose old ideas of scarcity &
| exclusion on the digital realm, where both are obsolete.
|
| 2.NFTs are an absolute ecological disaster
| jerry1979 wrote:
| I don't use NFTs, but the author of the linked blog article
| said Proof of Stake avoids the ecological problem.
|
| That author also does not engage meaningfully with the green
| energy side of the crypto ecosystem. Strong international and
| local regulations would go a long way in protecting the
| environment and local prices.
| qqii wrote:
| The unique expression of ownership is novel, it really depends
| on how they're legally interpreted to conclude if they're bad.
|
| If you interpret them literally they're a better form of
| copyright that what currently exists. It accepts that digital
| recreations are easy and doesn't seek to prevent them yet still
| provides scarcity and reward for the effort in producing it.
|
| The NFT of Jack Dorsey's tweet is interpreted to captures some
| essence of the time, effort and manpower that went into
| creating twitter the platform.
| TheColorYellow wrote:
| > It accepts that digital recreations are easy and doesn't
| seek to prevent them yet still provides scarcity and reward
| for the effort in producing it.
|
| I like this description quite a bit. Im obviously a believer
| already, but this is a good way to describe the value
| potential of blockchain based NFTs.
|
| Slight digression, but personally I hate the way scarcity
| always makes its way into the conversation due to the
| obsessive discussion of deflation, but I think in the case of
| NFTs it fits well.
|
| I'd rephrase your statement as saying that NFTs using
| blockchain protocols preserve the scarcity of owning an
| asset. Then extending that, digitally verifiable proof of the
| scarce resource (i.e. ownership) is the aspect that can
| create an economic incentive for ownership.
|
| Well said!
| andreaorru wrote:
| Just want to point out that Ethereum 2.0 will be Proof of
| Stake, so moving forward the ecological argument is moot.
| bhay wrote:
| Exactly! Too many people in this thread are making huge
| judgements based off a very limited knowledge of what is
| going on in the blockchain space.
|
| I agree with OPs inference that the art market is going to
| get over saturated, but ETH ecology is not an argument
| against NFTs. Plenty of alt-chains exist and interchain
| marketplaces are being built as we speak.
| olah_1 wrote:
| > tries to impose old ideas of scarcity & exclusion on the
| digital realm,
|
| NFTs also impose the best aspects of physical goods. Namely
| that I can re-sell, trade, or borrow digital things as I wish.
| It's an improvement on DRM in that sense.
|
| GameStop can become a marketplace for NFT tokens for games.
| Better than Steam keys.
| dools wrote:
| The same is true for Bitcoin and all crypto "currencies"
| sygma wrote:
| I know it sounds catchy to say that NFTs are an ecological
| disaster, but that statement is sensational and not accurate.
|
| NFTs do not _cause_ carbon emissions themselves, just like you
| don 't add carbon emissions by occupying a seat on a public
| transportation bus. The bus is doing its daily route and has a
| fixed amount of emissions per day whether it has any occupants
| or not. This analogy breaks quickly, so I wouldn't look too
| much into it.
|
| Maybe a better analogy is to think of your WiFi router. Its
| energy use is (predominantly) static regardless of how many
| packets you route through it. So by browsing, you are not
| causing additional carbon emissions.
|
| In more technical terms: more transactions do not cause more
| hashrate. Ethereum's CO2 footprint does not scale with
| transactional count. So asking people to use the network less
| will not cause the hashrate to go down. The only way you reduce
| energy consumption is by getting miners to mine less, which
| triggers the protocol to adjust the mining difficulty
| accordingly. As laid out above, this has nothing to do with how
| many transactions are happening on ETH, or whether NFTs are
| being minted on it.
| karpour wrote:
| More accurate would be to say that NFTs are additional fuel
| for the ecological disaster that is ETH. Your analogy makes
| little sense in this context.
|
| Mining hardware will always run at 100% capacity, regardless
| of the amount of transactions, unless mining becomes
| unprofitable.
|
| The issue is, while the energy used by mining is not directly
| dependent on the amount of transactions, it is dependent on
| the amount of people and money invested into the network,
| which raises the price, which causes an expansion of mining
| effort. With more people investing, the amount of
| transactions also increases.
|
| If NFTs were to become a popular thing, mining will obviously
| increase at an even faster rate
| jules-jules wrote:
| The energy used to secure PoW networks is indeed wasteful.
| But just a heads-up, Ethereum is currently transitioning to
| Proof of Stake consensus mechanism which will reduce
| electricity costs by an order of magnitude.
| h4kor wrote:
| How long and how often have the announce the transition
| yet?
| T0Bi wrote:
| Well Phase 0 is already live with a lot of people
| staking.. Don't pretend like it's never going to happen
| um_ya wrote:
| This is only a short term issue. ETH is currently
| transitioning to proof of stake with ETH 2.0
| 8fGTBjZxBcHq wrote:
| OK read the article again because it addresses two
| different and significant reasons why that doesn't solve
| the problem.
| ShinTakuya wrote:
| This argument has some flaws. So firstly, if nobody got on
| the bus, the number of buses on the route would be reduced,
| and depending on circumstances the route would be cancelled.
| Additionally, the weight of the passenger _does_ slightly
| increase the power requirement. Ignoring that, while there 's
| minimal direct effect of usage, ultimately the bus is only
| there due to demand.
|
| Similarly, for block chains, mining only occurs when the
| thing being mined has value. NFTs would not be mined if
| people weren't using them. Therefore I would absolutely call
| them an ecological disaster.
| sygma wrote:
| > Similarly, for block chains, mining only occurs when the
| thing being mined has value. NFTs would not be mined if
| people weren't using them. Therefore I would absolutely
| call them an ecological disaster.
|
| The point is that energy consumption due to mining on the
| Ethereum network does not scale with transaction count. So
| it does not matter if NFTs are issued ("minted") or not.
| They add no marginal energy cost in the mining process.
| That is why calling them an "ecological disaster" is a
| misnomer.
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| What they're saying though is that if no one was using
| Ethereum (for NFTs or other purposes), there would be
| zero reason to mine them in the first place. It seems to
| follow to me that as demand goes up, the supply will
| increase in turn, since it's seen as a more attractive
| thing to mine.
| paulgb wrote:
| I'm less familiar with ETH than BTC but my understanding
| is that this is true:
|
| 1. Minting an NFT costs ETH in the form of "gas"
|
| 2. The miner who mines a block gets that ETH
|
| Assuming both of these are true, each NFT minted on the
| ETH blockchain increases the amount they can
| profitability spend on energy in economic equilibrium.
| bhay wrote:
| Your understanding is correct, however ETH is moving
| sharply away from PoW to PoS systems which are
| significantly less demanding systems in terms of energy
| requirements. I believe the roadmap expects the full PoS
| transition to happen this year (a multistage launch that
| we are partway through).
|
| On top of that, there's other more specialised NFT
| blockchains like flow which are becoming very popular.
| AA-BA-94-2A-56 wrote:
| I hate to be a complainer, but where is the definition of NFT in
| this article? I was taught in university to expand acronyms the
| first time I used them. Is this not common practice?
| exporectomy wrote:
| Don't just blindly do what you're taught. There are reasons for
| expanding acronyms and reasons for not. In this case, I'd say
| that if someone doesn't know what an NFT is, the article will
| be meaningless because it also lacks a long "background"
| section teaching the reader what they are. So maybe you're not
| the intended audience or it's more effective to let you Google
| it yourself if you don't know.
| cranium wrote:
| Problems I see with NFTs: - What prevents anyone from launching a
| competing chain and re-tokenize the same assets ? - As other
| chains: if you lose the access to your private key, you're done.
| - For real world assets (like a house), you have to enforce that
| the token is equivalent to the asset. That is: ownership of one
| implies the ownership of the other. Legally, it looks like a hell
| of a thorny problem: high-frequency house trading anyone ?
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| I can see use cases for this in the future applying to real world
| items to prove authenticity such as unique cars, expensive shoes,
| pet ownership, antiques and plots of land.
|
| Digital artwork seems to be an easy go to item at this infancy
| stage of NFTs.
| jb775 wrote:
| I think the immediate value of NFTs lies in industries where you
| need to keep the producer honest to protect against artificial
| scarcity.
|
| For example, what stops baseball card printers from re-printing
| "rare" cards? And how do we know they're not hoarding some of the
| best cards for a few years, then selling them individually? I
| could see NFTs being demanded in situations like this to force
| producers to create digital proof of initial production and
| distribution.
|
| I haven't thought about it much, but hashing old tweets or a
| picture of something and claiming it's valuable sounds like
| snake-oil sales to me.
| [deleted]
| root_axis wrote:
| NFTs are not useful for securing anything in the real world
| because there is no way to verify that the thing in the real
| world is uniquely connected to the NFT.
| jb775 wrote:
| I was thinking they would still make the physical baseball
| card, but also provide the purchaser with a NFT linked to
| that specific card that includes the card's metadata, etc.
|
| This way you have the physical card to display, and have the
| NFT as a proof of authenticity and ownership.
| root_axis wrote:
| The NFT is proof that you purchased the item, but it's not
| proof that what is in your possession is the the thing the
| NFT claims it is.
| cam0 wrote:
| "A fool and his money are soon parted"... This is a great way to
| part the early, non-sophisticated but luckily wealthy bitcoiner
| and ETH-holders from their rapid and "easily" won windfall.
| imaginationra wrote:
| Independent film/animation/interactive studio here-
|
| NFT's are a cool new space we are very excited about
| experimenting in. I usually like Seth Godin's stuff but that blog
| post feels like an old rich man yelling at a cloud that exists in
| a dimension he doesn't understand.
|
| Doesn't he know all the NFT stuff is going on in Ethereum which
| is transitioning to POS which mitigates the whole "crypto mining
| is the death star stealing all the earths electricity and killing
| baby animals" narrative?
|
| If you want to yell at the electricity cloud then yell at
| Bitcoin, though we are using that to pay a composer in Venezuela
| for our new film and produce a novelist in Brazil so Bitcoin is
| cool too :0
| [deleted]
| Roark66 wrote:
| >Doesn't he know all the NFT stuff is going on in Ethereum
| which is transitioning to POS
|
| Ethereum has been "transitioning" to POS for years and it is
| still using POW. It reminds me a bit of nuclear fusion that is
| always "30 years away".
| jerry1979 wrote:
| If Alice buys art from Bob, and that art goes up in value due to
| the open-market activity of anonymous [Carol?, ...], then Alice
| can donate that now expensive art to a digital museum for a tax
| write off. Where could Alice get the NFTs appraised? Is the open
| market activity sufficient?
|
| It's almost like the NFT system allows proles to do fancy tax
| write-offs like their bourgeoisie cousins.
| d-sk wrote:
| NFT appraisal is a grey area if it is anything like the art
| market, and yes it can be used to defraud.
|
| https://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-irs2mar02-story.html
| jerry1979 wrote:
| Thank you for posting this article. I had not come across
| this one in my limited research.
|
| >It is appraisers, not museums, who determine the value of
| art for donors. But the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles
| is investigating whether museum officials furthered the
| scheme by knowingly accepting donations of overvalued art
| from suspect dealers and collectors over a decade, according
| to affidavits filed in January.
|
| Looks like software might eat this too.
|
| Anyway, I think I naturally tend to support the Liberal
| Project for better or worse, but today's streams of
| turbulence feel refreshing on tired feet.
| heliodor wrote:
| Do people donate _for_ the tax write-off or do they donate and
| happen to enjoy an additional tax write-off benefit?
| 8fGTBjZxBcHq wrote:
| Rich people absolutely do donate things for the tax
| writeoffs. Land and art especially can have on-paper values
| significantly different from what you could actually receive
| from selling them at a given time.
|
| I can't find it now but a few months ago there was an
| interesting article going around about this written by an
| accountant. A large part of the work of accounting is
| matching different appraisal methods to best fit the needs of
| the person at any given time. Donations definitely factor
| into this.
| kjrose wrote:
| Why does it feel to me like a way to launder money.
|
| Its not like the art market hasn't been used for that for
| centuries.
| dgellow wrote:
| Regarding the energy use: Since the 1st of March Cardano has
| native tokens (you can create your own token without the need for
| a smart contract) and multi-assets (wallets and transactions can
| contain more than one asset). The blockchain is using Proof-of-
| Stake and a full node runs on a raspberry pi 4. So it is
| completely possible to have NFTs without the massive energy
| consumption of Ethereum and without the very high gas fees
| problem. You can transfer for example 10 different tokens in one
| single transaction for just 0.16ADA (around 16cents at current
| price).
|
| I still don't understand why someone would buy a tweet or the
| ownership of an image, but you can do it in a more sustainable
| way if that's something important for you...
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| For such an intelligent(on average) audience, it really feels
| like people on HN stopped paying attention to crypto years ago
| and still think it is just bitcoin + some scammy alt coins.
|
| There are other networks besides Bitcoin and Ethereum with very
| little eco footprint and billions of dollars invested.
| heliodor wrote:
| They're buying an autographed tweet.
| herbst wrote:
| Adding to this most newer smart chains are kinda like that plus
| even ethereum 2.0 is going in that direction
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy:
|
| Earth - a small planet in the outer reaches of spiral galaxy
| M7529, so far the only planet on record that the semi-intelligent
| biped inhabitants managed to overheat so badly that they became
| extinct. Overheating has happened before, of course, however the
| method of overheating is unique - the inhabitants invented a
| method of identifying uniqueness by making large calculations and
| attaching small drawings to the calculations, they then proceeded
| to trade these tokens as something of value, using more and more
| energy and creating a runaway green house effect. This has been
| used as an example to disprove the existence of god.
| jugg1es wrote:
| DON'T PANIC
| anonymoushn wrote:
| I'm hoping we can do our NFT trading on non-PoW chains within
| the next couple years. This should reduce the environmental
| impact to that of baseball cards.
| detaro wrote:
| I've seen a bunch of artists jump on
| https://www.hicetnunc.xyz (which uses Tezos, which apparently
| is a Proof-of-Stake chain?) after the "wait, ETH uses _how
| much_ energy?! " shock.
| ddeyar wrote:
| It is LPoS. It means you're able to delegate your
| validation rights. So you don't need to run a node to
| participate in the staking process, you just delegate to a
| baker. And It's self amending. Every 3-4 months a proposal
| with upgrades will undergo a voting phase. All bakers are
| able to vote on this to accept or reject the proposal. The
| source code is written in a purely functional language on
| which formal verification is applied.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| One random idea I had was to use cryptomining to "soak up"
| excess power: so, for example, you could build nuclear out to
| meet peak load and then set up mining rigs to use the
| difference between peak and the current load, subsidizing the
| cost of power production.
|
| It's probably a bad idea for other reasons, but it's one way
| to reduce the environmental impact of PoW
| pwm wrote:
| Yup, this idea has already been explored, eg. here is an
| example of environmentally net-positive way of mining:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-06/why-
| bitco...
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| I don't see it as a net positive unless you believe high
| energy cost crypto is of high value to society. You have
| a large environmental impact in building out and
| maintaining a mining facility and transport
| infrastructure thereto, as well as the ongoing waste all
| the way down to the food put into the pieholes of the
| humans running the facility.
| pwm wrote:
| Net positive means the benefits, ie. eliminating huge
| amounts of CO2 that would otherwise be released into the
| atmosphere, outweighs the costs, ie. your list of
| capex+opex. Turning gas flares into miners is both
| ingenious and objectively net positive.
| timoth3y wrote:
| This is called "Demand Response" and it's an important part
| of grid management. For example a factory will agree to
| decrease consumption when asked in exchange for lower
| rates.
|
| Too much power is usually handled in the generation side by
| incentivize producers to scale back generation or even
| paying to have them take a plant offline.
|
| For a bitcoin mining operation, I suspect it would not be
| profitable to have all that equipment sit idle except when
| there is an oversupply of electricity.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| I was thinking that if you built for peak load, you could
| reduce the idle time to four hours or so a day.
| prox wrote:
| Another way to change this : Could crypto not make useful
| calculations instead of useless calculations? Like
| protein folding for example?
| distances wrote:
| Like Folding@home? No crypto needed.
| gxon wrote:
| https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/20879/why-
| cant-w...
| onion2k wrote:
| You can reduce the energy output of a nuclear reactor both
| through the moderation of the fission reaction (via control
| rods, coolant temperature variation, neutron poisoning,
| etc), and through moderation of the electrical generator
| turbine (slowing down the turbine speed, venting steam,
| etc).
|
| There is no such thing as "excess power" for crytomining.
| Even if there was then that energy could just be stored
| using batteries or gravity storage or something, or it
| could be sold to neighbouring energy users, or it could be
| used in the grid and other more polluting sources could be
| scaled down instead.
| nandhinianand wrote:
| > There is no such thing as "excess power" for
| crytomining.
|
| I was thinking the idea seemed to have some validity..
| For ex: storage of solar/wind-powered is critical and the
| current inefficiencies and batteries rely on lithium and
| alternatives are still in
| research.(http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#moving-
| storage) ..
|
| so in theory there's a system that can be built around
| the excess energy(of renewable systems) + crypto mining
| as a incentive for taking up renewable energy setups.(Of
| course this cannot convert the mined stuff back to energy
| so it's a one-way stuff at best and has it's own cons and
| pros).
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| What I've generally heard about nuclear and the grid in
| general is that it's cost-ineffective to build out
| generation capacity to meet peak demand and that nuclear
| power is relatively bad at meeting fluctuations in
| demand. Sure, you could use batteries or whatever to
| store/use the power that the grid currently doesn't need.
| You could also build aluminum processing plants or arc
| furnaces or whatever. Cryptocurrencies would be
| interesting because the mined cryptocurrency could used
| to reduce rates to consumers.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Or just stop the proof of work stuff. Just an idea.
| gxon wrote:
| You could use mining to incentivize the build out of remote
| energy generation before transmission infrastructure is
| ready.
|
| For example, drop some solar panels and miners in the
| middle of the desert and immediately start generating
| profit. Use the profit to deploy more solar panels and
| build out transmission lines. You can do this piecemeal at
| low initial investment to feel out an energy source without
| committing billions of dollars to build out.
|
| I'm not aware of anyone who's done major operations like
| this, but with the profitability of mining so absurdly high
| right now plus scrutiny on using dirty energy sources, I
| wouldn't be surprised if it starts. Access to mining ASICs
| is likely the key bottleneck.
|
| This is the story used to explain part of the reason so
| much mining is in China. They built out a ton of
| hydroelectric dams over the decades that have been
| underutilized due to lack of infrastructure. Miners came in
| for the unused electricity and brought in a ton of money to
| the area.
| root_axis wrote:
| It's a bad idea because the energy used is worse than
| wasted since all it does is contribute to an increase in
| the mining difficulty for the entire network, thus
| worsening the environmental impact. It's actually _better_
| for the environment to leave that energy completely unused
| rather than use it for mining bitcoins.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| This isn't necessarily true: if the subsidies spread
| clean power generation then the percentage of miners that
| have bad environmental impacts will decrease over time.
| Also, since this would make relatively clean power
| sources cheaper, it would help phase out fossil
| generation capacity.
| root_axis wrote:
| They're not "subsidies", they're just profits earned from
| selling what was mined, nothing useful happened, it
| simply makes the blockchain needlessly more expensive for
| everyone because a _nuclear power plant_ is dumping
| hashing power into the network. Green energy doesn 't
| change the fundamental nature of PoW, it inevitably
| expands to consume all available energy because the more
| energy you can burn the more money you can make.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| The important part is that the profits from mining are
| used to reduce rates: so it's subsidizing the power costs
| for the customers as well as offsetting the capital
| investment into the powerplant.
| root_axis wrote:
| Any reduction in rates would drive up the costs for
| everyone else. The capital investment required to
| construct a nuclear plant utterly dwarfs anything that
| could possibly be earned by mining.
| nandhinianand wrote:
| I disagree with the last part about direct
| proportionality between energy and money. But my real
| wonder is if we can use this hashed/mined out coins for
| something that is actually useful socially.(even if it is
| a transaction of services anonymously.) I keep wondering
| if we can create a crypto currency + IOT devices + energy
| tracking system that can value the coins you have based
| on the energy sources that fed into mining it. But it
| feels so complex that I am not optimistic about creating
| such a thing..
| root_axis wrote:
| Why do you disagree? If I profit X per kWh why wouldn't I
| burn as many kWhs as I can?
| nandhinianand wrote:
| Because not everyone is the "economically rational agent"
| that just wants to maximize profits as much as they can.
| May be you disagree, and think most people are and it's
| strong enough to be a normal distribution. (I am not sure
| it is, but i sure hope it is not a normal distribution
| and there are enough people outside).
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It doesn't matter that not everyone is a "economically
| rational agent". What matters is that there are _some_ of
| them. People who will reinvest their profit into more
| mining, to profit more and reinvest it further. The
| people who are currently fabbing their own ASICs and
| setting up mining farms in places where electricity is
| cheap. These people left unchecked will, over time, suck
| up all spare electricity generation capacity _and_
| eventually outbid quite a lot of normal electricity use.
| nandhinianand wrote:
| Once again I disagree.. these "some people" need to be
| the majority(of anyone participating in these currencies)
| for this mining to stay profitable.. Of course i may be
| mistaken about that part of the reasoning, but I'm fairly
| confident about it. Please let me know if you think it is
| an unfair assumption.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Majority is counted by hashing capability, not by head
| count. Is it not?
| andreskytt wrote:
| Or, there's an idea, just generate a random string, bundle it
| with the artwork and sign the whole damn thing using good old
| RSA. Achieves the exact same goal, uses a fraction of energy
| and no fancy tech.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Uh...no?
|
| These can trivially be copied (double spent), which means
| they're just as scarce as any digital data. Valueless
| without some significant proof of violence and hyper
| censorship ability enforcing copyright protection.
|
| The primary revolution of bitcoin was the invention of self
| enforcing digital scarcity.
| j4yav wrote:
| Can't the subject of NFTs also be trivially copied? All
| you really have is a token that refers to a particular
| file and proves that you own a token that refers to that
| file. Everyone else is free to ignore the token and copy
| the original file at any time.
|
| Is there something that you can only do via the token?
| Are there special events or access for token holders? I
| could see something like that being independently
| valuable, and interesting.
| lottin wrote:
| It's an "emperor has no clothes" kind of thing. A big
| farce, that's all it is.
| klipt wrote:
| The artist can sign a message including your public key.
| The message is verifiable using the artist's public key.
| If other people copy it, they're just copying the proof
| that it belongs to you.
|
| If you want to sell it to someone else, you sign a
| message saying you give it to them and so on, forming a
| "chain" of signed transactions.
| dnpp123 wrote:
| Congratulations, you just invented an inefficient PoS for
| a single use case!
| esperent wrote:
| The point being made is that it's trivial to create a
| proof of ownership system without using the blockchain.
| arnarbi wrote:
| Any owner can sign as many receipts of sale as they want.
| klipt wrote:
| Can't an artist also mint as many NFTs as they want?
| elefanten wrote:
| What stops an original owner (of the to-be-digitized
| asset) from selling an NFT on the same thing multiple
| times? Perhaps on multiple different platforms?
| supermatt wrote:
| Nothing, but they can only sign the "first" once
| drusepth wrote:
| If the NFT is just a pointer to a digital good, can't
| they have multiple "first" NFTs all referring to the same
| digital good?
| cbovis wrote:
| Yes and no. If they minted multiple within the same block
| then yes. If not, then proof of first minted NFT could be
| verified by block height.
| anonporridge wrote:
| They could mint or 'sign' as many as they want.
|
| But like a painting that can be copied, people decide to
| disproportionately value the first one...just because.
| supermatt wrote:
| sure, but unless they are signed in the same block, then
| there will be a "first".
| lottin wrote:
| > The primary revolution of bitcoin was the invention of
| self enforcing digital scarcity.
|
| I thought DRM already invented that.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Some company can run a DB to record spends. Why trust a
| third party? Well with any crypto linked to real world
| outcomes you need it trust a third party. Be that tether
| or some NFT hustler.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Because if I'm a rich person wanting to spend stupid
| amounts of money on some 'original' work of digital art,
| I don't want to trust a third party store the ownership
| records that could easily be corrupted.
|
| The ownership record in a public blockchain can't be
| corrupted.
| lottin wrote:
| Rich people entrust their entire wealth to third parties
| to manage it for them. Why wouldn't they trust a third
| party to keep some ridiculous record of ownership?
| anonporridge wrote:
| Because the entire ethos of the cryptocurrency space is
| about dematerializing trust from large, complex networks
| of humans with various carrot/stick incentives keeping
| them honest to trust based on cryptography and game
| theory dynamics of open distributed systems that can't be
| successfully cheated without a massive accumulation of
| power.
| lottin wrote:
| What do you mean dematerializing trust, can you put an
| example? As far as I know, trust is not made of matter, I
| don't know how it could possibly be dematerialized.
| root_axis wrote:
| The ownership of the NFT itself is verified through
| public-key cryptography, the blockchain adds nothing of
| value.
| HeadsUpHigh wrote:
| If the artist signs the NFT to you, then you can't track
| resales. It will always be signed as belonging to the
| original person who bought it. So basically this
| "alternative" to NFTs would be impossible to trade. It
| blows my mind that people still don't understand stuff this
| basic.
| lottin wrote:
| The only reason for tracking resales is to prevent
| double-spending, in other words, to create a false
| illusion of scarcity. The whole thing is a charade.
| HeadsUpHigh wrote:
| We already have artificial scarcity. It's called steam.
| You buy a game in steam, you can't resell it. This allows
| you to resell the things you buy.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| It cant be artifial scarcity when there is endless
| supply.
| lottin wrote:
| You can't resell a game in steam because Valve doesn't
| let you, not because the game is being made artificially
| scarce. Which it is, but this is not the reason you can't
| resell it. The point is that reselling an NFT doesn't
| require a central ledger. The central ledger is necessary
| to prevent the same token from being sold multiple times
| by the same seller. In other words, to create the
| illusion that the seller doesn't have something (and
| therefore can't sell it) when in fact they actually have
| it.
| HeadsUpHigh wrote:
| Each NFT is separate. You can authenticate a digital game
| by owning the nft. The publisher can sell as many tokens
| as they wish, that's entirely different. The point is
| that they can't stop you from reselling, because it's on
| the blockchain, not on steam.
| bottled_poe wrote:
| And how valuable is that capability?
| kristofferR wrote:
| It's what you're paying for.
| HeadsUpHigh wrote:
| That's up to you. It could easily replace steam for me.
| Or digital audio purchases.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| ECC (curve 25519) would be preferable.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Yeah, you could plausibly just transfer these things by
| having each owner sign an attestation of the new owner's
| public key. But since it looks like this junk will happen
| on a publicly accessible slow computer/database, I'm just
| hoping it happens on e.g. Solana instead of Ethereum.
| kolinko wrote:
| Signing attestation by itself wouldn't work because of
| double spending. You would need either a centralised
| database of who owns what or a blockchain.
| nandhinianand wrote:
| Loved it .... I've been craving a replacement for Douglas Adams
| for a while now.. Terry Pratchett was quite close.. but now he
| too is gone.. perhaps it's time for me to find other writers or
| write stuff myself..
| JPKab wrote:
| This was hilarious and well-written.
|
| I've become extremely alarmed at the number of completely non-
| technical people who don't know anything about how
| cryptocurrency works getting extremely into it via YouTube
| click holes. It's obvious that these NFTs are capitalizing on
| it.
|
| A guy I ran into at the hardware store today was talking to me
| and he didn't understand the concept of a cryptocurrency that
| has a stable value so that it can be used as a means of
| exchange.
|
| He's an airline pilot and he just has tens of thousands of
| dollars invested in various crypto things that he heard about
| on YouTube and he's made a ton of money on it.. It was eerily
| reminiscent of conversations I had with people flipping houses
| in 2006.
| nicbou wrote:
| Every single male friend of mine is talking about crypto. I
| am so tired of this topic.
|
| That and Tesla.
| epx wrote:
| I avoid the subject since a friend insisted on taking about
| Bitcoin with me during the funeral of HIS mother.
| secabeen wrote:
| > He's an airline pilot and he just has tens of thousands of
| dollars invested in various crypto things that he heard about
| on YouTube and he's made a ton of money on it.
|
| "made a ton of money on it." Until he has sold those assets
| and turned them into a major, stable currently like USD in
| his bank account or a diversified collection of other assets,
| they are as reliable a store of value as Enron stock was in
| July of 2000.
| Puts wrote:
| Isn't it interesting though that the people who don't have
| the technical understanding of why most cryptocurrencies at
| the core are unsustainable, just as the housing market was in
| 2006 are still the ones making money on it?
|
| When betting in any market understanding people and
| psychology seems to be more important than understanding the
| product.
| justincormack wrote:
| No, the price is going up, everyone on average is making
| money. In a bubble everyone tends to think they are very
| well informed and investing rationally and getting the
| psychology right.
| quattrofan wrote:
| "why most cryptocurrencies at the core are unsustainable"
| would you care to elaborate on such a sweeping statement?
| [deleted]
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| Thanks for the compliment - I'd like to think he would agree.
| Nursie wrote:
| It's also currently reminding me of the second-life land
| rushes from about that time.
| roywiggins wrote:
| I am reminded of the Shoe Event Horizon.
|
| https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Shoe_Event_Horizon
| flimflamm wrote:
| Sounds like bitcoin predictions coming true.
| nutanc wrote:
| How much for an NFT for this comment :)
| ozim wrote:
| I would be a bit more optimistic, here is my take on it.
|
| Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy:
|
| Earth - a small planet in the outer reaches of spiral galaxy
| M7529. Inhabitants with watery brains came up with technology
| to use their star energy directly for complex mathematical
| calculations. Our space archeologists still don't understand
| why the calculations were producing random outputs so they
| never managed to get out of their star system and used all
| their star energy for that. Their Dyson sphere is interesting
| place to visit because as of now, it is the only civilization
| that achieved building it and never managed to go any further.
| incrudible wrote:
| This repeats the same mistaken belief that "energy is precious".
| In reality, there's lots of energy that is either worthless or
| has negative value. There currently is no economical solution for
| storing this energy and it's the biggest impediment for renewable
| energy.
|
| Many bubbles have left lasting improvements to infrastructure.
| The railroad bubble brought railroads. The telegraph bubble wired
| up the country. The internet bubble made internet connectivity
| mainstream.
|
| I believe that proof-of-work can bring lasting improvements to
| both energy infrastructure and semiconductor processes that are
| unaccounted for in all the naive calculations that make for a
| good headline.
