NFTs are not the answer to many questions. Maybe you should start asking the correct questions.
The one problem NFTs solve perfectly: How to do decentralized and pseudonymous proof of community membership.
Successful projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club are not about the fancy drawings, but about the exclusivity of a social club. You may find that silly, but that does not diminish the human craving for status.
NFTs are the digital equivalent of designer clothes, luxury watches, and fancy cars.
There are a lot of people promoting NFTs as the solution to problems digital artists have, so it's worth spending some time talking about how that's not true, and how, in fact, many digital artists have been getting paid for their work ever since stuff like PayPal existed. Myself included, digital art's my job.
Your point that they are status markers has something, though! Especially given how most of the successful work seems to be operating under completely different aesthetics than those non-filthy-rich people enjoy looking at and funding (seriously all these randomly-generated things are ugly); the "fine art" world has had increasing amounts of work that you have to be trained to see as "good art" ever since photography made accurate depictions of a scene something everyone could have for very little effort.
Ignoring the NFT aspect of it, I disagree that all of the randomly generated art pieces are ugly. I think the vast majority are, but that some turn out great, and that this is the main reason it's an interesting medium. The artists who are the best at this are successful at upping the rate of outputs that look good, and that makes them good artists. It's very similar to how anyone can throw paint splatters on a canvas, but not everyone who does so is Jackson Pollack. And many of the individual pieces even from the most successful (artistically I mean) projects still aren't nearly as good as the best pieces, similar to how most Pollacks are not as good as his best.
This was long-winded, but all I'm saying is that I think generated art is an interesting medium, with both good and bad artists and good and bad pieces, like every other artistic medium. (Again, completely without taking a position on whether NFTs are the right way to create / sell these!)
The intent of my statement "all these randomly-generated things are ugly" was not "all aleatoric art is ugly", it was that all of the randomly-generated NFTs I've seen look like the results of hitting "randomize" on a mediocre Picrew except for the part where someone's trying to convince people it's worth more than I pay for rent in three years.
> NFTs are the digital equivalent of designer clothes, luxury watches, and fancy cars.
I feel like a lot of people (particularly on this site) see these kinds of things as shallow, uninteresting, and contributory to a lot of the worst parts of society. It feels… odd… to hear them invoked as a positive/useful thing.
Like, yes, I get it, a lot of people are shallow and want status symbols to fill the voids in their souls and give their lives meaning. But the idea of taking the clout-chasing mechanics that wreak so much havoc on society and going “what if we had more of that?”… well it feels a little like trying to invent digital junk food because real world junk food sells so well.
I totally share your vibe on this, but I also think we do ourselves a disservice when we turn our noses up at stuff lots of people actually like. I try to separate two different questions: "Is this something that people will find valuable?" and "Is this something I want to dedicate my scarce time and energy toward working on?". I think in the case of all this shallow stuff, those answers are "yes" and "no". But I think we have a tendency to conflate the two questions and since the answer to the second one is "no", assume the answer to the first one is also "no". I personally did that with Facebook for many years and really talked down the business because I considered it superficial and actively bad and not something I wanted to have any involvement in, but the truth is that it is a very valuable business that I just don't want to work on, and that's fine. I increasingly see a lot of this cryptocurrency stuff as very much the same. I may not like it, but that doesn't at all imply that it won't be valued by a large number of people.
"designer clothes, luxury watches, and fancy cars" all have understandable limits to production and have genuine scarcity (even if that scarcity is strictly controlled). NFTs have artificial scarcity... for little to no purpose other than monetary gain. Generally I am against the concept of artificial scarcity in any industry.
Many fashion houses literally burn their unsold products to create this scarcity or create limited runs. DeBeers have a heavy control over the diamond industry. If an artist says they'll only create unique pieces (a 1/1 collection) then while they could create more in future, they'll still have a market determined value.
Fashion houses burning clothes to maintain image and Dabeers creating a diamond cartel are not good. Im not saying that artifical scarcity doesnt exist, im saying that its bad and we shouldnt build economies around it.
For digital art vs physical art, there is a clear difference between "there will only ever be one mona lisa" and "I am not going to press cntrl-c cntrl-v on this image license"
I’m all for artificial scarcity. Collectors are going to find rare things to collect. It would be better if they didn’t, but I think it’s probably a part of human nature to some degree.
Personally, id be ecstatic if collectors decide they can get their fix collecting rare jpegs and Pokémon cards instead of “truly scare” ivory, furs, or blood diamonds.
To me, TCGs are defensible because they are Games in which you are knowingly consenting to a system in which collection is a part of the experience. The manufacturers give a standard MSRP for cards during their printing period. Aftermarket cards are priced based on the utility given within a game system and that feeds into a collectors valuation. This is, I think, an acceptable outlet for the humanistic urge to collect things. I do think its exploitative but at least the messaging is clear and fair.
I take issue with systems which exploit gambling urges for profit. NFT's claim to be the future of DRM for independent artists, but they are exploited into becoming pump-and-dump schemes and wildly speculative markets. They use language used to defend artistic IP but ultimately function as a game with arbitrary rules.
Artificial scarcity is, however, a prerequisite for it, at least with that kind of margin. Otherwise you'll get competition bringing the price back down toward production cost + overhead.
Technically, I think that would be monopoly power, not artificial scarcity. The government grants a legal monopoly to producers to stamp their products with their brand name, which also prevents producers from using someone else's brand name on their products.
A legal monopoly is artificial scarcity. However, if the provenance of an item is important to the buyer then scarcity of items from that source would be natural, not artificial—even if goods which are otherwise physically identical down to the atomic scale (including branding) are available from other sellers. That has nothing to do with any monopoly granted by a government. The trademark rules which prohibit using someone else's brand are there to protect buyers from fraud, not to create scarcity. As long as the buyer is fully informed as to the actual origins of the item there shouldn't be any concerns over fraud regardless of how it's been marked. Using someone else's mark in a misleading way to sell your own product would be fraud, though, even in the absence of trademark laws.
In many cases the “limits to production” and “genuine scarcity” are functionally meaningless though, and surely have no measurable effect on the market price of the item. A cheap screen-printed t-shirt could be $7 if it’s printed with one design, and $100 if it’s printed with another design. It’s completely silly to point to “limits to production” and “genuine scarcity” as an explanation for this.
A more apt explanation for this is Baudrillard's conception of sign value. (Veblen initially thought out parts of it through the concept of Veblen goods, but it was Baudrillard who took this idea to the extreme). The value is not created by any utility or scarcity, but is derived by the system of signs (prestige, class symbol, brand) created in consumerist societies. This system of signs is often self-reinforcing, since sign values themselves are "in association" with other sign values, rather than having cause-and-effect chains and physical processes. And it's "free-floating" just like the current monetary system of floating currencies are.
I don't think anybody is trying to explain the price difference between a $7 shirt and a $100 shirt as being the result of one having a larger supply than the other.
That’s the most charitable interpretation I can make of the original comment:
> "designer clothes, luxury watches, and fancy cars" all have understandable limits to production and have genuine scarcity (even if that scarcity is strictly controlled).
The entire thread is about buying and selling NFTs, so I think it’s fair to infer that we’re all talking about the merits of NFTs having a non-zero price.
Yes, and their point was in the context of a thread debating the merits of NFTs having non-zero price. The comment was claiming that the supposed "genuine scarcity" justifies the buying and selling of those physical goods.
The claim was that they would rather not buy anything that is being made scarce artificially, which is a perfectly reasonable position. You don't have to agree with this principle. But, again, this is bears no relationship to the question of why a t-shirt is worth $10 and another t-shirt is worth $5.
If you're talking about mass-produced watches sure. But visit, say, Rexhep Rexhepi's or the Gronefeld brothers' workshops, and you would be hard pressed to come away without an appreciation for hand-finished mechanical movements that border on art.
Yes, but if you buy the watch you can put it on your hand, use it and show it to me. NFT is more akin to a photo of an invoice from the workshop you attended - it might have some sentimental value to you, but it's not a watch, does not have intrinsic value and I don't have to respect it.
You're taking a digital item and complaining it doesn't exist irl. It's only an "invoice" to the physical world, it can actually be used for things in the digital world, like gaining access to private chat rooms / spaces or getting early access to product drops.
Also a digital item should have a value irl otherwise it won't get any respect irl. What you describe here is similar to any old-style password or subscription code, while a NFT art doesn't give you access to anything extra.
And which side of that continuum between craftmanship and lazy brand-markup are NFTs actually on? I don't look at the NFT artwork I'm seeing sold online and find myself filled with an appreciation for incredible, intricate, hand-finished work. Digital apes in particular are incredibly derivative and feel very mass-produced, this is the kind of artwork that would sell for maybe $50-100 tops as a commission. Except honestly not even for that much money, because part of the commission price is being able to choose what gets made, you can't just recolor the same image and give it a little cigarette and an earring.
It's all well and good to talk about designer watches that are perfectly constructed masterpieces, but NFTs aint that. They're the $3 mass-produced digital watches that are getting a brand slapped on them and then sold purely for the name. The only thing more mass-produced than the bored ape collection are the silly pixel avatars on Twitter; we're not really talking about significant skill or craftmanship or even creative expression here. Zoom in on some of the images in the bored app collection, the artist is very literally copying and pasting parts of the drawing between pictures, that's why they all look the same.
It just feels really silly to try and artistically compare some cookie-cutter Photoshop templates to a hand-crafted watch.
> It's all well and good to talk about designer watches that are perfectly constructed masterpieces, but NFTs aint that.
Nonsense. NFTs are neither mass-produced digital watches nor Rolexes. They are simple watches - some mass produced and some artworks created by skilled craftsmen.
Sure, a good bunch are (looks like 20% to 50%, depending on your percentile chosen).
But the Cryptopunks are, generative and a collectible yes, but by all accounts a labour of love, an experiment before its time, given away for free at a time when no one gave a damn; it's not exactly the mass-production story you suggest.
Even if you buy wholesale into the narrative about the history of cryptopunks (and to be clear, this is a deliberately chosen narrative, the cryptopunk creators were not against making money and they gave away a large percentage of their tokens in part because they hoped the tokens they held would increase in value if they became more popular) -- but even if you take everything about their history at face value, you're still left with:
A) Pieces that do not have much artistic value outside of their position and relevance inside the ecosystem in which they were created: nobody is going to seriously claim that cryptopunks are themselves great works of art, any artistic value comes from the creation of the NFT model for generative/mass-produced artwork,
B) Pieces that are definitively mass-produced by design, and that served as a template for how other mass-produced collections could work,
C) Pieces that have been largely divorced from any artistic message that the original pieces held; the evolution of a piece designed to evoke a counter-cultural punk aesthetic into a piece that can only be controlled and owned by the richest members of society is its own possibly unintentional statement on the state of NFTs, and
D) Pieces that are significant specifically because they formed a model for other even more derivative pieces by other creators who lack even the benefit of imagination about the crypto-ecosystem itself. Cryptopunks are significant because they proved the viability of other collections like bored apes and their ilk, products that are entirely devoid of any kind of meaningful social statement or craftmanship. And one has to wonder what the actual artistic value or craftmanship is in building that model and why we should be impressed with the creators behind it.
And even if you're optimistic about all of this and think the pieces are genuinely significant and meaningful, you still wouldn't compare cryptopunks to a hand-crafted watch. They're at best historically significant, but they don't demonstrate any particularly breathtaking artistic skill, and any artistic message they were trying to make has been largely invalidated by the evolution of the space into the least "punk" community in tech. The nicest thing I can say about cryptopunks is that they have inadvertently turned into an effective satire of what the NFT community thinks about itself.
BAYC is a community in the sense that it has members and non-members, but what binds that community other than having purchased some asset? Sure, that's one definition of community, but it's not a definition of community that I'm inspired to participate in, or a definition of community that I would be willing to stake my own money on.
people aren't paying huge sums of money for a collaborative virtual graffiti wall, they're paying huge sums of money to signal that they have huge sums of money. People have been doing that for centuries.
Didn't some artist get his NFTs stolen through Discord screensharing and he begged his Twitter followers not to acknowledge the possessor of the NFT as the real owner of art?
My personal view here is that your continued ability to own an NFT depends on your ability to tell an interesting story.
If 51% of the professional clout of the art world decides you don't own something any more, you ... might not?
If the metadata that denote ownership of beeple's first 5000 everydays are accidentally overwritten due to a small bug, probably everyone will agree to ignore that.
But if someone puts on a super cool art-thief costume and does a livestream where they write and execute software that resets the ownership so it's their art now, while they play "The Thomas Crown Affair" soundtrack in the background, probably everyone will go along with this, yeah?
(Certainly the theft of the Mona Lisa increased its value!)
Which database to you query? They're on the blockchain, but you have to know which format you're accepting, how to verify, etc. Do you accept OpenSea as the source of truth for NFT ownership? How about Foundation? What about MyFirstMarketplace, the one that I've decided to create?