| notahacker wrote:
| Demand for energy efficiency improvements already exists. All
| PoW adds is a new form of demand designed to scale up to
| consume all energy efficiency improvements; every time energy
| prices fall miners are incentivised to increase the rate of
| mining (unless the block rewards or coin market price also
| falls)
|
| The Internet bubble was people making infrastructure available
| in the hope people would use it, not people converting DDoS
| attacks into money and claiming that stopping others using that
| bandwidth would be worth it in the long run if it lead to the
| invention of servers and cables that scaled to infinite
| capacity
| incrudible wrote:
| > ...unless the block rewards or coin market price also falls
|
| At least one of these is guaranteed to happen, so that kind
| of makes your argument moot.
| krylon860 wrote:
| They might be a trap, but wouldn't you at least like to have a
| real life girl hold your hand through the check out process? [0]
|
| [0] http://qloppi.com
| toss1 wrote:
| It is all about creating Veblin Goods [1] - where the price paid,
| and the obviousness of the price paid, is a key part of the
| asset, and have very different supply-demand-price curves.
|
| Also, not far from Greater Fool theory of investing, which always
| ends well, ...ha...
|
| [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/veblen-good.asp
| etrabroline wrote:
| How much electricity is used refrigerating frozen desserts in the
| US? It's probably a lot. Probably more than a small country. Is
| ice cream an unnecessary and "dangerous" trap that we will all
| pay dearly for in the end? Probably.
| ashkankiani wrote:
| I don't understand the point of this comment. It's almost
| schizophrenic in nature. Are you advocating _for_ wasting
| energy by saying that wasting energy is fine because it 's done
| in other places but not criticized?
| esturk wrote:
| I've noticed that low karma accounts like the one above yours
| tend to leave snarky comments to gain karmas. It's ambiguous
| enough to get some up votes from readers that like their
| humour and not get down voted out right for its vagueness.
| nerbert wrote:
| It's probably more like if we had a common point of
| comparison for all the energy spending points in our society
| we wouldn't be focusing on blockchain that much.
| Osmose wrote:
| Pointing out the environmental impact of NFTs is not taking
| away a meaningful amount of attention or effort from
| pointing out the impact of nonrenewable power, cars, etc.
| What it can do is clue in NFT users who may not understand
| the impact of their participation.
|
| Anecdotally I've seen several artists on social media
| making posts recently saying "wow okay I just heard about
| the power use of NFTs, this is nuts" because it's really
| not obvious if you're not already familiar with blockchain-
| related stuff.
| ashkankiani wrote:
| Even if something like frozen desserts used the same amount
| of energy as NFTs, it's still not a good light for NFTs
| considering those frozen desserts probably support a large
| number of jobs, infrastructure, and at the very least some
| kind of nominal amount of calories (even if not very
| healthy ones).
|
| NFTs might help _some_ artists get money. That 's not
| really as much of an impact.
|
| So if we're comparing things, the full context needs to be
| included as well, not just some strawman of a magnitude.
|
| And all of that being said, if the world decided that it
| would stop producing desserts, I'd probably be on board
| with it anyway, but the impact would be pretty large. If
| the world decided to stop supporting NFTs, not much would
| change (I suppose it could in the future, but based on
| their current trajectory it doesn't seem like that'll be
| the case).
| emptyparadise wrote:
| I think keeping food from going bad is a lot more useful than
| very inefficient digital signature verification.
| gfodor wrote:
| OK, so what happens if, say, the worlds energy demands jump 100x
| in 2-3 years due to out-of-control feedback loops like crypto?
|
| Energy prices go up. People suffer. There are two possible
| responses:
|
| - Regulation/laws to stop the feedback loop
|
| - Investment + deployment of new energy technologies to increase
| supply
|
| Will be interesting to see which of the two scenarios above
| happen, or if the fears of this crypto wave leading to insane
| energy cost increases just don't happen.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| The reality is neither. No feedback loop will be removed, and
| no new energy will be ready (at scale) in time. China has been
| building a lot of coal plants, I expect more of that.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| The simplest answer is to move people towards the various
| networks already operating with very little energy consumption
| in comparison to bitcoin or ethereum. Cardano and Polkadot both
| operate on a proof-of-stake mechanism rather than mining.
|
| It's like HN doesn't realize there's more going on in the space
| than bitcoin and ethereum.
| Rinum wrote:
| Sounds like an investment in the energy sector is worthwhile
| now. Make money selling the shovels (reference to the gold rush
| where shovel sellers made more than people looking for gold,
| i.e. valuable NFT's and cryptos being "gold" here)
| [deleted]
| qqii wrote:
| > People can look at images of the Mona Lisa all day long without
| compensating you, because you simply own the original trophy, not
| the idea...
|
| Your ownership isn't stamped or an inhenrant part of the Mona
| Lisa, your ownership comes from the certificate and trust in the
| certificate, history of sales and its legacy. NFTs are simply
| digifying this.
|
| > [Creators will] become promoters of digital tokens more than
| they are creators. Because that's the only reason that someone is
| likely to buy one-like a stock, they hope it will go up in value
|
| Since this is such a new idea and market speculation is rampant
| but the comparison and suggestion is still unfair. Money may be
| one driving factor in buying stocks, but it often isn't the only
| factor. NFTs don't change much for physical artists but non
| fungiblility did not exist for digital art until now.
|
| > NFTs aren't usually aesthetically beautiful on their own, they
| simply represent something that is.
|
| In both cases the certificate is a representation of the art. The
| certificate or idea that you own the Mona Lisa isn't what's
| beautiful, the piece of art your ownership represents is.
|
| > BUYERS of NFTs may be blind to the fact that there's no limit
| on the supply. In the case of baseball cards, there are only so
| many rookies a year.
|
| Creating a new token is easy, just as doing a scribble and
| calling it art. There's still implicit trust that the creator
| won't make a duplicate token with the same representation just as
| there's implicit trust an artist won't certify identical
| paintings as originals.
|
| The benifit for collectables is that the minting and supply is
| public. You can verify that your NFT is 1 out of X, and only X.
|
| > THE REST OF US are going to pay for NFTs for a very long time.
| They use an astonishing amount of electricity to create and
| trade. Together, they are already using more than is consumed by
| some states in the US. Imagine building a giant new power plant
| just to make Christie's or the Basel Art Fair function. And the
| amount of power wasted will go up commensurate with their
| popularity and value. And keep going up. The details are here.
| The short version is that for the foreseeable future, the method
| that's used to verify the blockchain and to create new digital
| coins is deliberately energy-intensive and inefficient. That's on
| purpose. And as they get more valuable, the energy used will go
| up, not down.
|
| The energy costs of the NFTs are currently pretty high, but to
| claim it'll only go up is disingenuous. In the foreseeable future
| Bitcoin will be the only energy intensive blockchain as others
| move to proof of stake. Ethereum has begun to make this
| transition and most other large platforms have already made this
| transition.
|
| Since blockchain is digital and public the ease to produce a
| concrete estimate of energy paints an easy target. Measuring
| energy from other recreational activities is much harder and
| fuzzy. Gaming is a similar target but is much harder to
| discredit.
| bsenftner wrote:
| NFTs are the perfect fraud for the moment, and will be
| controversial right to until they are worthless.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Has anyone done an analysis of NFTs being used for money
| laundering? Seem like they'd have most of the benefits of art
| plus most of the benefits of crypto.
|
| I suspect NFTs will continue gaining in popularity, if only for
| this alone.
| [deleted]
| herbst wrote:
| Why? Trading histories for NFTs are usually fully public. There
| are so many other things like ponzi smart contracts that move
| millions every day that using NFTs doesnt sound so appealing
| neiman wrote:
| I disagree with the arguments there.
|
| - Creators... become promoters of digital tokens more than they
| are creators": Is this a purist approach that artists needs to do
| only art for 24/7? Anything else is a violation of their artist
| oath or something?
|
| - "BUYERS of NFTs may be blind to the fact that there's no limit
| on the supply": there's the same limit on supply you got on
| regular art. Attaching a token to an art piece does not change
| its supply.
|
| - "THE REST OF US are going to pay for NFTs for a very long time.
| They use an astonishing amount of electricity to create and
| trade": No they don't. NFTs are not a separate blockchain. They
| add nothing to the electricity already being spent.
|
| The post has so many more inaccuracies, making it difficult to
| take its conclusion seriously. Here's another example:
|
| - "Unlike alternative digital currencies which are relatively
| complicated to invent and sell": what? no. There are ERC20 tokens
| generators exactly like there are NFT generators.
| snissn wrote:
| It's easy for a famous entrenched artist who mass produces their
| work thanks to legacy infrastructure to talk down on this but I'm
| seeing lots of independent creator artist friends making some
| money for their work
| Osmose wrote:
| What property of NFTs has suddenly made them make money where
| previously they weren't? Like how did adding NFTs to the mix
| suddenly make their art start selling?
| lmm wrote:
| Previously there was no way to credibly sell an "original".
| You can produce a commission for someone, but the nature of a
| digital artwork is that anyone you show it to has the whole
| thing.
|
| To a certain extent this was already the case with photos,
| and IMO that's part of the reason that prices for
| photographic artwork are much lower than other media. You'll
| sometimes see photographers selling a series of 500 numbered
| prints (or whatever) as a sort of a way around that, and NFTs
| are kind of a more digital version of that.
| tigen wrote:
| No, the NFTs are a separate thing which apparently has some
| sort of sentimental value. The digital artwork is still
| whatever it was before. I could sell an NFT for my cuckoo
| clock. It has nothing to do with my cuckoo clock.
| lmm wrote:
| It's akin to a certificate of authenticity for a numbered
| print in a series. Anyone can make another copy of the
| print, and it doesn't really matter which copy a
| certificate goes with, but without the certificate the
| print is worthless.
| knrz wrote:
| I think it has to do with the money being held in crypto...
| the whales have more than they'll need and are looking for
| reasons to spend it.
| dorkwood wrote:
| I suppose the reality one would have to buy in to is that
| people were previously sitting around with tens of thousands
| in disposable cash ready to spend on art, but were held back
| by the fact that ownership of the art could not be proven
| digitally.
| [deleted]
| dimgl wrote:
| This is exactly what I don't understand. If it's the same
| art, why does it matter if the art is in an NFT or in a
| physical representation? Like, why are people buying pieces
| of art using NFTs?
| detaro wrote:
| Digital art doesn't have a natural physical representation,
| and people find it interesting to get rid of the
| requirement for creating and maintaining one just to make
| it a thing to exist as art. I.e. fundamentally digital art
| pieces are today often sold as part of installations which
| are a pain to maintain long-term. Or as physical media,
| which also are difficult to maintain long-term, or if you
| don't require the specific media to be preserved you get
| into the chaos of which later copy is an "original". That
| really only works at an expensive high end.
|
| Or you don't create exclusivity and sell it cheaply, but
| while people do buy e.g. music that apparently doesn't work
| as well for other art forms (artists certainly have tried).
|
| Limited/unique prints apparently do work (as in people are
| willing to spend money on those), but limits you to static
| 2D media.
|
| In principle nothing stops you from selling digital art
| with licenses like we do sell software with licenses, but
| that hasn't caught on, for whatever reason. (I'm actually
| expecting that to be added _to_ NFTs soon-ish)
|
| Enough people do seem to be currently willing to accept the
| concept of an NFT representing ownership of a digital thing
| to put a price on it, and that price is noticeably higher
| than what they pay for non-exclusive digital art. For many
| artists, that's reason enough to use this new avenue to
| sell their art.
| jb775 wrote:
| Well for one, NFTs on art create a unique money laundering
| strategy.
|
| Drug dealer buys an art NFT for $1k (using legit money),
| sells the NFT plus a bag of drugs to someone for $10k. They
| just made $9k in "artwork" profit, which is clean
| money....and since the value of art is always subjective, it
| can't really be questioned. On top of that, all monetary
| exchanges and transactions can be handled via smart
| contracts, so this reduces risk to everyone involved.
| herbst wrote:
| Yeah i am not going to buy relevant amount of drugs on
| something that has a visible public history when i easily
| cant.
|
| I think you highly underestimate how liquid the crypto
| craze market really is.
| seibelj wrote:
| One amazing use-case is recurring revenue on secondary market
| sales by coding royalties into the smart contracts. Artists
| used to die poor and their family saw nothing as their work
| skyrocketed in value. Not anymore with NFTs.
| Lazare wrote:
| The problem I think, is that their art _still_ isn 't
| selling. NFTs aren't art, they are effectively trading cards
| _referencing_ art.
|
| These trading cards are, somewhat mysteriously, selling, and
| that does get money into the hands of artists which is good,
| but they're not doing it by encouraging people to buy art or
| tip artists, and it's hard to see how "everyone can just
| print trading cards referencing things" is a sustainable
| _anything_.
| scsilver wrote:
| People pay for mods and skins all the time. People will pay
| secondlife furniture. They will pay to be be able to
| display it in their VR houses. They will display it like
| badges on their forum avatars.
|
| The speculation and whales will being the capital to
| generate a steady market and build out the partnerships and
| incentives for customers. Once people are used to digital
| wallets, sending a few bucks for instant delivery of some
| unique design is easier than etsy.
| Lazare wrote:
| > People pay for mods and skins all the time. People will
| pay secondlife furniture. They will pay to be be able to
| display it in their VR houses. They will display it like
| badges on their forum avatars.
|
| All of those are neat ideas which do not _require_ NFTs,
| and are not _enabled_ by NFTs. People already pay for
| Second Life furniture.
| scsilver wrote:
| And advantage I see is the shared protocols and
| blockchains offer quick and seemless ownership validation
| even after the original merchant has gone out of business
| or stopped selling. And for the merchants, its painless
| and seemless to sell and delegate ownership without
| having to manage that inhouse, or pay a large fee for the
| service.
| detaro wrote:
| I don't have the impression people buying NFT art consider
| there to be much difference between the art and what you
| call a "trading card" referencing art. (sure, many probably
| buy for speculation, but that happens with meatspace art
| too)
|
| Thought experiment: if they sold a digital art piece in
| traditional terms, would you consider the printed licensing
| contract (which is our usual legal tool represent selling a
| file) to be a "trading card" and the art itself to be not
| sold? (the legal meaning of an NFT is less defined, true,
| but I suspect people will tie licensing contracts into that
| soon enough)
|
| Especially in art, a lot of this comes ultimately down to
| social convention of what people do consider to have value,
| and as long as enough people agree it doesn't really matter
| what the rest of us thinks. (I think I get how the logic
| works for NFTs, but it doesn't work for me in the sense
| that I currently don't consider owning an NFT to be
| meaningful to me, unlike owning other kinds of
| (representations of) art)
| Lazare wrote:
| > if they sold a digital art piece in traditional terms
|
| People do sell licenses to digital art, yes. I've both
| bought and sold such licenses, primarily on TurboSquid
| (https://www.turbosquid.com/), a digital market place
| which has been doing that for over 20 years.
|
| That's neither a trading card nor the art itself, but
| it's certainly closer to "art" than "trading card",
| because I get specific legal rights to do specific things
| with the art, such as use it and reproduce it in a book,
| website, computer game, etc.
|
| It is worth, I think, asking what is being offered by
| NFTs that TurboSquid (and it's endless competitors and
| equivalents for other media types) don't offer. Scarcity?
| Nothing stops such marketplaces from selling exclusive
| licenses, and some have tried, although I don't think
| it's ever been popular.
|
| > the legal meaning of an NFT is less defined, true, but
| I suspect people will tie licensing contracts into that
| soon enough
|
| Well, yes. People might start selling some sort of "NFT +
| rights" package at some point, but they don't come with
| any _now_ , hence the "trading card" digs. Even if people
| start adding rights in the future, it's not clear that
| these rights will be (or will be seen to be) an integral
| part of the NFT. If I can sell an NFT of my 3D model now,
| and I can sell the right to use my 3D model in a game
| now, why would I combine these in a package and not just
| keep selling them independently?
|
| (Now, one interesting thing is that the rights attached
| to NFTs would presumably be transferable, while licenses
| to digital art are currently overwhelmingly non-
| transferable. That _is_ a big change. But...we could sell
| transferable licenses now; you don 't need NFTs for that,
| and the concept is currently not popular. I rather think
| that rather than NFTs true value being that they enable
| transferable licenses, the transferability of licences
| attached to NFTs will be a drawback.)
|
| > Especially in art, a lot of this comes ultimately down
| to social convention
|
| That is true. Art prints are an interesting example;
| you're basically paying for 1) the right to reproduce an
| artwork on a single piece of physical media and 2) paying
| for the artist to do that reproduction for you. Both are
| legitimate services, but it's odd to find them packaged
| together like that so frequently. And yet, art prints are
| a huge and very well accepted part of the art market. If
| NFTs become widely accepted, they will seem less strange,
| to be sure.
| throwaway_kufu wrote:
| The turbosquid comparison is fair...basically NFTs are
| recreating that, but without the need of turbosquid.
|
| To your other point many NFTs already include these
| additional legal rights, it's articles and forums like
| this where people are talking about NFTs as if they are
| all just digital baseball cards.
|
| Just look at decentralized domain names as the obvious
| counter examples (Unstoppable Domains and/or Ethereum
| Name Service). You aren't just buying an NFT for a domain
| name, the NFT includes the rights to the actual name. I
| use both companies as examples, because even if this new
| space they are not offering the same rights over the
| underlying domain and it's incumbent on the user to
| understand what rights they actually get with the NFT.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Think of it as a certificate of authenticity. If it's not
| made/endorsed by the artist it's not worth anything.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Exactly. What would you say if I told you I have a famous
| painting and a certificate of authenticity and am willing
| to sell you the certificate for $$$ and keep the
| painting?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| What if it's a digital painting where all copies are
| identical? The certificate basically _is_ the ownership.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Suppose I own a game on steam. I pay a friend to write me
| a certificate saying whoever owns the certificate owns
| the game. I sell you the certificate. You pirate the
| game. Do you own it?
|
| If the NFT doesn't come with conventional legal rights,
| you don't own the thing the NFT points to in the real
| legal system. If it does, it's redundant.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If first sale doctrine is ever fixed, your friend could
| sell you their copy that way.
|
| I don't know why all your examples involve third parties
| stamping sweet nothings onto a piece of paper. Of course
| something made by a non-author and with no ownership is
| useless. I said that in my first comment.
|
| > If the NFT doesn't come with conventional legal rights,
| you don't own the thing the NFT points to in the real
| legal system. If it does, it's redundant.
|
| An NFT needs to have some kind of rights in the contract
| or it's a scam. Notably you at least need exclusivity!
|
| But that doesn't make it "redundant". It's a _way_ of
| making a contract, not a replacement for contracts.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| > If first sale doctrine is ever fixed, your friend could
| sell you their copy that way.
|
| Yes, but NFTs claim to get similar effects without
| changing the law.
|
| > I don't know why all your examples involve third
| parties stamping sweet nothings onto a piece of paper.
|
| The third party is the blockchain. Because the blockchain
| can't enforce that you actually hand over real ownership
| rights to correspond with the NFT ownership.
|
| > An NFT needs to have some kind of rights in the
| contract or it's a scam. Notably you at least need
| exclusivity!
|
| If I own a piece of paper my country's legal system will
| accept as meaning I own something, why would I also want
| a piece of virtual paper that a bunch of people on the
| internet will accept as meaning I own some sort of rights
| to something.
|
| > But that doesn't make it "redundant". It's a way of
| making a contract, not a replacement for contracts.
|
| What NFT can I use to make a contract that any real legal
| system will accept?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > If I own a piece of paper my country's legal system
| will accept as meaning I own something, why would I also
| want a piece of virtual paper that a bunch of people on
| the internet will accept as meaning I own some sort of
| rights to something.
|
| So you can buy and sell it easily, and show everyone that
| you own it.
|
| That's much better than paper!
|
| > What NFT can I use to make a contract that any real
| legal system will accept?
|
| Surely they have terms of service? That's where the legal
| system ties in.
| quantumsequoia wrote:
| That still doesn't make any sense to me. Would anybody
| have paid for a physical certificate of authenticity for
| a digital file pre-NFTs? If the NBA started selling
| certificates of authenticity for video clips that didn't
| come with any intellectual property ownership or
| exclusive ability, people would have laughed and would
| have never paid millions for them
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Access to markets. Like it or not, there are many, many
| wealthy cryptocurrency holders. NFTs are a way of exposing
| the new artist class to the new rich.
| centizen wrote:
| It's also easy to discount someone's arguments by writing them
| off as an "entrenched artist" and implying their opinion is
| invalid and old fashioned.
|
| I'm not so convinced, especially when Seth has been a major
| proponent of digital currencies and economies for decades now.
| elevaet wrote:
| "It's an ongoing waste that creates little in ongoing value and
| gets less efficient and more expensive as time goes on. For most
| technological innovations the opposite is true."
|
| Reminds me of another cryptographic novelty that's come back into
| vogue lately.
| siquick wrote:
| NFTs applied to media just feels like a really rubbish version of
| CDs, tapes, vinyl, DVDs, and trading cards.
| quantified wrote:
| All worth is in the eyes of the parties to a transaction.
| Sometimes you can take comfort that there is a cohort with
| similar thoughts. You probably got your starting thoughts from
| that cohort. But caveat emptor, that expensive house might go
| down in value as the crime rate rises in the neighborhood, and
| maybe your "investment" in fine china and antiques disappears
| because lifestyles and interests change. A NFT for ownership of
| Woody Allen's Sleeper would probably be worth less now than its
| peak value.
|
| Meanwhile, a big (or the main) point of the art was the
| environmental impact. That part seems really pertinent to keep in
| mind.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| The fact we're so far into crypto and NFTs that this famous
| bloggers take is "it's bad for the environment" should be the
| signal he's past giving relevant takes.
|
| This would have been the take to have in the first months of
| Bitcoin.
|
| A boomer can't comprehend the actions of the generation where
| house prices rocketed and their salaries stayed the same. They're
| going to do whatever it takes to build wealth and gambles like
| crypto, gamestop, nft are now the norm, anyone over 30 today
| realizes building savings and living within your means is now a
| waste of time as they still struggle to afford houses.
|
| When it comes down to it "but the environment..." isn't going to
| put anyone off, the environmental impact of AirPods never put
| anyone off the convenience of no cable so why would this?
| whiddershins wrote:
| This meme that living within your means and saving isn't
| effective is ... dangerous.
|
| It's pretty always better to do so.
|
| Saying 'yeah but if I do that, I still won't be able to afford
| x purchase' easily becomes a justification for being in debt,
| which just doesn't help.
|
| Even if we don't live in a meritocracy, behaving as if we do
| and assuming you can increase your merit, is an effective
| strategy.
| [deleted]
| Igelau wrote:
| What happens when someone actually starts going after IP rights
| on these things? I suspect that's when the "popping" starts.
|
| 3D-ified pokemon card, no way the creator licensed the
| trademarked character or the copyrighted text:
| https://app.rarible.com/token/0xd07dc4262bcdbf85190c01c996b4...
|
| Knock-off CryptoPunk where someone just ran a filter on the
| original image (that someone else "owns"), and apparently sold it
| for 0.11 ETH:
| https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c2484200...
| lwhi wrote:
| I've seen articles in the news try to compare an NFT with
| signature of an artist. This feels like a romantic concept, which
| supports the idea of unique value.
|
| If I start to think about NFTs as a receipt, some of the latest
| bit stories start to gain a new perspective.
|
| Someone has a receipt for buying the first Twitter message for
| $2.5m dollars.
|
| It feels like stupidity, because it's a clear case of the tail
| wagging the dog.
|
| --
|
| On the other hand, there's a hug amount of utility in the idea of
| a transactions (receipts) being stored on a blockchain.
| [deleted]
| anonporridge wrote:
| The possibilities of NFTs fascinate me, especially for portable,
| digital identities and assets that transcend any specific virtual
| realm and can't be arbitrarily erased by any central authority.
|
| But I also won't put a single sat in any of them right now.
| chickenfries wrote:
| > The possibilities of NFTs fascinate me, especially for
| portable, digital identities and assets that transcend any
| specific virtual realm and can't be arbitrarily erased by any
| central authority.
|
| I'm struggling to understand the possibilities. Can you
| enlighten me? It seems like people buying these things are just
| speculating. Can you paint a picture of what kind of
| possibilities you're excited about?
| nightski wrote:
| Ooohhh not the evil speculation. So scawwrry. Seriously
| though, everything in life is speculation. Do you have a job?
| That's speculation on return for your time. Do you own a
| house? That is speculation on property prices. Do you have a
| bank account? That is speculation on inflation. Everything is
| speculation unless you have a God's eye view of the world.
| Get over it.
| jes5199 wrote:
| "digital identities and assets that transcend any specific
| virtual realm"
|
| I think they mean, you could have the same stuff in different
| video games
| benrbray wrote:
| The hard part about this isn't the crypto, it's the
| coordination between game companies on how to store and
| render assets.
| anonporridge wrote:
| This is exactly why I would be wary of committing to the
| current stuff.
|
| Without integration into large networks, NFTs are
| worthless.
| anonporridge wrote:
| This thread touches on it,
| https://twitter.com/FEhrsam/status/1366248629661552642
|
| A very simple example is that it could partially solve the
| problem of verifying digital identities. If I follow/friend
| your NFT based identity, and various virtual realms (games,
| social media, virtual spaces) integrate with that 'identity'
| NFT for user accounts, then any new virtual realm I enter, I
| can immediately find and connect with people I already know,
| or identify imposters. There will obviously still be some
| other hoops I need to jump through to know a digital identity
| maps to a particular physical person.
|
| I could also see game studios start to issue varying tiers of
| rare in-game items as NFTs that can then trade on a free
| market, like collectible cards. Not only would I suspect
| people will be much more likely to pay more for digital items
| they can actually take uncensorable possession of (and still
| sell after they get banned from a game), but different
| studios could even make deals to make their NFT items cross
| compatible. (Mario NFT skins and items in Minecraft?)
|
| Maybe I'm starry eyed and delusional, and I'm sure it's a
| LONG, messy road to get wherever we're going with this.
| chickenfries wrote:
| Thank you for your answer. Personally, as a gamer the idea
| of cross game microtransactions and collectibles does not
| interest me. Minecraft skins are free and easy to create,
| you can make yourself look like Mario if you want, or
| anything else. The idea of putting that on the blockchain
| instead seems dystopian. On top of that, I'm pretty sure
| that Nintendo would never want to do such a thing.
| adbachman wrote:
| > A very simple example is that it could partially solve
| the problem of verifying digital identities.
|
| It does not. In fact, it reduces to the public/private key
| system we already have for verifying digital identities.
|
| I have zero way of proving that I am the owner or creator
| of an NFT without the private key used to sign the original
| transaction. Why bother with an NFT and the complexity of a
| wallet when I can just sign whatever you'd like me to sign
| and you can verify it with the same public key that
| verifies my identity claim?
|
| NFTs add _nothing_ to the equation.
| atweiden wrote:
| > A very simple example is that it could partially solve
| the problem of verifying digital identities. If I
| follow/friend your NFT based identity, and various virtual
| realms (games, social media, virtual spaces) integrate with
| that 'identity' NFT for user accounts
|
| You don't need Crypto Kitties for account verification. All
| you need is a cryptographic keypair, like the kind you
| already get by default in any Bitcoin wallet. Just sign a
| message proving you own a public key with the corresponding
| private key.
|
| > Maybe I'm starry eyed and delusional, and I'm sure it's a
| LONG, messy road to get wherever we're going with this.
|
| Evidently we're going back in time to 2015, when "NFT"
| meant a blockchain representation of a digital trading card
| game. No one cared then, and no one cares now. The only
| thing new to the 2021 "NFT" narrative cycle is Twitter
| trying to monetize itself by selling tweets. Needless to
| say, none of the historical attempts at NFTs have ever
| resulted in lasting value to society, and probably this
| won't either.
| root_axis wrote:
| NFTs do not exist outside of the blockchain, a central
| authority would not care in the least about the NFT, they would
| simply target the actual asset in the realm of their authority.
| TheDong wrote:
| > portable, digital identities and assets that transcend any
| specific virtual realm
|
| Why not just have a government or trusted company sign things
| rather than an NFT? If the UN says "we will digitally sign
| digital passports", that seems strictly better than an NFT for
| identity. Without a central authority to verify identity, how
| do you solve the problem of a thousand people creating NFTs
| saying they're john doe living at location X? Don't you need
| someone to validate it, at which point you have a central
| authority?
|
| Or is this for digital assets like "I own this git repository",
| which you can already do by signing it with your gpg key and
| then distributing it via ipfs or such?
|
| > can't be arbitrarily erased by any central authority.
|
| Sure they can be. If a government creates a law saying "anyone
| that processes NFTs must first put them through this list of
| NFTs to filter, must filter them out, etc, or go to prison",
| well, now NFTs are effectively erased.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Here I'm talking more about pseudonymous virtual identities
| that aren't necessarily publicly tied to meat world people.
| Digital passport for verification of physical world identity
| probably will be some government agency.
|
| Boy would it suck if they 'accidentally' delete your digital
| identity and suddenly you can't participate in any social
| media. As more and more of our lives go virtual, this could
| legitimately become a prison like punishment and hopefully
| there's an arm of the justice system that manages that
| transparently.
| paulmd wrote:
| You mean like getting your facebook profile banned?
|
| As always, this always exists and the question is why
| Facebook would want to give up their centralized control of
| it, just like national central banks won't willingly accept
| loss of control over their own currencies.
| logicchains wrote:
| >If a government creates a law saying "anyone that processes
| NFTs must first put them through this list of NFTs to filter,
| must filter them out, etc, or go to prison", well, now NFTs
| are effectively erased.
|
| Just like how the government successfully erased the drug
| market by making drugs illegal.
| rektide wrote:
| great write up thanks Seth.
|
| we're going to have to suffer hearing about these terrible ways
| to extract money from people & waste energy for so long.
|
| this is a demented game of make believe, and it's just going to
| keep getting worse all around us.
| TheColorYellow wrote:
| Pretty bad take on NFTs.
|
| There are numerous configurations, networks, and commercial
| structures that can be created for NFT offerings that can
| mitigate "problems" described in the OP and accommodate for
| different tradeoffs.
|
| A simple retort would point to the many alternative NFT networks
| that don't use POW-based consensus algorithms or the NFT
| offerings that enable value add offerings very differently than
| purchasing art or baseball cards.
|
| Evaluating the capabilities of NFTs against the value offerings
| of something like rare art is an apples to oranges comparison. Of
| course the market for digital assets offered via NFT is immature
| and speculative; this is a new market, based on an alternative
| technology paradigm, that has a long way to go before it settles
| into a more usable and valuable structure.
|
| Ultimately, the idea of using key-pairs pegged to widely
| accessible peer-to-peer public networks as a mechanism for
| tracking ownership of digital (or near digital or at times even
| physical) assets is incredibly novel. It turns the conventional
| model of third-party hosted digital assets on its head and
| enables really interesting mechanisms of distribution, ownership,
| access, and value consumption and creation that does not compare
| well with traditional mechanisms. And in saying it doesn't
| compare well I mean to acknowledge its limitations and its
| potential at the same time. However, the critique in the OP is
| pretty bland and doesn't seem to acknowledge the full scope of
| the situation.
| smt88 wrote:
| > _Evaluating the capabilities of NFTs against the value
| offerings of something like rare art is an apples to oranges
| comparison._
|
| Someone should tell that to all the artists who are selling
| NFTs with the implication that they're analogous to owning
| original works.
|
| I agree that it's apples-to-oranges, which is why so many
| people are appalled at the charlatans who are successfully
| selling these oranges as apples.
|
| > _It turns the conventional model of third-party hosted
| digital assets on its head_
|
| How so? The assets that are "sold" as NFT are still hosted
| somewhere.
|
| Owning the NFT for something does nothing more than copyright
| already does. You can store the digital asset on your computer
| with or without the NFT. You can "consume" it either way as
| well.
|
| So what if the digital asset is an item in a video game? The
| game can check to make sure you own it before you use it!
|
| Yes, it can. But the creator of that game can also choose _not_
| to do that, just as anyone can choose _not_ to respect
| copyright.
|
| > _I mean to acknowledge its limitations and its potential at
| the same time_
|
| What is its potential? What can someone do with NFTs that they
| couldn't do before?
| TheColorYellow wrote:
| > What is its potential? What can someone do with NFTs that
| they couldn't do before?
|
| The novelty comes from the underlying protocols that back the
| NFT. These protocols create marketplaces that are widely
| available and accessible and are reliably secure and robust.
|
| Take copyright for example. Copyright laws vary across
| regions and marketplace. The encoding and repudiation of
| these copyright laws is based on analog processes. The data
| related to the assets in question are stored in databases
| with a widely varying degree of access. Verifiability across
| assets or even within a single asset class varies and to
| varying degrees of reliability. And I'm not saying this to
| point out that copyright laws and the assets relying on them
| have failed or are not value add in many ways. The
| fundamental point is that the technological infrastructure
| underlying the use of copyright laws today has a lot to be
| desired when it applies to ease of use for digital media.
|
| Networks using blockchain protocols can offer a natively
| digital infrastructure solution that helps extend or
| replicate the value offered by something like copyright law.
| The natively digital aspect enables broader interaction which
| engenders more general purpose usage which ultimately leads
| to new consumer models (i.e. direct artist to consumer, peer
| to peer, etc.).
|
| > Owning the NFT for something does nothing more than
| copyright already does. You can store the digital asset on
| your computer with or without the NFT. You can "consume" it
| either way as well.
|
| The point is not to displace copyright law)(although others
| may argue this I do not). The value add here is in creating a
| widely accessible and reliable digital mechanism for
| creating, expressing, and modifying ownership rights.
| Different, or maybe even traditional, consumption models are
| then built on top of this to capture this value.
|
| To your point about gaming creators choosing to do so or not;
| this question is really a question about what is the value of
| blockchain protocol networks in the first place and how would
| someone like a game creator benefit or capture this value? To
| this point, I can only point out the potential benefits as
| I'll be the first to agree the nature of blockchain and its
| value is still being explored. My arguments above are trying
| to express the value as I see it.
|
| Would be curious to hear more thoughts and criticism.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| The point you're making is valid, but you're side stepping
| the key concern being raised.
|
| The tokens you acquire are worth nothing.
|
| Nothing about owning a token grants you any rights to
| anything other than what some other person is willing to
| pay/exchange it for.
|
| So if a game developer chooses to accept tokens, you can
| use them; but that developer can _at any time_ choose to
| stop accepting tokens or a subset of tokens making what you
| own worth _actually nothing_.
|
| Now... for a regulated system of tokens (eg currency) a
| developer can't do that: they are legally bound to accept
| fiat currency even though it is not redeemable for any
| "real" equivalent (eg gold).
|
| Since a token is _not_ bound to the DRM access to an item
| (say, image for example), it's totally pointless to asset
| ownership with it, because it does _not prevent the copy of
| the original digital asset_.
|
| The best you could ever hope for would be a regulated
| system, in which access to an asset via DRM was granted by
| a token.
|
| ...at which point, any "decentralised" benefit is lost.
|
| So ultimately, the risk is 100% on the buyer here.
|
| What you buy may be redeemable for something for some
| period of time... but that is true of any kind of token.
|
| The "uniqueness" of the NFT is an illusion; it does not
| offer any strong guarantee of uniquely representing an
| _actual asset_.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Now... for a regulated system of tokens (eg currency) a
| developer can't do that: they are legally bound to accept
| fiat currency even though it is not redeemable for any
| "real" equivalent (eg gold).
|
| This isn't true in general. Legal tender status is _very_
| loosely an obligation to accept _for existing debts_ ,
| but it is not an obligation to accept it as, say, a means
| of accepting a offer. So unless they are giving you goods
| first, and the looking for payment (which certainly is
| not the norm for digital goods), they are under no
| obligation to accept currency.
| freshhawk wrote:
| But that's really why everyone _will_ always accept them,
| because they can pay their debts /taxes with them. It's
| probably a common misconception because it's so close to
| correct.
| TheColorYellow wrote:
| Rephrasing your questions and critiques more broadly:
| What is the point of all this digital infrastructure if
| no one uses it? Why would anyone use it?
|
| This is a more difficult question for NFTs as the market
| is even smaller than the financial use cases which has
| been driving blockchain applications. It'll take some
| time for seemingly legitimate and long-lasting value in
| areas for NFT to emerge as they are still being explored
| and developed.
|
| However, no matter how you frame it, rhe value
| proposition for applications comes down to the value add
| characteristics of the networks they are built on top of.
|
| > The tokens you acquire are worth nothing.
|
| The tokens worth is determined by the market place that
| emerges around the tokens characteristics.
|
| Some tokens are censorship resistant and run on globally
| accessible networks so that they are not easily erased,
| their ownership is easy to prove, and their history is
| reliably known. Some tokens are required to access other
| marketplaces or services because they have properties
| that make them more easy to use as traditional
| currencies. Some tokens allow for self-ownership
| paradigms.
|
| Again, the tokens acquired carry the value of the
| characteristics of the networks in which they are issued.
| What these characteristics are valued as and actually
| "worth" in real economic terms is dependent on their
| demand.
|
| > The "uniqueness" of the NFT is an illusion; it does not
| offer any strong guarantee of uniquely representing an
| actual asset.
|
| This is only true if the NFT isn't accepted as value. If
| the characteristics I described earlier indeed do become
| valued, then the ledger which holds the claim i.e. the
| NFT will be taken as the source of truth for representing
| the ownership of the claimed asset. Its the theory of
| accounting applied to a different space.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| > the NFT will be taken as the source of truth for
| representing the ownership of the claimed asset...
|
| I simply can't see how that is possible for digital
| assets you can copy and paste and have two copies of the
| original asset; it only works for physical assets where
| there can only be _one_ copy of the asset, ever.
|
| You've hit it on the head: what does it mean to own an
| image when ten other people also "own" a copy of it, and
| any of them can create more copies other people can
| "own".
|
| It's meaningless, unless you assert ownership entitles
| you to additional legal rights beyond what the token
| conveys... and in which case, how the hell is that
| different from the same thing with no crypto involved?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _You've hit it on the head: what does it mean to own an
| image when ten other people also "own" a copy of it, and
| any of them can create more copies other people can
| "own"._
|
| Also worth remembering: doing anything with a digital
| asset involves automatic creation of countless of copies.
| When you're viewing an image from your computer's
| storage, you already have at least three copies at that
| moment - one in storage, one in RAM, and one in video
| memory. There may be another one in your screen's buffer
| too. If you try to send it through the network, every
| switch and router along the way effectively creates its
| own temporary copy.
|
| This is to emphasize: ownership as a concept makes no
| sense in the world of bits. It doesn't exist. Ownership
| is defined by agreement between people; these days,
| usually through the legal framework.
| kmtrowbr wrote:
| Possession of the private key also allows you to create
| signatures which prove your ownership, while not
| revealing your private key. Artworks could be encrypted
| and only decryptable by such signatures. Client
| applications could be built to incorporate this.
|
| We have a big problem today in that our information
| technology's ability to infinitely create copies of
| digital artifacts seemingly breaks the incentive
| mechanism to create. I.e. art, news, authorship worked
| better when you could sell physically sell copies of your
| album, book, painting. This has resulted in a glut of low
| quality stuff.
|
| Think of the long term. It would be very good for society
| to solve this problem. With the distribution abilities of
| the internet, plus the ability to monetize adding
| incentives to create, we should see much more, and higher
| quality art. It would enable more of our economy to move
| online, which would be good for the environment. I.e.
| humans are mostly interested in social status. Today we
| show that status by creating and showing off possessions.
| But also we need jobs. What will people do for work in
| 2050? Perhaps we'll still be busily working to climb the
| pile of monkeys, but now with virtual goods. That's more
| sustainable than the current situation.
|
| For a hacker & technology forum, Hacker News is
| remarkably negative on crypto topics. Part is a
| justifiable reaction against the hype. Another part I
| think is FOMO. But also, the crypto space is only
| partially about technology. It is very inefficient
| technology from a functionality point of view. But from
| an economic point of view, where the problem is
| coordinating human activity in the way that money does, I
| think there's a lot of potential there.
|
| At a certain point there is more risk in being a
| "permabear" than there is in taking a measured interest.
| The crypto space has been growing for 12 years ... is it
| really just a giant fraud at this point? No value,
| nothing of interest at all?
| acdha wrote:
| > For a hacker & technology forum, Hacker News is
| remarkably negative on crypto topics. ... The crypto
| space has been growing for 12 years ... is it really just
| a giant fraud at this point? No value, nothing of
| interest at all?
|
| The negative reaction is _due_ to HN being a technology-
| heavy forum: the blockchain field is a marketing
| invention and divides into two camps: Merkle trees, which
| are useful but not new, and everything else, which is
| uncompetitively reinventing commonplace concepts with
| language designed to attract speculators' money. For a
| decade, salespeople have been showing, repeating
| marketing points which don't hold up to much thought, and
| hammering the "use your money to make me rich" message,
| so it's not surprising that it's hard to get attention
| with the same spiel now.
|
| Put another way: after 12 years, huge amounts of money
| and attention, where's anything clearly better than its
| predecessor? (For the user, not the seller) That's
| considerably longer than it took for the web to have a
| huge impact on advertising, sales, dating, travel,
| banking, research, job hunting, etc. despite much lower
| barriers to adoption. Someone trying to invent a new DRM
| system to make signed prints isn't remotely close.
| TheColorYellow wrote:
| > unless you assert ownership entitles you to additional
| legal rights beyond what the token convey
|
| This is precisely the idea to a certain extent. The
| ledger serves as proof of ownership which then allows
| access to entitlements dictated by that ownership. This
| being done in a digital first way is another aspect as
| well (although not really conceptually mind blowing to me
| personally).
|
| > how the hell is that different from the same thing with
| no crypto involved?
|
| This goes back to what I said earlier about the
| characteristics of the underlying network driving the
| value. The differences can be in things like the peer-to-
| peer nature or the decentralized infrastructure which
| provides a degree of censorship resistance or improved
| accessibility.
|
| We're at the point where credible evidence of the value
| added by these characteristics is still being explored.
| You can certainly make some level of argument as to why
| the decentralized nature of these protocols is better
| than the traditional alternative, but even I'll admit its
| difficult to parse through the noise of speculation and
| hype for the arguments that may be worth a damn.
|
| The idea of distributing control, responsibility, costs,
| and other aspects of operating a system away from
| singular points of failure is an idea that seems worth
| investigating and to me this is what blockchain is doing.
| NFTs are a different flavor of exploration then that of
| cryptocurrencies.
| [deleted]
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| > How so? The assets that are "sold" as NFT are still hosted
| somewhere.
|
| This is what I don't understand. It's like a baseball used in
| a World Series game and then signed by members of the team
| and the Certificate of Authenticity that accompanies it. The
| value of the CoA is when it ACCOMPANIES the baseball and
| authenticates it. I don't see how the CoA in and of itself
| has any value when the baseball is in someone else's
| possession.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > There are numerous configurations, networks, and commercial
| structures that can be created for NFT offerings that can
| mitigate "problems" described in the OP and accommodate for
| different tradeoffs.
|
| Ah, yes. The goid old "might", the adage as old as the whole
| blockchain itself.
|
| Translation: "will painstakingly re-invent all the attributes
| of what real world needs, and already has, and doesn't need
| blockchain in the least".
|
| More eloquently put in these articles:
| https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c...
| keymone wrote:
| ah yes, another bitcoin obituary, there's hundreds of them on
| the internet posted quite regularly, ever since bitcoin's
| inception.
| dmitriid wrote:
| It's not an obituary, and you'd know it if you'd bothered
| to read it. It very aptly describes the perpetual state of
| bitcoin in particular, and of blockchains in general.
| keymone wrote:
| I read it, it's an article from 2017 proclaiming bitcoin
| is worthless for a payment system while it is now 2021
| and amount of value exchanged on bitcoin is more than
| ever. Author is clueless and the article is worth
| nothing.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > it's an article from 2017 proclaiming bitcoin is
| worthless for a payment system
|
| It's clear you didn't even pretend to read it. Or
| understand all the problems listed. Payments is just a
| part of the first article. The sequel doesn't even talk
| about payments.
|
| > it is now 2021 and amount of value exchanged on bitcoin
| is more than ever.
|
| Amount of value exchanged on bitcoin !== it's useful for
| payments. Actual _payments_ (you know, for goods and
| services) are a very, very, very tiny fraction of
| exchanges.
|
| > Author is clueless and the article is worth nothing.
|
| Ah. So you didn't actually read it. Or you'd try to
| address the authors' points (or link to an article that
| addresses his points) like:
|
| - The key feature of a new payment system is the
| confidence that if the goods aren't as described you'll
| get your money back (bitcoin has none, and is busy
| reinvents centralized institutions to help with that)
|
| - The government-backed banking system provides FDIC
| guarantees, reversibility of ACH, identity verification,
| audit standards, and an investigation system when things
| go wrong. Bitcoin, by design, has none of these things.
|
| - In terms of micropayments, people enthuse that bitcoin
| transactions are free and instant. Actually, they take
| about eight minutes to clear and cost about four cents to
| process. <- This is now outdated. It's significantly
| _worse_ now. Median confirmation time is ~10 minutes (and
| was as high as 25 minutes just a few months ago [1]) and
| transaction fees ar $13 to $30[2]
|
| ^ And that's just _payments_
|
| The article and its sequel go on to discuss the issues
| with smart contracts, distributed storage, computing, and
| messaging, authentity verification and so on.
|
| [1] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/median-
| confirmation-time
|
| [2] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/fees-usd-per-
| transaction
| keymone wrote:
| > It's clear you didn't even pretend to read it. Or
| understand all the problems listed. Payments is just a
| part of the first article. The sequel doesn't even talk
| about payments.
|
| it's clear you didn't even pretend reading my comments or
| understand the words i'm writing. we can be playing this
| game all day.
|
| > Amount of value exchanged on bitcoin !== it's useful
| for payments. Actual payments (you know, for goods and
| services) are a very, very, very tiny fraction of
| exchanges.
|
| since when you're the authority on what counts as useful
| and what counts as actual?
|
| > The key feature of a new payment system is the
| confidence that if the goods aren't as described you'll
| get your money back
|
| that might be the key feature in the payment system of
| your choice, but it's the anti-feature for people who
| find bitcoin valuable. finality of transactions is way
| more important and on top of a system with finality you
| can build all sorts of escrow services that offer money-
| back due to customer dissatisfaction and what not.
| without finality your payment system is worth shit.
|
| > The government-backed banking system provides FDIC
| guarantees, reversibility of ACH, identity verification,
| audit standards, and an investigation system when things
| go wrong. Bitcoin, by design, has none of these things
|
| again, all anti features. i don't want them in a system
| that handles my assets. thank you very much.
|
| > In terms of micropayments, people enthuse that bitcoin
| transactions are free and instant. Actually, they take
| about eight minutes to clear and cost about four cents to
| process. <- This is now outdated. It's significantly
| worse now. Median confirmation time is ~10 minutes (and
| was as high as 25 minutes just a few months ago [1]) and
| transaction fees ar $13 to $30[2]
|
| this also shows how clueless you yourself are in anything
| bitcoin related. confirmation time is a function of
| hashrate fluctuations, not some inherent property of
| bitcoin that gets worse with time. and the article author
| is obviously clueless for even claiming nonsense like
| "people enthuse that bitcoin transactions are free and
| instant", his exposure to bitcoin is probably a single
| drunk talk in a bar.
|
| and btw in payment channels payments _are_ instant and
| essentially free and unlike visa and other payment
| processors, payment channels are completely independent
| and dont require centralized coordination, so i can
| already claim with all seriousness that bitcoin is able
| to process unlimited number of transactions per second.
|
| read up on the topic before arguing.
| qqii wrote:
| A new medium requires reinventing and making explicit "real
| world" constructs. The article rejects anything worse than
| the best part of current systems without making clear the
| explicit tradeoffs. I could retort and point to companies
| actually using blockchain but you can easily argue flaws in
| their implementation. A "real world use case" is not well
| defined.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > The article rejects anything worse than the best part of
| current systems
|
| For a technology that's frequently hailed as the best new
| thing since sliced bread, it's quite telling that it can't
| exhibit a single of the best parts of current systems. And
| it's replete with parts that are worse than even the worst
| parts of the current systems.
|
| > I could retort and point to companies actually using
| blockchain but you can easily argue flaws in their
| implementation.
|
| Of course I would. And the articles argues as well,
| successfully. Because for the absolute vast majority of
| these real-world companies anything they do can be done
| better, faster, and more efficiently without the use of
| blockchain. And if the are not busy scamming people, they
| are busy re-implementing, often poorly, those "best parts
| of current systems" that you're so quick to dismiss.
| TheColorYellow wrote:
| This same author can be seen here recommending blockchain
| technologies to the CA government here:
| https://www.govops.ca.gov/wp-
| content/uploads/sites/11/2020/0...
|
| If you're not willing to consider the hypothesis of value
| proposed by blockchain I can genuinely understand why and it
| makes sense. Lots of other areas to invest personal time and
| effort in.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > This same author can be seen here recommending blockchain
| technologies to the CA government here
|
| 404 page not found for me
|
| > If you're not willing to consider the hypothesis of value
| proposed by blockchain
|
| So, not even the value proposed by blockchain but the
| hypothesis of the value?
|
| What would those values and hypotheses be?
| TheColorYellow wrote:
| Search "govops ca kai stinchcombe" and you'll see the
| doc.
|
| > So, not even the value proposed by blockchain but the
| hypothesis of the value?
|
| Of course. This is a nascent and emerging market. To act
| as if this is anything but a hypothesis on what may be
| valuable is a lie. This is true of every emergent market
| ever.
|
| > What would those values and hypotheses be?
|
| See my other comments in this same thread if you'd
| genuinely like to engage in discussion. The value is
| derived from the characteristics of the network protocols
| and the hypothesis is these values are difficult to
| achieve without the protocol and that they will come to
| be highly desired.
|
| As a simple example, take the oft common hate for Google
| accounts being deserviced. A globally accessible,
| immutable ledger representation of a user account could
| be a theroetic start in the direction of mitigating the
| problems of thirs-party owned account data.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Search "govops ca kai stinchcombe" and you'll see the
| doc.
|
| Did you read the file you're referencing? Let me quote it
| for you (emphasis mine):
|
| --- start quote ---
|
| Permissioned blockchains as a datastore
|
| Solutions can be built on either open source datastores
| (like mysql or postgres), on proprietary datastores
| (Oracle), or on blockchains.
|
| Our position on this topic is that the proof is in the
| pudding: let the bidders describe the system they can
| build and the costs, let them choose the underlying
| technologies they will employ, and let the state's
| procurement officials select the most competitive bid.
| _If blockchain offers an advantage, they will be well
| positioned to win in the marketplace._
|
| Unpermissioned or semi-permissioned blockchains as a
| datastore
|
| ..., recall that the most complex and burdensome aspect
| of maintaining a non-Torrens ledger is preventing false
| data from entering the system. Absent tremendous progress
| in digital identity, we believe the types of _title fraud
| commonly seen_ in the lived experience of the several
| states _would be increased by such a system_.
|
| --- end quote ---
|
| The only place he "recommends" blockchain is in
| (paraphrasing): "governments should not be afraid of new
| technologies, and new technologies like blockchain should
| also be proposed on equal footing as other technologies.
| However, all these technologies should be evaluated
| whether they have the potential to make search, record
| validation, or detection of error or fraud cheaper,
| faster, or more accurate"
|
| > See my other comments in this same thread if you'd
| genuinely like to engage in discussion.
|
| Others have already answered to that.
|
| > The value is derived from the characteristics of the
| network protocols
|
| Technology on its own has very little merit.
|
| > These values are difficult to achieve without the
| protocol and that they will come to be highly desired.
|
| _Which_ values? If you 're talking about "this is the
| proof of ownership", the entire value falls apart at the
| point of data entry (see the articles I linked).
|
| > As a simple example, take the oft common hate for
| Google accounts being deserviced. A globally accessible,
| immutable ledger representation of a user account could
| be a theroetic start in the direction of mitigating the
| problems of thirs-party owned account data.
|
| Riiiight. And what will stop anyone from not accepting
| your immutable ledger representation of a user account in
| a service? Just the fact that it's on a blockchain? In
| the form of NFT? How will this help you if you still
| can't access any services?
| Kiro wrote:
| What prevents someone from creating another NFT platform for
| tweets and do the same thing? The tweet is only unique on the
| Cent Valuables platform, not on the blockchain itself. Or am I
| missing something?
| everfree wrote:
| There's an implicit social contract that the tweet owner (the
| "artist") wouldn't create a second NFT of the same tweet on a
| competing platform. There's nothing to enforce that social
| contract, though.
| patatino wrote:
| Nothing, you are missing nothing.
| AgentME wrote:
| >CREATORS may rush to start minting NFTs as a way to get paid for
| what they've created. Unlike alternative digital currencies which
| are relatively complicated to invent and sell, it's recently
| become super easy to 'mint' an NFT. [...] The more time and
| passion that creators devote to chasing the NFT, the more time
| they'll spend trying to create the appearance of scarcity and
| hustling people to believe that the tokens will go up in value.
| They'll become promoters of digital tokens more than they are
| creators. [...]
|
| >BUYERS of NFTs may be blind to the fact that there's no limit on
| the supply. In the case of baseball cards, there are only so many
| rookies a year. In the case of art, there's a limited number of
| famous paintings and a limited amount of shelf space at
| Sotheby's.
|
| How do these make NFTs signficantly different from the art trade
| and collectibles market? In both cases, creators could fall prey
| to focusing too much on selling things, and in both cases, the
| creators at any time could decide to put out a ton more. (I don't
| get why the case of baseball cards is treated differently:
| nothing stops them from suddenly deciding to print many more
| cards.)
|
| ---
|
| I think the externality of the power usage of proof-of-work
| blockchains is a significant issue though, and that maybe NFTs
| should be discouraged on that basis until we have NFTs working
| through environmentally-friendly solutions like proof-of-stake. I
| think this is way more of an issue than whatever possibility of a
| downside exists from artists maybe deciding to focus too much on
| making sellable tokens instead of art.
| dannyw wrote:
| The electricity argument is flawed. The electricity used is to
| power the ethereum proof of work blockchain. All its doing is
| checksumming hashes.
|
| It doesn't matter if you buy 0, 1, or 100 NFTs: your marginal
| impact on the electricity usage is zero.
|
| The argument of marginal gas fees is also going away in July,
| with the network upgrade no longer paying gas fees to miners but
| burning them instead.
| alexmingoia wrote:
| NFTs aren't much different than merchandise artists and musicians
| sell. Tshirts, buttons, plastic figurines, stickers, etc.
|
| The environmental critique rings hollow. Our economy revolves
| around this unnecessary consumerism. Why single out NFTs? Seems
| like sour grapes to me.
| TheDong wrote:
| > The environmental critique rings hollow. Our economy revolves
| around this unnecessary consumerism
|
| It is only proof of work which needs to be more wasteful the
| more efficient things become.
|
| If it turns out t-shirts are polluting massively, and someone
| finds out that by replacing one chemical with another they
| pollute much less, then people will do that.
|
| If a more efficient machine comes out for making a t-shirt,
| t-shirts will become cheaper to make.
|
| Proof of work chains can't take advantage of any improvements.
| They waste X amount of money in electricity intentionally. If
| computers get faster, they need more computers. If electricity
| gets cheaper, they need to burn more electricity to have
| similar security (make the cost of a 51% attack the same
| again).
|
| Any time computers get significantly better, old hardware has
| to be thrown out in favor of the new fancier hardware, or else
| other miners outcompete you.
| alexmingoia wrote:
| Whether it's a waste of electricity is a matter of opinion.
| You may think it's a waste of time and energy, others do not.
|
| Electricity generation can come from non-polluting renewable
| resources (the sun, the water, the wind, etc.)
| arcticbull wrote:
| Can but doesn't, and of course there's a ton of generating
| capacity that would need to be replaced with green power
| first. Let's operate in the reality domain.
| exporectomy wrote:
| Wasting electricity may share a good feature with wasting
| water or wasting internet bandwidth. It's troublesome in the
| short term but it leads to increased capacity being made to
| meet demand which benefits everyone in the longer term.
| moultano wrote:
| Tip the artists you love. If you want you can send them money by
| paying for prints, or buying originals, but ultimately just send
| them money. There's no need for it to be transactional. If there
| are artists in the world that make things a little more beautiful
| for you, you can just pay them for that, without any need for it
| to be tied to something concrete.
| megameter wrote:
| It's also transactional if they put the work behind a
| centralized DRM system, yet somehow we are not pushing back
| against that, which to me suggests a lack of imagination.
| sneak wrote:
| Buying an NFT directly from the artist could be seen as this
| form of tipping.
|
| Buying one from anyone else is clearly not.
| nerdwaller wrote:
| As far as I understand it, some NFTs are built where the
| original creator gets some percentage of every sale.
| Proven wrote:
| That's how it already works for DRM-protected content,
| without the overhead of NFTs.
| detaro wrote:
| How can the contract know the actual sales price? I.e.
| sure, it can see a transaction, but it can't see the second
| transaction with the rest of the sum, or the cash that
| changed hands at the same time.
| judge2020 wrote:
| My understanding is that the USD value attached to an NFT
| is just the equivalent of however much ETH is being
| traded. If some outside monetary platform is being used
| to exchange the item then the real price wouldn't be
| known.
| seibelj wrote:
| The major NFT exchanges like OpenSea and Mintable enforce
| it in the marketplace. But otherwise it's mostly honor
| system right now.
| detaro wrote:
| So basically the same way it's done with traditional
| meatspace paintings: you make a (legal) contract
| stipulating it, or you rely on people to do it because
| they think it's right.
| 55555 wrote:
| I founded a blockchain project dedicated entirely to NFTs. This
| is clearly a bubble. There may be some long term value in these
| NFTs long in the future simply because they will be some of the
| first NFTs ever made and NFTs will eventually possibly be
| extremely commonplace (offchain in-game items in MMOs, etc.), but
| IMO it would be prudent to just stay far, far, far away.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| NFT: non-fungible token. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-
| fungible_token
|
| Expand your acronyms, peeps.
| qqii wrote:
| For a more technical definition following the citations:
|
| > NFTs are distinguishable and you must track the ownership of
| each one separately.
|
| > The pair (contract address, uint256 tokenId) will then be a
| globally unique and fully-qualified identifier for a specific
| asset on an Ethereum chain.
|
| https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721
| johntash wrote:
| Thanks! I assumed non-functional tests and was really confused
| at first.
| hansvm wrote:
| *ACRONYM: a concise rendition of nomenclature you'd misplace
| dredmorbius wrote:
| <bow>
| ikiris wrote:
| Thank you.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Keep up folks. Your so Feb 2021 to not know what NFT means.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| @admins is it ok to flag that article just for that reason?
| JshWright wrote:
| No, the HN submission guidelines explicitly ask that the
| original title be used.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| With numerous exceptions.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| I'm not an admin but I think the answer should be yes.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| whats the reason?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Failure to expand / define the acronym.
| JshWright wrote:
| That isn't mentioned anywhere in the posting guidelines.
| I don't think posts should be flagged for breaking rules
| that don't exist.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| A broad interpretation of clickbait as any low-quality or
| gratuitously obscure writing style might be seen as a
| factor.
|
| In practice, people will vote down or flag what they
| will. Asking for permission really won't change that.
|
| The practice of using a recently-coined acronym without
| definition _as the principle focus of a story_ is pretty
| egregious.
| echelon wrote:
| NFTs have been the wildest mania to sweep the internet in the
| last three weeks. If you're not watching, well, check it out.
|
| People are paying millions of dollars for artwork that doesn't
| exist.
|
| The bid for Jack Dorsey's "first tweet" is over two million
| dollars. (What does that even mean?!)
|
| Sure, I suppose you could link ownership of intellectual
| property or actual goods to NFTs, but what's the benefit? Who
| enforces it? And what happens when crypto is broken and people
| can't prove they owned the private keys?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I hadn't made the "first tweet" connection, though I'd seen
| that story. Thanks.
| prepend wrote:
| NFT is an initialism [0], not an acronym. Acronym is used when
| you say the initials as a single word (eg, "nift"). Initialism
| is used when you say each letter distinctly.
|
| [0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/initialism
| ikaria12340 wrote:
| https://opensea.io/accounts/JohnnyUtah269
| cloudking wrote:
| There seems to be a mix of legit use cases and mania going on
| with the NFT craze. I can see use cases like NBA Top Shot being
| legit, here you have essentially the digitization of trading
| cards (a proven collectable market) backed by a major sports
| league. The top shot "moments" have some unique advantages over
| traditional trading cards in that they can't be
| damaged/stolen/lost, can be traded instantly online, and may be
| more interesting to fans since they are videos vs pictures. You
| can see the transaction history of a moment, and in some cases
| NBA players themselves are trading them adding to the value for
| die hard fans. Being backed the NBA and unique content created
| specifically for the purpose of trading via NFT, I could see them
| having a long term value & market https://www.nbatopshot.com
|
| Then there are ideas leaning more towards mania, essentially
| trying to make "NFT for X" by adding a token to every piece of
| digital data. For example, NFTs for tweets:
| https://v.cent.co/tweet/20 (current bid is 2.5 million for Jack
| Dorsey's first tweet). I suppose these tokens have value as long
| there is a market for them, but at certain price points I
| question if they can sustain long term and if they are more
| trying to cash in on the mania.
|
| Debate on this topic here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26370866
| ping_pong wrote:
| Wait so you can create an NFT on a tweet that you don't own?
| You're just claiming ownership in this NFT universe but it
| doesn't entitle you to anything related to the tweet does it?
| Meaning Jack Dorsey who "owns" the tweet didn't create an NFT
| on the tweet, a 3rd party did?