This requires some social contract to know who the authority is, and that's probably based on how much they have spent on marketing to become The Authority.
The blockchain is the database. It stores objects and, like postgres, can store code for manipulating the objects. Each NFT would have a particular storage location which you can query, either directly via a block explorer like etherscan.io or via javascript using any one of a number of apis like ethers.js
This sub-thread is talking about an existing case where an NFT has been taken from the person who paid for it by social engineering. The new owner won’t return it so the marketplaces have blacklisted the NFT. So querying the chain isn’t enough in this case because social consensus has determined the chain to be wrong.
The blockchain isn't the database, it's just the storage medium. There are multiple different NFT database on top of the blockchain, implemented in different ways by different people, conforming to different standards.
you missed the part where the parent asked 'who is the authority'
if there are 20 NFT chains, and 10 of them assign ownership to A, and 5 of them assign it to B and the other 5 don't assign it at all - what can we say anymore about the ownership?
all of this public ledger stuff might make more sense if, unlike as is customary, there is a single authoritative chain instead of a 'marketplace' of chains.
it's up to the nft originator to assign ownership in just one jurisdiction. if they create and sell multiple nfts in different venues, but for the same item, then i imagine that would damage their reputation and the value of their prior and future items. the chain itself does not assign ownership independent of the nft originator.
with art i think nfts do function very much like certificates of provenance. game items are different in that the community of players, or the company hosting/developing, indicates the proper database source (chain).
It was funny to see how they responded to losing their NFTs by being tricked on discord: they contacted the centralized storefronts (rarible, opensea) to have them marked as stolen.
I do not know this particular story and do not see the relevance to the points I am making. That being said, you cannot steal an NFT via Discord screensharing unless you manage to display your private key on screen. In which case: Children gotta learn that the stove is hot.
It bums me out how the HN crowd lacks any creativity when it comes to anything Crypto. NFTs do solve a problem, and the problem that they solve is that creatives are getting paid for their creative output. Not every NFT is a flex, or used to launder money. Some folks use NFTs as Patreon -> to support artists who's work they admire. "Why not just buy a painting?" Well people who make digital videos and 3d renderings are artists too, aren't they? The promise of NFTs is that they offer a different way for people to interact. Ownership is always based on social constructs, so folks that are involved in this space need to have some consensus of what it means to "own" an NFT on whatever chain. From there these items can be gamified. NFTs run on top of what is essentially programmable money. What if we designate an NFT to an application (a smart contract) that in exchange issues tokens to designate fractional ownership of that NFT? Never in history has anyone been able to buy shares of highly coveted art... maybe now you can? Using smart contracts you can you can also conduct trustless exchanges of digital assets (NFTs). This is huge.
I think people on HN react to NFTs perfectly resaonably and I don't think you make a good argument about their value for creatives. As far as I can see NFTs at the moment have done nothing for creatives getting paid. As you point out - we have solved the problem of creatives getting paid for their work, they can sell their work, they can take commissions, or they can use patreon or similar sites. I would bet that at the moment the commission that shopify or patreon are taking are much more creator friendly than paying to mint an NFT. You say that NFTs provide a new way to interact - but what is that interaction? What does an NFT give me that sticking a badge on a shopify store saying "Creative ownership of peice of work X" does not? And I don't see how that problem has anything at all to do with being gamified?
>Never in history has anyone been able to buy shares of highly coveted art... maybe now you can
Well, firstly, let's be clear that it's highly contentious whether you meaningfully own the art if you own an NFT. But let's assume that's a solved problem. YOu can already buy shares of highly coveted art - https://www.masterworks.io . It's exactly the same model as NFTs - some individual buys the actual art, then they offering to sell "shares" of the art. The difference is that Masterworks doesn't carry all the risk of being scammed in the crypto market.
>In most cases the creator of the NFT != the creator of the artwork.
You are describing counterfeit art and is easy to identify
That's like pointing out how many fake Gucci bags are out there and dismissing the real Gucci by saying "in most cases the creator of the Gucci bag is not Gucci."
I'm not solely describing "counterfeit" ( again, nft's are not legally protected, so counterfeit is not applicable ).
I'm also talking about hiring a low salary graphic designer to create some simple cartoon avatars and then wash trade it into popularity because of metrics on the platform.
Or just copying of-chain images to create an NFT.
Or copy an NFT and put them on another NFT market.
Or change a pixel and put it on the same NFT bazaar ( by definition of law= code, it is unique by hash)
You can't get a real Gucci bag on NFT. The comparison is false, since i can right-click save a perfect original. There is no copyright on NFT's.
Edit: valid response below and couldn't respond. But it's not correlated to the NFT itself ( not saying you are intuiting that, just mentioning)
Easy to identify? How do you know that the individual behind a digital signature is the individual they claim to be, unless you meet them in person and they give you some fingerprint (which happens 0% of the time)?
I can see the legitimate of the image by looking the Ethereum wallet address, even if you have an image of Bored Apes Yacht Club stolen i can see the proof if yours is genuine by looking on the blockchain.
Are you serious? Artists aren’t getting paid? XCOPY a London based artist has made over $10 million on royalties from his NFT artwork. Please supply evidence to back up your bogus statements.
NFT provide trust less royalties directly to the creators wallet with no middleman.
Most people on Hacker news aren’t doing an ounce of research into the potential of NFTs and it’s clearly recognizable when i read all these comments. Reading a few articles by Bloomberg is not sufficient. You will all be left behind.
Let me ask you, let's say that I get one of these artists to draw up a contract and sell me one of their peices of art. Do you think it will command the same value, more value or less value than the equivalent NFT associated with it?
Becuase I take a look at this and it looks to me like all of this commercial activity has basically nothing to do with the art. I would kind of get it if you pointed to me to a guy whose selling peices of art for a few bucks, maybe $50-100 and selling a decent number of them who you know... like the art. But what market is this? These aren't art collectors who are just using the new medium is it. They're not fans of the art. They don't have thousands invested in traditional collections. They're not going to buy the same art, but off-chain. So is this really anything to do with paying artists at all? Who are these people who are suddenly rushing to pay thousands of dollars to artists?
Is this "StarryNight" who paid $2000 for this NFT excited to be supporting xcopy. Or is it the account of the venture capital fund of the same name? That's not exactly the story of giving power to creators that we were being told is it?
I think the problem here on HN is actually the opposite of what you're stating- the second you do do an ounce of research these claims start looking more and more fishy.
Are people buying art or speculative tokens? This is horse betting with extra steps. Absolutely fantastic for them that they're getting paid for their work, but considering this as sutainable or something that can be achieved by any artist outside of the NFT betting bubble is naive.
Can you just publish your work on Instagram or similar site? I don't think publishing has been a problem since a long time. People are publishing their own books.
>Can you just publish your work on Instagram or similar site
I don't see how you can make money that way.
>People are publishing their own books.
Now this, on the other hand, has a clear solution. You can simply put your epub on Amazon for $10 or so. There's no equivalent that I know of for art. For whatever reason, people are more willing to buy digital text than digital images.
Right but where's the "creativity" of the solution that NFTs supposedly bring? Or is it just the same as Patreon (no creativity or uniqueness at all) but just more complex and potential downsides?
I mean for one, a patreon staff member who doesnt like you for some reason cant just ban your nft account. That seems like a pretty good starting point.
resale and the secondary sale cut (that goes to the artist) is fundamentally different than patreon. Not to mention the take rate can be arbitrarily low
NFTs are selling a much more personal connection with the artist. Buying merchandise or subscribing to patreon is much more impersonal. There is also a sense that you own something. You can show people your NFTs.
Masterworks is centralized. You rely on Masterworks for everything, whereas you can buy NFTs from a number of competing sources.
> NFTs are selling a much more personal connection with the artist. Buying merchandise or subscribing to patreon is much more impersonal.
In what way? A ton of artists I know on Patreon are polling their contributors to get feedback, releasing early content to them, and releasing exclusive behind-the-scenes info or life updates.
What about an NFT provides more personal connection than ongoing support and communication with the artist?
----
And if Patreon isn't enough of a connection to your favorite artists, you can always directly commission them, which will give you a genuinely unique piece of artwork instead of just a serial number, designed in direct cooperation with the artist, that no one else owns, and that is uniquely tied to you in a fundamental way that can't be faked.
What about an NFT provides more personal connection than having direct creative input and a personal hand in the creation of a piece of artwork?
What are you talking about NFTs are more personal? You can literally commission most artists to make you a personal peice. Most Patreons including regular Q&As, opportunities to make suggestions and all sorts of stuff. What exactly is the personal connection that comes from an NFT?
Is that thread correct? Is the general theme that corporate NFTs don't truly decentralize, but small players and committed crypto people put their NFTs on Ethereum so they can be moved around?
HN people are a wider community than crypto enthusiasts.
My mother-in-law would be as almost dismissive of NFTs as I am, except she doesn't understand technology so she won't be as articulate about it.
I think some crypto enthusiasts hang out with other crypto enthusiasts way too much and that is how they get HODler ideas and drive the price of things up like
People on HN are mostly normies, except technically articulate. Crypto enthusiasts think we hate crypto, but it's because we're reflective of the wider community which feels like
Generative art (Processing, p5.js, etc.) has been a hobby of mine for 15 years or so. During that time, a handful of people were truly able to make a living out of it -- or even get paid for doing it. I ran workshops, taught people to code, helped students learn, etc. and it was all for fun, as a hobby, to get people interested in computer-based art and to learn a bit about programming. (Incidentally, p5.js is excellent for teaching programming to kids b/c of the immediate visual feedback.) Making a living or even getting paid to do this type of work was extremely difficult prior to the emergence of NFTs.
There's now an accessible marketplace for me to sell that work, thanks to NFTs. I do it as a hobby, not relying on the income, through Hic et Nunc, which runs on the Tezos blockchain. I do it for two reasons: it feels really good to sell my work, even if it's just for a few dollars. My entire family, including kids, get really excited when I sell something for just $3 or whatever.
The second reason is that it has vastly accelerated my ability to connect with communities of similar artists. For most of them, this has been a hobby for many years. Through them, I've joined some of the most positive, fun, and creative communities I've ever found on the Internet. Most discussion is not NFT related, but just about techniques, helping each other, fun and friendly weekly coding challenges, etc.
Say what you will about NFTs. I'm not blind to the issues they bring along with them. For a lot of digital artists, however, the accessible marketplaces and creative communities are truly groundbreaking. Honestly, the past 6 months of participating in these communities have been some of the best times of my life, full of new friendships and the occasional small financial reward. I'm very thankful for NFTs providing this because I know that, even if the marketplaces go away, the new creative communities will persist.
Nice story, but it's just a coincidence that the platform you found uses NFTs, as far as I can see just as easily it could have been regular centralized platform operating over Stripe or PayPal.
No, that's not correct. deviantArt and similar platforms have been around for years, and none of them have created the kind of income that NFT marketplaces have. Those older platforms were decent as communities, but their marketplaces were designed primarily to generate revenue for the platform itself, not as a free market for the artists providing the content, and it showed.
This is a very good point, thank you for making it. I've always approached HN with my own bias, which is an interest in underground technology, hacking, and of course crypto. I never really saw the crowd as mostly normies, but I guess I never paused to reflect that there's a lot of content here I ignore, precisely because it is that.
Tends to be a term that unusual groups (Asperger patients, people who are awkard but don't get diagnosed as anything, incels, etc.) use to refer to normal people that is somewhat pejorative.
My particular use is a bit ambiguous and ironic. I'd see both the crypto enthusiasts and HN users as not normal. In terms of hierarchy however, I'd say HN users are relatively more normal than crypto enthusiasts, but that's half my opinion and half being provocative. (e.g. it will cause some people to make unforced errors.)
Normies is a term that crypto enthusiasts use to refer to folks that don't know much about crypto. I guess it's pejorative, but I use it in jest. Maybe I should stop using it.
Well, if you did crypto around the time you joined here = 2019/06.
I can say that this normie predates your crypto experience with 3 years. A lot of people here way earlier.
My currently expired crypto magazine it's most popular article was "how to recover your Bitcoin password" ~ 2017. I've seen/experienced this 'movement' before ;).
Ps. Ethereum was already popular then because of it's "potential" of programmability.
It changes so fast that "when" is largely irrelevant. I started with crypto in 2013, just getting to play with Bitcoin a little bit. Was never a big holder, but waiting for the day it would see bigger adoption. I lost interest in BTC after the block size debate. My first exposure to ETH was shortly after they launched, but it took me a while to really understand how it works. These days I use ETH every single day, mainly via NFTs and side projects. I'm also interested in new and emerging chains with niche use cases, getting in early as a validator as a way of placing bets on potential future success... but I'm in no way a fanatic. I don't think crypto will "replace" fiat. I don't think NFTs will disrupt ownership, and I optimize my gains towards traditional investments. I find crypto fun, and I think it offers interesting ways for folks to interact with each other using programmable money. My gripe I suppose is how easily some folks dismiss it, but to each their own.