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| This is nothing new in the art world
|
| https://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/27/living/richard-prince-
| ins...
| cloudking wrote:
| In this system https://v.cent.co/ anyone can bid for a tweet,
| and it's up to the actual Twitter user who created the tweet
| to verify ownership and mint/sell the NFT via their system.
| All you own by buying it is the token, the real owner of the
| tweet could delete it any time :) see what I mean about
| mania?
| Hamuko wrote:
| Live example:
| https://twitter.com/SLVTRMNDI/status/1368314035284873218
| gbertasius wrote:
| Seems like case better suited to staking than NFTs.
| m12k wrote:
| An NFT really is just a commemorative plaque that says "I
| own [URL HERE]". It doesn't come with some crypto-backed
| security that only you can do anything with whatever is at
| the URL. It doesn't give you any legal rights unless backed
| by a separate contract (which could just as well have been
| made without the NFT). All it guarantees is that no other
| plaque with exactly the same words can exist on that
| blockchain.
| chillacy wrote:
| It reminds me of those companies that will sell you a
| plot of land on the moon or a star.
| [deleted]
| _Microft wrote:
| NFTs seem like an amazing opportunity to extract some money from
| people who got rich fast with crypto currencies ;)
| EGreg wrote:
| ICOs were better
| arcticbull wrote:
| ICOs were the NFT of 2017 for sure; still waiting on my
| dentacoin investment to pay off ;)
| rvz wrote:
| Exactly, with all the VCs, celebrities, etc hyping up their
| own coins and launching an ICO to potentially pump and dump
| the coin for a quick exit scam in 2017.
|
| This is no different and it is another giant scam. Where
| was the same 'thought leaders' on Twitter who were
| screaming and hyping about ICOs in 2017? Bust.
|
| On to the next get rich quick scheme I suppose for the VCs
| and the hype brigade on Twitter, I guess.
| dools wrote:
| So how is it any different Bitcoin?
| tiku wrote:
| The whole thing has a large "bragging" part to it for now. Public
| auctions, showing how much you've paid (on the site I saw about
| NFT's) This is also true in the physical art-world, you display
| it on your wall, show it off to your friends etc, hang it in a
| gallery.
| aaron695 wrote:
| > I could, for example, turn each of the 8,500 posts on this blog
| into a token and sell them on the open market.
|
| So it's like a DOI?
|
| DOI's can apply internally, so a book can have one, a chapter can
| have one, paragraph, sentence.
|
| I guess someone will blog the difference at some point
| dash2 wrote:
| Really? The latest random string of numbers for a gazillion
| dollars isn't a wise long-run investment?... Look, I know this
| isn't very HN-ish, but the Pope is a dangerous Catholic, and the
| woods are full of dangerous shitting bears.
| ajiang wrote:
| Regardless of what you think of NFTs, you have to recognize that
| the author's only counterargument against NFTs is that they're
| bad for the "rest of us" due to externalities that everyone else
| has to pay.
|
| The "rest of us" don't pay for the electricity use. The ETH
| miners are paying for it directly. And creators and buyers are
| paying for it indirectly through ETH usage. It isn't an
| externality. That's like saying the physical art world shouldn't
| exist because it uses physical real estate, electricity, and raw
| materials to be made on -- and the rest of us pay for those
| things.
|
| Is it a good use of electricity? Maybe, maybe not. That's for
| people to decide individually, unless we'd want to go down the
| moral rabbit hole of judging every single use of electricity.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Until the price of carbon is accounted for in the price of
| electricity, using ridiculous amounts of electricity for such
| trivial uses is externalizing the costs of these transactions
| onto all of us.
|
| We are facing a climate crisis that is projected to accelerate
| a mass extinction crisis and create tens of millions of
| displaced refugees and yet we are spending 200 KgCO2 of wasted
| compute on a 'digital ownership token' on this:
| http://cryptoart.wtf/#https://superrare.co/artwork-v2/the-fo...
| worik wrote:
| Not sure I care about the price.
|
| How much for the whole world?
| jrmg wrote:
| _The "rest of us" don't pay for the electricity use. The ETH
| miners are paying for it directly. And creators and buyers are
| paying for it indirectly through ETH usage. It isn't an
| externality. That's like saying the physical art world
| shouldn't exist because it uses physical real estate,
| electricity, and raw materials to be made on -- and the rest of
| us pay for those things._
|
| Negative environmental consequences with costs imposed upon
| society are literally externalities. All the things you list
| are textbook examples.
| megameter wrote:
| The electricity argument loses weight when you look at the
| world allocation of GPUs. Although mining has cut into supply,
| they're also being used for gaming, workstation, and cloud
| compute tasks. One way or another all of that chip supply would
| be sold, and then it is a case of benchmarking the social
| value, load and efficiency of the different uses to some
| utilitarian optimum.
|
| Much easier to cut off the framing early and declare "all
| crypto is bad and has no value", which is what the contra side
| is leaning towards. It's easily embraced by authoritarian-left
| ideologues, since their inclination is to reject market
| solutions anyway.
|
| My suspicion is that we'll all be surprised in eighteen months.
| The "boom" will be gone, but an unalterable trend will have
| taken hold regardless, and the platforms will have largely
| moved on to proof of stake, closing the environmental argument.
|
| The thing of cryptocurrency is that at the end of the day, all
| you have is a file of a few hundred gigabytes that somehow
| represents hundreds of billions of dollars of market value.
| That value means that an absolutely huge number of eyeballs are
| scrutinizing it, looking for a way to protect their investment.
| They can't "turn off" the system and make sweeping changes. The
| hypotheses of anything-goes "assassination markets" have not
| panned out - crypto has become a sector with a civic outlook.
| distances wrote:
| > One way or another all of that chip supply would be sold,
| and then it is a case of benchmarking the social value, load
| and efficiency of the different uses to some utilitarian
| optimum.
|
| I disagree. Cryptomining created a new market that increased
| the demand. There's no reason to assume the same numbers of
| GPUs with the same utilisation rate would be in use if we
| didn't have crypto. Thus, it does have direct environmental
| consequences.
|
| Not all of that electricity use is a total waste: a friend of
| mine uses part of his mining heat to warm up the apartment in
| the winter. It's an expensive heater though.
| mattigames wrote:
| >The "rest of us" don't pay for the electricity use;
|
| No but the rest of are paying it with the overheating of the
| planet which is way way worse
| bagels wrote:
| The externality of the electricity use is the pollution, and
| increased prices due to demand.
| ajiang wrote:
| That's an argument for a different question, which is "should
| we allow people to waste electricity if they pay for it?". If
| your answer is that we should regulate what people are
| allowed to use electricity for, then we'll need to change the
| laws in this country.
|
| It is very difficult to start being the moral judge for every
| single use of electricity. Instead, we let the free market
| decide in most situations. And when there are true
| externalities (meaning costs that borne by the broader
| population, e.g. car emissions) we do impose regulations to
| reduce those externalities.
| drdeca wrote:
| right, we should just tax carbon emissions by just enough
| to pay for removing those emissions, and then use said
| taxes to remove said emissions.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Isn't his argument moot due to ethereum's eventual transition
| to proof of stake
| arcticbull wrote:
| I'm sure Vitalik will deliver we just have to wait (skeleton
| meme). That is to say I'll believe it when I see it.
| sollewitt wrote:
| "This is bad because of externalities, the externalities are
| big and will grow" is exactly why we don't have general nuclear
| power, saying it's the only argument doesn't make it a weak
| argument.
| ajiang wrote:
| When the cost is directly paid by the actor, it isn't an
| externality. It is the literal opposite of what externality
| means.
| detaro wrote:
| And pollution is usually not, or only partially, paid for
| by neither the energy producer nor the consumer. Thus it's
| an externality.
| drdeca wrote:
| carbon emissions aren't currently paid for by the person
| paying for and using the electricity?
| purple_ferret wrote:
| > you have to recognize that the author's only counterargument
| against NFTs is that they're bad for the "rest of us
|
| No, I think he makes a valid point that they're intentionally
| misleading and a scheme to sucker someone out of money.
|
| Let's look at Jack Dorsey's 'minted' first tweet.[0]
|
| This is in no way gives to exclusivity to 'owning' this tweet.
| It literally is just 'owning' the rights to 'Valuable's' NFT of
| this tweet (if they even are committing, legally, to never
| create another NFT of it). There are no limit of companies that
| can do exactly what they are doing and 'selling' this tweet in
| the same way, nor is Jack Dorsey committing never to accept
| those 'sales'.
|
| To me, it seems like an outright scam that anybody but Twitter
| is trying to do this.
|
| [0]https://v.cent.co/tweet/20
| exporectomy wrote:
| Same for art though. You don't own a copyright. You own only
| the bragging right as well as the useless physical canvas and
| paint. All artful beauty it has can be copied much more
| cheaply than the original painting's price.
| 3131s wrote:
| You should try looking up what an "externality" is again,
| because this is almost a canonical example of one.
| throwaway_kufu wrote:
| The articles is to simplistic and the author doesn't understand
| the technology.
|
| The author claims it's easier to mint an NFT than a
| currency...for all intents and purposes it's no different to mint
| a erc20 token vs erc721, so the we shouldn't pretend NFTs are
| somehow the lowest common denominator while "alternative
| currencies" are inherently complex. A shit coin is a shit going
| whether it represents a digital image or nothing at all other
| than a store of value people collectively agree on.
|
| What everyone ignores is that not all NFTs can be described as
| representing a jpeg (the digital baseball card). sure many are
| that, but others actually include a transfer of the intellectual
| property they represent. Others have a "public" representation
| but have embedded files accessible only to the owner. Others
| represent ownership of digital items that can be used in various
| DApps across the ethereum blockchain.
|
| And even assuming all NFTs were just digital baseball cards, if
| baseball cards were your thing, then I think you could
| acknowledge how valuable it is to be able to trace every baseball
| card that exists and otherwise be connected to a marketplace that
| include the ability to buy/trade/sell directly with other persons
| without a centralized authority regulating those transactions.
| dools wrote:
| So will this help everyone realise how stupid Bitcoin is? Is this
| dorseys goal? To counteract the insane libertarian propaganda
| through reductio ad absurdim?
| teucris wrote:
| > The more time and passion that creators devote to chasing the
| NFT, the more time they'll spend trying to create the appearance
| of scarcity and hustling people to believe that the tokens will
| go up in value. They'll become promoters of digital tokens more
| than they are creators.
|
| This has always been an issue with art. Artists can be promoters
| of their art to support their livelihood ("sell out"). I do not
| think that stops making people creators.
|
| And a small nit: > Unlike some stocks, it doesn't pay dividends
| or come with any other rights.
|
| Many NFTs pay a cut of future sales back to the creator. For that
| reason, I think of NFTs more like a stock than a claim of
| uniqueness.
| gohurnd wrote:
| "Buyers of NFTs may be blind to the fact that there's no limit on
| the supply". Sure anyone can make an NFT, but not all of them
| will be viewed as realistic stores of value. Like baseball cards,
| you will not print an unlimited copy of rare cards cause they
| would lose their value, and no creator would sabotage their brand
| like that. Besides, it costs money to mint a token, so there is a
| limit related to the artist's economic situation.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| The author didn't present the case for "danger"
| seibelj wrote:
| > _They use an astonishing amount of electricity to create and
| trade. Together, they are already using more than is consumed by
| some states in the US. Imagine building a giant new power plant
| just to make Christie's or the Basel Art Fair function. And the
| amount of power wasted will go up commensurate with their
| popularity and value. And keep going up. The details are here.
| The short version is that for the foreseeable future, the method
| that's used to verify the blockchain and to create new digital
| coins is deliberately energy-intensive and inefficient. That's on
| purpose. And as they get more valuable, the energy used will go
| up, not down._
|
| Binance Smart Chain has many NFTs and doesn't use Proof of Work.
| Ethereum is migrating to Proof of Stake soon and will eliminate
| the power waste argument. If he wanted to attack NFTs he should
| have used a better argument.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Weird that multiple people downvoted this.
|
| Mining wastes power on purpose. Transactions don't waste power
| on purpose, and there are designs that make them minimally
| expensive.
| detaro wrote:
| "Don't worry, we'll be on PoS soon!" is what the crypto space
| has been saying for years, and as far as I can tell right now
| the majority of NFTs are done on PoW chains, and still people
| doing them trumpet "but soon!!" instead of putting their
| money where their mouth is and actually using a PoS setup
| today. As mentioned elsewhere, some actually do, props for
| that, but the overall impression of the crypto space is that
| they're completely fine with deflecting to some point in the
| future, and then they shouldn't be surprised if people judge
| what's actually done and not what's possible and are a bit
| tired of that argument.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Even without proof of stake, it's possible to make
| transactions low-cost.
|
| Bitcoin is going to burn power whether or not you attach
| your token-tracker to it. If you design a system with
| thousands to millions of users that makes one bitcoin
| transaction per day to secure itself, then it's responsible
| for a pretty negligible amount of wasted power.
| paulmd wrote:
| > Even without proof of stake, it's possible to make
| transactions low-cost.
|
| only at the cost of reversibility.
|
| the central thesis of proof of work is that an attacker
| must expend more energy than the "main" chain, across the
| duration of time they want to be able to reverse a
| transaction (older transactions require more time).
|
| The amount of energy expended is determined by mining
| rewards - over time, mining profit will converge to zero,
| miners will expend however much energy the mining rewards
| buy.
|
| as such - any reduction in energy expenditure (i.e. a
| reduction in mining rewards) will lead to a reduction in
| security, making it easier to reverse transactions.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That's a perfectly fine analysis for a standalone
| network, but that's not what you'd want to use.
|
| If you tie into bitcoin or ethereum once per day, you get
| the full security while only being responsible for about
| a millionth of the power use.
|
| That means your NFT trades will only be 100% locked in
| once a day instead of continuously, but that's plenty.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| I think the author needs to look into NFTs more closely before
| making a judgment like this. With the sole notable exception of
| NBA TopShots, which is on Flow, all prominent NFTs are currently
| issued on Ethereum. Ethereum's energy consumption will massively
| decrease in the near future as the long-planned switch of its
| consensus algorithm to one based on Proof of Stake is
| implemented.
|
| Ethereum's Proof of Stake Beacon Chain launched in December 2020
| and has worked smoothly since then. The launch was the first of
| the three phases of ETH2, by the end of which Ethereum will be
| fully reliant on Proof of Stake - with no dependence on energy
| mass-consuming Proof of Work - and be massively more scalable.
|
| The author's criticism aside and on the subject of the nascent
| NFT market, I hope in the future multiple MMORGs recognize NFT
| sets and allow players to unlock certain digital items, traits or
| characters by proving ownership over an NFT within that set.
|
| Being able to migrate digital assets across virtual worlds could
| lead to the emergence of a global cyber culture with universally
| recognized digital cultural items.
| minitoar wrote:
| Has someone made a meta-NFT yet? I want to be able to buy an NFT
| representing another NFT transaction.
| purple_ferret wrote:
| NFTs, the new way to spin a copyright or incorporate into DRMs,
| but since it pumps and is bullish for crypto, all cool kids are
| lovin it.
| friedman23 wrote:
| This is a complete misunderstanding of what an NFT does. The
| content isn't protected by the NFT, ownership is.
| smt88 wrote:
| Neither the content nor the ownership is protected by the
| NFT. The NFT has literally no connection to the content at
| all, except that someone said, "Hey, buy this and you own the
| 'original'!" Except in all things digital, "original" means
| absolutely nothing.
|
| There's a guy who has been selling property on the moon[1].
| This is exactly the same thing.
|
| 1. https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/03/25/meet-the-
| man...
| Traster wrote:
| That guy selling plots on the moon is an idiot. If he were
| selling NFTs for ownership of the moon he'd be a
| multimillionaire by now.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| It doesn't have connection to the content, unless it's
| declared that it does.
|
| All intellectual property law works this way already. The
| copy you have does not have any bearing on the copy someone
| else has, but we created laws that link it back: you don't
| "own" the copy you have, and using it in certain ways is
| made illegal.
|
| NFTs as they are now, without any legal protection, are
| still innocent, but they are bought because people want to
| "own" something. Since NFTs don't actually provide
| technological means to implement that "ownership", the next
| logical step is to declare it by law: "owning" an NFT gives
| "ownership" of the content. I hope it never comes to this.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| People are attempting to create a new world so scary and
| different to what you know, that it seems insane and
| completely off base. But we know what we're doing. We know
| this is leading to the future of a world where artists and
| fans can take back and redefine ownership.
|
| It doesn't matter what you think ownership is. We're
| redefining it. :)
|
| See you on the other side.
| smt88 wrote:
| There is no substance to your reply, so I can't even
| refute it. It sounds like something copy/pasted from a
| crypto startup's landing page.
| 90minuteAPI wrote:
| Cramming the concept of ownership into another post-
| scarcity environment is hardly redefining it.
| lottin wrote:
| Talk about delusions of grandeur.
| purple_ferret wrote:
| I know what an NFT does. It doesn't even give you ownership
| on anything other than a blockchain print. To me, the logical
| conclusion of this is copyright protection, where, say, an
| eventual platform only plays content where the player can
| only be verified as the owner.
| throwaway_kufu wrote:
| > It doesn't even give you ownership on anything other than
| a blockchain print.
|
| I'm pretty sure my domain name NFTs give some ownership
| rights you are overlooking.
| growse wrote:
| What if someone in a similar position to you sold a
| domain name they 'owned' to someone else off-blockchain?
| Where would the rights sit then?
| throwaway_kufu wrote:
| It's to much of a hypothetical but in general it would be
| the same as being the registered owner of a domain name
| and selling/leasing it direct to someone.
|
| In other words if I own abc.eth and abc.com and sell them
| both to you directly but I keep the abc.eth NFT and keep
| abc.com, then you could still bring me to court to
| enforce our agreement
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| It's like owning a shitcoin with tokenomics of 1 coin
| premined, no future coins and zero decimal places.
| worik wrote:
| What is a "NFT"?
| gorgoiler wrote:
| The huge USD value of this market seems odd. It either points to
| how rich these cryptocurrency holders are, or how illiquid their
| market is.
|
| It's all very well having 18.78lo (gorgcoins; ~$687,441) but if
| all you can do with them is buy 18.78lo of Cryptotchotchkees then
| it doesn't seem like such a big deal.
|
| I guess, if you're stuck with an exit, what you really need to do
| is to make some kind of a market for some new product that can
| only be bought using gorgcoin. Then you'll finally be able to
| sell your gorgcoin for USD, and buy a lambo / Patek / heart
| operation.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| > ...stuck _without_ an exit...
| electriclove wrote:
| NBA Top Shot runs their own very liquid marketplace (when it
| is, cough, up). It is 100+ times more liquid than selling
| physical cards on Ebay.
|
| Yeah, if you buy some random crypto art, you may be stuck with
| it just like in real life.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Can the owner of the nft of a digital art start to sell printed
| copies in the real world and profit? Or other words, have the
| commercial rights to it?
| legohead wrote:
| What happens when the network supporting an NFT goes away?
| OscarTheGrinch wrote:
| Just a technical question about NFTs and physical ownership. Are
| NFTs just a cryptographic key that points to digital goods or do
| they somehow encode them? If the former then the image is "on the
| cloud" and therefore actually on someone else's physical network,
| and the key will only be able to access the goods as long as a
| third party keeps the encrypted goods on their network. Once
| money has been exchanged what is in it for the third party keep
| hosting?
| gbertasius wrote:
| Seemed like a good start to an argument. I don't see the
| blockchain power use as a consequential issue for NFTs. From what
| i understand its just a concept that can exist on any blockchain
| based system. Also, the vicious cycle he refers to would apply to
| a small niche of the digital market. The race to put out content
| is real in any new market. I hope this becomes a sustainable way
| for artist to make a living. At this point it seems open ended in
| where this lead to. I can imagine NFT's being a thing in games
| like Destiny, Warframe, etc(whatever genera bucket fits) where
| devs can release unique assets. I wonder what an NFT from 2021
| will mean in 2121. Is this a fad or the beginning of new
| paradigms? Will that peice of digital art exist 100yrs from now
| or even be verifiable?
| Tenoke wrote:
| When an article rants about the high electricity use of NFTs
| without acknowledging that some projects are on PoS and more are
| moving to it they are clearly just trying to present it in the
| worst light.
|
| Even worse here as he mentions NBA Topshots which is on Flow, PoS
| and likely uses up less electricity than his blog.
| colechristensen wrote:
| The world is full of dangerous value traps: money, status, likes,
| power, attention, etc. where the trap seems like a good idea to
| encourage something important but has a dark side which destroys
| it instead.
| KirillPanov wrote:
| Yeah, but this one lets you post variations on "bitcoin =
| global warming", a meme which achieves transcranial stimulation
| of HN's pleasure center.
| justanother wrote:
| The NBA is selling rare pepes now? Yeah that's a pretty clear
| sign of a bubble about to burst.
| tal8d wrote:
| It is odd, I've been involved in the cryptocurrency scene from
| the beginning, and I've seen the whole "Bitcoin kills Mother
| Gaia" talking point pop up every couple of years - but I've never
| seen such prolonged parroting as this last cycle. It is a silly
| complaint, because it never considers the wastefulness of the
| status quo. But it is an interesting method of attack, trying to
| conceal the fact that it is a call for others to act against
| their own interests, while also tickling their envy. It could be
| a dangerous gambit though, while most people can't see far enough
| ahead to realize that global carbon caps effectively freeze the
| international market's structure, they can see when somebody is
| ham-fistedly screwing with their money.
| Animats wrote:
| _I 've never seen such prolonged parroting as this last cycle._
|
| The scale of the thing is getting out of hand. Cryptocurrency
| mining is eating up power on the scale of a small country, a
| sizable fraction of GPU manufacturing capacity, and a
| noticeable fraction of wafer fab capacity.
|
| This has some parallels in how Spain went broke mining gold in
| the Americas in the 1500s. Expeditions went to the New World
| and gold came back. They were rich! Well, no. They had only
| created inflation by creating a gold glut. At a much higher
| operating cost than printing money, too, because it took ships
| and armies to make this happen.
| tal8d wrote:
| I've never seen an estimate that withstood any kind of
| scrutiny. I've seen estimates based on both fundamental
| misunderstanding of the function of mining, and wild
| assumptions regarding miner behavior and out of date asic
| specs. Have you bothered fact checking any of those claims
| you just made? I mean actually reading the papers they cite,
| and learning the methodology they used. Because while you're
| thinking about conquistas, I'm thinking about the field of
| cybernetics in the 70's, and how it killed itself dead with
| ridiculously flawed methodology for modeling population
| growth - as the Davos types all nodded in agreement.
|
| "Give me a one-handed Economist. All my economists say 'on
| the one hand...', then 'but on the other..."
|
| -- Harry Truman
| tal8d wrote:
| Oh and it gets better: known bad data is still repeated,
| despite the poster being told why it was bad data - over a year
| ago. Pointing this out results in flagging, for reasons that
| have nothing to do with ego or narrative continuity... surely.
| arcticbull wrote:
| That's a dead easy argument to debunk. If each visa payment
| used 600kWh like a Bitcoin transaction visa alone would consume
| 3x as much power as the entire world generates and produce 100%
| of the worlds ewaste. So no, the status quo is orders of
| magnitude more efficient on a unit basis by definition.
| tal8d wrote:
| lol, you seem to be forgetting every other system related to
| and directly supporting payment networks, clearinghouses,
| etc... oh, and all the regulatory frameworks. And the FED :)
| arcticbull wrote:
| I'm not. I'm saying by scaling just one small corner to
| bitcoins inefficiency it cannot be true as it would use 3x
| the worlds power supply. It cannot be true by induction. If
| we scaled those aspects up too we'd be taking hundreds or
| thousands of times more power than the world generates. By
| doing that id actually be making my argument stronger.
| tal8d wrote:
| I wasn't kidding when I said "parroting". You are
| regurgitating a number derived from lazy thinking.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21289486
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The only misconception is you can't scale Bitcoin to visa
| without a hard or soft fork.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Yep, I agree completely. I've seen the argument that the
| status quo is somehow less efficient on a per transaction
| basis than Bitcoin is today, and that's thermodynamically
| impossible.
| paulmd wrote:
| virtually all of those services will still have to exist
| under crypto. Regulatory frameworks will still exist,
| centralized entities will provide lightning channels to
| small-fry actors, firms will still host servers to execute
| trades based on the network, etc.
| tal8d wrote:
| Yes, but they will be dealing with a currency that has
| mathematical guarantees - which changes things entirely.
| Imagine a scenario in which self driving cars are not
| only the norm, but they've achieved a perfect safety
| record due to an open source, formally verified, code-
| base. In that scenario, do you think the National Highway
| Traffic Safety Administration still needs 600 employees
| and a 900 million dollar budget? I have no doubt that it
| would still exist, but it would be addressing an
| infinitely simpler problem - and the reduction in
| resource requirements would cut it down to a skeleton
| crew that would operate much like stubcode in the wake of
| a refactor.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| Bitcoin's transaction throughput is independent of its energy
| consumption. If its block size limit was raised to allow
| Visa-scale transaction throughput, its per transaction energy
| cost would be 1/1000ths what it is now.
|
| Bitcoin Cash forks Bitcoin to provide a block size limit that
| allows these kinds of throughput levels, while Ethereum
| enables both sophisticated transaction compression methods
| and layer 2 models, that can achieve Visa-scale throughput
| without raising layer 1 block sizes.
|
| So attacking the cryptocurrency concept based on Bitcoin's
| peculiar shortcomings is misguided.
| tal8d wrote:
| When you blow up the transaction limit you physically
| centralize the verification process. This is why you'd see
| miners gamble with sitting on a solved block and secretly
| beginning the next search, with a few seconds of head
| start, before announcing to the network, or skipping the
| inclusion of any transactions: because fractions of a
| second make a big difference. Bigger blocks propagate more
| slowly, and magnify the advantage of employing those kinds
| of undesirable behaviors. This is why HFT boxes end up as
| physically close to Wall Street as possible. This is also
| why bcash got so much early support from Chinese miners.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| > When you blow up the transaction limit you physically
| centralize the verification process.
|
| What numbers are you basing that on? Bitcoin is 1.5KB/s.
| A $10 vps is 80,000 times faster than that.
|
| > because fractions of a second make a big difference
|
| No they don't. The examples you are talking about are
| rare and have very little impact. If the entire network
| makes blocks once every 10 minutes on average, each miner
| finds blocks much less frequently.
|
| > Bigger blocks propagate more slowly, and magnify the
| advantage of employing those kinds of undesirable
| behaviors. This is why HFT boxes end up as physically
| close to Wall Street as possible.
|
| Where are your numbers here? How long do you think it
| takes to send around 900KB ?
|
| A single twitch stream will propagate more than that
| around the world every second to thousands of
| individuals. Cryptocurrency only has to send the same
| tiny amount of data every few minutes to miners.
|
| High frequency traders trying to be physically closer to
| a connection are operating on the scale of single micro
| seconds. You are comparing that to something 600 MILLION
| times slower.
| tal8d wrote:
| > What numbers are you basing that on? Bitcoin is
| 1.5KB/s.
|
| You know you can't verify an incomplete block, right? If
| you think you can just plow ahead after getting the first
| packet... you are going to have a really bad day once the
| other miners notice that you can be fooled into wasting
| hash power on bogus headers. You know that blocks get
| announced by the miners after they solve the hash, in
| chunks that can be up to the max blocksize, right? For
| Bitcoin that is 1MB, for bcash it is 32MB. Imagine if
| NASDAQ offered two levels of service: one that put the
| FIX protocol behind a 1MB buffer, and the other behind a
| 32MB buffer - which one would be disadvantaged? Anyone
| sitting at the 32MB buffer would be getting their lunch
| eaten. This is about as fundamental as it gets, so you
| might want to do some reading - because you've clearly
| got a big blindspot.
|
| > No they don't. The examples you are talking about are
| rare and have very little impact.
|
| If you are talking about bitcoin, you are very wrong - it
| is a thoroughly documented occurrence, it even has a
| name: the selfish miner strategy. If you are talking
| about bcash, I dunno one way or the other - I don't pay
| much attention to the joke coins.
| https://doi.org/10.1109/ICBC48266.2020.9169436
|
| > How long do you think it takes to send around 900KB ?
|
| Again, you need to actually do some reading on how mining
| works and what the network propagation characteristics
| are. I really don't want to have this come off as
| meanspirited, but it needs to be said: you obviously
| thought you knew how things worked, and you obviously
| don't - I wonder how many people you've misinformed.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| > you are going to have a really bad day once the other
| miners notice that you can be fooled into wasting hash
| power on bogus headers.
|
| What are you even talking about here? 900KB takes a
| fraction of a second to transfer on a modest internet
| connection, any miner with $10 a month for a VPS can
| transfer that is a millisecond. No one said anything
| about downloading fractions of blocks, you hallucinated
| that.
|
| > Anyone sitting at the 32MB buffer would be getting
| their lunch eaten. This is about as fundamental as it
| gets, so you might want to do some reading - because
| you've clearly got a big blindspot.
|
| What is it that you think is even happening? Blocks get
| sent out. One has 32x the transaction throughput. Why do
| you think 32MB or more would be anything other than
| trivial to send and receive? Any miner can send and
| receive that in a second.
|
| > I don't pay much attention to the joke coins.
|
| Bitcoin cash already has more sustained transactions than
| bitcoin. Maybe you should reach beyond the propaganda of
| /r/bitcoin
|
| > it even has a name: the selfish miner strategy.
|
| Miners that do that take the risk that someone else will
| propagate a block before them since they didn't share the
| previous block they found. Empty blocks have much more of
| an impact on bitcoin because the throughput is so
| constrained. Empty blocks do not have much of an impact
| on the usability of bitcoin cash because it has plenty of
| throughput. A miner maliciously mining empty blocks on
| bitcoin will also leave a lot of money on the table
| because they won't get transaction fees.
|
| > you obviously thought you knew how things worked, and
| you obviously don't
|
| Everything you said is either completely made up or an
| exaggeration of some minor effect. In your last message
| you compared something with a 10 minute window to
| millionths of a second. For some reason you ignored this
| and ignored the actual numbers of modern bandwidth. You
| keep using hyperbole but won't quantify anything because
| the numbers don't add up.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| >>When you blow up the transaction limit you physically
| centralize the verification process.
|
| You could 500X the transaction throughput and running a
| full node would only require a 25 Mbps internet
| connection.
|
| >>Bigger blocks propagate more slowly, and magnify the
| advantage of employing those kinds of undesirable
| behaviors.
|
| Miners do not propagate blocks all at once. They use
| propagation protocols like compact blocks to only
| propagate the transactions not already in other nodes'
| mempools:
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8922597
|
| The transactions fill the mempool over the course of the
| entire on average 10 minute duration between blocks,
| meaning that by the time a block is discovered, other
| nodes already have almost all of the transactions in that
| block.
|
| The 'validation free mining until the new block is fully
| propagated and validated' strategy further mitigates the
| competitive disadvantage miners face when receiving large
| blocks from other miners.
|
| All-in-all, centralization concerns do not justify
| preventing Bitcoin blocks from growing to meet market
| demand up until they reach at least 500 MB (ie. 3.3 MB/s
| of transaction throughput). The current 1 MB - or 1.6 MB
| assuming full SegWit adoption - limit, which only allows
| for 2 KB/s of transaction throughput, is absurdly
| inadequate, and makes Bitcoin's current energy
| consumption absurdly wasteful.
| tal8d wrote:
| You are overlooking the disadvantage of not verifying the
| prior hash, which you can't do until you can verify
| hashMerkleRoot, which you can't do until you have
| collected the entire block. If you skip verification, you
| open yourself up to bad actors feeding you a bogus header
| - and you only figure that out after being drip fed a
| bunch of transactions that don't match the merkle root.
| Erasure coding doesn't fix that. In any case, proponents
| of the 'cram everything in the public ledger' method have
| already advocated 128MB and even completely uncapped
| block sizes... so the outcome is predictable.
|
| Take a hint from every successful network that has ever
| networked since ever: hierarchy, extensibility, etc.
| Demanding that it all be crammed into a homogenous block
| is so obviously doomed to fail that you should be
| suspicious of the proponents' motives.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| > being drip fed a bunch of transactions
|
| Where are you getting ideas like this? How fast do you
| think internet connections are?
|
| Only in the context of bitcoin do people start thinking
| 250 byte transactions are somehow difficult to send over
| gigabit connections. The average bitcoin block is 900
| -kilobytes- at most at 10 minutes on average.
|
| How is it that people have absorbed propaganda that makes
| them actually think that causes anyone a problem?
| blizzard.com is 13MB, gfycat.com is 29MB. Who are these
| miners that are struggling to send out 900KB ?
| tal8d wrote:
| > Where are you getting ideas like this? How fast do you
| think internet connections are?
|
| As fast as the packet source wants? The only way to
| defend against a slowloris DoS is by accounting for it at
| the application layer, which is both unusual and
| difficult - as DoS attacks are usually handled at the
| transport layer. In this case that could mean applying a
| deadline for the block announcement in its entirety -
| which means mandating a minimum connection speed, and
| classifying every connection that dips below that as an
| attack... so you better have a good SLA with your
| upstream network. Well, that is no problem for
| centralized operations... Guess what happens to
| cryptocurrencies that adopt massive 128MB+ blocks in
| order to increase their transaction throughput - they
| become incredibly fragile as the slightest amount of
| packet loss starts waves of peer bans.
|
| > Who are these miners that are struggling to send out
| 900KB ?
|
| Anyone who wants to handicap a competing pool by forcing
| them to either wait for the complete false block, or
| waste time hashing on a fake block header.
|
| When are you going to admit that you haven't thought this
| through?
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| >>If you skip verification, you open yourself up to bad
| actors feeding you a bogus header - and you only figure
| that out after being drip fed a bunch of transactions
| that don't match the merkle root.
|
| Malicious actors can't give a bogus header, because you
| can verify the bogus header doesn't have enough PoW. If
| the malicious actor does produce sufficient PoW for their
| bogus header, they are foregoing massive block rewards to
| fool your node for a few seconds. That's why this kind of
| malicious activity doesn't happen, and why miners do
| validation free mining on a new header until they've
| verified the whole block.
| tal8d wrote:
| > Malicious actors can't give a bogus header, because you
| can verify the bogus header doesn't have enough PoW.
|
| Ok, I guess you don't know how verification works. Here
| are the 19 steps: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_rul
| es#.22block.22_messag... Step 4) "Block
| hash must satisfy claimed nBits proof of work"
|
| The bad actor has full control of that, he just has to
| make sure the fake header has enough leading 0s in phony
| header nBits, the function that checks this is
| CheckProofOfWork() at https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/
| blob/master/src/pow.cpp#L... Step 10)
| "Verify Merkle hash"
|
| Well gee-wiz, how are we going to do that without having
| all the transaction in the block that the phony header
| hashMerkleRoot represents? GetHash() at https://github.co
| m/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/primitive...
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| What kind of a response is this? They said anyone can
| verify the proof of work and you are saying they can
| verify the proof of work. Where is the contradiction?
|
| Verifying blocks is trivial. You aren't still saying that
| needing to receive 900KB is a big deal are you?
|
| You seem to be acting like there is some sort of
| prediction that there will be a problem. Ethereum already
| produces blocks every 13 seconds at three times bitcoin's
| throughput.
| [deleted]
| brutal_chaos_ wrote:
| Only if you're the last one holding! /s
| foolfoolz wrote:
| this severely underestimates their value. the baseball card
| analogy is good. there's only a few that become valuable. the top
| shots nfts are good example, only some replays from the last 10
| years are ones people care about. and those will retain value
| hacker_newz wrote:
| "An NFT"?
| drawkbox wrote:
| Short term view NFTs look like a scam or a joke.
|
| Long term view we will need digital ownership especially when it
| comes to content or individual data/items.
|
| When the augmented reality spectacle takes over and everyone is
| looking through AR glasses, rather than through a small device
| but through their own eyes, digital collectibles will have more
| value.
|
| Shared spaces with others will have collectibles that only exist
| in the virtual space, but also with AR a shared virtual reality.
| Sitting in your room you can have layers of digital collectables
| that you can swap out: art, sports/gaming, music, landscapes etc
| that others can also see and experience. Availability and
| exclusivity are always part of the market and the augmented world
| will have similar in many areas.
|
| Eventually consumption will have to move mostly digital with
| carbon neutral energy generation to prevent overuse of resources,
| people can collect much more in the digital space. Hoarding
| digital/augmented content is not as problematic as hoarding in
| the real world.
|
| Everyone knows this is coming and NFTs seem to be an early
| iteration of digital ownership to make unique collectibles.
|
| Making games let you know that many players just like to collect
| things, obsessed with it. Digital collectibles already are a
| massive market.
|
| When that market changes to an augmented world, where people will
| share spaces virtually or play games in the real world overlaid
| with fun elements like games, scenery, educational content,
| history, events and more. This is when digital content ownership
| will make more sense when it comes to the unique experiences and
| items that people will need to make money and a market. This will
| only grow with more augmented spaces, events, experiences, games,
| entertainment, education, history and more.
|
| Rather than tie these digital items to a platform, ownership
| outside the platform is better in terms of being a standard. NFTs
| might not be the final form, but digital content uniqueness is
| actually something that can help the planet once the power usage
| is improved or neutral. If you think about it in the long term,
| where more people will be viewing augmented experiences from
| their own eyes (Apple Glasses and more) suddenly it makes more
| sense, then some items may only exist in that augmented layer.
| dbspin wrote:
| Here's the thing most people on Hackernews have missed. Owning
| an NFT does not usually mean you own the copyright to the
| image, and this is a good thing.
|
| It's not introducing artificial scarcity, its purchasing
| collectable bragging rights that allow an artist to 'monetize'
| their work, while retaining the copyright.
|
| Here's the relevant line from the Rarible TOS "In the absence
| of an express legal agreement between the creator of a
| Collectible and purchasers of the Collectible, there cannot be
| any guarantee or assurance that the purchase or holding of the
| Collectible confers any license to or ownership of the
| Collectible Metadata or other intellectual property associated
| with the Collectible or any other right or entitlement,
| notwithstanding that User may rightfully own or possess the NFT
| associated with the Collectible. " Link -
| https://rarible.com/terms.pdf
|
| Here's one example of an attempt to standardise this contract -
| https://www.niftylicense.org/
| echelon wrote:
| Why are we introducing scarcity to digital goods? That's not a
| good thing and shouldn't be praised!
|
| We rail against companies selling cosmetic additions to games.
| It doesn't add value.
|
| We already have "ownership". The legal framework of copyrights,
| purchase or goods, and licenses.
|
| NFTs are barcodes. People are selling cryptographic barcodes.
| [deleted]
| gorbachev wrote:
| "We rail against companies selling cosmetic additions to
| games. It doesn't add value."
|
| That's not quite true. There are sub-groups of gamers, in
| particular with racing games (e.g. Forza Motorsport), who do
| value cosmetic additions quite a bit.
| distances wrote:
| I fully agree. I hadn't heard of these NFTs before, but
| sounds like a dystopia to me, a perversion of the
| underpinnings of the digital world.
| drawkbox wrote:
| Here's my Mr. Brightside view of it, there is a Black Mirror-
| esque side as well as some humans build towards utopias and
| some build toward dystopias. I look at the quality of life
| and good side of things where I can.
|
| I agree with most of what you are saying but that is based on
| the current era. Created scarcity and exclusives are annoying
| but there are pros and cons. Putting value to something will
| create markets and digital markets you can take your stuff
| with you.
|
| When we get to more augmented spaces it will change the world
| dramatically. There will have to be some sort of digital
| ownership that is transferrable preferably a standard outside
| walled platforms. For instance artists or entertainment
| events that are unique are collectible.
|
| Uniqueness creates value, value creation makes markets, this
| would create massive amounts of jobs and quality of
| life/livelihood if done right. Already it is spawning some
| amazing art and assets. It is in a pump/bubble but new things
| always come out hot, rework, then in the end the best parts
| do live on and the initial bubble might have even been
| undervalued, like the internet, or mobile. The augmented
| space will have all sorts of network effects like that.
|
| It is in the very early stages, like a sketch of a storyboard
| early on in pre-production, everything early on in a way
| sucks, but we do know that over time the world will be more
| augmented and in that space digital ownership and uniqueness
| will be a thing.
|
| The market is there now for collectibles and stores of value
| and it will only grow.
|
| Take for instance you participate in a launch AR game for a
| launch event that takes place in your own environment with
| others locally or virtually, where you are in maybe a
| Stranger Things Upside Down world and you have to kill
| Demogorgons. The winner gets to keep the Demogorgon from that
| event. That item has value, you can buy a regular copy of
| one, but the original may be worth value over time. Do that
| same thing with any Star Wars, Marvel or other property, you
| start to see people will want those.
|
| Or let's say you go to a concert and an event gets a
| recording from a musician that you get to keep and show
| others who are sharing your augmented space but you own it.
| You own the unique view or access, but others can get copies
| of other parts.
|
| Or you watch a piece of digital art be created and the piece
| is sold and traded.
|
| Like right now if I got to buy some sort of collectible from
| the first Half-life that was unique and part of it was my
| house or a yard can be turned into a level like datacore or
| stalkyard and I could have friends play it with a unique
| character added in from the Half-life launch it would be
| pretty awesome. There can be copies, but to have the one
| specified by the creator has some value and some uniqueness
| that creates that value.
|
| Collectors love this type of stuff. Think of it like
| comicbooks, baseball cards, movie poster one sheets and
| unique characters. The fact that a collectible has value
| makes it more fun in a way but also creates value that can
| employ people and make a digital market. Markets like this
| will help keep people happy and doing things. The more people
| in the digital market the more jobs and resources out there.
| There is value in creating a marketplace that people can
| participate in that doesn't require physical assets/resources
| or even location. It could be used to help inequality and
| create economic markets. Economics can solve lots of problems
| but also require resources, if the resource problem is solved
| then it can be very beneficial.
|
| These were just game/entertainment examples but you get the
| idea.
|
| The coming eras of augmented reality and shared spaces on
| that will probably refine this idea more and more.
|
| The far end of this is like some of the tech in Blade Runner
| 2049, unique landscapes, augmented bots that are
| friends/assistants that learn, companions like virtual pets,
| and other valuables that gain unique knowledge that cannot be
| replicated because it learned from your experience/event, but
| that is way in the future.
| iamben wrote:
| Few things - I think the whole AR world could end up pretty
| sad. Imagine I go to a friend's house and all the art on
| his walls is mine? Like a world I've chosen where I'm not
| exposed to anyone else's tastes and choices?
|
| That aside - isn't this all _still_ likely to rely on
| something _central_? I mean it sounds like you 're talking
| about something pretty close to Ready Player One (which was
| owned by a central corporation)? Any AR world (in order to
| be successful) is going to need a whack of capital (Google,
| FB, Apple) and then vested interest in making it
| successful/profiting from it - at which point why do you
| need a Blockchain to own items? If you were the corporation
| running it, wouldn't you just implement your own "in space"
| ownership? Not saying it's better or worse - just isn't
| that more _likely_?
| echelon wrote:
| The web was supposed to be distributed.
|
| But we wound up with Facebook and Google.
|
| AR and the metaverse will be the same.
| [deleted]
| jonwalch wrote:
| There's tens of millions of people that disagree with you
| regarding cosmetics in games. Gamers largely have disposable
| income and are happy that they can support their favorite
| game developers and look "cool" (show off their status) while
| doing it.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Cosmetics in games largely have value due to the game being
| online and multiplayer, which means NFTs aren't useful for
| them because there is already a central server to manage
| ownership.
|
| They don't buy cosmetics just to show off their status, but
| to actually make their character look different when
| playing with a group of people who can see it. It's rarely
| "oh look - expensive" it's more "oh look - freaking Cowboy
| Ursa lmao"
| nikisweeting wrote:
| That will change when cosmetics can be shared across
| multiple games, which is already starting to grow with
| the onset of custom multi-game avatar+identity APIs being
| provided to game developers.
|
| When you avatar persists across multiple different games,
| it makes sense to have an ownership mechanism that isn't
| managed by a single central authority.
| echelon wrote:
| What economic incentive to game developers have to
| respect NFT ownership? Or anyone, for that matter?
|
| In VRChat, you can be _any_ model.
|
| If I had a game, I wouldn't care who owned the NFT. It's
| not a value add. As far as I'm concerned, anybody could
| use it.
| Noos wrote:
| It's more or less a small amount of whales that can
| actually buy meaningful amounts of cosmetics though.
| Cosmetics and digital content are EXPENSIVE; for a person
| to get many we're talking thousands of dollars. $30 US
| mounts are easy to make, and incredible profit.
|
| Even granting people who buy limited amounts to show
| support, its very easy to price them out of the market
| fast.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Key quote for me:
|
| > The trap, then, is that creators can get hooked on creating
| these. Buyers with a sunk cost get hooked on making the prices go
| up, unable to walk away. And so creators and buyers are then
| hooked in a cycle, with all of us up paying the lifetime of costs
| associated with an unregulated system that consumes vast amounts
| of precious energy for no other purpose than to create some
| scarce digital tokens.
|
| Tangentially, this resembled me of troubled financial markets
| (minus energy expenditure). Companies are hooked on making their
| stock go up, even if it requires distorting reality to hide
| fundamental problems. Like creators who become more about NFTs
| and their value than art, companies become more concerned with
| inflating valuations than actual business. Stock buyers are
| hooked on making stocks go up, not selling even if fundamental
| indicators are suffering to the point where viability of the
| business should be in question. Banks are hooked on making stocks
| go up... A vicious circle all around.
| 127 wrote:
| Why can't NFTs be done without a blockchain? Please explain. Just
| add multiple hash, public/private-key cryptography, downsample
| discrete cosine transform, etc. You can just create a file format
| and a protocol. Why do you need to dump tons of CO2 into the
| atmosphere just for this purpose?
| StrLght wrote:
| You're trying to apply common sense to mania and speculation
| qqii wrote:
| Blockchain like structures use consensus to uniqueness. A
| protocol that attempts to replicate this meets the loose
| definition of blockchain.
|
| As the other commenter explained, concensus doesn't require
| CO2, but most of these have been recent developments.
| dorkwood wrote:
| In your example, the money flowing into the market would need
| to come from regular people rather than crypto speculators,
| which would be much less lucrative.
| pwm wrote:
| Preface: I'm not endorsing NFTs nor do I know much about them
| and personally I would never buy one.
|
| > Why can't NFTs be done without a blockchain?
|
| In the physical world it is rather involved to check wether eg.
| a painting is the original one and not a copy. A simple way to
| define original is that it came first, before any of its
| copies. In the digital world the blockchain acts as the
| canonical timeline. You or anyone else can always tell what
| came first.
|
| > Why do you need to dump tons of CO2 into the atmosphere just
| for this purpose?
|
| In short we don't. The author of the article conflates
| blockchains and PoW:
|
| - There are blockchains that don't rely on PoW
|
| - The ones that are currently PoW might not be PoW in the
| future
|
| - The ones that stay PoW might solely use non-CO2 producing
| methods in the future
| eeegnu wrote:
| > The ones that stay PoW might solely use non-CO2 producing
| methods in the future
|
| What does this even mean? How can a Blockchain possibly
| enforce that your electricity used in mining is coming from a
| carbon neural source?
| pwm wrote:
| Blockchains can't and won't enforce it. They will be forced
| to rely CO2-neutral renewables when fossil fuels are taxed
| to oblivion and/or outlawed. This also points to the
| absurdity of blaming energy usage of things rather than
| attacking the root of the issue.
| erosenbe0 wrote:
| PoW can't be non-CO2 producing even if solar powered. You
| still have to contend with e-waste and even the poop of the
| janitor in your calculations.
| pwm wrote:
| Everything is life uses energy. We can only minimise the
| harmful effects of energy production, not (yet?) eliminate
| it. I first and foremost want global warming to slow/stop
| and imho for that we need a global restriction and/or ban
| on harmful ways of energy production. I can't see any other
| way. Everything else is either a distraction or
| ideologically driven, eg. "crypto wastes energy" really
| means "I think crypto is useless hence is deserves no
| energy". Once everything is forced to run on renewable
| energy sources then we will be in a much better position
| regardless of crypto.
| gbertasius wrote:
| You'd want some system of verification and notarization by
| parties involved. Analogous to real world where art is
| inspected, verified, and notarized. If you own the mona lisa
| you'd wanna be damn sure you have the real thing. Kinda like a
| certificate authority.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Should be interesting as soon as Tikectmaster or something offers
| NFTs to boost sales but with the explicit written agreement that
| NFTs are non-transferable and any transfer history voids the
| ticket.
| homero wrote:
| You can't trade them? Then how would you capture gains? I
| thought they were an investment
| jamesgreenleaf wrote:
| NFTs make perfect sense for representing a claim on things that
| can be used, like event tickets or in-game virtual goods. But as
| certificates layered on top of collectibles... I'm not so sure.
|
| With something like CryptoKitties, you can do something with the
| tokens (play a virtual pet game). But with something like
| CryptoPunks you're essentially paying for digital beanie babies,
| which are worse than real ones since anyone can display and enjoy
| the image you paid for.
|
| You can brag about owning such-and-such an image, but only as
| long as enough other people desire images from that particular
| set. When a set's popularity wanes, so does your token's value,
| and your ability to show it off.
|
| I'm always happy to see artists being paid for their work, and if
| they can make some money during this craze - more power to them.
| Beyond a few creators being rewarded, it seems like this is going
| to be 90% bubble (with plenty of hucksters), and 10% real use
| cases that stand the test of time.
| scsilver wrote:
| You obviously wont be displaying your rare nft art collection
| in the west wing of your 2-bit, thirdlifeVR mansion.
| Animats wrote:
| That may be Decentraland's business model.
| runeks wrote:
| > You can brag about owning such-and-such an image [...]
|
| How? You don't own a (digital) image. You own a token that
| references an image.
|
| Everyone else can view the image and send it to their friends.
| But you have some token allegedly signed by the author of the
| image -- who cares?
| meowface wrote:
| You're correct, though if I understand correctly, some NFT
| platforms do provide some (centralized) feature for
| "unlocking" content. For example, you could upload a full
| resolution art piece to an NFT platform or any other place
| and have the server serve the content to any request that
| proves ownership of the token.
|
| This is a pretty terrible system, though, as it's completely
| off-chain and not "Web 3.0" or decentralized in the
| slightest. The server has to store the "private" content in a
| private centralized database, so the server owners also can
| access the content, and any hacker could access the database
| and publicly dump all of the supposedly token-walled content.
|
| It's just taking advantage of the fact that any computer can
| determine the Ethereum address that owns a particular token
| and can check to see if a message was signed by that
| address's private key.
|
| I could imagine a future standard that could maybe integrate
| this into Ethereum proper, though I'm not sure if it's
| technologically possible.
|
| There's no way to prevent someone from just publicly
| releasing the art, but one could imagine some system like the
| full resolution piece stored as a public key-encrypted blob
| in the blockchain which can only be decrypted by a token
| holder.
|
| Maybe upon token ownership transfers the key could be
| encrypted with the token buyer's Ethereum address public key,
| though I'm not sure how or if it could work since I think the
| original content key would have to stored on the network in
| some fashion in order to later encrypt the key for token
| owners. So it might not be possible even in theory, though I
| don't know nearly enough about Ethereum and cryptography to
| say with any certainty.
| fluffything wrote:
| The author cares. They got real cash for signing a
| meaningless token.
| aabhay wrote:
| So why not ask for donations or sell prints?
| andypants wrote:
| It's like owning a celebrity's autograph. Some people do
| care, a lot.
| jjnoakes wrote:
| Except it is different in a way. Owning a physical
| autograph is different from owning a picture of one; the
| physical autograph can't be reproduced and has value due to
| its uniqueness and to its physical existence.
|
| It would instead be like owning a unique piece of paper
| with a unique number on it, which somehow corresponded to a
| picture of the autograph. Now the autograph portion is
| identical between you and anyone else (neither of you has a
| physical autograph); the only differentiator is your piece
| of paper. Where is the value?
| andypants wrote:
| The NFT is cryptographically signed by the author. You
| can't forge it, and it's publicly, verifiably linked to
| the author. It's even better than a physical autograph.
| joyeuse6701 wrote:
| I feel that this is true of any art, NFT or otherwise.
| berberous wrote:
| CryptoPunks will be in the MoMA one day. They are a pioneer --
| and will be valued as such. Derivative works and obvious cash
| grabs are a bubble and low effort art will trend back to $0.
| tasogare wrote:
| > low effort art will trend back to $0
|
| This is being continuously disproved since decades by
| contemporary art.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| Art is what people say it is. Its appreciation is what
| probably separates us from the animals and certainly
| separates us from the AIs.
|
| We say "Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder", because it's
| true. There will be no accounting for a persons own taste
| or for what society finds fashionable today or over time.
|
| If what you personally call Art and its story speaks to you
| then it is valuable. If others share that feeling then it
| is even more valuable. It's just that simple.
|
| I personally like the idea of commissioning art like what
| big families did back in the Renaissance, but use Social
| P2P networks like what is already happening with customized
| digital Avatar makers/artists. NFTs have a role to play
| here equivalent to an old Renaissance painter signing the
| bottom of the painting, only now it's with the owner(s) and
| all future owner(s) signatures there for all to see.
| yreg wrote:
| Animals certainly appreciate beauty among each other[0]
| probably also in the environment[1].
|
| AI can be trained to recognise and prefer beauty as well.
|
| [0] http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150511-why-are-
| animals-so-b...
|
| [1] https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/sir-david-
| attenboro...
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| I'll give you the Animals as your likely right and it's
| more a turn of phrase than a logical argument, however I
| have to respectfully disagree with regards to AI. A thing
| that is trained to recognize and prefer is exhibiting
| behavior - it is not experiencing 'appreciation' with all
| that implies at the human level. A machine may pick good
| art out of a line up but that art will not improve its
| mood or inspire it to take up painting or make it want to
| write a poem to an old lover it was reminded of. AI can
| be useful in creating art perhaps, but I don't see it
| ever as an end user consumer of art's appreciation.
| gbear605 wrote:
| Most contemporary art has a lot more effort put into it
| than you think. It's perfectly okay to not _value_ that
| effort, but things like those "black squares" or whatever
| actually aren't just that. If you see them in person, you
| can see how the different brush strokes overlap and
| theoretically signify different things.
| elsurudo wrote:
| > If you see them in person, you can see how the
| different brush strokes overlap and theoretically signify
| different things.
|
| You had me until this bit
| DrewRWx wrote:
| Respecting nuance in other other people's perspectives,
| even if you don't see it, is a good skill to learn.
| injidup wrote:
| Son, see the weave on the emperor's gown and how it's
| delicate changes in weave and texture signify the
| greatness, taste and glory of our leader.
|
| Mama! Yes but ....
| RobertKerans wrote:
| The example you're using isn't contemporary, it's over a
| century old, and it's a design for a stage curtain. It's
| not valuable for the effort put in * (it's literally just
| a solid black painted square), it's valuable because of
| the point in time it represents w/r/t art history
|
| * edit for clarity: what would be commonly considered
| technical artistic effort, although a large % of graphic
| designers would disagree with that as composition is a
| skill, and conceptual artists would disagree due to the
| thought put in (which imo feels post-hoc but hey ho)
| RobertKerans wrote:
| Just to expand on that, I love Malevich as an artist.
| I've travelled specifically to see exhibitions of his and
| his contemporaries' works. If I had large amounts of
| spare cash and I were in a position to buy an original, I
| probably would. From an artistic pov, I feel the ideas he
| introduced are extremely important. From a technical pov,
| I think his colour and composition are superb. From a
| conceptual pov his art is a pretty laser-sharp
| distillation of the ideas he had regarding what art means
| or can mean. From a personal, professional point of view,
| I'm trained as a designer, and worked as a designer and
| illustrator. The tenets of constructivism and suprematism
| have been formational to much of my approach to design.
|
| So, it's not that being technically spectacular in some
| arbitrary _" really accurately painted or drawn picture
| of reality, like a photo"_ way makes art valuable
| (photography effectively destroyed that a long time ago,
| sorry!). It's that it has some special significance. If
| that significance is more than personal, as in it has
| some historical/cultural significance, then it becomes
| valuable. There's no point to it, it's art. So w/r/t
| original subject, above reasons make me think twice about
| any knee-jerk cynicism I have toward it (which I do have,
| I just have to have an open mind)
| freshhawk wrote:
| But how good are they going to be at laundering money? I
| can't imagine they're going to be in the class that
| contemporary art is in, so they aren't really comparable.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| CryptoPunks is not the first NFT market, not by a long shot.
| but it has more fortunate market timing and better optics
| than projects that predated it.
| playingchanges wrote:
| It seems like your argument is more agains collectibles in
| general. I also can go online and look at the art for various
| rare Pokemon cards for example. I think you underestimate the
| psychological component of 'ownership' and the extra
| satisfaction that might bring a collector.
|
| An anecdote,
|
| I am an avid jazz record collector (vinyl). Every record I own
| is available to me on Spotify and I actually frequently find
| new records to purchase on Spotify (they have a great jazz
| selection).
|
| Interestingly, or maybe not, I find that I listen to the
| records I own more than those I don't even though I have access
| to so many more.
|
| I also find myself having significantly more patience with the
| records I buy blindly than I would a random thing that comes on
| algorithm radio.
|
| The point being, ownership creates psychological attachment
| which in turn creates some intangible form of value that I
| can't quite put a number on but I definitely feel.
| mlthoughts2018 wrote:
| > "You can brag about owning such-and-such an image, but only
| as long as enough other people desire images from that
| particular set."
|
| I think that's the whole point. An enduring aspect of human
| culture is that we praise and confer social status on owners or
| stewards of rare curiosities. You aren't buying NFTs for
| tangible value, you're buying a speculative investment in
| social status. And people feel very confident that the market
| cap and liquidity for buying and trading this type of social
| status will go way up, and that unique, verifiable digital
| ownership allows the pay-for-status desires to take place
| untethered to physical goods.
| zemo wrote:
| what is the use-case for an NFT for an in-game virtual good? A
| sword from World of Warcraft (WoW) can already be traded
| between players within WoW, since the environment in which it
| appears is already centralized and that's already provided by
| the environment. Trading a WoW sword outside of WoW has
| ambiguous logic. Let's say you sold your WoW sword to a Destiny
| player. Ok, does the sword still exist in WoW or not? What if
| the WoW servers just say that it does? Do all players verify
| that other players have the items the server says they have? If
| the player uses the sword and the server says "they did 9000
| damage because that's how big the sword is", what difference
| does it make if your client say "NO! Nooo! They don't -HAVE-
| that sword"? You can't just wave your hand and say "but we'll
| just make the games peer to peer and that fixes it". P2P
| lockstep protocols were extremely widespread but fell out of
| favor due to performance and anticheat issues inherent in
| lockstep protocols. Most gamedevs would prefer the luxury of
| not having to run any servers. How do you make a purely P2P
| multiplayer game protocol that is cheat-resistant and allows
| more than a very small number of players to witness one another
| simultaneously? If everyone needs to establish a network
| connection to everyone near them inside the virtual world, how
| do you handle crowded spaces?
|
| When the sword is sold -outside of WoW-, how does it have value
| in another context? Can a Destiny character equip a WoW sword?
| (No.) Ok but what if the Destiny devs made an in-game Destiny
| item that was pegged to that WoW sword, and then the games all
| checked your inventory at login? You'd have to check the ledger
| -every time the item is used- or the player can just login,
| trade it away, and then stay logged in and continue to use it
| (use after sell, essentially).
|
| If players can -already- trade items within the simulation
| where they were created, but we're not defining what it
| actually means to move an asset -between simulations-, what is
| the actual use-case here? That you can trade non-functional
| skins outside of the game? That's it? Why is that good?
| jamesgreenleaf wrote:
| I will help clear up some confusion if I'm able.