Creatives I've listened talk about NFTs have said that NFTs are a terrible deal for them. "Minting" an NFT of their work costs a not-insignificant amount of money and there is no guarantee that anyone will buy the damn thing.
For the Ellens and Kanyes of the world, it's great, because their work is already in-demand and can fetch a huge price on the NFT market. For the 90% of artists in the "long tail" of content production it's probably a net loss over more conventional funding means like Patreon, commissions, and Bandcamp. Even if these collect a higher portion of their income as fees, there's less up-front investment (and hence risk) for the artist.
I'm an absolute nobody in the art world. I started minting my art in early 2020. This year i have made about 2.5x my tech salary from NFT sales and royalties. NFTS are an amazing deal for creators.
You are right that there's a barrier to entry as far as minting costs, but it's a small price to pay to find out if you have an audience.
Furthermore, there are now thriving NFT communities on chains like Tezos and Solana, where it costs pennies to mint.
> I'm an absolute nobody in the art world. I started minting my art in early 2020. This year i have made about 2.5x my tech salary from NFT sales and royalties. NFTS are an amazing deal for creators.
I'm not sure what marketplace you're on, but assuming an average tech salary of $100k USD, earning $250k in 12 months would put you well within the top 100 earners on SuperRare. The majority of artists in that tier have over 50,000 followers each, so the fact you're able to compete with them as a 'nobody' means you're a special case.
Have you computed how much environmental damage you personally have created?
I work to minimize mine, my home's pretty well analyzed to reduce power and consumables usage and I'm in the process of prepping for solar. How are you atoning for your burnings?
I think the environmental impact is overstated. It's often conflated with the environmental impact of Bitcoin. I haven't touched Bitcoin in years. Also POS chains have active NFT ecosystems, like Tezos.
This is what I've seen too. For example, I saw an artist on twitter crying because she was able to get out of debt from selling NFTs.
My experience has been largely positive. Artists get better paid. The fans can buy something that gives them a more personal connection with the artist. Everyone else can still view the art for free.
He's not an artist as he mentioned. He's a tech guy that says artists get paid with NFT's, while he earns money with NFT's.
See the contradiction?
I'm pretty sure his art in a normal situation wouldn't have much value. It would surprise me if anything else has been done than copy/pasting or creating an avatar.
We also get royalties on resales which is great, rather than when i sell vinyl and someone buys a few and then re-lists them at a higher price on discogs and i get nothing. not to mention traditional distribution networks would take 50% of sales straight away.
The reason nfts exist in the first place is because so many in the art/music world are annoyed with what we have and are desperate for alternatives, art world has been building on crypto for years -> https://www.daowo.org/#artists-organise-on-the-blockchain
What stops me, technologically, from creating an NFT from an image that I didn’t actually create? If it was about creators getting paid then there'd be a better answer than "nothing, caveat emptor".
Someone mentioned hicetnunc.xyz here, so I went and took a look at their FAQ. I thought this was interesting[1]:
> To make it easier for buyers, please leave a trace to any social profile or website in the description of your artwork, so potential buyers can validate the authenticity. If you can link the NFTs the artist is advertising on the profile with the NFTs on Hicetnunc, you can assume it is legit.
So NFT markets are relying on third party social media sites to prove authenticity. And I suppose artists would rely on the government an actual copywright law if they wanted to enforce anything.
Yep. It's either decentralised or a proof of an authentic link to the artist, never both.
The case for NFTs solving artists' problems is it's a way of getting noveaux rich with a particular interest in digital collectibles to spend money on art they wouldn't otherwise give a second glance to. There's real value in matching buyers and sellers. But I guess admitting the value was all in the collectors and not in the supposed transformational properties of the token wouldn't sell tokens as effectively...
Nothing. This is a canard, though, because the fundamental nature of blockchain technology allows a potential buyer (or anyone, really) to verify the provenance of an NFT. It's then up to the buyer to verify that the NFT originated in a wallet or account associated directly with the artist.
As a buyer, as always, it's your job to verify that you're not buying a counterfeit. As a seller, as always, the value of the NFT you hold is subject to its verifiable provenance.
A few NFT marketplaces will verify identity but no where near thoroughly enough. Privacy and KYC are going to be the biggest crypto issue for 2022. More and more projects are looking to incorporate identity oracles like Global ID and are looking to provide no more data than is necessary for KYC inquiries using tech like Zero Knowledge proofs (ZKP).
Panther protocol is the most interesting of these projects I've come across, but every utility driven blockchain is making plans to incorporate identity verification in some way.
Typically they get paid the initial listing sum of the auction (at least) and what happens on secondary market is not their concern, similar to classic art pieces.
Royalties can be a thing provided NFTs are traded using a smart contract that pays royalties to the creator but it's not that common since artists are compensated well enough by the first approach and don't need to milk secondary market trades.
I suspect that there is a strong relationship between distaste for anything crypto and lack of any crypto substantial assets.
The problem is that just about everyone here could be a multi-millionaire if they had just taken a few minutes to set up pool mining on their gaming rig back in 2010.
I think there is a tremendous amount of latent bitterness, embarrassment, and frustration about this. I include myself in this group. Folks should pause to reflect on this and determine how much these facts are clouding their opinions.
Crypto is just a new interesting technology. Maybe it will last, maybe not. But the amount of hate and skepticism on this forum is way, way out of proportion to the reality of the thing.
I think you are right that most people critical of crypto don‘t hold any significant assets. But that seems obvious and means nothing.
If you have a lot of crypto assets, you think it‘s a good thing. If you didn‘t, you would probably divest or would have done long ago.
Even if you where ambivalent you may keep it to yourself or erase that doubt, because "you have to believe, wagmi“ seems to be pretty strong in the community (maybe thats too harsh, I‘m not in it).
If you don‘t think they are a good idea, why would you buy into them? Most people in tech aren‘t really strapped for cash and becoming a millionaire with something you think is bad for the world is something many people don‘t want.
But yeah, I also regret selling my 2013 era playing-around assets that would make me a millionaire today. It probably does color my opinion, and if for some reason I had kept them till now, I would have a very positive take, which is also self selecting and means nothing.
If I had changed my opinion at any point in those 9 years, I would have sold at the next 10x.
I still think that analysis and opinion is colored much stronger for those who hold then for those who don‘t.
If I could take this week's lottery numbers back to 2010 I'd be rich as well.
The thing is, I saw a lot of this stuff happening back in the $400-$500 price range for bitcoin. A colleague ran an arbitrage bot and somehow managed to lose money. The value proposition has always been "you can sell this to others for more" and "you can evade all the existing financial rules", both of which are uncomfortable.
What I don't understand is the vociferousness of the detraction. This community loves Capitalism; crypto is just Capitalism Capitalisming. We've had snake oil salesmen and door-to-door salesmen and contract housing and pyramid schemes and dotcom startups and on and on. People abuse the freedom of the free market; we've always had to cut the "promise" of such markets short with regulation to stop real harm from being done to consumers. That doesn't mean that every possible iteration of such products were useless, or their sale predatory.
Or maybe that's wrong. But that would tend to make most HNers hypocrites, and it's only fair to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.
> The problem is that just about everyone here could be a multi-millionaire if they had just taken a few minutes to set up pool mining on their gaming rig back in 2010.
You can say this about anything. Look at the stock market right now relative to 2010. If anyone had known the future, they'd be betting on sports and buying lotto tickets. Way OTM TSLA calls would've made me rich beyond my wildest dreams.
If the only response you have to the detractors is "you're jelly," then you're just falling for your own confirmation bias.
I have been using crypto since 2012.
> But the amount of hate and skepticism on this forum is way, way out of proportion to the reality of the thing.
Crypto has enabled a staggering amount of fraud and criminal activity. Not everything criminal bothers me personally...but financial crimes and exploiting gullible desperate investors really rubs me the wrong way. Oh also, its insanely inefficient to have a global network of redundant computers perform trivial work which could be done by a single web app.
I disagree that this is exactly the same as the stock market or the lottery. I think the fact that it is a technology that many in the tech sector missed the value of, during a time that they and only they (ie. pre-Coinbase) could have gotten involved, gives it particular sting.
Regardless of criminal activity and fraud, my main point is still that it is a new and interesting technology. No one knows what useful things it will be used for (or not) in 10 and 100 years, just like all new technologies.
Usually people on HN are positive and constructive about new techs. I observe that in the realm of crypto, people are incredibly negative, dwelling on things, like fraud and criminal activity in the present, that don't seem very important to me on a long timeline with unlimited possibilities. I am confident in the market's ability to correct those kinds of things, where there is real value.
My suspicion is those same folks wouldn't hold those opinions if they were super-lucky crypto millionaires. I think the money is causing a general lack of self-reflection in this realm: like I said, bitterness, embarrassment, and frustration. I spot those emotions in myself if I am honest.
Boiler rooms that sell bogus investment opportunities have been around for decades and extract more money from the gullible than crypto scams ever have.
I mean, no? Ownership is always based on societal constructs; in the useful sense it means that the state is enforcing it. If someone takes it you can use violence or the threat of violence (legitimately, by proxy) to retrieve it. If someone else claims that it is theirs they can attempt to retrieve it through courts (with the the backing of legitimate violence or threat of violence by proxy again). You may exclude people from the use of the thing you own (with violence or threat of violence by proxy, or sometimes, by direct violence for which the state will excuse you).
It devolves always to the state having an effective monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. This is a social construct in a sense, but NFTs are a poor substitute.
Notably, most NFTs can be replicated bit-for-bit, and anyone else can emit a new NFT with the same exact payload, only lacking the traceability, but otherwise indistinguishable from the original. The only way to prevent that would be legal action, in which case you might as well dispense with the notion of the NFT itself.
In fact, a great business if you want to get in on this scam is to just sell counterfeit NFTs; even openly counterfeit! Call yourself "The Copy-Cat" and just resell Copy-Cat original copies of existing high-value NFTs. Even in the real life art world it has transpired that well-done forgeries have acquired a value of their own.
Any sane man understands this, but crypto people are too steeped in lies. They're detached from reality, just like their beloved crypto money.
Even if a perfect decentralized database will be invented, the violence, that enforces the rules under which the real world operates, can't be decentralized.
Oddly enough, I'm a "crypto" person myself -- I've been active in the Bitcoin community since forever, basically. I still think cryptocurrencies are an enormously powerful concept, but we can't blind ourselves to the reality of how money and ownership works in the real world.
I think the real reason my post got downvoted is that someone really wants to do my CopyCat idea and now they're worried that I'll sue them for stealing my idea. Should have made an NFT out of the business proposal.
There's a strong argument that the nature of "civil society" is how far removed from that threat of violence we live. That is, people obey "the law" because it's the right thing to do and they don't do that.
People don't steal, not because they worry about being arrested or imprisoned, but because stealing isn't right. Policing and Law Enforcement scales sublinearly with population size only if the population is by and large compliant, or rather, that the laws are compatible with the behavior and motivations of the majority of people.
So we keep that foundation far away -- instead of violence, it's the thought of the social opprobrium of the prospect of the threat of violence. But it has to be there, otherwise people who were willing to resort to violence would take everything.
> maybe we dont want a society that is based upon threats of violence.
I'm not convinced that such a thing is possible.
Fundamentally, for such a society there has to be some kind of rule that "threats of violence" and "violence itself" are not allowed. How is such a rule enforced? If your society is unwilling to be violent in any way, under any circumstances, but someone else is willing to be violent you're going to have a bad time.
>> Never in history has anyone been able to buy shares of highly coveted art
What? Anyone can buy a part-share of any work of art. Want to own a 5% share of the Mona Lisa, just ask. If the owner want they can sell you a percentage of that object. Or you can buy a percentage without ownership rights. Or do anything else you want. Property law and the concept of partial ownerships has been around for thousands of years. Most every possible permutation is available should two parties agree.
Hi. I'm an artist who works exclusively digitally.
Getting paid for my work is a solved problem, I can draw a thing for a client and get money via PayPal or any of the other payment processors competing with it. I have a Patreon campaign to let my fans toss money in my tipjar for me to go draw whatever the heck I want to draw. So do people who make videos and 3d work. I see them doing it all the damn time.
Neither of these methods involve a system where huge numbers of people are converting energy into waste heat as they compete to be the one who gets the token reward for recording a pathetically small number of transactions.
"Proof of ownership"? How about "I have the source file and you don't"? How about "I have an email chain with the artist that goes from asking if they're open for work, through agreeing to a contract, and multiple WIP files, to a final rendering, source file, and settling up of the finances"? Why does converting energy into waste heat in competition to be the one rewarded for recording a tiny number of transactions need to be involved at all?
I see you're new and probably young. You're mistaking "lack of creativity" for realism.