|
| First, I don't think the big use case is for items being
| traded between different games. However, a system like that
| is possible. Blizzard would be a good example here, since
| their games have a high degree of cross-pollination, and they
| frequently offer promotions that unlock similar items in
| several of their games at once. So, owning a Blizzard "magic
| sword" token might give you a sword item in WoW, another one
| in Diablo, and a sword card in Hearthstone, each adapted for
| its own game. This is a small use case, in my opinion.
|
| I imagine that the big use case is for any game developer
| (indies especially) to leverage the marketplace without
| having to build one, or be locked into one provided by a
| single publisher/distributor. The game itself does not have
| to be p2p as you're suggesting. Game architecture would
| remain centralized, and would communicate with a blockchain
| where the tokens are stored.
|
| The process might look like this:
|
| 1) A player purchases an NFT representing an in-game item
| issued by a wallet owned by the game developer.
|
| 2) The player sends that token to a smart-contract address,
| also owned by the developer, with a memo that identifies
| their player account.
|
| 3) The smart contract notifies a centralized game server,
| then sends the token back to the player's wallet.
|
| 4) The in-game item appears in the player's inventory, within
| the game.
|
| There could be any number of steps involved, and the
| contracts could operate however you'd like. The token could
| be destroyed after a single use (like purchasing keys for
| loot crates in CS:GO) or used and traded any number of times.
| The game server would have to keep track of which player
| account controlled which token, and update players'
| inventories whenever the token changed hands.
|
| One more thing - NFTs can be programmed such that creators
| receive an automatic royalty (a percentage of the sale lands
| in the creator's wallet address) whenever the item is sold on
| the blockchain, no matter who is selling to whom. This could
| be huge for indie developers, who would benefit not only from
| selling the original items up front, but also from the long-
| tail resale of such items between their players.
| zemo wrote:
| > So, owning a Blizzard "magic sword" token might give you
| a sword item in WoW, another one in Diablo, and a sword
| card in Hearthstone, each adapted for its own game. This is
| a small use case, in my opinion.
|
| I'm like 90% certain that there are cross-game item unlocks
| in Blizzard games already.
|
| > NFTs can be programmed such that creators receive an
| automatic royalty (a percentage of the sale lands in the
| creator's wallet address) whenever the item is sold on the
| blockchain, no matter who is selling to whom.
|
| Why is that good? Who is it good for? Why would a game
| developer sign up for this? You seem to be under the
| impression that I have no concept at all of what NFTs do.
| The problem is that a multiplayer game server is
| fundamentally already a trusted third party and the
| incentives for gamedevs to use them are poor, while the
| complexities enormous. Boiling the oceans to produce a
| trustless ecosystem for asset transfer is a fruitless
| endeavor if those assets can only be reified inside of
| environments that fundamentally require trusted third
| parties.
|
| You already need to have a trusted third party (the game
| server) in order to give any functionality to the assets.
| Once you've added that trusted third party, you've thrown
| away the key benefit of blockchains.
|
| The trusted third party is effectively required to moderate
| custom assets in games; untrusted asset creation is an
| unchecked liability in general, and is expressly prohibited
| by the terms of many game platforms. If a player creates
| content that is hateful, then another player that is a
| child can download it, and if their parent sees that, the
| kid will say "I'm playing $your_game", and then the parent
| will raise a stink about how $your_game has $hateful
| content in it and $your_game exposed their children to that
| content. That sort of thing will certainly get your game
| delisted from the Nintendo or Sony stores. Even if you're
| only concerned with an unregulated PC market, it's going to
| be a hit to your sales.
|
| If a child wanders onto a hateful website, the parent is
| going to say "the web exposed my child to $extremism", and
| then use parental controls to control what their kid can
| access on the web, but you cannot do that in a game. Sorry,
| you can't bring your $valuable_item in here because
| $other_player has it disabled in their content settings.
| You'd better believe parents are going to say "$video_game
| exposed my child to hate speech" and it's going to harm
| your sales.
|
| Beyond hate speech, assets have to be verified by the game
| dev to verify their integrity; the asset has to be loadable
| and working without errors and without breaking the game.
| That's assuming there are zero vulns in the asset pipeline.
| Beyond merely being loadable, it should also conform to
| some guidelines so that the asset doesn't perform well for
| players with fast machines, but make the game unplayable
| for players with slow machines.
|
| As for royalties: Steam Workshop already gives royalties to
| people who create assets (albeit at poor rates) and people
| already play that game. Why would I, a game developer, sign
| up for something that makes all of this worse, reduces my
| revenues, is massively more complicated, requires me to
| verify data against a blockchain constantly, AND increases
| liabilities? This is assuming you even -can- verify the
| data against the blockchain frequently. Even assuming
| you're using a blockchain with a read latency of zero,
| you're still performing i/o. You want to perform blocking
| i/o to an external datastore every single time a player
| wants to use an item? The only away around that would be to
| write a lock into the blockchain to prevent transfer with a
| contract and cache the ownership semantics, at which point
| you have completely duffed every single advantage a
| blockchain is giving you.
|
| Let's say, hypothetically, that we ignored all extant games
| and ONLY considered new games. Again: if you're not moving
| an item between simulations, it's all for naught because
| the game dev can just implement a traditional inventory
| system more easily, and if you -are- moving an item between
| simulations, the spawning simulation and the target
| simulation need to be in agreement about what an item
| spawned in one simulation means in the other simulation.
| That alone is a terrifically difficult problem that NFTs do
| nothing to address. Few game devs would sign up for this,
| because it would mean that the -other- gamedev would be
| able to affect the balance of the economy in -their- game,
| potentially to catastrophic effect. It effectively ties the
| game economies together, but different games have
| fundamentally different economies with different mechanics.
| Who is in control of the spawn rate of assets? "You just
| make the asset be some random thing whose nonce is some
| thing that's made on the blockchain at a fixed rate
| determined by the blockchain itself" like CryptoKitties or
| whatever. Ok, fine. How do you issue a patch to alter spawn
| rates, balance the relative frequencies of different items
| appearing, or change their properties? If you -can't- do
| that, you can't balance your game. Balancing live game
| economies is -incredibly- difficult, you can't just hope to
| get it right on the first shot.
| jamesgreenleaf wrote:
| That's right, Blizzard does cross-game unlocks already,
| through their own platform. I don't expect that companies
| like Activision/EA/Valve would be the ones to use NFTs
| for this kind of thing, since it's better for them to
| build and operate their own marketplaces, which gives
| them total control.
|
| I completely agree with you on the boiling of the oceans.
| It's a problem that cryptos will have to solve in the
| long-term to be viable as any part of a green economy.
| There are a few projects that are energy efficient, but
| Ethereum and others have work to do. In any case, NFTs
| aren't specific to any one blockchain.
|
| I think content creation and limitation is a separate
| issue, and not implicitly part of NFTs. You can issue a
| token representing a particular game object, with no
| ability for the player to customize or modify it. You
| bring up an interesting point though - there could be a
| limited, controllable level of customization available to
| players. Consider a smart contract that mints NFTs and
| allows certain attributes to be modified, which could
| affect the cosmetic or functional details of the in-game
| item they represent. You could sell a class of NFTs
| representing a certain sword, and players could pay extra
| for a golden version, or a version with infinite
| durability.
|
| For Steam Workshop, I think you've identified exactly the
| issue. They control the marketplace, and set the rates.
| If it's more profitable for a developer to set their own
| rates/royalties, and it's easy enough to implement, and
| there are enough players willing to use NFTs (or a
| platform that manages NFTs for them) then we'll start to
| see developers use them. Marketplaces aren't mutually
| exclusive, so you could have some items on Steam, and
| others on blockchain. You could make certain desirable
| items exclusive to the platform that nets you the most
| profit.
|
| I agree regarding difficulty of implementation - this is
| something that most developers won't bother with at the
| moment since it doesn't make economic sense, but as the
| ecosystem develops we'll likely see companies that
| provide a simpler abstraction layer for NFTs (perhaps
| even specializing in games). As the implementation costs
| drop, we'll start seeing adoption. This might take
| several years.
|
| Regarding blocking I/O, I don't think it would work like
| that, just like it wouldn't work as p2p. A game server
| could poll the history of its smart contracts (or the
| abstraction layer provided by a service platform) every
| few seconds or minutes, and update its centralized
| database of items to match whatever transactions have
| occurred. All reads within the game would still be to its
| own database, and not directly from a blockchain.
| imtringued wrote:
| You have to look at the bottom line. The only benefit of
| decentralization is cross publisher items. If it's through
| the same publisher it can be done in a centralized way.
| Publishers care about their profits. If NFT can increase
| their profits they will do it, but if someone buys a WoW
| sword on Etherum and uses it in Destiny (I haven't played
| either so please don't nitpick that Destiny has no swords).
|
| Why would the publisher behind Destiny care? Blizzard is
| the one profiting off the items. Each publisher would
| create their own mutually incompatible smart contract to
| maximize profits. Companies absolutely hate the existence
| of secondary markets. They want cash shop items to be tied
| to accounts so that every player has to rebuy the same
| items over and over again. It simply won't work except as
| an easter egg.
| jamesgreenleaf wrote:
| Totally agree - this will only happen if it makes
| economic sense for the developer. Big companies like
| Blizzard won't bother since they can build and manage
| their own marketplace, but smaller developers who can't
| afford to do that will still be able to unlock value by
| participating in an open market.
|
| Players re-buying the same item is definitely profitable,
| but it may turn out to be more profitable in the long-
| term to allow players to freely trade items while taking
| a cut of each transaction as royalties. Also, as
| mentioned before, NFTs allow for single-use items. A game
| could provide all sorts of different items with different
| rules.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > But with something like CryptoPunks you're essentially paying
| for digital beanie babies, which are worse than real ones since
| anyone can display and enjoy the image you paid for.
|
| It seems like the obvious counterpoint is that perhaps all of
| these "collectible" scarce physical things which are bought and
| sold for huge amounts of money (art, coins, relics, etc.) are
| in fact being used simply as a way to identify a unique "token"
| that is good for generating hype among a group of people and
| exchanging value among that group because it has a story
| attached to it and isn't easily counterfeitable. It's pretty
| obvious that a decent reproduction of most of these things
| would deliver the raw surface aesthetic experience to the vast
| majority of interested people and would cost much less. For
| many famous paintings it's easy to understand why someone would
| want a reproduction in their house for decoration. It's less
| obvious to me why someone would want a reproduction of an old
| coin with a minting flaw, but perhaps that's just me.
| dools wrote:
| Also if anything is a digital beanie baby then so is Bitcoin,
| what's the difference?
| bob33212 wrote:
| It is permissionless. You can transfer BTC without a bank
| or eBay or the postal service being involved. It is the
| best way to buy LSD from a stranger. So it has some value
| because of that. Similar to rare wine, most of the price is
| due today to speculation and asset diversification, and
| rich hobbiests.
| aabhay wrote:
| There's a limited supply of Bitcoin
| [deleted]
| meowface wrote:
| You're not wrong, but there can be more than one thing
| playing such a role. Bitcoin is Beanie Babies, Ethereum is
| a varied ecosystem of pet rocks, Monero is Pokemon cards
| with traces of white powder. Can't hurt to diversify your
| speculation.
| AlunAlun wrote:
| > in-game virtual goods. But as certificates layered on top of
| collectibles... I'm not so sure.
|
| I agree - the problem with most NFTs at the moment is that you
| can't actually _do_ anything with them, apart from trade them.
|
| There are games coming out now (e.g. Goal Revolution[0]) where
| your NFTs' properties (and, by extension, value) change based
| on _what_ you do with them (how you use them). If the NFT thing
| is going to have any future, it needs to follow this example.
|
| [0] https://www.goalrev.com/
| andreaorru wrote:
| Have you played Aavegotchi? [0]
|
| [0] https://www.aavegotchi.com/
| qqii wrote:
| > the problem with most ~NFTs~ art at the moment is that you
| can't actually do anything with them, apart from trade them.
|
| I dot agree with this statement but perhaps it'll help you
| expand why you think this way. As the article says, you don't
| have to own the Mona Lisa to appreciate it's beauty.
| freshhawk wrote:
| So the best case scenario for them is to be a part of the
| worst type of video games? The pay-to-win/microtransaction
| sector?
| ThomPete wrote:
| This always comes down to how you understand value.
|
| How valuable is Jimmy Hendrix guitar pick? How valuable is a
| lok of Justin Biebers hair? How valuable is a book owned by
| Charles Darwin?
|
| Of course NFT is a bubble just like about every other thing
| humans create, but humans will always attach value and meaning
| to dead things even digital ones.
|
| And so NFTs can be used for many things including allowing
| people to buy something overhyped that will depreciate in
| value.
|
| That's all good, the more of this the better.
| aklein wrote:
| Only in this case the value is stored in "digital gold".
| Unlike gold, which is chemically stable, I'm far from
| convinced the digital format itself will end up sticking
| around long term.
| ThomPete wrote:
| Not sure about your definition for long term.
|
| TCP/IP looks pretty solid to me. NFT is basically TCP/IP
| with memory, why shouldn't that be useful for all sorts of
| things?
|
| Bitcoin is more like gold, NFTs are more like network based
| consensus validation of ownership.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| This has value because it's a tangible reductio ad absurdum for
| crypto currencies. Best case art, median case scam.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > You can brag about owning such-and-such an image, but only as
| long as enough other people desire images from that particular
| set. When a set's popularity wanes, so does your token's value,
| and your ability to show it off.
|
| And only as long as people recognize your NFT claim to
| ownership as even being valid. Other people may view that brag
| as being as sad as someone bragging about their land holdings
| on the moon: https://lunarland.com/.
| [deleted]
| andypants wrote:
| There's a difference if the author of the art is the one that
| minted the NFT.
|
| It's like jack dorsey selling an NFT of the first tweet
| compared with any random person trying to do the same.
| jameshart wrote:
| What rights do you actually have in a tweet?
|
| Which of those rights are actually transferable?
|
| What rights do you have in a tweet that you made in your
| capacity as an employee of a company?
|
| What rights do twitter as a company have with respect to
| tweets? Or to impose restrictions on the ability of people
| to transfer rights with respect to tweets?
| [deleted]
| snarf21 wrote:
| NFTs are nonsense and just as much a pyramid scheme as
| everything else crypto. People will get left holding the bag at
| the top just like with CryptoKitties. I have several hand
| painted reproductions of famous paintings (impressionist). I
| get just as much enjoyment looking at them on my wall as I have
| at the museums looking at the real ones. I don't need to have
| $100M. I'm glad that content creators are getting paid now but
| remember that most "artists" end up penniless and their art is
| only highly valued posthumously.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| > NFTs are nonsense and just as much a pyramid scheme as
| everything else crypto.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| samvher wrote:
| Not sure if it's just me but it sounds like you're sort of
| making an argument _in favor of_ NFTs here. The main argument
| against NFTs I hear is that what is being certified can just
| as easily be enjoyed by people who are not the certified
| owner. And you 're saying that that's actually the case for
| regular art as well - but still someone ends up willing to
| pay $100M for the original!
|
| I think there is a case to be made for NFTs, but would also
| not be surprised if you're right that it ends up with mostly
| bag holders.
| Igelau wrote:
| > NFTs are nonsense and just as much a pyramid scheme
|
| What scares me is that there are artists who I don't think
| understand how scammy this is. They've drunk the kool-aid and
| accepted the handwaving "you don't need to know how it works,
| just that it exists" explanations. Creators who wanted to
| make an honest dollar but ignorantly perpetuated the scam
| could find them themselves in hot water.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > Creators who wanted to make an honest dollar but
| ignorantly perpetuated the scam
|
| To be fair, if they're doing it honestly the value
| proposition is "Support the artist and get bragging rights
| for having done so!", which doesn't become a scam (or at
| least any more of scam, depending on your view of bragging
| rights) just because there's a scammy secondary market that
| the patron doesn't necessarily have to participate in.
| Igelau wrote:
| It seems like there should be a better way to "Support
| the artist and get bragging rights for having done so!"
| that doesn't involve the scammy other part. You see this
| with Patreon all the time where certain tiers get a
| shout-out.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| Oh certainly, and we should encourage such methods where
| practical. But if we're going to condemn people for using
| the same financial tools that can be (and are) also used
| for scams, I have some bad news about that global economy
| of yours...
| maayank wrote:
| How do you go about having such quality reproductions? What
| are the costs?
| snarf21 wrote:
| As mentioned in the thread, there are different qualities
| but a couple of hundred will get you something pretty nice
| that is hand painted. Usually framing will cost more.
| Impressionist paintings tend to have some thick paint that
| can't be captured in a print. Large prints can also be just
| as expensive as real paint on real canvas. I know it isn't
| as good but I don't sit and stare at it for hours from 6
| inches away. It is also a beautiful reminder of a nice trip
| to the museum.
| fossuser wrote:
| A few hundred dollars: https://www.galeriedada.com/
|
| This is supposedly the company the movie Ex Machina used
| for the CEO's Jackson Pollock.
|
| I've been tempted to get one from them. :-)
|
| https://www.quora.com/Did-they-use-an-original-Jackson-
| Pollo...
| gruez wrote:
| >NFTs are nonsense and just as much a pyramid scheme as
| everything else crypto. People will get left holding the bag
| at the top just like with CryptoKitties.
|
| You can say this about literally every non-productive asset,
| including NFT's real-life counterparts eg. painting or
| trading cards.
| bostonpete wrote:
| Except those sorts of collectibles drive much of their
| value from their limited supply.
| Taek wrote:
| The entire point of NFTs is that you can attach a
| verifiably limited supply to a set of collectables. Just
| like with their real world counterparts, you can have
| knock-offs and reproductions that people collect, but the
| owner of the actual original one knows they have
| something of a limited set.
| Can_Not wrote:
| When beanie babies have limited supply, it's because the
| factory has to manufacture other goods for their next
| contract.
|
| When imaginary cryptohashes have limited supply, it's
| kind of pointless, or at least there is nothing good for
| the buyer or society.
| gruez wrote:
| paintings might be limited in supply, but trading cards
| are easily mass produced.
| bostonpete wrote:
| They are easily mass produced, but the companies still
| limit the supply specifically so there is value for
| collectors
| gruez wrote:
| But the same dynamic exists with NFTs. The issuers can
| limit supply to ensure value for collectors.
| imtringued wrote:
| Physical goods have a counterfeiting risk. Is it possible
| to use NFTs to prevent counterfeiting by verifying that a
| product is genuine? If not then they really have no use.
| Physical goods need verification but digital goods can be
| replicated perfectly. A "bootleg" is just as good as the
| original so no verification is needed.
| K0balt wrote:
| Yes. That is precisely one of their best uses.
|
| I'm a dev at pruf.io and this is one of the many things
| our platform is designed to do.
| krrrh wrote:
| They're both still subject to entropy and the rules of
| the physical universe in a way that digital isn't.
| theptip wrote:
| Worth noting that NFTs aren't just cryptokitties; there is a
| lot more you can do with them.
|
| ETH NFT refers to the smart contracts that you would use to
| digitize ownership of a house or any other (physical or
| financial) unique asset that you might trade.
|
| You can nest an NFT under an ERC20 token, too, so that you
| can sell partial ownership tokens in your NFT.
|
| Of all the use-cases in crypto, I think digitizing ownership
| is the one that seems most likely to be actually used for a
| non-trivial volume of non-speculative trading.
| snarf21 wrote:
| As a sibling mentions, you can't digitize a house. The
| state has already done that. The whole point of crypto is
| decentralized trust. You don't need that when the state is
| the system of trust, whether you like it or not.
| K0balt wrote:
| That's what I think too, which is why i started pruf.io
| roywiggins wrote:
| What happens when a judge says "no, the person who the NFT
| says owns the house doesn't, it's Bob over there"?
|
| When it comes down to it, the entry on the local tax rolls
| or property registration office is going to be the one that
| counts.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| What's the other proof of ownership?
|
| NFTs are the digital equivalent of a vehicle title,
| that's the strongest usecase (proof of ownership), IMO.
| I'm not too keen on the collectibles/art usecases,
| they're probably the easiest/low-effort ones.
| roywiggins wrote:
| My point is, that states have monopolized property
| transfers and there's all sorts of weird and arcane laws
| and practice around how you transfer property- especially
| real estate- and convincing the state to recognize an NFT
| as evidence of anything is going to be a real challenge.
|
| ex, if the law requires an actual notarized handwritten
| signature to transfer ownership, what you and I do on the
| blockchain will simply not count when it comes down to
| it.
|
| If I accidentally burn the NFT that represents ownership
| of my house I'm definitely still the owner of the house,
| there's no world where a government would shrug and say
| "I guess nobody owns it anymore, oops"
| Taek wrote:
| Blockchains are a shortcut to social consensus, not the
| final word. There is substantial value in the state
| giving credibility to a blockchain, allowing an NFT title
| for a house to be transferred digitally.
|
| That value does not disappear if the state + courts also
| build in processes for over-ruling the on-chain owner of
| an object and forcibly transferring it to someone else.
| The core value here comes from how much easier it is to
| clear all of the red tape in a fully programmatic world.
| bal4591 wrote:
| Are you insane, what happens when my grandma forgets her
| password?
| roywiggins wrote:
| So now you have two ledgers: one on a blockchain and
| another one that's just "the court said X". They will
| diverge over time, and eventually everyone will just use
| the latter one, because that's the one that counts.
|
| Before I buy an NFT, I'll have to check the GovLedger
| _anyway_ to make sure that NFT is actually that person 's
| to sell, and hasn't got a lien on it or something else
| that means they can't actually sell it.
|
| If the idea is the blockchain is permissioned and the
| state can choose which transfers to allow and can
| forcibly recover NFTs, why not just use a database?
| everfree wrote:
| The court, in making their ruling, could forcibly
| transfer the NFT, as it would make sense that they would
| give themselves admin status in the smart contract. So
| there's no reason the blockchain would need to diverge.
|
| Regarding liens, it seems simple enough to say that if
| someone does not own an NFT "free and clear", then they
| cannot transfer it "free and clear". It might even be a
| different NFT entirely (a "liened NFT," where the
| original un-liened NFT is held in trust by yet another
| smart contract, with limited or conditional ownership
| rights given to the lien holder.)
|
| The reason not to use a database is interoperability. Any
| smart contract can transfer these NFTs according to
| infinitely nuanced scenarios, and only during disputes
| would a court need to get involved and forcibly transfer
| the NFT according to a judgement.
| berenza wrote:
| there is work being done on bridging smart contracts with
| contract law and it may be further along than you think.
| https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/topics/research/blockchain-
| leg... https://www.lawtechnologytoday.org/2020/12/how-
| smart-contrac... https://www.ikigailaw.com/how-have-
| different-states-in-the-u...
| roywiggins wrote:
| It seems to me that there's going to be an unbridgeable
| gap when it comes to physical property. If someone hacks
| my wallet containing my "house NFT" and transfers it to
| themselves and I can't hunt them down and force them to
| return it, who owns the house? How do I sell it, if I
| don't have the NFT? Can I go get another NFT minted, and
| who from? How does the buyer know that this newly minted
| NFT represents the true ownership and the old one
| doesn't?
|
| Suppose I die taking my wallet keys with me; how do my
| heirs inherit my NFT-ized house?
|
| If the government is minting these NFTs and deciding
| which transfers are legitimate and which aren't, why are
| we bothering with all this?
|
| Basically: at some point, an NFT will become separated
| from the ownership as recognized by the people who count
| (banks, governments, etc). Without a mechanism to reunite
| them, the NFT is not very useful; but if there is some
| sort of mechanism, it's really that mechanism that
| determines ownership, not the NFT and you might as well
| use a centralized ledger.
| theptip wrote:
| One easy way to resolve all of these problems is to build
| an escape hatch in the contract so that in the case of
| theft, loss, or other special circumstance you can invoke
| arbitration and mint a new token if needed.
|
| It's important to understand that these tokens aren't
| going to replace the existing legal system (much though
| the anarchist/libertarian wing of the crypto community
| might wish it). They just enable certain transactions to
| occur with lower overhead and time delay. This is about
| improving friction in the happy path, not providing new
| solutions for every conflict case.
|
| Personally I don't think there is a reason to put your
| primary residence one the blockchain (you don't trade it
| that often). But it's interesting for places where you
| might want to trade assets at higher frequency (eg micro
| loans, supply chain finance, etc) and maybe there is a
| real-estate trust angle too.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| When I read about smart legal contracts, all I can
| imagine is Google's live-staff customer support combined
| with government flexibility. Is this the future we want?
| tablespoon wrote:
| > NFTs are the digital equivalent of a vehicle title,
| that's the strongest usecase (proof of ownership)
|
| No they aren't, and least not until they're recognized by
| law as such.
| quantified wrote:
| Right, analog of a purchase receipt is maybe a better way
| to put it.
| theptip wrote:
| It is already possible to write legal contracts which say
| "whoever controls token with public key X, hereforth
| 'Owner'" for many asset classes.
|
| I'm sure there are many asset classes where you can't
| write such a contract but I don't think your categorical
| rejection is correct.
| fredfoobar wrote:
| I'm not sure what a "usecase" has to do with laws, a
| usecase can exist outside of the law.
|
| Are you implying that laws should come before
| inventions/ideas?
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > a usecase can exist outside of the law
|
| So, let me get this straight: you have an NFT that
| represents the deed for a vehicle, but the law does not
| recognize the NFT as the deed for the vehicle... if you
| don't see any problems with that, boy do I have a bridge
| to sell you.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I don't really get your point. What happens when a judge
| says "you don't own your house any more, the government
| owns it now"? Well, what happens is you lose your house.
| The fact that the government can circumvent _any_ notion
| of property ownership isn't really a criticism of any
| particular notion of property ownership.
| quantified wrote:
| Just highlighting "there's a trump card over your claim
| to ownership lurking out there."
| imtringued wrote:
| Yes this would also defeat the government's own ownership
| database/archive.
| K0balt wrote:
| The underlying thing has to be already considered valuable.
| Consider tokenized single cask scotch.
|
| So, it's made, and costs 150 a bottle. Why? Ostensibly, it's
| good scotch whiskey, and it's a limited run, 10 years in the
| making.
|
| So why tokenize it?
|
| Gamification.
|
| Only people with the actual bottle can play.
|
| Open it, scan the qr under the cap, then you can share the
| official tweet from posh-makers whisky announcing the opening
| of the bottle.... "that was us last night, good times all
| around!" maybe you get a 25 dollar certificate for your next
| limited run bottle. It's a social flex, and it's great
| publicity for the brand.
|
| ...and the remaining 237 bottles just went up in price. Fast
| forward a few years, and somebody has one of the last three
| bottles.... Which is mostly because he can actually prove he
| has one of the last three. Now its worth 270k.
| op00to wrote:
| Why is it worth 270k? It could also be worthless. It could
| be worth a little.
| yawnr wrote:
| I'm skeptical about NFTs too but trying to keep an open mind,
| because at the end of the day, while you or I personally
| don't need the 100M to enjoy the impressionist art, you can't
| ignore the fact that someone out there is in fact willing to
| pay that for the original. And that's kind of the same weird
| authenticity bragging rights situation.
| bostonpete wrote:
| Well there's also the allure of the physical object that
| the artist created by hand. People done go see the Mona
| Lisa rather than a replica for bragging rights. That's not
| there with digital goods.
| afterburner wrote:
| I worry about the weird effect on society of massive
| lopsided wealth encouraging hucksterism (from all levels of
| wealth) just because people don't know what to spend their
| too-much-money on.
| thinkloop wrote:
| There's a big practical difference between owning an
| original and owning a print. People have discovered secrets
| behind paint or canvas before. New technologies often allow
| us to introspect qualities of the art that we previously
| didn't know (chemicals used, techniques, tools, lifestyles,
| etc.). An original is a snapshot of history that includes
| tons of unique information that is simply not available in
| prints or nfts.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _while you or I personally don't need the 100M to enjoy the
| impressionist art, you can't ignore the fact that someone
| out there is in fact willing to pay that for the original._
|
| There are people who happily pay $10,000+ for an Italian
| purse. There are people who are happy with a $10 Chinese
| knock-off.
|
| There are people who happily pay $2,000 for an Apple
| laptop. There are people who are happy with Linux on a $100
| machine from Goodwill.
|
| There are people who go outside to feel the breeze. There
| are people who are happy with a fan.
|
| I don't understand NFTs at all. But I have to remind myself
| that often value is subjective.
| Taek wrote:
| You should also account for how early NFTs are. If you've
| been following blockchains for a while, you may recall
| that in 2012 and 2013 there were an ocean of Bitcoin
| knock offs that distinguished themselves by changing
| things like the difficulty adjustment algorithm, or the
| hashing function, or the total coin supply. All of these
| "altcoins" to experts seemed to be completely useless and
| many chalked the entire category up as worthless.
| Eventually of course a lot more interesting altcoins were
| invented, and it turned out to be a great source of
| innovation, it just had a hurdle to cross first.
|
| I feel like NFTs today are roughly where altcoins were in
| 2012. Lots of good fundamentals to the ideas, but most of
| the implementations are really missing the mark. Whatever
| the NFT equivalent of Ethereum, Zcash, Sia, etc is...
| it's not here yet. And it may yet be a year or two until
| it first appears.
| okareaman wrote:
| I feel your take is the correct one. I'm old enough to
| remember when home video recorders were criticized
| because porn, but porn was just the kick off to the wider
| world of video uses and purposes.
| laingc wrote:
| > There are people who happily pay $2,000 for an Apple
| laptop. There are people who are happy with Linux on a
| $100 machine from Goodwill.
|
| This is the weirdest sentiment that I see all the time on
| HN, but enough people express it that I have to accept it
| as both widespread and genuine.
|
| However, I think that if you think $2000 US for an Apple
| laptop isn't the best value for money you can get on the
| laptop market, then you're either very good at finding
| bargains or completely bonkers.
|
| Yes, macOS is no longer for developers. Yes, for extreme
| workloads I use my linux ryzen7/2080ti or the cloud
| rather than the MBP. Yes, they had a strange couple of
| years with the keyboards.
|
| But honestly, they're the best hardware hands down. Not
| just the best absolutely, but the best per dollar. And
| personally I love macOS, but I'm just a manager these
| days so I guess I would, right?
| reaperducer wrote:
| I'm not disputing that a Mac laptop is the best hardware
| out there. I'm stating that not everyone needs it.
| They're happy with a $100 Goodwill laptop. I've always
| been someone who believes in using the best tool for the
| job at hand.