Right-Click - Save image. Create an NFT, done. Work from an artist digitally is not unique and can be easily copied ( and even become more popular).
Creativity? Dogs, lost cowboy, punks, pigs, hungry aliens are the typical NFT's. That's not art, they mostly sell avatars.
ML models creating art => Not art and again the most technical knowledge person is getting paid.
Wash-trading has become the new normal. The people who pump and dump their own "art" see attraction and as usual, the average people are getting left behind with no piece of the pie. The most popular people ( not even artists) with the biggest following online win.
I'm neither new nor young - I'm just a guy that gave this thing a chance and really liked the results.
The right click save argument is boring. It's not the image that's the NFT, it's the entry on the blockchain.
I agree about the "typical" NFTs you're talking about, they are referred to as digital collectibles, and yeah they don't do it for me either, but within NFT land there are multiple eco-systems, including those that are centered around what you would traditionally perceive as art.
You are right that nothing is legally backed... but why does it need to be? The blockchain is immutable, so anyone who participates in it has no choice but to honor who the chain designates as an owner.
> NFTs do solve a problem, and the problem that they solve is that creatives are getting paid for their creative output.
It did not. There are already plenty of ways artists can get paid for their work. If you had said "this creates another way for artists to get paid," sure (ignoring all the NFTs that are blatantly stolen), but asserting that this is the only way is false.
> The promise of NFTs is that they offer a different way for people to interact. Ownership is always based on social constructs, so folks that are involved in this space need to have some consensus of what it means to "own" an NFT on whatever chain.
I see "ownership" tossed around so often. But I just pulled up two recently sold listings on OpenSea (one from Bored Apes, the other from Cryptopunks), and unless OpenSea hides information if you're not logged in, there were no rights transferred for the original works themselves - you just own the NFT listing. What's the point of shelling out six figures for mass-generated artwork when you don't even have any IP rights?
Sure, there's the "exclusive community" of Bored Apes (though you can apparently have your NFT stolen but still be in the community, so...not sure how exclusive it really is), but other than that, it just seems like a way to flex on everyone.
I have more legally enforceable rights to a $20 drawing I commissioned (paid for on ko-fi) than many NFTs going for $100k+.
It's either a speculative bubble which will burst eventually, or the community is worth the price (plus the flexing privileges).
This may be a dumb question, but why should people pay to "own" the art if it can be digitally copied and given to others (can it?)? I understand the artists need money and support, but other than that, why would anyone want to pay a lot to own a file that's accessible for viewing in a free way?
> Some folks use NFTs as Patreon -> to support artists who's work they admire.
No, I don't buy this. Patreon already exists. And when you factor in gas fees, people who use NFTs to support artists are picking one of the least efficient ways to do so. Etherium in its current form is not a scalable model for how to pay for content, the fees make micropayments unnecessarily cumbersome and inefficient.
The fact that none of these people who are using NFTs "to support artists" were interested in supporting digital artists through any of the multitude of existing ways that existed before NFTs leads me to cast serious doubt on their claims that they actually care about the art ecosystem.
So, let's say you actually want to support artists:
----
If you want to buy the digital equivalent of "shares" of an artist's work, use Patreon/Liberapay/etc and join the community of people who are regularly investing into their output. This is the preferable method for many indie artists, because many indie digital artists want predictable income, and Patreon allows you to commit to regular donations instead of one-off payments. Many artists will use Patreon as a way of soliciting early feedback and providing early access to their projects.
If you want to buy specific pieces, donate directly or just buy those pieces on any of the many art-selling sites that exist online (Gumroad, Itch, etc). This is the really straightforward way of saying "this thing that exists is worth money."
If you want to own something more tangible for supporting your artists, look into printing sites and physical products (Etsy, Topatoco, etc). This requires a little bit of setup from the artist, but not any more than NFTs would, and it allows you to somewhat "advertise" your support with physical objects in a more tangible/public way than NFTs would ever allow.
If you want to get something unique and personal out of supporting an artist, commission them. Commissions are often going to be more affordable than buying NFTs, they provide you with an actually unique product instead of just a unique ID number, they allow you to directly interact with the artist you're supporting, and commissions usually come with better IP assignments.
If you want to encourage investment into a piece of artwork, encourage the artist to set up a Kickstarter/IndieGoGo campaign. Kickstarter isn't just usable for funding theoretical products, artists can use Kickstarter to fund predictable work and specific releases. Krita for example used Kickstarter to fund development on specific features, even allowing contributors to "vote" on what features should be prioritized.
If you want status/clout for donating, and you want to be publicly recognized, sponsor artists. Many artists have systems where they'll give you public credit for sponsoring a piece of work. This is also a far better system than NFTs because that clout can't be re-sold or faked, and because the artist directly promotes you to everyone who sees their work; other people don't need to go find your digital wallet and validate it on the blockchain in order to recognize what you've done.
----
So what do NFTs provide that the above solutions don't? A tiny bit of standardization (although it's questionable how standardized they really are), and other than that, pretty much just speculation. NFTs are kind of awful at a lot of this stuff, they're expensive to create and trade, they're complicated to work with, validating copyright/legitimacy is annoying, they're more subject to regulation, they're less private, they can be traded around which devalues the original statement of buying them, a large percentage of them are subject to link rot, the "gamification" of them is laughably bad because gas fees make it impossible to do most interesting mechanics, and even their display/status value is underdeveloped and still in its infancy. But they allow you to gamble that the token you're holding will go up in value and that you can sell it later for a profit.
And that's why people buy them. Not to support artists, all of these people could have been supporting artists ages ago, and they didn't. They buy NTFs because they're a speculative asset. They talk about supporting artists because it makes them feel better and because that conversation feeds into the hype, and that helps their speculative assets grow in value. That's all that's happening here.
I didn't read your wall, but, if I bought a $2M Jay Z art, or a deed to a famous house, and wanted to show that off on my Twitter page, web3 tokens allow me to do this — not Patreon.
Might be worth looking into as a Patreon feature — or a competitor.
No worries, short version is that in most cases if you're trying to show off to the world that you supported an artist, traditional sponsorship mentions by the artist themself are going to be more public, confer more status, and are going to be seen by more people than a token.
But agreed that having more Patreon integrations (in the same vein as how Discord roles already work) would make that kind of thing even easier.
Most of the arguments against NFTs ultimately boil down to "centralized systems already do this".
Which to me is very sad and uncreative. The entire point just flew straight over-head at ten thousand miles per hour. Yeah, centralized systems already do this; what is necessary to create a world where they don't? Where people can transfer value without the help of a centralized authority.
Ok so: "How do you verify authenticity". Two responses:
1) What if you don't? What if the NFT itself is the value? We already see this with, for example, the Bored Ape Yacht Club; people can create duplicates, but the originals are cryptographically verified. They created value out of thin air, which is where all value comes from at the end of the day.
2) And in other situations, where the value comes from something real outside the blockchain like the original artist; use centralized systems! It's not all or nothing! Centralized systems are great at verifying providence. Use 'em! "This NFT was the one the artist tweeted about".
Then they follow up with: "Lol I can just copy-paste".
Yeah! Isn't that fantastic? NFTs create value for the people who want that value, by having a concept of "ownership of the original". But nothing is stopping all of us from also enjoying it.
Finally, the end-stage of any debate always arrives at "its destroying the planet".
This is, of course, typed as a comment into a website via a computer burning dirty coal power, through 3,000 miles of underground plastic fiber and fifty network appliances, to a beefy server running in a data center. Afterward, Captain Planet will hop in their gas-burning car to drive to work, drink a grande Starbucks coffee from a disposable cup, flush the toilet ten times throughout the day, pick up the newest iPhone from the Apple Store on the drive home, then watch an hour of Foundation on their 65" TV with 5.1 surround sound.
I'm obviously being a dramatic. More generally and accurately; humanity is destroying the planet. We're really good at it. People act like NFTs are destroying the planet, while every day doing far more to destroy the planet than NFTs ever will. It's a bad argument, especially when NFTs (and ETH in general) present a fantastically optimizable solution to the problem of value ownership; they'll get more efficient over time. Data centers can easily be powered by clean energy.
Here's the axiom I've noticed: the pro-NFT crowd has seen every single argument against them. I don't know if the people who post articles & comments like these think they're being original, like they're the first one to notice that verifiable providence is a difficult problem, but trust me; many people in this community have been thinking about this long before you first heard the word "cryptocurrency". Your inability to exhibit creativity in reasoning about a solution to the problems you present does not mean there is no solution, or that the technology won't continue to flourish.
Perhaps my understanding of NFTs is lacking, but what prevents someone from pulling a scam like in The Producers and simply selling multiple NFTs for the same work of art, apart from people finding out about it? Is simply the fact that the artist publicly states “this hash belongs to this piece”? So if the buyer wasn’t paying attention or didn’t validate the hash there’s nothing stopping someone from selling as many NFTs as they want?
This is not unique to NFTs, and is based upon the trust you have for the artist / gallery that is selling the work.
If---in the traditional art world---you buy a $35,000 fine art photograph from a limited edition of 10 prints by the photographer, you also trust that the artist will not make a second run of 100 prints. Or if they do, that the second run will be denoted and priced differently, so that the original run retains most of its value.
Ultimately the system will evolve toward more centralized entities which can verify the providence of items. Whether that's an auction house, or a twitter verified badge. The sites which allow "viewing" and "transacting" the NFTs will display this "chain of authenticity".
Thus, its baked into the price; plenty of counterfeits exist, but the "real" one ("this is the one Deadmau5 tweeted about") will be worth the most.
The argument that this is antithetical to the distributed goals of blockchain are missing the point; its a marriage of old-school centralization and new-school peer-to-peer. Centralization is great for some things, like verifiable providence. It's been a negative force in other things, like limiting or taxing access to financial services & marketplaces.
Furthermore, if you're in the camp of "zero centralization"; it's great for that too. Imagine an artist publishing their GPG key, creating an NFT of a piece of art, then signing some part of the content of that NFT with their GPG key.
This idea of combining NFT and GPG to demonstrate both ownership and authenticity is very intriguing. Would the artist's public GPG key have to be something similar to a verified Twitter account, i.e. some kind of due diligence by a third party that the key actually belongs to a specific person/artist? How would the artist "sign" the artwork with the private GPG key in such a way that the signature wasn't simply duplicated when the digital artifact was copied? Is there a way to combine some identifier from the NFT with the GPG key such that there was a way to cryptographically demonstrate authenticity?
All NFTs have a verifiable chain of providence baked-in; you can see the wallet address of the account which minted it.
So, I present GPG signing not really as a novel mechanism for establishing authenticity given a lack of any other method; the NFT itself is the authenticity. Today, zero-trust creators may publish their GPG public key; tomorrow, maybe they publish their address; "the only legit NFTs are the ones minted from this address"; this is cryptographically secure.
But, maybe a creator is more "well known" for their GPG public key, or wants to mint from a large number of addresses for whatever reason. They could sign a phrase which includes the wallet address which minted the NFT; when combined with the verifiable providence blockchain already offers, this is a compelling and secure solution for them.
Blockchain has all the same "zero-trust bootstrapping" problems as GPG does; where does the artist actually broadcast "this is my address", and how can fans know that it was actually the artist who said it? It's something GPG has struggled with for a long time. Ultimately it usually falls back to centralized authority; that doesn't mean GPG doesn't have value beyond the authority who told you "Yeah, this is Deadmau5's public key".
The idea is simply presented more-so as a bridge between the old and the new. Many people here understand what GPG is and why it is valuable, but don't understand how blockchain delivers an extension of that value. GPG is great at asserting authenticity; blockchain extends this and asserts both authenticity and providence ("is it real, and where did it come from?"); this is a critical addition required for a concept of ownership. But blockchain's ability to assert this ends at the blockchain, as you'd expect; the world will still need centralized authorities to jump the gap between the blockchain and a human being.
IF that matters in the context of a given NFT. There are tons of NFTs which created 'virgin value' so to speak; value of thin air. No one cares who minted them; the token itself is what is valuable.
Wouldn't it be basically the same as a centralized blockchain that was exclusively used to verify "original" NFTs? That would seem to be a better way to me, IF the community could settle on a singular blockchain to hold it.
I mean the hash is unique, but the piece of artwork that hash is associated with isnt.
I'm not even saying something like "the artwork is all boring its not unique" or anything, or that someone could copy I it, I mean the seller is literally selling multiple of the exact same artwork.
But if the recipient being unique is all that matters, why have artwork associated with it at all? That's basically just a weird online packaging/box art at that point.
That's my point though - it's not ownership of the artwork. It has no legal power, and multiple can exist, made by anyone. Ownership of what then? Of a receipt or a signature.
I've just enjoyed watching my Solana go up so that I have a way to make money off of this silliness. Just need to time the exit before the fad goes away.
Consider flipping it into Loopring, which strives to (and seems to be succeeding in) serving a much wider market, with custody staying on ETH network in case Loopring network eats shit.
The marketplaces verify the collections. So if you're buying from a famous artist on OpenSea, you know the NFT is the one from that artist. There are copycat collections but it's no different from someone trying to flog a fake Banksy a the local shopping mall.
You're not even buying the "1s and 0s" with an NFT either. You're buying a record in a proprietary (albeit public) database that says you "own" it. There can be many records in many propriety databases claiming the same thing and none has any more legitimacy than any other technically speaking
Why the quotes on "own"? You can hold it, trade it, or destroy it—curious what other factors you see as necessary for "full" ownership of a digital token?
Legally speaking, the Land Registry (in my country) is the arbiter of whether or not I own my house. Because of, like, the law. There is no corresponding law that says owning an NFT means I own [any rights to] an artwork.
You can't duplicate or send your house by email. The "art" linked to the NFT can be duplicated bit-for-bit. What is unique is the NFT, that is, the certificate of ownership.
Ownership is legal right, so to own a digital token you would need some kind of title to the token. Without a title you don't really own it, just like you don't own a house without the proper paperwork that says you own it.
Even with a title or other legal means of asserting ownership, in the end with digital tokens you're still dependent on their network continuing to exist.
If a national highway system goes down, your house is still there.
If a digital token network goes down, be it a token-based centralized SaaS company with an API or token-based decentralized blockchain, goes down, your assets go down with it, regardless of legal abstractions.
NFTs aren't digital media, they're digital tokens.
You own the token as you own an API key for a service, except since decentralized there's no network operator who can revoke your key ("suspend your account") as with, say, centralized SaaS REST APIs.
You're not buying the JPEG, you're buying an API key that happens to be linked to the JPEG.
The fact that something is or isn't one of a kind doesn't make it valuable though. If value only came from the art itself then whether something was one of a kind shouldn't matter - especially so if a reproduction is close enough that they are visually identical. For expensive paintings the value of the painting is completely separate from the art itself - I think we can agree that a Picasso would sell for a lot less if you didn't tell people it was painted by Picasso. That's despite the fact that who painted something is not a physical aspect of the painting.
An NFT is basically like a 'certificate of authenticity' - whether you think it's BS or not depends entirely on who issued it. A item that includes such a certificate from a known reputable source may be extremely valuable to a collector, where-as the regular item may be practically worthless, and that can be true even if nobody can tell the items apart. At the same time, John Doe down the street signing 'certificates of authenticity' doesn't provide any value because nobody cares who John Doe is, in the same way that some random person signing an NFT doesn't automatically make it worth anything since anybody else can just come along an do the same. But if the author of an artwork came by and produced an NFT of it, that's unique in a way that people may care about.
It all comes down to technology. If we had the technology to create an atom-by-atom replica of a painting, then this justification would need to change. People would probably say “but these atoms are still the original ones.” Of course the only way to verify that at this point would be to have evidence of a chain of custody, which would likely be very difficult to establish with any confidence.
So paintings just “lucked out” and already had a convenient scarce item that interested parties could agree represents the “original act of creation of the work of art,” because the technology to create an exact copy doesn’t exist, and it’s extremely expensive and difficult to create a convincing forgery.
An NFT cannot be a certificate of authenticity, because the content is hosted by a third party. The third party can replace the supposedly original content with a non-original copy at any time.
I'm not saying they are a certificate of authenticity, I'm saying the value it creates is similar in concept. A certificate of authenticity has value based on the issuer of the certificate of authenticity - if the issuer is some random person it doesn't create any value because anybody can create such a thing, but if it is someone important/relevant in that field then it can be very meaningful.
In a similar way an NFT has value based on particular details about the NFT such as the author and database it is in, not just the bytes themselves. You can certainly create the same NFT with a new author, or on a new database, or etc. but it's no longer the same NFT at that point, it's a replica and can be distinguished from the original. And while an NFT published by the author of the art might be a interesting thing to own/control, the same NFT published by a random John Doe doesn't carry the same relevance. And fundamentally you still can't change the properties of the original NFT in the original database.
I don't think that certificates of authenticity work like that. A certificate of authenticity has value in as much as it certifies authenticity, not because someone important has signed it. That would be an autograph.
> A certificate of authenticity has value in as much as it certifies authenticity, not because someone important has signed it.
I think you missed the point, someone has issued the certificate and it only matters if you value that person's or entity's opinion. If you don't then it's just a meaningless piece of paper.
For example, PSA grades playing cards. A rare card that is graded highly by PSA will generally make it much more valuable than an ungraded version of the same card. However, if someone send me a card in the mail and I grade it a 10 and send it back, that means nothing because nobody cares about my opinion on cards.
Similarity, if PSA were to issue NFTs, they would have value specifically because it was PSA who authored the NFTs. I could take the exact same data and author an NFT myself, but nobody would care because they specifically want the one that was created by PSA, and that is something that is verifiable and that I cannot duplicate. They don't want it for any real tangible reason, they want it so they can say "I own an NFT from PSA".
Of course, because a certificate is a statement about some fact. Therefore a certificate is useful as a certificate to the extent that the issuer can be trusted about the statement that is being made. But that doesn't apply to NFTs because the issuer of an NFT is not making any statement. An NFT is more like a blank piece of paper that has been rubber stamped by somebody.
> An NFT is more like a blank piece of paper that has been rubber stamped by somebody.
Well it has something written on it, but yes pretty much. If the "somebody" is someone you care about though, then that can make it more than just a piece of paper, in the same way that if you care about the issuer of a certificate then it is more than just a piece of paper. I get the distinction you're trying to make, and I don't think it really matters, but perhaps it was a bad example and autographs would have been a better one.
To be clear, I don't own NFTs, I get the idea but they don't appeal to me. But I also don't own any expensive art either for the same reason, so to each his own. I do own a bunch of trading cards, and I'm sure plenty of people would just view them as pieces of paper. Point being, people value plenty of silly things, NFTs are just one of them.
> … the content is hosted by a third party. The third party can replace the supposedly original content with a non-original copy at any time.
Generally the content is hosted in IPFS and identified by a content hash which was recorded as part of the transaction which minted the NFT in a blockchain, which makes it somewhere between "difficult" and "impossible" for any third party (or first or second party, for that matter) to replace the content.
It can be replicated in such a way that you cannot apply a test to determine whether it is original, unless you’re one of a very few experts who can distinguish highly skilled forgeries from original paintings. Historically there have been forgeries that have fooled all experts and thus the entire art world for some time. This is a much more difficult and less reliable process than checking a digital signature in a public database.
NFTs are based around the idea that you create a new cryptocurrency for each object you want to sell on a chain, for example Ethereum. When you do this "creation of a non-fungible token", your token gets an address that is essentially an "ID" for the token you've created.
Every token you create gets a unique ID, that only that token has.
So with that in mind, a NFT is as unique as a painting in your example, as a NFT is always "one of a kind".
But the actual image data isn't stored in the token, just its URL (usually). So what you own is not the image, but rather, whatever resource resides at a particular URL, with there being no guarantee that that resource doesn't also live at some other URL.
Not sure how this is relevant to the discussion at hand. Either you think it's valuable, or you don't. I happen to think NFTs are not as valuable as others seemingly think, but they do have some use cases (apparently).
What is reality anyway? We have a distributed, decentralized database (Ethereum) that people can set/get data in/from. Now we also have a abstraction on top of that that allows us to have unique data. What can we do with this? Fuck should I know, also I don't really care. Think of it what you want.
Have you not heard of this concept? Seems to be a bit of copout to explaining the value of an NFT given an NFT, by it's mere existence, has no bearing on anything outside of a blockchain. But if you are unclear on the concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality
I feel like you're trying to find a more concrete reason than is necessary - the fact that it is unique can be valuable on its own. I can go buy a reproduction Picasso that looks identical to the original and from an art standpoint it's effective equivalent, but it's still worth nothing compared to a "real" one. The fact that the original was painted by Picasso is what provides it so much value, even though who painted a particular piece of art is not a physical part of the art itself. A unique NFT effectively provides value in the same way, it is valuable as long as people care about who/what issued it and thus want to be able to say they own that unique one.
And while it's notable that digital art can be duplicated perfectly and physical art cannot, I don't personally think that matters all that much. People who are buying a Picasso aren't doing so just for the art, they're doing it so they can say they own a Picasso. In the same way you're not buying an NFT for the art itself, you're buying it because it's uniquely identifiable in a way you and others care about.
No, the ID is not unique. It might be unique in a particular database, where the software enforces such uniqueness, but that doesn't mean the ID unique. Anyone can make an exact copy of the ID, which will be undistinguishable from the original, or they can copy the entire database, any number of times, at a negligible cost. You can't do that with a physical object.
In current capitalist societies, ownership of property is fully secured by the military (police) and judicial (law) power of the state. NFTs provide you with neither of these (not even copyright protection), so yes: there's no one stopping from doing a right-click on your image.
Maybe if everyone was really "believing" that ownership really originates from the Ethereum blockchain (just like beliving that strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is a basis for a system of government), then the ownership could be recognized socially without any coertion or violence. But so far the only people really beliving in this system of values are elites and crypto enthusiasts, so if you really are one of those people who want NFTs to be a basis for ownership, you've be better off pandering to the government to enact laws to arrest people for right-clicking.
The market dictates the value. As a test, create and mint an exact replica of a Bored Ape NFT and try to sell it for the current minimum price of 32 ETH or around $150k.
I know nothing about NFTs but if I was to forge something for a test, it probably wouldn’t be something that is high profile. I would pick something in the 1-10k range and start from there. /cluelessrant
I doubt this. I imagine it is easier to create forgeries of low profile things, lets say a Thomas Kinkade painting vs a Monet. Its also more likely that as the price of an item goes up, the buyer would be more interested in verification.
> Ownership is the state or fact of exclusive rights and control over property, which may be any asset, including an object, land or real estate, intellectual property, or until the nineteenth century, human beings.
In light of this
> In current capitalist societies, ownership of property is fully secured by the military (police) and judicial (law) power of the state.
Any examples of non capitalist societies that actually governed more than just a city for more than just a couple of months where there were no enforcement of exclusive rights over anything?
Because if I can think of none, just for example, USSR would get real pissy real fast if you infringed on the exclusive rights which they thought existed over a whole host of things.
Sure, in most non-capitalist societies people had no exclusive rights to their own labor, or their own persons, but there were still many people who had exclusive rights over things that would be enforced by use of force. And the state did have exclusive rights over the person and labor of their subjects, which is a key differentiation from most "capitalistic societies" as you call them.
So then why did you qualify your sentence with "capitalist societies" if what you say applies to non capitalist societies also? And if it does not, give examples.
If you do believe the same thing applies with non-capitalist societies, then you then surely agree even more with my initial criticism with NFTs? (which was the primary thing I was talking about?) I don't understand why you're making such a big deal out of this.
Yes, I believe that my statement can be expanded into certain non-capitalist societies also, like in previous instances of feudalism and communism (where the state "owned" everything through military coersion). The reason I've brought out capitalism is because it's the environment in which NFTs were born, and therefore its relationship with it should be talked about it. But what you're talking about has absolutely nothing to do with the main discussion (which is, how state power and ownership is crucially interlinked, and NFT's failure to acknoweledge this is the problem).
> The reason I've brought out capitalism is because it's the environment in which NFTs were born, and therefore its relationship with it should be talked about it.
NFTs are a world 3 construct (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popper%27s_three_worlds) and has no dependency on any economic system or even society to exist and the problem of using them to represent an ownership relation is not limited to any economic system either, but exists due to factors inherent in both the concept of ownership and what NFTs are. NFTs can't reach from world 3 into world 1 by themselves and this is no more or less a problem in any specific economic system.
So we seem to both agree that what NFTs (and blockchain) is doing is actually just bookkeeping, and this “data” cannot invade the physical world unless we actually act upon the physical world according to that data.
What I was talking is: the reaching from world 3 to world 1 (in Popper’s terms) in capitalist societies are often enforced with the absolute power of the state, and “free” markets emanate from that power. NFTs don’t add anything more to this current state of society, since it is just another way of bookkeeping, and the actual reaching from world 3 to world 1 is left unsolved (which for me, how to do this without relying on violence and coercion is the most important question of liberalism, and failure of this will lead to its demise). NFTs and crypto are still exchanged in US dollars, and people always talk about it in how many US dollars it represents. So value is ultimately delegated to the dollar, the dollar which holds its global monetary status via the US’s hegemonic military power, so we’re back to our current problem.
So, do you think NFTs can actually change the current status quo? Does it bring anything new to the equation?
> So, do you think NFTs can actually change the current status quo? Does it bring anything new to the equation?
No, it does not change the status quo, and brings nothing new to the equation.