|
| FWIW, I used my Trump Bumps to buy a new MacBook for my
| wife, and I plan to use my Biden Bonus for a new MacBook
| for me. (Assuming Apple releases one with a large enough
| screen in the next six months.)
| stolenmerch wrote:
| >I get just as much enjoyment looking at them on my wall as I
| have at the museums looking at the real ones.
|
| I'm sorry, but I simply don't. Not trying to be contrarian,
| but reproductions bring me a very different joy and
| appreciation than provable originals. I agree some things in
| crypto are scams, but NFTs, in my opinion, have a really
| important function in some domains.
| dcow wrote:
| NFTs aren't the original and digital reproductions are
| perfect.
| ThomPete wrote:
| NFTs are the orginal NFTs
| fossuser wrote:
| 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.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Cryptopunks will always have mindshare as an early mover. In
| the collectible world it will maintain decent value. More than
| the original purchase prices.
|
| In many worlds, image NFTs you own are displayed with special
| indicators that they are yours. You can print out a picture of
| the Mona Lisa, but its not going to have the same impression as
| the real painting.
|
| Original Beanie Babies are worth a fortune.
|
| This craze is happening because many people realize that at the
| least, there is sustained value in first-mover NFTs of various
| types. Before dismissing this as yet another craze or bubble,
| consider that a digital world where 90% of NFTs are worthless
| is _no_ different than real life with commoditized art.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| I believe the rarepepewallet project is considerably older
| (on the crypto time scale) than cryptopunks, maybe the first
| fully functional NFT market, and operating before the term
| was even in use. but its less polished and much of the
| content is laced with various racist smells.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > NFTs make perfect sense for representing a claim on things
| that can be used, like event tickets or in-game virtual goods.
|
| There's absolutely no reason for that to be decentralized, only
| one party can honor the tokens anyways. Like most things crypto
| they don't actually make sense for anything.
| blockyhead wrote:
| Yes there is. If it is decentralized (properly), you can't be
| canceled or locked out of your account, you can trade your
| good at any time.
| jayd16 wrote:
| You still might want to hand out tokens to third parties to
| trade but not copy. I agree that a decentralized structure is
| not necessary.
| arcticbull wrote:
| If that's what you want throw a "transfer" button on your
| site. There's already a button to do this on the
| Ticketmaster app.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Agreed. I still think there's some charm to the idea that
| it can be supported passively but as you say the
| fulfilment is ultimately not passive, so it doesn't
| really gain you all that much.
| throwaway_kufu wrote:
| > If that's what you want throw a "transfer" button on
| your site.
|
| Well when you buy a ticket from ticketmaster you can't
| exactly dictate what features they offer through their
| platform...not to mention ticket master is a 3rd party
| service that they take a massive cut.
|
| blockchain is cutting these 3rd parties out in these use
| cases, allowing the event holders to easily mint the
| admission tickets and users take advantage of peer to
| peer open source technology. Meaning easily trace the
| tickets and buy/trade/sell without relying on
| Ticketmaster.
| jayd16 wrote:
| >Well when you buy a ticket from ticketmaster you can't
| exactly dictate what features they offer through their
| platform...not to mention ticket master is a 3rd party
| service that they take a massive cut.
|
| Is this an argument? We're talking about ticketmaster
| moving to a chain, why can't we talk about them moving to
| a cheaper better service that isn't based on crypto?
|
| And besides, crypto isn't free. The network takes a cut.
| Doesn't it cost like $20 to perform a transaction right
| now?
| calciphus wrote:
| The thing that makes ticketing difficult is not minting
| and selling unique items of inventory - that's a well
| understood problem with many viable solutions. Nor is
| verifying at any given moment if a single piece of
| inventory is valid and who owns it - again, that's a
| solved problem.
|
| The secondary markets in ticketing exist because there's
| an excess of demand and entities who can exploit access,
| speed, or technical know-how for arbitrage. Blockchain
| ticketing companies don't fundamentally change that
| statement - they enable it.
|
| No one likes Ticketmaster - but to call them a 3rd party
| service that takes a massive cut is inaccurate.
| Ticketmaster is owned by Live Nation, which usually owns
| both the venue and the artist's tour schedule. And owns
| the primary and secondary ticketing sales. So
| Ticketmaster is usually the first, second, _and_ third-
| party in ticketing.
|
| Blockchain doesn't magically fix this. It doesn't change
| the deep relationship Live Nation has with labels and
| artists, their fodness for excluding artists who play at
| rival and independent venues, their habit of defining
| contract requirements that can only be fulfilled by
| Ticketmaster software...
|
| Blockchain is solving all of the wrong problems in
| ticketing. I don't need a distributed, trustless ledger
| of who owns a ticket when all of them are issued by and
| redeemed at the same location. The only real reason to
| push for blockchain in ticketing is to help scalpers hide
| what they're doing.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _The secondary markets in ticketing exist because there
| 's an excess of demand_
|
| I don't buy "excess of demand" as being fundamental,
| though, except in the most technical sense. Imagine a
| super niche event, where the organizers know there are
| _exactly_ 200 fans on the entire planet, and they offer
| that many tickets on sale. It still makes sense for a
| random scalper to take a loan, buy all 200 tickets, and
| resell them with a markup. It would still make sense if
| the organizers offered 300 tickets, i.e. greater supply
| than demand in terms of heacount! A scalper could still
| come ahead buying all 300, selling 200 at a high enough
| markup, and feed the remaining 100 tickets to a cat.
|
| I think scalping (arbitrage) can occur in any situation
| in which the supplier isn't charging the maximum the
| market can bear (perhaps that's what is meant by "excess
| of demand" and I'm missing some technical definitions
| here).
| lottin wrote:
| Excess demand refers to a situation where a good is
| underpriced, resulting in a quantity demanded that
| exceeds the supply. [0]
|
| [0]
| http://www.personal.psu.edu/dxl31/econ2/pizza_market.png
| arcticbull wrote:
| People who issue tickets through Ticketmaster absolutely
| get to dictate terms. Otherwise they wouldn't use
| Ticketmaster and would use a competitor.
| dmurray wrote:
| How would you resell a stadium event ticket with a
| centralized setup? You'd need the event organiser to run the
| marketplace, which isn't always desirable.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Same way this has been happening for as long as I've been
| alive.
| Paradigma11 wrote:
| The blockchain is only infrastructure. It is an open
| decentralized cloud for financial services/contracts. Sure
| vendors could also have their own service and marketplace but
| why should they. This way they just print and sell some NFTs
| and that's it.
| sneak wrote:
| This assumes that the centralized minter (and ultimately
| redeemer) of the, say, tickets, is both willing and able to
| run a secondary marketplace for them.
|
| Those two things are not a given.
| koonsolo wrote:
| When it's owned by an external party, you might not be able
| to (easily) trade it. When it's decentralized, nobody can
| stop you from trading it.
| arcticbull wrote:
| But of course there's only one place you can redeem them.
| That means either that party is ok with transfers (in which
| case your point is moot because they can offer that
| themselves like Ticketmaster does) - or they're not ok with
| the transfer in which case they won't honor the token,
| making your point moot.
| cdata wrote:
| It is funny: there are essays in this thread, authors
| clearly breathless to explain the utility or lack thereof
| of NFTs.
|
| Yet your two sentence explanation is the most
| comprehensive.
|
| NFTs enable the possibility of a market that is orthogonal
| to the channel that distributed the token.
|
| The viability or existence of such a market is not
| guaranteed, but the likelihood that one could emerge at all
| has gone up thanks to the novel properties of NFTs.
| lloeki wrote:
| What does the tokens even mean anyway? It doesn't mean "I'm
| the owner of this one in five paper canvas art", it just
| means "I'm the owner of this one number, which someone
| decided is related to that digital piece of art for which
| there can exist infinitely many copies that are perfectly
| identical".
|
| What does it even mean? Let's say I buy a NTF $1000 and get a
| digital copy, what prevents me (barring legalities) to
| perfectly duplicate it and massively redistribute it (not the
| token, the distributed supposedly high quality file) for a
| fraction of $$$ and turn a profit (because since it had such
| a high price it must be in high demand)? The question is not
| about the legal consequences but about the thing you own: of
| you have one original painting you have only one, it's quite
| hard to exactly duplicate it for resale.
|
| I may be naive (the dropbox-is-just-rsync kind) but I've yet
| to see a tangible explanation of a use+ of CryptoArt/NFT that
| could not be done with `xxd -l 128 -p /dev/random` and
| PGP[0].
|
| + No. "being in the blockchain" brings absolutely nothing
| (except burning watts). If the author wants to reissue
| anything he readily can. You. Just. Own. A. Number. I also
| hear some picture the author getting a cut of resales of the
| token, which is even more crazy when you manage to entertain
| the thought while trying to keep a straight face.
|
| [0]: https://twitter.com/lloeki/status/1366804865943556106
| qqii wrote:
| > "I'm the owner of this one number, which someone decided
| is related to that digital piece of art for which there can
| exist infinitely many copies that are perfectly identical".
|
| Which the ARTIST has decided is a digital certificate for
| the price of art.
|
| Just I could make a duplicate of the supreme brick, my
| duplicate wouldn't have as nearly much value if I tell
| people it is a duplicate. Supreme could sell bricks again
| but they probably won't. There's nothing physical that's
| stops them but there's still an implicit agreement between
| artist and buyer.
|
| I may not wish to buy own a supreme brick, but I can at
| least understand why people find it valuable.
| kgwgk wrote:
| The all-caps "artist" brought this to my mind:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist%27s_Shit
| NoOneNew wrote:
| A can of old shit sold for EUR275,000???
|
| Jesus Christ Mary and Joesph, what is the name of all
| things pure and holy...
|
| Look, I get it outside of the money laundering scheme to
| modern art, throwing around how rich you are by buying
| "stuff". I get it. Tiny pecker syndrome. But let's stop
| and remember that Rockefeller and Carnegie, the OG
| capitalist titans, were dick measuring by donating their
| money. Sure "to the arts"... at least they were building
| halls and museums. They participated in some solid
| currency velocity that helped pay the wages to
| construction contractors. Still, they were assholes, but
| a lot better than just shoveling money between other rich
| cunts as a form of showing off.
| detaro wrote:
| > _Let 's say I buy a NTF $1000 and get a digital copy,
| what prevents me (barring legalities) to perfectly
| duplicate it and massively redistribute it (not the token,
| the distributed supposedly high quality file) for a
| fraction of $$$ and turn a profit_
|
| The file is usually publicly accessible, why would anyone
| give you money for something they can just download?
| gruez wrote:
| Why do people pay extra for signed books? A signed copy
| is literally identical to a non-signed copy aside from
| the signature ink.
| detaro wrote:
| I'm not sure how that's relevant to the question of
| reselling stuff?
| lottin wrote:
| Some rich dude has bought the "first tweet" for $2.5
| million, despite the fact that it's publicly accessible
| [0]. I imagine it's about showing off how rich they are.
| They could achieve the same result by throwing $2.5
| million into a furnace.
|
| https://twitter.com/jack/status/20
| [deleted]
| sp332 wrote:
| I don't think that's the question. That guy paid for the
| exclusive NFT thing, but no one else is going to make a
| profit selling cheap copies of that tweet.
| lottin wrote:
| Everybody who wants a copy already has one for free,
| that's what "publicly accessible" means.
| Taek wrote:
| There's no social validation in throwing $2.5 million
| into a furnace. Spending $2.5 million on a tweet means
| you are validating everyone who believes that NFT's are
| real and an industry with a promising future. Especially
| in an environment where these objects are so hyped and
| driving a lot of venture capital investment,
| participating has large social benefits.
| jameshart wrote:
| What rights do you get with 'owning' the first tweet? Who
| could you buy those rights from? Do you get any
| responsibilities along with that? Like if UNESCO declare
| the first tweet a culturally significant artifact, could
| you be held liable for allowing it to fall into
| disrepair?
|
| And what does the existence of an NFT allow you to do
| with respect to that bundle fo rights you bought that
| couldn't already be done by having someone write down a
| rights assignment on a piece of paper, sign it and hand
| it over to you in exchange for some consideration?
| lottin wrote:
| The buyer gets to own not the tweet but a "digital
| certificate of the tweet" which is the actual NFT thing.
| So what they buy is a certificate although I'm not sure
| what it certifies.
| cachvico wrote:
| It certifies two things:
|
| 1. That you paid a certain amount for the certificate.
|
| 2. That there will never be another certificate for the
| same thing, from the same brand of certificates (e.g.
| "Valuables BY CENT").
|
| Pretty much exactly like owning a baseball card, then.
| nikkwong wrote:
| But this would only make it unique on the CENT
| blockchain, no? What if another blockchain becomes the
| standard offerer, wouldn't that devalue everything on the
| CENT blockchain? Further, wouldn't we expect multiple
| blockchains to be competing to become the "primary" chain
| in which these items are deemed valuable, i.e. CENT and
| blockchain A & B & C trying to be the medium which holds
| a unique cert to Jack's first tweet. Jack's first tweet
| has a unique copy on each blockchain, but being that each
| chain has it's own NFT of jack's tweet, the digital
| certificate of the tweet is not necessarily unique. Or is
| twitter supposed to maintain their own blockchain that
| creates NFTs for each of their tweets and users are going
| to assign the most value to this chain since it's
| maintained by the company itself?
|
| Further, I don't understand how this works in music/art.
| Grimes' copy of her music is issued on Nifty Gateway, but
| isn't that art only valuable as long as users assign
| value to the Nifty Gateway platform? What stops another
| art blockchain from becoming more desirable/valuable and
| creating a NFT of Grimes' art there? Doesn't that erode
| the value of the original NFTs?
|
| What am I missing here?
| cachvico wrote:
| That's correct. Which makes it all even more absurd.
| Although the smart contracts are there forever, so at
| least it can't "go bust" (although the web front-end
| certainly could).
| lottin wrote:
| But when you buy a baseball card you get a card. Here it
| seems that you only get a receipt stating that you have
| paid (aka the certificate) AND NOTHING ELSE.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| If I understand it correctly, that receipt in conjunction
| with your keys allows you to prove you own the NFT and
| can control it on the blockchain(sell it, trade it, etc).
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| If you have essentially bought a jpeg image, you have as
| much control over it as anyone else: Anyone can view,
| transmit or edit it, etc. Your "proven purchase" grants
| you exactly nothing extra.
| lottin wrote:
| But the NFT _is_ the receipt, if I understand correctly.
| You own a receipt (the NFT), and you can trade it, but
| why are people buying and selling receipts? You make a
| payment, you get a receipt, and nothing else, which makes
| absolutely no sense. Usually, when you buy something you
| get a receipt for free and then the actual thing that you
| have bought.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| I think at that point the platform upon which the receipt
| resides will prevent people from making duplicates on
| their chain, and the owner of the receipt have control
| over buying/selling it.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > If I understand it correctly, that receipt in
| conjunction with your keys allows you to prove you own
| the NFT and can control it on the blockchain(sell it,
| trade it, etc).
|
| And one should be happy to control the receipt of their
| purchase of imaginary goods? Ok.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| Currently, when it comes to Dorsey's tweet? Yeah I agree.
| But there is more going on and it will not always be
| "imaginary goods".
|
| https://medium.com/treum_io/on-chain-artwork-
| nfts-f0556653c9...
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > it certifies ... that there will never be another
| certificate for the same thing, from the same brand of
| certificates (e.g. "Valuables BY CENT").
|
| How many "brand of certificates" are there now, and what
| is the barrier to entry?
|
| I suspect 1) several and 2) low.
|
| Also, how is "there will never be another certificate for
| the same thing, from the same brand of certificates"
| technically enforced?
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > Also, how is "there will never be another certificate
| for the same thing, from the same brand of certificates"
| technically enforced?
|
| A Merkle chain[0] append-only ledger contains a
| transaction minting the certificate, and the consistency
| rules for that Merkle chain mean that any extension of
| the chain which mints another such certificate is not
| valid (the same as a extension that spends money from a
| account with no money in it is not valid).
|
| 0: technically a blockchain specifically, but that's not
| actually relevant
| cachvico wrote:
| Correct. Although there is only one brand that has sold a
| Tweet NFT for $3mil.
|
| The enforcement, interestingly, is more traditional; the
| owners of the "Valuables by CENT" trademark can use
| existing legal structures to prevent anyone else using
| that name.
|
| Meanwhile the NFT is digitally linked to the Valuables by
| CENT smart contract on Ethereum, which will presumably
| have an 'author' property attached to it, set to the
| string "Valuables by CENT".
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > The enforcement, interestingly, is more traditional;
|
| Ah, so they pinkie swear not to do it a second time?
| cachvico wrote:
| It would be equivalent of Sotheby's starting a second
| brand competing with themselves, but yes.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Sotheby's was founded in 1744 (1). They have a track
| record, a _brand_ to maintain.
|
| Your average blockchain was founded recently, and have a
| lot less to lose taking the money and running, or popping
| up again under a new name, for a second go at the same
| shtick.
|
| 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sotheby%27s
| bakatubas wrote:
| Personally I think these should have a legal license
| associated with them. Like if the author transfers NFT it
| transfers the creative license as well (so the purchaser
| actually owns the art). For instance, Nayan Cat beanie
| babies can now only be manufactured by owner of said token,
| and whenever the new owner transfers the token the license
| goes with it. Etc.
|
| Basically, if Token == Intellectual Property ownership then
| it makes sense.
|
| This would mean if a creator, say a musician wrote a song
| and transferred the NFT and it became a wild success in the
| future, the owner would earn profits from the investment,
| but so too would the content creator receive the mentioned
| dividends proportional to the value.
| darawk wrote:
| There is a reason. Just not a technical one. It becomes
| obvious when you ask the simple question: why hasn't it
| already been done? The answer is that it's in no actor's
| local incentives to create the public commons.
|
| Why is there no global market place for reselling digital
| event tickets? Certainly Ticket master and the other
| retailers could agree on an open standard protocol, pay for a
| centralized clearing house, and create a digital market
| place. But they don't. And they don't because it isn't in any
| of their local interests to maintain such a thing.
|
| This problem, which is fundamentally social and economic in
| nature, is what is solved by smart contracts. It allows the
| creation of a public commons, not one that technically
| _couldn 't_ exist, just one that no private actor is ever
| incentivized to create.
| Traster wrote:
| The example you give - reselling tickets, is actually
| something that is directly something ticket sellers want to
| discourage, crypto doesn't solve that.
| newsclues wrote:
| If I'm in ticket selling business, if I can maintain a
| level of control with crypto I can, but back tickets and
| resell them, but most importantly I can capture any
| upside I missed by selling the tickets for too low of a
| price, and the purchaser resells the tickets for a profit
| given I get a cut of each and every transaction
| ZitchDog wrote:
| How do you guarantee the person trying to get into the
| event is the owner of the ticket?
| yreg wrote:
| They pay their token when they want to go in?
| cbovis wrote:
| They can verify ownership by signing something with the
| wallet that the token is associated to (signing is free).
| They're only able to do so if they own the private keys
| of the wallet.
|
| It should be noted that private keys can be shared if the
| owner wishes. In the case of using NFTs as event entry
| the event organizer would still need to keep a record of
| which NFTs have been used already for a given event
| because the wallet can be shared. Third party services
| will almost certainly pop up to fill this need.
| meowface wrote:
| Exactly. It'll have to be like a software license key: in
| theory you can share your key, but the service can just
| authorize and lock in the first device/entity that
| presented the license key. This kind of DRM is often
| annoying for regular customers since you may have to
| manually contact customer support in order to request a
| transfer of the license to another device you own, but it
| does help mitigate non-paid use to an extent.
|
| This could be enforced for real-life events by handing
| out a wristband with a GUID QR code to the first person
| to demonstrate they possess the private key that owns a
| particular ticket token, then never handing anything out
| for that token again, and also triggering an alert if the
| same QR code is ever seen on more than one person (to
| mitigate "pirates" who might offer identical or similar-
| looking wristband material and "replay attack" with an
| existing assigned QR code).
|
| There are probably other attacks I'm missing (including
| obvious existing stuff like people just sneaking in and
| evading wristband checks), and there are lots of
| questions about whether an NFT or decentralized
| blockchain is a smart idea for a given live event, but
| from a security perspective I think it should probably be
| feasible if an event organizer does decide they want to
| do it for whatever reason.
|
| However, there are other analogues that I think are much
| less feasible or perhaps totally infeasible. There are
| some NFT... apps? platforms? companies? DAOs? that are
| providing some service where an NFT grants you access to
| something like a restricted Discord server. Even aside
| from how valuable or sensible that may or may not be,
| there's absolutely nothing stopping a token-holder from
| just sharing their Discord account email and password
| with as many people as they want. The platform and the
| Discord servers would have no idea if anyone's doing this
| and how many people could be sharing any given account.
| (Discord employees could potentially detect some cases
| but I doubt they'd play any part in this.)
|
| For a real-life physical event, someone can't just copy
| your body and make it a shared proxy for pirating, but
| any NFT ticket use case short of in-person events is
| probably often just going to rely solely on the goodwill
| of people to not abuse/pirate things, and we all know how
| that goes - especially in anonymous online communities.
|
| The rubber-meets-the-road real-world crossover part is
| where NFTs and "Web 3.0" in general tends to become
| really shaky. I'm still mildly optimistic about it in the
| long-term, but I think a large percentage of existing use
| cases are going to fizzle as pointless dead ends that are
| surviving purely based on flavor-of-the-year hype and fad
| waves. Things are obviously stuck in one such fad right
| now.
| cnasc wrote:
| > This could be enforced for real-life events by handing
| out a wristband with a GUID QR code to the first person
| to demonstrate they possess the private key that owns a
| particular ticket token, then never handing anything out
| for that token again, and also triggering an alert if the
| same QR code is ever seen on more than one person
|
| This is quite close to what unlock-protocol[1] did for
| several conferences pre-covid. Overall it worked, though
| there are some key difficulties: gas prices make
| interesting on-chain things too expensive for most
| people, and wallet ergonomics aren't great for this sort
| of thing.
|
| (I am a former unlock-protocol employee)
|
| [1] https://unlock-protocol.com/blog/checking-key-in
| notahacker wrote:
| And there's always a necessary third party to a p2p
| ticket exchange anyway: the entity that actually puts on
| the event the ticket gives entry to. Where they want
| ticket exchange (or at least refunds) to be possible they
| can do so in a centralised manner and when they don't,
| they're not a middleman that can be cut out.
| meowface wrote:
| One could imagine it being a kind of emergent community-
| organized event, somewhat modeling a decentralized peer-
| to-peer network itself. There will still technically be
| at least one intermediary of a sort, but hypothetically
| the only real intermediary could be restricted to the
| single person or group who initially proposes the event
| and issues the batch of ticket NFTs.
|
| There are plenty of major concerns here, like how
| security and access are physically enforced if there are
| no official organizers or designated volunteers, but in
| theory you could maybe distribute a phone app so everyone
| is automatically scanning for unauthorized people, and
| just rely on physically capable attendees and police to
| deal with potential security incidents. Still probably a
| recipe for utter Fyre Festival-esque disaster and
| lawsuits in many cases, but feasible in theory.
| qqii wrote:
| Why would that be so? My understanding is that they want
| to discourage scalping.
|
| Digital tickets tied to digital identities that can only
| be transfered at market price. That's not a difficult
| smart contact to create.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Scalping is also selling tickets at market price - after
| first making sure the market price is a big multiple of
| what it was before scalpers got to work.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| When it comes to in game items... why should one game honor
| another game's items? EVE Online and World of Warcraft dont
| exist in the same context. Even if you did it between Guild
| Wars, Elder Scrolls online and WoW, you still cant
| interchange the items due to stats, style and general game
| mechanics let alone the coding rework to have these items
| function the same way between games.
|
| If there was an mmo framework that is shared between
| different games, I guess. But even then, why have a universal
| currency instead of just making it framework/platform
| specific? It's less work and is all handled in a fast
| centralized DB. At that why create the extra work of PoW or
| PoS or whatever algorithm solving process it'll use.
| currencyAmount += tradedAmount is way easier and makes more
| sense on the game dev side.
|
| All these anti NFT arguments amount to is, "This is
| solutionism at its finest, but people already bought koolaid
| in bulk...so enjoy the show."
| meowface wrote:
| In my opinion, it only has the possibility of making any
| sense if a game itself is (largely or entirely) an Ethereum
| dapp. I think a WoW NFT would make zero sense (and I think
| Blizzard would agree, barring the hypothetical potential of
| trying to exploit a fad purely for extra profit), but an
| NFT representing an asset in your Ethereum-based Second
| Life "d-game" could possibly make some sense. I know some
| dapp games exist and more will be made, but I'm not sure
| how practical or fun they are or can be.
|
| Even then, there are still a lot of questions: what makes
| the d-game actually interesting/novel/unique/fun and an
| appropriate, creative, and clever use of a decentralized
| blockchain.
|
| And although I mostly agree with this essay and the Medium
| essay it's referencing about environmental impact, I do
| think NFTs have some potential use cases outside of games,
| art, and bilking greedy people. I think those use cases
| just have to be a little further along the "blockchain from
| end-to-end" spectrum.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| I dont know about theres a "use".
|
| Remember that crowdfunded, over engineered juicer? It was
| some $400 and claimed to do like 100 pounds of force on a
| pre-juiced juice packet to squeeze into a glass for you.
| Some other article showed you can just squeeze these
| packs by hand into your glass with barely any force. This
| was "the Keurig" of juicing.
|
| Total shit show of over engineering and solutionism.
|
| I see the same thing with crypto and NFTs _currently_.
| Everytime I have this discussion in person, I always say
| that I do believe there will be a viable digital currency
| of some sort in the near future. The current gen of tech
| has proved the _want_ , which is important, but now a
| real _how_ is needed along with commonsense.
|
| Like, theres a real want for an easy to go, healthy
| juice. Just bottle it and sell it that way. Why go
| through the extra step of a juicer if the shit is already
| juiced. I won't doubt their drinks were good. But they
| got caught up in solutionism gimmicks. Digital currencies
| are caught up in the blockchain gimmick.
| arcticbull wrote:
| The want it proved is people want to get rich fast. It's
| important not to mistake want for wealth, for want for
| NFTs.
| runarberg wrote:
| Looks like artists aren't quite making money either:
|
| https://twitter.com/isyourguy/status/1366176796996112385
| lazzlazzlazz wrote:
| > it seems like this is going to be 90% bubble (with plenty of
| hucksters), and 10% real use cases that stand the test of time
|
| All the most interesting developments in computing start like
| this. This is good. The future is being born now and not
| without the required creative destruction.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| Not sure why you're downvoted. You're exactly right. This is
| how new frontiers always are.
|
| Lots of hype, most of which never pans out, with a core of
| projects that change the world.
| thinkingkong wrote:
| Maybe NFTs for collectibles isnt ideal but Im wondering if there
| are some more - lets say - utilitarian uses of this concept that
| we havent discussed yet. The other day I tried buying a bike. Id
| really like to know it wasnt stolen, and somehow being able to
| tie a real world representation into a virtual single item good
| would be somewhat useful.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The be your own bank headaches that most people can't handle
| will then apply. You need to spend a lot of money on gas fees,
| hardware wallets etc and get a good grounding in cyber
| security. Or just get a lock and bike insurance.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| This all assumes most people care about buying a stolen bike or
| not. Maybe you care, and maybe I care, but I'm sure there are
| plenty of people that really don't give a shit and are thinking
| "it's a cheap bike and I don't have the luxury of money or time
| to care, I've got to get to work".
| TheDong wrote:
| Bikes have unique serial numbers. https://bikeindex.org runs a
| free website to let you lookup serial numbers and mark them as
| stolen, and there's also various other regional websites that
| do a similar sort of thing.
|
| If you want to buy a bike, make sure it has a serial number
| (and if the number was filed off, then yes it was probably
| stolen), and look it up on the index.
|
| How would an NFT be better than the above database in any way?
|
| I do think the bikeindex could be run better (fewer regional
| websites, a database we can download for archival purposes,
| sharing of information between multiple registries), but all of
| those things seem like they're easier and cheaper to do without
| a blockchain or NFTs.
|
| Rather than do something like NFTs, they could do what the
| certificate transparency project does, and just dictate "here's
| the data format, here's how you share data", and get all the
| benefits I can think of with none of the downsides or
| ecological waste.
|
| For what it's worth, there is evidence that such a database can
| be made and work in a similar case, since car registrations,
| transfers, etc are all quite well handled with no NFTs.
| lmm wrote:
| An NFT is inherently decentralized, maintained by multiple
| independent parties, and more or less tamper-proof. That
| database is only as resilient as the organisation running it
| (or maybe less, plenty of organisations have lost their
| databases before), and presumably there are corruptible
| humans with write access to it.
| TheDong wrote:
| The certificate transparency project has the same
| attributes you mention to my knowledge.
|
| There is the problem of correct data, but I don't
| understand how an NFT manages to make data correct. How do
| I prove to the NFT that I own the bike with SN 123? How do
| I prove it was stolen?
|
| I'd love if we replaced the bikeindex with a certificate
| transparency project-esque system and each large bike
| manufacturer ran an instance.
|
| That also seems like it would be vastly easier to create
| than having people use the bike-stolen-registry-NFT you're
| talking about, and as a bonus it would be far less
| wasteful.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| It seems like it would optimally require the manufacturer
| to participate in creating a token representing that
| serial number and assigning it to the person who bought
| the bike who would have to transfer it to the next owner
| and so forth.
| growse wrote:
| And so when I sell my bicycle to someone (and write them
| a receipt) but forget to do the weird token transfer
| thing, who owns the bike?
|
| In the eyes of the law, the guy holding the bike and the
| receipt owns it. What the NFT says is irrelevant.
|
| So how are NFTs useful again?
| michaelmrose wrote:
| If they had been out long enough to be pervasive you
| could require all online marketplaces ebay,offer up,
| facebooks etc which are commonly used to traffic stolen
| goods to upload an NFT as part of the transfer whose
| description matches the item being sold which is
| transferred with the good.
|
| It would be like requiring every good sold to have a
| trivially electronically verifiably accurate original
| receipt that only someone who acquired it illegitimately
| would lack.
| lmm wrote:
| Certificates still have the problem of who your trusted
| root is, and don't (by themselves) solve provenance
| issues - if two people have certificates for the same
| bicycle then there's no way to choose between them,
| whereas an NFT inherently has an auditable chain of
| custody going all the way back to the original issuer
| (presumably the bike manufacturer in this case) and
| digitally signed at each stage.