To kind of rephrase what you said slightly: All ownership relations exists in world 3, that is their nature, they can't act in world 1. NFTs don't bring anything to the table here, crypto does not bring anything to the table here. With NFTs, ownership relations is still a world 3 thing, and world 3 things still cannot act in world 1. And no enforcement mechanisms we currently have for ownership relations give any special recognition or consideration to NFTs, blockchain or crypto assets.
The only disagreement we have is that I don't think it makes sense to qualify sentences with "capitalist societies" when the claims they make are more broad. It's a bit like saying "all Furry mammals are characterized by the presence of mammary glands which in females produce milk for feeding (nursing) their young", it may be true, but the word "furry" in that sentence adds negative value:
> To strengthen your argument and increase clarity, limit the number of qualifiers in each sentence to only those necessary for accuracy—the remaining qualifiers will then do their job well.
The problem is that NFTs doesn't solve a problem that existed.
NFTs supposedly allow you to prove who owns something. However they don't actually form a contract for the thing that you think you are buying. You are buying the NFT, not the artwork them selves.
This is the main problem, so if you get scammed, or you try and assert what you think your rights are, you have no support.
To translate it to business, its like buying the sole share in some company, but its not actually the sole share, its a letter that says you've bought a receipt for a sole share from person x.
There is no assertion that you own the actual thing the bit of paper says its a receipt for, or indeed that the person selling it to you owned it in the first place.
This has been said time and time again about each and every "blockchain/defi" project for the past 10+ years: all the guarantees of blockchain protocols are within the blockchain. The very moment you try to put literally anything relating to outside of blockchain all you have is extremely inefficient append-only database - nothing more, nothing less.
NFTs are datums with an URL. That is all there is to an NFT. It's not a receipt for art, it has absolutely nothing to do with an art in question. To translate it to business it is a receipt for an entry to the Louvre with a URL pointing to an image of Mona Lisa. It does not prove your ownership of Mona Lisa. Anyone can access said URL without the receipt. There can be unlimited number of different unique receipts with same/similar URLs to same/similar image on Mona Lisa.
It is merely an overly complicated way of transferring cryptotokens.
The problem is that people don’t understand what NFTs are and talk about them with the idea that they are about representing digital art.
NFTs are about representing non-fungible digital assets.
For some reason, NFT art took off (which I don’t understand), but that wasn’t what NFTs were built for. NFTs can represent digital assets that exist fully on a blockchain and aren’t tied to off-chain assets. A digital ID, a in-game asset, a digital license, a ENS name, etc… are all NFTs and don’t need to reference any odd-chain URLs or images.
> A digital ID, a in-game asset, a digital license, a ENS name, etc…
These are literally things tied to off-chain assets. Your "ownership" of any of those things only matters if someone else cares about the particular block chain it lives on.
If you "own" a game asset on blockchain A and I only care about blockchain B, as far as I'm concerned you don't "own" anything.
There's nothing stopping anyone from starting yet another blockchain and reselling all NFTs on that new chain.
Besides, unless a URL a token "owns" lives on the blockchain it literally points to some off-chain resource. If that URL in any way becomes inaccessible the thing you "own" is meaningless.
Again, assets on a blockchain only matter if someone cares about that blockchain. If I only support blockchain B, it doesn't matter how many assets you have on blockchain A as I will never support it. If I'm invested in blockchain B there's little reason to add to my expenses to support other blockchains.
Even in the most practical terms, if I sell in game assets they're ones I made for my game. I know they work with my game. Why would I put in extra effort to import third party assets I don't make money on? If your assets are in a proprietary format I'd need to spend more money licensing some importer or build my own.
This only works if the developers choose to spend time implementing an import/export system. That’s a lot of work and since they need to have an arrangement for that anyway, why wouldn’t they use their existing billing system to retain control of it and a greater share of the profits?
Neither of these are good examples: the real value comes from the outside legal relationships. If you have an in-game asset, what matters is whether EA thinks you own it and you get what they choose to implement. Similarly, a Windows license key is valid to the extent that you have a legal agreement with Microsoft — if you transfer it and the license doesn’t cover that, the blockchain doesn’t mean anything. If they do allow transfers, you don’t need a blockchain since their SQL Server database is what matters and it does the job faster and so much cheaper.
Very few NFT concepts are different than this: the legal weight comes from the outside world and the cheaper alternatives are likely to win out once the VCs drop the subsidies and start trying to get money out of the system.
NFTs essentially are blobs of data on the blokchain. As soon as that data references anything off chain you need off-chain methods to sync data with a blockchain, at which point the blockchain becomes merely a datastore.
> A digital ID, a in-game asset, a digital license
All of which require off chain sync. For NFTs to have any meaning at all, the embedded data must be world readable. At which point that digital ID, in-game asset, license all are usable by anyone else. In order for that "ownership" to have any meaning at all it must be exclusive and therefore the service must check your identity one way or another, be it somehow checking that you actually own the private key corresponding to NFT, or using any other mutually agreed authentication method. If the service does not recognize the particular blockchain fork your NFT resides in your NFT is more than useless, because it does not prove absolutely anything to the service provider. Proving identity via blockchain is probably the most inefficient method known.
NFTs can only make viable statements about on-chain assets. As far as I am aware, there are no other on-chain assets than cryptotokens, therefore all NFTs do are provide a level of indirection to cryptotokens.
Can you explain what non-fungible digital assets are? Because the reason I think NFTs are a scam is that I think of digital assets as inherently fungible.
I think NFT's applied to art make only nominal sense. I myself had to come to the realization that NFT's are really just flexing for the rich, because as anyone realizes, right-click save-as is all you need to have the art too, just not the "key" or "ownership proof" to that art.
However when it comes to gameing, its a whole different story. Think of it more like a key to unlock something unique in the digital world.
Want to own some unique special edition sword with rare attributes in the Zelda-verse? Buy the NFT block chain address to it that says you and only you can have it. Want to own the penthouse apartment in the zucker-verse? Buy the NFT key that says only you have ownership rights. Want to be a unique character with unique pets in World-of-crypto-craft? Buy the NFT's to unlock these. Sell them if you get bored for more money, and the game developer gets a cut!
The gaming application scenarios are enormous. That's why crypto gaming will likely be huge and I myself have invested in it's foundations for the long term (Enjin, Seedify-fund, D-race, etc). It's one of the few applications that makes sense outside of rich snobs flexing.
"Only you have it. We definitely didn't copypaste the meshes and logic and sell it to somebody else because the idea of digital non-fungibility is a neat joke. We promise. BTW: when you buy this, our execs are buying Porsches and other things that are real. Cool, huh?"
This holds no water and the streak remains unbroken: nobody I've seen describe blockchain-fiddling with respect to games describes the process as anything that anyone who plays games wants. Nobody actually wants this except for the people who want to make everybody else play involuntarily into weird cryptocurrency schemes while the schemer still holds the bag.
Diablo could have individual uniques right now if they wanted and you could trade them if you wanted and nobody needs to burn a dumpster full of coal to do it. It is genuinely a social toxin and you should stop.
But how does the NFT actually help with that? Couldn't developers/companies just create copies of that item/asset and sell them as often as they want to?
If they want to sell assets/items exactly once nothing is stopping them from doing so right now, they are the only ones who can actually enforce that anyways.
I'm no expert at all, but this is how see it from an outsider perspective.
With an NFT you can prove the ownership of X digital asset, that proof of ownership is what is non-fungible
In order for NFTs-art to make sense to me, artist must attest that "whoever owns that digital asset in the ______ (ethereum blockchain?) " has the artist's recognition of ownership, and is a big UX problem for artists to really prove that, which I believe it's "solved" by platforms like opensea attesting on behalf of artist
So in practice, your buying the recognition of opensea that you own X asset, which opensea claims that is approved by X artist (it's also claimed by the artist on social networks or alike). there's still a problem there if the relationship between artist and opensea will be intact in the future, I don't know if or how they try to solve it
So in practice, most of it could have been done with a centralized database, but that would be missing the point.
There surely are knowledgeable NFT-creators who knows what they are doing and they can provide the attestation by themselfs, without any intermediary party, and that's where things get interesting with NFTs, look for example in gaming, especially where assets are shared among multiple games (otherwise it still could have been done with a database), it's just all impractical for non crypto-savvy folks
NFT can't prove ownership of anything but itself. Anyone can make a new NFT for the same artwork/game-asset/bridge/moon-plot and claim they own it.
There isn't even a uniqueness check, so there's no limit to copying other people's NFTs.
It's like buying a copy of an artwork in a museum gift shop. Your print is yours, but there can be thousands of other copies and there can be printed more at any time. None of them are the original artwork anyway.
> NFT can't prove ownership of anything but itself
That's why the artist has to publicly attest which NFTs he approves
> There isn't even a uniqueness check
Even if there were, it wouldn't change anything, it's too easy to change one bit, or the metadata, and voilá, a new totally different digital asset that looks exactly the same to the naked eye
Again, none of these work without the artist approval of the NFT itself, that's the only thing that adds value to it
But that claim means nothing if the in-game asset is not recognized in the game, and that copied artwork is for some crazy reason not recognized by other interested parties as the actual original NFT. None of them are the original NFT, minted by the creator.
NFTs are completely useless for this. Why would game use blockchain to store ownership of an item? There are exactly 0 benefits to doing that instead just tracking it on their won servers in old normal database. Since anyone can create duplicate NFTs they would have to track which ones are genuine which defeats the whole purpose.
If done well, it could prove to me that I could trade the asset at my will, without the game's platform blessing.
I know people that play games to sell their gold for real money, against the platform blessing, risking getting banned.
I also imagine that generating a market for real money in a game is a legal PITA for game developers, and NFTs frees developers from any liability since they are not in charge of its trading, transactions are not in their database anymore and they have no power over them
Also the same NFT can be used in different games, no need to change anything from game developers, just reuse NFTs. On the other hand, in the database world of games, it requires specific integrations with a centralized database
> I know people that play games to sell their gold for real money, against the platform blessing, risking getting banned.
Why would game developers ever implement a system that lets you circumvent the rules?
> Also the same NFT can be used in different games, no need to change anything from game developers, just reuse NFTs.
What? They still have to write code to interpret the NFT in their game. They still need specific integrations for every single token they need to support, and they also control what that token is. If they choose to interpret your really expensive sword as a common one, well, tough luck.
You cannot create duplicate NFTs. That is the whole point. The reason to have NFTs (and also fungible tokens) in games is that the gamers would know and be able to trust that the quantity of a given item was fixed. There may be more appeal to play a game where the economy was predictable and couldn't be later manipulated by the company or original game creators.
But the game developers own the database, so if they want something to be unique, they can already do that!
None of this are either actual problems that developers have, or things that users want. Never once has someone playing a game say "boy I sure wish all these hats were more expensive!"
NFTs neither do nor can enforce uniqueness too. Blockchain is a method to, as you put it, trustlessly couple a particular instance of a datum with a keypair.
Game developers can duplicate the blob describing in-game asset in their own database or on the blockchain. For off-chain data blockchains are nothing more than a datastore which provides immutable link between a datum and a keypair.
So yes there is an original keypair that establishes the data. But ones established it can be fixed in a verifiable way. A game client, community of art lovers, government agency, social consensus, then recognizes that nft as corresponding to some offchain asset. It cannot be later changed, duplicated, etc without some social consensus to do so. You don't need to trust a third party with control.
Game developers can mint more tokens at any time. There's nothing technical ensuring scarcity of NFTs, and gentleman's agreements don't need a blockchain.
For game assets the game is necessarily the central trusted authority. Ethereum has a speed of C64 and latency of a postal pigeon, so you can't run a game server on the chain. Therefore, you have to trust an off-chain game to actually honor what the blockchain says. This is not substantially different than Steam CS:Go skins, except for industrial-scale coal-rolling.
> Game developers can mint more tokens at any time.
That's a very valid criticism of most game implementations (maybe all? I only know like 3 and they are all centralized blockchains -- puke), and that's why I'm staying away from them too, at least for now.
But I cannot deny there's real potential here, I can imagine totally open source games without servers, just p2p connection for battles (like we used to do to play Age of empires) and its assets backed by NFTs
As has been said, how does the game engine enforce ownership of those assets? The best it can do is query a blockchain (and for p2p games without central server every client must also become a node in all backing blockchains) and check ownership of corresponding private key[s]. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from minting a new NFT describing in-game assets, therefore the *content* of NFT must be signed by players in a match or some other external entity, but the blockchain makes no guarantees about the content.
Most of the blockchain properties only apply to on-chain assets. The very moment you involve an off-chain party, blockchain becomes append-only database with performance of table top calculator and latency of postal pigeon and is therefore a shitty database.
The only valid use case I see is a smart contract that automatically issues certain assets, which could be seen as somewhat of a solution searching for a problem, but games are not the problem. With games all clients must agree on game state anyway, storing game state on the blockchain is too expensive/cumbersome and if you have to agree on game state anyway, the state can also include assets.