|
| I'd love it if these industries/communities adopted log-
| structured distributed datastores with digital signing to
| track provenance of things without wasteful "mining". But
| the fact is that they've shown no willingness to do so,
| and it's a lot harder to bootstrap a system like this -
| if your system relies on a trusted root then you need the
| trust before you can start to develop the system at all,
| but users have no reason to trust the system until it's
| all fully running and proven.
| dingaling wrote:
| > How would an NFT be better than the above database in any
| way?
|
| It wouldn't depend on the benevolence of a third-party
| absorbing the cost of running the index.
|
| It would be geographically and culturally agnostic. Zoom out
| here and notice how little of the World's population is
| involved: https://map.bikewise.org/#0/84/-77
|
| It would be globally unique and would not require the
| cooperation of manufacturers. Neither of my two bikes has a
| serial number because they're 'too old'. Other bikes have
| conflicting serial numbers.
|
| It would eliminate the privacy and security risks of
| maintaining a central database of PII and associated valuable
| assets.
| __float wrote:
| > It would be geographically and culturally agnostic
|
| Who's to say everyone is using the same NFTs for this? We
| already see a variety of different platforms for NFT art.
|
| > It would eliminate the privacy and security risks of
| maintaining a central database of PII and associated
| valuable assets.
|
| How are there now fewer privacy and security risks when the
| entire blockchain is completely public? Where's the
| privacy?
| handmodel wrote:
| I still am confused by this though. If the
| police/government don't acknowledge this then you can't
| really get it back without a fight.
|
| Wouldn't you rather just have it run by an entity the legal
| system can point to?
|
| If you don't trust the legal system...then I really doubt
| that having a third-party website is going to help you with
| a bike thief in anyway.
| j4yav wrote:
| How would you prove to a blockchain that a particular
| serial number really is owned by you, or was lost, or all
| the other things that can happen that don't occur on the
| blockchain? Aren't you sort of back to needing the
| cooperation of lots of different entities globally, and
| some kind of authority equivalent to the third party
| database maintainer to ensure the data makes sense?
| grey-area wrote:
| No instead it would foist that externality on the entire
| world in the form of carbon emissions and depend on the
| highly uncertain future value of a cryptocurrency.
|
| _And_ it would still require a third party to benevolently
| run an app to search and make sense of the data from the
| ledger, and also to verify that the data inserted was
| actually real and not poisoning the db.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| It's another example of the title problem. You can think of
| it in a similar to how VINs work for cars, or ESNs work for
| phones. In those cases, there's a centralized database that
| tracks whether things are stolen or not. It's possible that
| NFTs could be a decent way to handle supply chain auditing of
| this variety, considering it's just rebirthing a process that
| already exists but in a more analogue form.
|
| The advantage over something like bikeindex is that you could
| make the transfer process a lot more seamless. You could
| build things like escrowing into the protocol, so when
| someone sells a bike to you on craigslist, you have a nice
| clean transactional system which adds some nice anti-fraud
| measures and protections for you without necessarily
| requiring you to buy it from a store or marketplace to gain
| those protections.
| analog31 wrote:
| I actually had a similar idea, last time the theft of a famous
| painting was reported in the news. The museum could offer a
| deal, where they get the painting back but give the thieves a
| certificate for it. As part of the deal, they have to hang a
| sign next to the painting, saying, "This painting is considered
| to be stolen."
|
| The thieves can do whatever they want with the certificate --
| use it to pay illicit debts and so forth. They can visit their
| painting at the museum, and brag to their friends about it. But
| the rest of the public still gets to enjoy the painting too.
|
| Now closer to home, I'm a musician and play a modestly valuable
| instrument. I've thought of taking really high resolution
| images of it, because the grain pattern of the wood is
| practically like a fingerprint, and would be difficult to
| conceal without destroying the instrument. A database with hi-
| res pictures of valuable instruments would be like a serial
| number database for bikes.
| smt88 wrote:
| > _The thieves can do whatever they want with the certificate
| -- use it to pay illicit debts and so forth. They can visit
| their painting at the museum, and brag to their friends about
| it. But the rest of the public still gets to enjoy the
| painting too._
|
| I love this answer because it's a perfect analogy to explain
| why NFTs are total nonsense.
|
| Owning a one-of-a-kind, literally irreplaceable painting
| cannot be substituted for a certificate. The certificate has
| zero value because it does not allow the owner to restrict
| access to the original painting.
|
| The core concept of ownership (control over a scarce
| resource) is violated as soon as you start trading a
| certificate instead of the original item.
|
| It's like someone saying that owning the last remaining
| Michael Jordan baseball card is the same as owning Michael
| Jordan, and that both have the same value. It's ludicrous.
| throwaway_kufu wrote:
| > The core concept of ownership (control over a scarce
| resource) is violated as soon as you start trading a
| certificate instead of the original item.
|
| That's entirely how our markets are run. Nearly all stock
| is owned by a few trusts and what everyone is trading
| everyday are "certificates" of the original stock
| certificates.
|
| Even big ticket items like cars or homes, they really
| aren't worth anything without a clean title or deed. On the
| other hand people buy deeds all the time without ever
| seeing the actual property.
| smt88 wrote:
| Stock ownership is backed by the legal system. It also
| has a ledger that must be settled and sent to the
| government.
|
| Stock ownership gives you dividends and votes, too. You
| can sue for these things if they aren't given to you.
|
| Cars and homes are things I can physically interacg with.
|
| Digital certificates of digital goods have none of those
| qualities. If you do get any legal rights when you own
| them, it's not any different than copyright, which we've
| already seen is essentially impossible to enforce for
| digital works.
| analog31 wrote:
| Note that I wouldn't endorse owning a person, but whether
| they have the same value is a matter of whether they have
| the same utility. Leaving the painting in the museum might
| make the certificate _more_ valuable for all we know,
| because it ensures that the painting will be stored
| properly and not forgotten by the public.
|
| Honestly I didn't even think about a _definition_ of
| ownership when coming up with my idea.
| setr wrote:
| You could do the same thing today, offering a certificate of
| authenticity or whatever, validated by the relevant comunnaly
| accepted authority, and it would be be just as baffling and
| nonsensical an offer. The certificate is not the weilder of
| value , even if it were required for the object itself to be
| valuable (eg originality).
|
| With an NFT I don't even know what you're certifying, except
| that this one chain says you own the object. In your example
| that's not even true, the museum "owns" it, yet the thieves
| have it, and the NFT is now just as flawed as today's
| understanding of ownership.
| j4yav wrote:
| Couldn't the thieves just make a new NFT blockchain that says
| they own whatever they like and skip the messy steps in the
| middle? You'd end up at the same end state where the museum
| has a painting and the thieves have a certificate that says
| they own it.
| analog31 wrote:
| Since the theft is newsworthy, it would be clear that only
| the first NFT was genuine.
| 627467 wrote:
| I agree that most NFTs will be mostly useless outside of certain
| conditions. Ie. If I want to play a blockchain-based game NFTs in
| that game will be valuable because my client and other player
| client to the game is forced to accept that toke legitimacy. But
| outside of the blockchain-world? What's the point of a NFTs? I
| guess this who care to brag that they overpaid for a png or
| mp3...
|
| But I feel this post is another excuse to accuse cryptoassets of
| wasting energy. Up until 10 years of so ago detractors tried to
| tarnish cryptoassets reputations by associating it with
| traditional crime. Now they do it by trying to associate it with
| climate crime.
| fumblebee wrote:
| > ... detractors tried to tarnish cryptoassets reputations by
| associating it with traditional crime. Now they do it by trying
| to associate it with climate crime.
|
| Help me understand, are you suggesting these aren't the case,
| or that they aren't legitimate concerns?
| jhonovich wrote:
| One major distinction between cards and other physical
| collectibles is that they come bundled with the implicit
| protection of the legal system on others making more physical
| copies (i.e., counterfeiting). So if one owns a rare card, others
| can see pictures of it, but they cannot make their own physical
| copy (backed by the legal system and threat of being arrested).
| This is unlike the NRT / digital side where making identical
| copies (sans blockchain) is perfectly legal.
| blinding-streak wrote:
| With ETH based NFT markets (which is the majority as far as I can
| tell) there seems to be a lot of sticker shock around ETH gas
| fees [1].
|
| Fundamental transactions like minting new NFTs or buying/selling
| can be expensive depending on network conditions at the moment.
| It's not uncommon to see gas fees of $40-$60 to make a single NFT
| purchase [2].
|
| [1] https://ethgasstation.info/
|
| [2] https://coingeek.com/the-ridiculously-high-cost-of-gas-on-
| et...
| ikeboy wrote:
| Tldr: proof of stake is a climate disaster because it rewards
| those who already have money, which means those without money
| will get hurt more by climate change.
|
| Yes, this is the actual argument made in the underlying post that
| this is blogspam for.
|
| >I'm sure you're seeing the problem here- there is not a schema
| that doesn't reward those who already are already wealthy, who
| are already bought in, who already have excess capital or access
| to outsized computational power. Almost universally they grant
| power to the already powerful. This is also a climate issue.
| Climate justice is social justice. This is true in that the worst
| impacts of climate collapse are felt by those with no means to
| avoid them, while those with resources easily fuck on off to
| somewhere where they don't have to see it.
| jamesscaur wrote:
| I've been reading a lot of pro-NFT opinions recently. This is a
| nice counter.
| stevebmark wrote:
| When cryptocurrency became popular, it was hard to imagine a more
| poorly designed system. Generating random numbers, continuous
| guessing, to verify a ledger? That's the culmination of decades
| of algorithm and performance knowledge?
|
| Then smart contracts took the stage, and we realized they were an
| even worse idea than cryptocurrency. Permanently lose access to
| your money by locking it into a buggy computer program? How could
| we lose?
|
| And now NFTs are the new worst idea. It's somehow made the
| fundamentally terrible random number generation idea of
| cryptocurrency worse.
|
| The collapse can't come soon enough.
| m0netize wrote:
| The author is confused about what an NFT is. It's simply a
| verifiable digital claim about 'anything'. It also happens to be
| a token that is easy to transact with, i.e., buy and sell.
|
| I think the author is just complaining what someone is willing to
| pay (and is paying) for NFTs. This argument comes up all the
| time, especially regarding items that have mostly status value.
|
| The answer to that is simple, anyone can pay whatever it's worth
| to them. It's none of the authors business. Stop complaining.
|
| There are artists and creators who have worked for years and
| never made a dime from their art. NFTs have changed their lives.
| NFTs create instant markets for any digital item, giving them
| value. And there are no middlemen.
|
| The author is missing the beauty of this creative explosion and
| opportunity. Look into it for yourself and you'll see. Either
| that or stay poor.
| ganafagol wrote:
| Read the first few paragraphs. Still don't know what an NFT is.
| elif wrote:
| People looking at NFTs as beanie babies or mona lisas are
| severely missing the point.
|
| The vast majority of high value art transactions are ALSO
| tax/asset management activities. The prices are only loosely
| coupled with the art, and are primarily derived from the scarcity
| AND the fact that someone else paid $x in the past.
|
| The fact that you purchase these with cryptocurrency should
| highlight the use case.
| dcow wrote:
| I agree with the author's premise but find the crypto argument at
| the end weak at best and misleading at worst. I don't see how
| NFTs will ever be responsible for any remotely significant slice
| of the raw energy usage of the blockchain they might be
| implemented atop. Or, if you implemented a blockchain solely for
| an NFT, how it would ever get to a scale of energy consumption
| that is prohibitive or wasteful.
| rchaud wrote:
| I was disappointed to see many of the artists I follow on social
| media filling my timeline with talk of 'crypto art' and NFTs. I
| understand that art is hard to monetize, especially when original
| designs can be stolen and reproduced by some anonymous faker.
|
| But digital-only art is already expensive, and adding this NFT
| stuff on top of it feels pointless. Who but the artist thinks
| this adds an element of unique-ness to the product? Nobody will
| be buying crypto kitties at Sotheby's to impress their friends at
| their abode in the Hamptons. And impressing others with your
| taste is half the point when it comes to collecting expensive
| stuff.
| rasz wrote:
| NFTs are 21st century Dadaism.
| fenk85 wrote:
| Am I missing something here but would NFTs be perfect use case
| for ownership of a decryption/DRM key for music/video/game ?
|
| Seems like a technology that actually could solve a those
| industries have
| Jan454 wrote:
| I know there are some cryptocoins that actually do _useful_
| calculations.
|
| Maybe we should all strive for some kind of open standard with
| which every interested party can get their calculations
| calculated as the proof of work (e.g. cancer detection, seti,
| dna-analyses, ai-training, ..).
| sradman wrote:
| This article by the author/podcaster Seth Godin [1] highlights
| the issues with Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) [2], built on the
| Ethereum cryptocurrency. It extends the ideas introduced in an
| Everest Pipkin post [3]:
|
| > Cryptocurrencies and NFTs are an absolute disaster for so many
| more reasons than the ecological.
|
| The ecological issue is due to the energy consumption required to
| perform (some^) cryptocurrency computations.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Godin
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token
|
| [3] https://everestpipkin.medium.com/but-the-environmental-
| issue...
|
| ^EDIT: added "(some)" cryptocurrency computations based on
| Tenoke's comment
| Tenoke wrote:
| Except there are non-ETH NFTs which don't consume much
| electricity and the author is specifically talking about some
| of them - like NBA Topshots - while pretending they all have
| large consumption.
| [deleted]
| resters wrote:
| Youtube has been successful even though most videos are watched a
| dozen times or so.
|
| NFTs are a parallel copyright system. The market price of an NFT
| that violates meatspace copyright law would be a function of the
| relevance and enforceability of the law/jurisdiction in question.
|
| The shortcomings cited by the author are critiques of the
| distriution of market prices, but there is no alternative
| proposed. Of course most Youtube videos get a handful of views,
| and of course most NFTs will be nearly worthless. That concern is
| orthogonal to the question of whether NFTs offer some benefits
| over traditional copyright mechanisms.
| cbovis wrote:
| One of the issues I see around NFTs is simply a misunderstanding
| of what they are at a fundamental level and the constraints which
| exist. The lack of understanding is causing hyperbole and flat
| out mistakes in online discussion around the topic.
|
| Some truths:
|
| * NFT is simply an idea; non-fungible token. The idea is that of
| a certificate of authenticity.
|
| * The most prominent implementation of the NFT idea is the
| ERC-721 standard on the Ethereum blockchain.
|
| * The ERC-721 standard simply defines a common interface for
| verification of ownership (validity of the certificate of
| authenticity) and transfer of ownership -
| https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721
|
| * The ERC-721 standard allows for a token to be purchased in one
| market place and sold in another. The same way an email can be
| sent from a gmail server and received on a proton mail server.
|
| * The ERC-721 standard allows any party to verify that a given
| Ethereum address (wallet) owns a particular token. It allows
| anyone with the private key of that wallet to verify their
| ownership of the wallet and therefore the token.
|
| * The private key can be shared with anyone in the same way a
| physical certificate of ownership could be replicated and shared
| with others given sufficient resources to perform the
| replication.
|
| * The underlying implementation of an ERC-721 compliant smart
| contract (think token owner registry) is up to the developer. The
| simplest implementation would be an array of Ethereum wallet
| addresses where each index of the array represents an individual
| token and its corresponding value represents the owner. Just a
| lookup.
|
| * If the ERC-721 standard is being followed then there is only a
| single "owner" of the token. Multiple owners are not supported by
| the standardised interface.
|
| * Other standards exist and will likely be created in the future.
| Their success will be determined by network effects.
|
| * A different NFT standard to ERC-721 COULD assign value of a
| single token to multiple owners. I would argue that this token is
| no longer an NFT :shrug:
|
| * NFTs are not JPGs, GIFs, tickets, or pointers to an owned item.
| They are simply some kind of ownership entry in a smart contract
| stored on a trusted ledger (the blockchain). They're collectibles
| in the sense that a wallet can collect them.
|
| * The value of an NFT lies solely in the external value assigned
| to an individuals ability to verify ownership of the token
| through a private key. For an art piece this might provide access
| to an exclusive real world event, the ability to hang the art
| piece in a virtual world, bragging rights etc.
|
| * The external value can change over time. Right now you may
| "own" a GIF but in ten years time the artist may host an
| exclusive event and invite token holders.
|
| * The standardised interface means that anyone can assign value
| to a given token. A cryptokitty is minted by dapper labs but can
| be used in any environment which recognises the token as a
| "thing". For example this could be a virtual world or any number
| of games.
|
| * A new platform can sort of bootstrap liquidity by supporting an
| existing type of NFT (e.g. cryptokitties, punks etc.). One of a
| new MMORPG's value proposition may be that they have integrated
| hundreds or thousands of popular types of virtual items to be
| used within their world.
|
| * As such, Dapper Labs could go bust and disappear but a
| cryptokitty could have value in other environments beyond this
| event. The standardised interface means that a cryptokitty can
| continue to be bought and sold beyond the lifetime of Dapper
| Labs.
|
| * NFTs cannot be copied, replicated, cloned. Private keys can be
| shared and therefore access to the NFTs value COULD be shared.
|
| * Based on the above points, hopefully it's clear that a given
| NFT cannot be minted multiple times. If the artist mints three
| NFTs then each one is unique. Each could have different external
| value assigned to it (or the same).
| krsdcbl wrote:
| I don't quite get this post, it somehow seems to make a case FOR
| nfts and then try to make the point that these are not look likr
| stocks (which is rather obvious).
|
| The whole point of nfts is to create uniqueness among endlessly
| duplicatable media, and provide the possibility for digital art
| to be handled like physical art.
|
| Just like the Mona Lisa, you can look at endless photos of it
| without restriction, but only one person can actually own it -
| the article correctly points out that nfts enable the same
| principle to hold true for digital goods, and then goes on to
| argue that this is bad because doesn't provide any passive return
| to the collector, which holds true for physical collectibles all
| the same ...
| frobisher wrote:
| The Mona Lisa is a physical "rivalrous" good, meaning if I own
| it, you cannot.
|
| Digital goods are "non-rivalrous", so although NFTs can give a
| psychological feeling of ownership, I wouldn't say they make
| digital goods rivalrous.
|
| I think digital NFTs only make sense in two ways: (1)
| psychological feelings of ownership, (2) perhaps a claim on
| something digital that _can_ be made rivalrous, for instance
| royalty streams. If these are subject to a smart contract that
| ensures one entity gets them, for example.
| TheColorYellow wrote:
| Digital ownership expressed through blockchain could
| certainly make it more difficult for others to own the good.
| This would be dependent on the configuration of the NFT, but
| if done this way it certainly would meet the definition of a
| rivalrous good.
|
| Music that requires you to present a private key in order to
| play it would meet that configuration, for example.
| electriclove wrote:
| Scarcity and print # allow for making them rivalrous (e.g.,
| only 200 numbered cards).
|
| Royalty models have been tried where the owner of the
| original receives 90% of the sale of a digital print. See
| eulerbeats.com
|
| Basically, I agree with your points and there are already
| active efforts in these areas that will make some NFT efforts
| very viable.
| scsilver wrote:
| Do people own the mona lisa in their home or do they have a
| curator hold it for them and their ownership is backed by a
| contract in the current legal system?
| kart23 wrote:
| Are NFTs actually decentralized? I heard they run on the ethereum
| network, but not too sure if thats universal. Also, what happens
| if someone starts uploading illegal content? Is there a method
| for deletion once an NFT is 'minted'?
| detaro wrote:
| Ethereum is the most common, but not the only blockchain people
| build NFTs on.
|
| As far as I understand, for space reasons they usually do not
| put the actual content on the chain, but a pointer to it (e.g.
| a hash that can be looked up on IPFS).
|
| AFAIK other blockchain things solve the illegal content problem
| by having lists of content they'll not show and that appears to
| have been enough for now. (e.g. there's been various
| blockchain-based social media projects that had the same
| question long ago)
| cma wrote:
| Why not batch these with a hash to a list of hashes? Is it
| that one extra level of indirection makes it too hard to
| explain to friends and newcomer investors what you own?
| Andy_G11 wrote:
| If non-fungibility is just a constraint of current technology
| protocols, and these protocols could be extended in time to allow
| exchange of larger swathes of tokens of different degrees of
| dissimilarity then the only things stopping this at the moment
| would seem to be demand - is that right? I.e. if Joe owned a
| uniquely verifiable, exchangeable and trackable piece of code,
| and so did Mary, then both of these codes could be pooled on the
| same market no matter how they differed within the constraints
| allowed by the protocols for verification, exchange and tracking?
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| The article references a fishy source for its claims of the
| ,,astonishingly" high carbon foot print. That web site
| ,,cryptoart.wtf" does not site any source on how it derives its
| carbon foot print numbers.
|
| Probably, they are derived from the claim Bitcoin consumed as
| much energy as Argentina. First of all, NFTs are minted on the
| Ethereum blockchain where mining is still much cheaper. Second,
| energy usage does not simply equate carbon foot print which is a
| function of geolocation and hardware efficiency.
|
| However, I found a nice peer reviewed article on the estimate of
| Bitcoin's carbon foot print:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243511...
|
| It's from 2019 and states that the whole Bitcoin blockchain emits
| the carbon dioxide equivalent of Kansas City.
|
| I am not aware of similar analysis on Ethereum but I guess one
| could use the Bitcoin number and scale it down quite a bit.
| qeternity wrote:
| The arguments made by people around NFTs strike me as suffering
| from the same maximalism that people apply to decentralization
| and inflation.
|
| Digital is not always better than physical. Decentralized is not
| always better than centralized. Deflationary is not always better
| than inflationary.
|
| All of these exist in a continuum, each with costs and benefits
| depending on a number of other external factors.
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| It would be really awesome if there was a digital exchange that
| dealt in multi use media. I would love to be able to buy an
| album, image, movie, 3D model, etc directly from the creators and
| then own the rights to use for whatever their content license
| allows. And then I could then resell that content and the
| original content creator would get an originator fee from the
| transactions. Some new data formats may need to exist because I
| would like to share my media with my license and the content
| creators license/copywrite intact.
| seibelj wrote:
| I think all of this will happen, it just takes time. Crypto is
| entering a more mainstream and useful phase right now, but it
| will take another 5 to 10 years for entrepreneurs to really
| make the future.
| sgt101 wrote:
| Crypto == destroy planet is an important meme.
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| So, lets think, we have following issues:
|
| - Climate change
|
| - Artificial general intelligence
|
| - Biotechnology risk
|
| - Ecological collapse
|
| - Molecular nanotechnology
|
| - Nuclear holocaust
|
| - Overpopulation
|
| - Global pandemic
|
| - ...
|
| Most of them caused by way we use our energy and time.
|
| Oh, yes we also have excess of computing power ... hm what shell
| we do?
|
| Solution: Let spend even more energy on large calculations in
| order to create meaningless random numbers.
| [deleted]
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Some of the items on this list - namely AGI, biotech, nanotech
| - are actually not problems; they're dangerous, but very
| desirable developments.
|
| Agree with the gist of your comment, though.
| [deleted]
| qqii wrote:
| This idea that we need to be perfect optimisers is foolish and
| pure whataboutism . You could say the same for any
| recreational, non productive activity.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Obvious solution to everything(to me) is to establish on-orbit
| 3D print space colony manufacturing by the end of this century
| to boldly go with.
|
| Wanna spend silly amount of energy on fake Internet points?
| Totally fine! Just buy a bunch of cylinders and do it there.
| Makes more sense anyway because they come with batteries too.
| pmlnr wrote:
| Teaching people that being "rich" is not a goal would help in
| the progress. The goal is enough: a point when one still
| yearns, so they can progress, but they don't suffer or live in
| fear for losing warmth, shelter, food, etc. But this idea seems
| far from the majority of the US mindset, and it's polluting
| many parts of the world as well.
| Joeboy wrote:
| "Shelter" sounds like a modest expectation, but at least for
| me, and a lot of other people, a decent level of "shelter"
| requires you to be pretty well off. The average house here in
| the UK costs PS~305k, so a mortgage on that requires like 30k
| deposit + 60k income, which means being a top 10% earner.
| I've no real aspiration to be "rich" in a superyacht sense,
| but I would like to be able to remain in my home city and own
| a modest flat, which requires me to be rich.
| leppr wrote:
| Good point. In most modern cities, the only individualistic
| solution to escape eternal rent-slavery (forgive the strong
| word) is to become rich.
|
| A collectivist solution would be to coordinate with other
| citizens to abolish the building/zoning restrictions and
| savings devaluation enforced by local and national
| governments, that cause the constant real estate price
| inflation in the first place.
| satyrnein wrote:
| Unfortunately, the "other citizens" are the ones who want
| the zoning restrictions.
| leppr wrote:
| Since most governance schemes favor entrenched players,
| there's a natural tendency for policies resulting in
| pyramid schemes to emerge.
|
| The first step is to educate enough people around this
| issue, so that some opportunistic countries/cities can
| become competitive at attracting residents using fairer
| policies as a differentiator.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| The solution is simple: build more houses to increase
| supply. It needs to be said: _there is a drastic shortage
| of decent housing in the UK_. The cost of building a new
| house is approaching less than half the final sale price
| (if not even less) simply due to pressure from scarcity.
|
| Why aren't people building as many new houses as there's
| clearly demand? Numerous factors: greenbelt laws, height
| restrictions, "Right to light", NIMBYism, etc. I don't
| believe I've seen either major political party advance a
| policy of making it easier to build new houses - or tall
| tower blocks (the _nice_ kind, not the 1960s council flag
| blocks), I suspect because it would result in immediate
| uproar from the Daily Mail-reading types who can't bear to
| see their house-values fall (I think Sunday Observer types
| would be a bit miffed too, if not about house prices then
| certainly the ecological impact: having lived in multiple
| countries in my life I noticed the "rural-rights" types
| that advocate preserving hedgerows and rambling access have
| a considerably larger influence in UK politics compared to
| other countries).
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| It is not so simple, let me give example, in UK during
| pandemic prices hyped by 30%. Reason is, rich own land
| and properties, but they own them on account of debt and
| cash flow. Some people have more than 100,000 properties
| in their portfolio, and they relying on cash flow. So, if
| anything disturbing happen let say pandemic kills lots of
| people (or they lose their jobs) and no one rents
| anymore, then next thing that will collapse are banks, as
| Banks cannot get their money back. Next thing is
| government collapsing. In order to maintain this
| structure, or protect it from collapsing, during each
| economic crises government pumps more money (subsidies,
| interest free money, free money) to the rich. What they
| do? They buy even more properties. So, basically on
| account of the blackmail-standoff-ransom-situation, they
| siphoning all the properties from the market. Regardless
| how many properties you make in UK they will buy them
| all, as they buying them with additional debt - and in
| that way protecting their renting business. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| [deleted]
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Desire for superiority over other people is instinctive. I
| don't believe it's something that can be "taught" out of
| existence.
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| citation needed
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| The voice of reason right until the end. The world has
| problems. Lets blame the US. Even if you are right, it will
| help nobody to say so.
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| not that i don't think your points aren't good just that
| finger-pointing is a bit destructive.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > - Artificial general intelligence
|
| Not only we don't have AGI but there is an ongoing discussion
| whether it's possible to have it at all.
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| If we had it (AI), talking about dangers of having it, would
| be too late (as human intelligence cannot argue with god
| intelligence)
|
| It is simple, as ant cannot contain human, in the same way
| humans won't be able to contain AGI. Can it exist, yes it can
| - simply, can me and you think, yes. In a way we are
| "device", so therefore, it is possible to make intelligence
| similar and/or more powerful than our is.
| Egrodo wrote:
| Bro this made like no sense.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| At first I thought it was generated by GPT-3, but then I
| realized GPT-3 generally generates coherent content.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| > In a way we are "device", so therefore, it is possible to
| make intelligence similar and/or more powerful than our is.
|
| I mean, yes, I can have a child and raise her to be smarter
| than me, but I don't really think that's what you have in
| mind.
|
| The strong AGI proponents always resort to hand-waving and
| dubious analogies. There's no reason to think that building
| ever-larger ML models will produce an intelligence capable
| of comprehension and insights like a human mind unless you
| believe the human brain is nothing more than a bunch of
| weighted vectors.
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| I am just simply stating, if it (bionic intelligence)
| already exist - another (artificial) can be built. I am
| not saying anything about existing models, ways or
| methods, just that if exist - it is possible to build one
| "again" so to say.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| I still don't think we've proven that at all. Unless you
| believe in god, then no one has ever "built" an
| intelligence. The human brain is the result of millions
| of years of evolutionary pressures.
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| Regardless how it is created, if it exist it can be made
| artificially again - it is just matter of time.
|
| Same as with bacteria. 'In May 2019, researchers, in a
| milestone effort, reported the creation of a new
| synthetic (possibly artificial) form of viable life,' -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_life
|
| Give human enough time and resources, we can replicate
| anything, that is in our nature.
| jwilber wrote:
| AGI in no way, shape, or form belongs on that list.
| rytill wrote:
| You're right - it belongs on a list of universal-scale risks
| rather than global-scale ones.
| pas wrote:
| There are multiple solutions, but all requires that the our
| current power structure decide and commit to solving them.
|
| So far there's no consensus on any level. (Meaning there are
| not enough people at any level to force, or agree/compromise,
| or influence the economy, or make it the dominant single issue
| politically/culturally.)
|
| Sure, participating in it by buying, mining PoW coins (or
| basically any coin that then - due to hedging/diversification -
| leads to even more PoW coin mining/demand) while knowing about
| the external cost is morally problematic. However the actual
| harm is likely less than doing many-many other selfish
| (immoral/bad) acts.
|
| If the early crypto billionaires exit crypto and put their
| newfound wealth into effective altruism the moral calculus
| changes very starkly.
| raindropm wrote:
| _> NFTs are going to be more like Kindle books and YouTube
| videos. The vast majority are going to have ten views, not a
| billion. It's an unregulated, non-transparent hustle with
| 'bubble' written all over it._
|
| Some people will called Seth have no clue about technology or
| don't know what's he talking about, blah blah, but I think this
| is more about human psychology & behavior(also, greed) than
| technology, like any speculation game. History will repeat itself
| regardless of technology.
|
| My opinion about 'current' use of NFTs: what a useless way to use
| our world's power. But who am I to judge...
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Aren't the costs associated with creating NFTs included in their
| price? Who pays to create them?
| syllable_studio wrote:
| What people don't realize, is that we already have fantastic
| alternatives to Ethereum for low-energy, world-class
| decentralized networks with built in NFTs. My favorite is
| avalanche. This is all so new, but we CAN have a future that is
| feature-rich, fast, cheap, decentralized, and good for the
| environment.
|
| https://docs.avax.network/build/tutorials/smart-digital-asse...
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