The "content" doesn't matter, all that matters is the NFT id (or hash, whatever is used to uniquely identify it). The game is what players have to coordinate about, make sure is the same one, and the exact same version of it. Because the code is the only thing that gives real meaning (the content) to that NFT. The blockchain is ONLY used to track ownership of and id (The NFT) nothing else is required.
I mostly agree on everything else you said as the current state of NFT-games. But unlike you, I do see potential for different kinds of games and dynamics that are not possible or impractical in database-games. I don't think they will be the same type of games we are used to, if you kill it now, we will never see into what it evolves.
The concert organizer acts is an inherent central authority. The whole problem is easily solvable with a QR code and a web API.
Using a trust-no-one arctic-melting decentralised layer on top of a thing that is inherently decided by a single real-world entity makes no sense whatsoever.
I think that the true value of NFTs will come from interoperability, where there is no central authority, and you can treat it as a sort of cross-platform standard for verifying ownership of digital assets. This doesn't really apply to concert tickets (except if someone grants some special privileges to people who went to a certain concert in some unrelated virtual space), but there are advantages to not centralising authority for certain things (say, domain name ownership, why should ICAAN control that).
What stops me from copying ticket data from the NFT and using it to enter the concert?
If the concert venue somehow checks ownership of private key associated with the NFT it means they are effectively using some form of identity verification and blockchain is really really bad for this purpose
You don't use the blockchain to verify ownership of a private key. You know the public key, and the owner of the private key can sign any message to prove that they indeed have the private key associated with that public key. This can be done completely offline.
Isn't a crypto wallet, literally a key pair, the purest form of identity verification? It's something you have (private key) and something you know (passphrase). No need for some central authority, no need for privacy concerns.
You are right on the latter point, a keypair itself is a pretty good method to verify pseudonymous identity.
However, we are talking about NFTs as tickets. Traditional ticketing relies on secrecy, or in other words possession of ticked-id grants entry. Data embedded in NFTs is (and has to be) public, therefore token auth model does not work, you must use challenge-response model. The very point here is that ticket data has to be linked with a keypair and provided at the moment of sale to be verified upon entry. Public key must be provided at moment of sale, blockchains are one way to store that link, private database of ticketing system is another. Blockchains bring their own disadvantages and the only advantage is trustless transfer.
In what scenario trustless pseudonymous transfer of a ticket is an advantage worth disadvantages of the blockchain.
NFTs can be created that are non-resellable, you just build that into the smart contract. Even if they were, you can see the full transaction history and decide to reject anyone but first owners
For digital underlying assets, what is the social value of imposing scarcity? For non-digital underlying assets, what is it that ensures the link between the NFT and the asset?
I haven't been following NFTs closely, but it seems to me that it would be much more interesting to use them not to create artificial scarcity out of digital goods (which seems to be all of the effort), but rather to track ownership of physical goods.
Like, a company could issue a bearer-bond where the owner wasn't the person who physically possessed the bond, but rather the owner of token XYZ.
So, reverse the pointer. Rather than the token claiming to "own" a good, have the good claimed to be "owned" by a specific token.
The thing that largely seems nonsensical to me about NFTs is that the underlying ownership is...not valuable. You don't "own" anything other than the token itself. If you were granted the rights of ownership of the digital good (for example, if a worldwide exclusive copyright license were assigned to the bearer of an NFT, then it would "own" something).
> NFTs supposedly allow you to prove who owns something
This is fundamentally wrong.
NFTs allow you to show off who "owns"[0] something.
[0] for some generalized, possibly meaningless definition of "own". I say possibly meaningless, then again, what is property really, just a government-managed, non-fungible, token? Don't gaze too hard at the abyss, unless you are willing to let the abyss to gaze back.
Only in a specious sense. The point to money isn't "scarcity", the point to money is TRUST. You trust that $1 is going to be worth $1 tomorrow, and that it will be worth $1 to the shopkeeper and the bank and your family and everyone else. So anywhere you want to trade for something, you can do it in dollars. It's true that to provide that stability you have to control the supply, so money is "scarce". But only in the sense that the economy it represents is finite.
NFTs don't provide that, therefore they aren't a good medium of exchange. They aren't "scarce" in the way that money is or has to be.
They're also a Tulip bubble, but that's a different thing.
> It's true that to provide that stability you have to control the supply...
Doesn't sound specious to me. The artificial scarcity is real, and has real consequences for real people. While trust is the primary property of money, scarcity-at-any-point-in-time is a fundamentally necessary (but not sufficient) to be a money.
The NFT-signed work is beautiful and also hanging on my walls (both digital, such as social media, and physical, in that I own prints representing the tokens, signed by the artists who have distributed the same NFTs).
The media does not evaporate as it is either on-chain, or distributed via IPFS (ie: peer-to-peer rather than a central server).
None of the artists I have purchased NFTs from have tried to trick me (including Anders Hoff, mentioned in the OP article, who has distributed his work as an NFT).
And, most importantly, the artists and non-profit organizations in the arts are getting paid via NFT sales.
And I think for most people getting a piece of paper, physically signed by the author stating that it's their work is far more valuable than some UUID on a computer.
Some NFT platforms also support credit cards. But, I'd rather buy art in a way that doesn't include exploitative third parties that take a significant cut (Stripe, Shopify, PayPal, currency exchange fees when paying an artist in another country, etc).
For reference, the last NFT I purchased on Hicetnunc.xyz had a protocol fee of 0.002947 XTZ (around 1¢ USD) and a platform fee of 2.5%, the rest of the sale went directly to the artist's wallet.
To your second point; this remains to be seen—society can place value on many different abstract concepts, "ink on paper" may not be the only valuable vehicle for art and culture.
In practice, the fees in traditional e-commerce systems tend to be significantly higher than 2.5% (I say this as an artist running a Shopify print shop for a few years). Some services like Bandcamp are upwards of 12-18%.
Hicetnunc fees are fixed, and the free market gives an opportunity for other platforms to improve on this if the community desires a marketplace with lower fees (it's much easier to build an alternative to Hicetnunc than an alternative Stripe/Shopify/PayPal). Artists are also given a 10-25% royalty (which they decide) for each resale of a token on the Hicetnunc marketplace. And, of course, since it is all peer-to-peer, you are free to exchange art tokens with no fees at all, save the negligible protocol/transaction fees.
> society can place value on many different abstract concepts
What society definitely can't place value on is a URL to a digital asset that may or may not be there tomorrow, because an uninsured, untrusted value store can't be relied on.
There's nothing saying NFT artifacts have to be digital, though, I'd think. Using them to facilitate trade of physical artifacts would back the trade with (relatively) reliable value stores (physical artifacts) while benefiting from the low transaction fees.
For many reasons, including lower fees (see [1]), acquiring ownership of an artist-signed asset, rather than a digital media file (the limited-edition token is cryptographically signed by the artist, the media file is not), participating in a digital art community, supporting decentralized systems, etc.
A simple way to frame Hicetnunc is a social media platform that is not driven by FAANG, advertising models, and "Like" buttons, but instead by artists, collectors, and OSS developers participating in a digital economy: selling and trading tokens, and also exploring ways to steward and maintain that work without solely relying on traditional centralized third-party services.
> For many reasons, including lower fees (see [1])
The lower fees derive from the medium used (crypto instead of traditional payment processors). You didn't need to involve a NFT to send crypto to the artist's wallet.
> acquiring ownership of an artist-signed asset, rather than a digital media file (the limited-edition token is cryptographically signed by the artist, the media file is not)
I'm going to refer to the rest of this comment thread about whether 'ownership' is a suitable word for having a cryptographic signature applied to your blockchain address, when the media file in question is bit-for-bit identical.
As you can guess, I hardly think so. There is nothing you can do as an 'owner' of a digital ape picture that anybody else who right-clicked it and saved it can't also do, with the possible exception of getting kudos from the artist for the money you gave them. But a simple donation would have had the same result.
> participating in a digital art community
Which hardly requires NFTs, only your involvement and communication. Online art communities go back to Elfwood.
> supporting decentralized systems, etc.
Tautology. "I use NFTs because I want to support the use of NFTs".
--
> A simple way to frame Hicetnunc is a social media platform that is not driven by FAANG, advertising models, and "Like" buttons, but instead by artists, collectors, and OSS developers participating in a digital economy: selling and trading tokens, and also exploring ways to steward and maintain that work without solely relying on traditional centralized third-party services.
I'm a Fediverse user and I want to nuke the FAANGs, so I'm fully on board with promoting alternative, decentralized social networks. I just don't believe that adding glorified baseball trading cards to the recipe makes them better or stronger in any way.
I never heard anyone saying that Team Fortress 2 became a better community after it became an online market for ugly digital hats.
And I can copy that url off of the chain, pay nothing, print it out and hang it on my wall. You bought nothing. If you want to support an artist, give them money. NFTs are the new penny stocks. Pump and dump.
One interesting aspect of NFT's is that the artist can continue to get paid on each sale of the item, automatically receiving a set percentage of the sale price on each sale in perpetuity.
On Hicetnunc.xyz, buying a token on the marketplace automatically deducts 2.5% of sale to the platform (for services rendered), 10-25% to the artist (or whatever they set as royalty amount for the token), and the remainder to the seller. This is enforced via the blockchain contract, i.e. it cannot easily be circumvented on that marketplace (but it can be circumvented via peer-to-peer transfer or an alternative marketplace/contract).
The wallets can all be anonymous; it just sends these tokens to different addresses.
The wallet address is your id. So essentially if I create an nft, it is forever associated with my wallet as the creator. I set a royalty amount in the smart contract and the transfer of the nft / token takes place through the contract and automatically sends the percentage of the fee to my wallet. The token does not go directly from A to B, it passes through the contract where the logic to transfer the token is implemented.
pretty much. You lose access to the wallet and don't have your private key backed up, then its gone. Most wallet providers bug you to back up your key seed and even test you to validate that you have.
All of these things between physical and NFT are such huge differences in order if magnitude that they can't really be considered the same thing.
In my 40 years, I've never had someone break into my house and take something and I've never had a house burn down. Yet putting a file on the internet, it will eventually get copied, probably some time in the next 3 months. And I have a bookmarks folder full of once-very-popular sites that are now just completely gone, plus a bunch of still-popular sites that have changed their site layout completely. Hell, it's a bit of a meme that one of the only sites you can count on to never disappear is the god damned original Space Jam movie website.
Depends on a lot of things. Usually paintings are hanged somewhere where you can see them, usually not in safes. But with NFTs, you can have the display on the wall while the wallet is in a safe. You could put a painting in a safe too, but you won't be able to as easily show it off then.
You can't honestly believe the same skillset applies here. Hacking digital assets is not the same as breaking a quarter inch pane of glass and turning a knob while no one is around.
Exactly. Hacking digital assets is a lot more accessible. It's almost guaranteed to happen, whereas most people live their entire lives without getting robbed.
Here's another physical asset theft category that says 1/3 americans have experienced - something tells me you're also wrong about how many people have been stolen from as well.
Ok, so you're comparing absolute numbers between things in different categories and with wildly different liquidity levels. And then I don't get how comparing NFTs to "leaving valuable packages completely unsecured outside" is supposed to help your case. And if we believe 1/3rd is accurate, the easiest crime of theft on the planet is only getting us to 1/3rd? Last time I checked, 1/3rd was significantly less than 1/2. Generally, when people say "most", they mean "50%, plus at least one person".
This is why I've muted "NFT" on Twitter. You can't get answers out of proponents without them massively shifting the goal posts.
Weren't you just suggesting more hacking attempts happen against NFTs because they're accessible and now you're saying package deliveries are more exposed to theft and so the comparison is unfair?
I agree these comparisons aren't perfect, but I certainly wasn't trying to move the goalposts - I am trying to understand how you've not done just moved the goalposts yourself, though.
"Looted" art was not stolen off somebodies wall. It was taken by "explorers", occupiers, colonizers, Nazi's etc. That is a terrible link for this discussion.
I have dozens of signed prints and it is true that all you get is an accompanied verification document and not any form of legal ownership over the original.
But what you do get is a guarantee from (a) the author and (b) the fact that prints are reasonably difficult to duplicate that there will only be a limited number in circulation. And this enforced scarcity is what makes it valuable even though it's just a print of the original.
If NFTs could limit duplication of digital art that would be something but right it seems like they are more akin to a payment system like PayPal only psuedo-public.
Many signed prints I own do not even include a verification document (not all artists distribute this).
NFTs do not need to limit duplication; the tokens are already unique, as each is addressable to a different contract hash. This is why, although there are many copies of the CryptoPunks contract for example, there is only one CryptoPunks token that tends to have a market around it[1]. Those tokens are linked with a contract address that has become widely recognized as stemming from the original project.
I am not talking about the NFT but about the artwork.
If you had an image file format that embedded an NFT and every device would refuse to allow copies then that would be something. But right now NFTs seem pointless to me because I can always just copy the underlying image once I see it online.
I answered a similar question here[1]. The economic value of art has historically been tied to the scarcity of access to its media. NFT presents an alternative paradigm that separates the signature (artist-signed token) from the artistic media (image, GIF, conceptual art project, etc), allowing the former to remain scarce & uniquely transferable while the latter remains abundant & widely accessible.
> How so? The author can (and probably does) sell signed prints all the time.
Artists in the signed print run business don’t generally run new runs, for the simple reason that they understand the moral contract and more importantly the economic implications: if you do reprint, the value-add of your assertions plummets.
The same artists will usually have other non-numbered or print-on-demand art.
> How is a print difficult to duplicate?
A multi-layer screen print is not trivial to replicate without the original assets for the individual layers, and material information about the inks. That’s like asking how a painting is difficult to duplicate.
I have many NFTs that I have purchased, and although there was no license agreement (just as with signed prints), it is reasonably expected that I may display that art (on my digital or physical walls, or in some other fashion).
I can of course sell these tokens to others (again, as with signed prints), but if I attempt to copy/clone the tokens and distribute more, I enter into legal/ethical grey area (again, just as with signed prints).
But... There's no legal grey area? And the ethical grey area doesn't need NFTs - that could be served just as well by the artist asking people other than the buyer not to copy it?
All digital artwork are "prints" when you save or transfer the work. There's really no concept of "original" in digital as they are indistinguishable. NFT's attempt to add time as a metric of scarcity (this artwork exists on this blockchain at this point in time, regardless of copies). It relies very heavily on a social and cultral decision to place value on this new form of provenance.
If there is no original than all digital artwork is worthless because it can be endlessly copied which would diminish its value.
Rarity is what dictates price, not only social decisions.
If I make an NFT of my photograph and sell it to someone, what is stopping me from making copies and selling it to someone else again? Or giving it away? Nothing. This will crash the price of an NFT if the NFT's value was dictated by the artwork.
> If there is no original than all digital artwork is worthless because it can be endlessly copied which would diminish its value.
Digital art is worthless, though. It's as you said. There are no original copies, all of them are equivalent. They can be trivially and endlessly copied. Once created, the cost of creating more copies might as well be zero.
It's the artist's labor that's valuable. It's the artists themselves who are scarce.
Of course. At zero copies, the art does not exist. At one copy, it exists. The artist's job is to generate that initial copy. This is what all human intellectual work boils down to: discovering data, numbers whose bits are set just right.
Once that initial copy is found, any number of copies can be created and distributed at zero cost. Value is determined by supply and demand. If supply is infinite, value must be zero no matter what the demand is.
That's the big question. Will there be any cultral shift in recognising NFT's as legitimate signals of "value" after the hype dies down? You can stretch the hype train out by convincing some big brands to get on board, this will push the price up just by force of recoginition but are the fundamentals sound for what values the NFT? as like you say, there's no real scarcity and we still rely on meat space for settling real disagreements about ownership.
And a public proof that you purchased the NFT, not the artwork itself or any particular license or rights in it.
As the OP mentions, people are selling NFT's with URLs pointing to art without the permission or involvement of the artist. This demonstrates that ownership of an NFT does not "prove" anything about ownership related to the art itself.
I'd go further. Only NFTs that have the image stored on chain are signed digital copies. It's the association between the signature and the actual data that's important and if that can rot it's bad.
Which only leads on to the next problem of how you associate the signature with a real human.
> You are buying the NFT, not the artwork them selves.
You can not buy ownership of a digital artwork because the whole concept of owning a digital work is nonsensical. Ownership in the world of physical goods is not a law of nature but a legal concept. Ownership is essentially the right to control some resource. A collective of people agree that you have the right to control (by force) some physical thing, which is useful because otherwise everyone would be fighting violently for the possession of that thing. In the typical case the sovereign enforces the property rights. In the digital world this makes no sense because you can't possess information and you can't enforce property rights. Anyone can make a copy and everyone can have that information without anybody else losing anything. NFT is only a record that tells you who supposedly owns something but ownership means nothing without possession. NFT is like buying a land deed from a dysfunctional state: Yeah, everyone who beliefs in that state may agree that you are the owner but what use is it to you if a bunch of guys with guns are squatting on "your" land and you can do nothing about it? That is ownership without possession.
NFTs, like bitcoin and other blockchains, are another step on the road to digital property rights. They don't work yet and no one has figured out how they will work.
One thing to remember is that the first stage of a technological advancement is the bubble stage that leads to an influx of capital to build out the infrastructure.
Eventually we will be able to use this infrastructure to build out businesses with more economic value.
They can't ever work. You can't prove digital rights to a non digital asset. It doesn't matter what the blockchain says owns a property when the county courthouse says you do. They tried the same thing for "produce on the blockchain". "You can prove that this crate of apples was grown organic in Kenya". But all you can really prove is that someone put that claim on the blockchain and attached the hash to some paperwork. You are still trusting something and someone not on the blockchain. And how do you make sure this crate isn't swapped for another crate of apples that this isn't true for. You are trusting that no one did that during its transit.
Blockchain can't work for anything that isn't a self-referencing currency. It only ever exists on chain so the chain can be trusted.
Bitcoin IS a fungible token! NFT literally is "non-fungible token". Do you even know what you are talking about? Please go take a casual 5 minutes to google a topic you are unfamiliar with before spouting off about it.
Bitcoin is definitely not fully fungible, because you can easily trace its origins. And so you could "stain" certain bitcoins. "We don't accept bitcoins coming from transaction X"
NFTs and Bitcoin are both forms of tokens, which represent digital property rights.
The parent comment almost certainly understands this and was talking more broadly about forms of digital ownership. So your blasting them was kind of cringe.
because NFTs are built in (and for) digital artifacts. In the digital world the actual "artifact" (the object of art) is digital. NFTs 'solve' this problem by not caring about the fact that the artwork can (and will) be freely copied with no cost.
Maybe it is better to think about NFTs as public official (blockchain-backed) certificates of donation (or support) rather than assets.
There is nothing official about NFTs, and since they can be traded they aren't a donation log either. When I watch a youtube video they often display donors, that is official. If the artist himself posts about donors, then that is official. If the artist posts "these NFTs are official", then why couldn't the artist just post "these people donated" instead? It is the same thing, it is the same level of authority, the NFT itself doesn't make anything more valid or official or less likely to get corrupted or forgotten.
Why would you trade support for an artist? Do you really think that people want to trade support for an artist? Like "I don't really want to get credit for this artist any longer, so now I sell it for profit!"? How does that make sense? And then the next guy who paid me for it, why didn't he just support the artist directly instead of giving me a cut? It is all just stupid.
> That's not machine readable and it needs action from the original artist.
That is the whole point, I donate to the artist and the artist shows me gratitude by performing an action for me, like including my name in his videos!
People buy funny hats to use them in games. Currently, the scope of NFTs is quite similar to that. That doesn't mean that we won't see better uses of them in the future.
> That is the whole point, I donate to the artist and the artist shows me gratitude by performing an action for me, like including my name in his videos!
If that's what you want that's fine. But there are artists that don't do videos and some people want other kinds of rewards.
Also imagine if e.g. Twitter would implement support for profile pics with NFTs. Then as an owner of a NFT you'd have something unique to display.
Does an NFT provide a mechanism for enforcement of ownership? If not, how is it better than copyright law? Under copyright law, I immediately own a work of art I create (in your example, a Twitter profile pic I created) and have the right to decide who can display copies of my art. The issue isn’t proving ownership, the issue is copyright enforcement (I may not be able to afford the cost of defending my copyright claim in court).
NFTs don't solve anything on the copyright enforcement level. How could they? Your printer doesn't enforce copyright either when you print a document or an image you aren't allowed to print.
Although I don't think there is any problem in doing a NFT like an ebook or a movie that is encrypted and the decryption key would be transferred to the wallet of the buyer when you sell or resell the NFT.
But that's not how NFTs are used currently. Right now it's just "I bought this" (with not many rights being actually bought).
What NFTs allow are open markets for these NFTs. Imagine the million dollar homepage redone with NFTs. Every pixel would be a single NFT. The homepage could automatically be generated from the public data and more importantly, the buyers of the pixels could try to buy more pixels on the open market after all pixels have been sold without the original artist/seller being involved.
Or gaming assets. DLCs today can only be bought from the game developer. There's no secondary market (or at least not a legal one). Why? Because the game developer doesn't get a cut from resold DLCs. With NFTs this could change. The game developer gets a cut on every resell and even more important, you wouldn't be confined to the game developers shop system but could sell the DLCs on any shop that is compatible with the NFT standards.
> NFT can be exchanged without the original artist doing anything and the artist can still get a provision from that.
Which only goes to prove that NFTs don't provide ownership. The doctrine of first sale limits the power of IP by giving consumers ownership. This mechanism eliminates the doctrine of first sale, giving even more power to IP holders and destroying the concept of ownership.
If the NFTs don't care that the artwork can be copied, what is their use case? If I own the NFT for a digital file that other people have copies of, what do I actually use the NFT for?
The only thing I can think is proof of authorship, but private key cryptograph already solves that.
Edit: after reading some other replies I've come to the conclusion that NFTs provide a way to prove who put a file on the blockchain first. Thus the use case is trustless transfer of the ownership of this fact of "being first", which is where the scarcity of the NFT comes from and thus the value.
Except that, so far as I know, there's nothing stopping someone else from putting the exact same data in another block in the chain, and claiming that is "first" instead. And unless you already know the first copy exists, there's no way to find it via the blockchain itself, and so no way to prove "first" without already knowing it's the first.
I only have a fairly basic understanding of crypto, so this may be a very naive view, but I thought it was the same as bitcoin, whereby the whole network eventually comes to a consensus on the order of transactions / blocks on the chain?
Sure, but if I post data to the blockchain (perhaps a URL to an XKCD comic) and someone else posts that exact same data another time, how would we even know each other posted it? At some point, it's practically impossible to search the entire block chain.
Now suppose each of use are selling the 'first' post of that data. How does a buyer know that we're really the first?
And so I'm saying that even claiming 'first' is practically impossible via blockchain. Even if someone knew about both of the instances above and could arbitrate between them, there might be a third, older instance yet.
Why is it impossible to search the block chain? Isn't this how bitcoin works: to accept a transaction, all transactions with the relevant accounts must be searched and summed to ensure there are enough funds?
My understanding is that people don't even mint whole files due to the cost of minting scaling with the size of the data, so they are minting links to the files, which you then have to hope always point to that file.
In-game items are a great use for NFTs because they provide ownership outside the game and can traded on 3rd party markets.
For example, i purchased a plot of land on cryptovoxels. Each individual plot of land is linked to a unique NFT. When i log into the game with my ethereum account (web3), then i gain build access to the plots of land that i own the NFTs for.
How is that different from paying for it with a microtransaction? You still have no rights outside of what the developer implements[1] and when they shut down, your token’s value rapidly approaches zero.
1. For example, say they sell to one of the big companies and the new boss with an MBA in gamer milking decides that virtual land needs annual property taxes, utilities, and improvements purchased from the company store or it’ll be reclaimed or simply that they’re creating new, more desirable terrain which will devalue yours. They control the code and servers, so your options are paying, giving up, or trying to convince other players to build, operate, and adopt a clone. The blockchain’s heavy cost doesn’t appear to be providing anything significant.
In a virtual world why the shit are you paying for a "plot of land"? It's not real land. There's not a finite amount. It's not made out of only the finest free range grass fed bits.
Except they really don’t. The tokens are blockchain-backed, the digital artifact itself isn’t.
To be what you define, I should not be able to copy-paste the digital artifact and then create a second token. The token should, in some way, behave like a hash, where the blockchain should complain that this digital asset has been accounted for already.
Technically even the token isn't directly blockchain-backed. ERC-721 (the base standard) only requires a URI to a metadata file. That file may contain a link to the asset (JPG or whatever). So there are 2 indirections. Hopefully both are IPFS addresses.
Of course, there are other NFT implementations that store metadata directly in the smart contract, but that requires a lot more gas.
> The problem is that NFTs doesn't solve a problem that existed.
In a way they do, they solve the problem that crypto was only about fungible stuff (money) before, now there's also non-fungible stuff. I think the point of NFTs is not exactly to prove that you own something, but to offer people an easy and non-fungible token to exchange with other people. The goal is not ownership but exchange (some would say speculation). At least that's how I understand it.
How do you exchange something that neither of you own? Beyond bragging rights, you will need some way to establish legal ownership of something because you own the corresponding NFT. So why not sell that ownership directly without the level of indirection that is the NFT? I guess the reason is that you have decoupled ownership and the ability to sell that ownership, making it easier to speculate independently of legal domains like countries.
Really, it's just adding a level of indirection, as always :-)
> I guess the reason is that you have decoupled ownership and the ability to sell that ownership, making it easier to speculate independent of legal domains like countries.
> Really, it's just adding a level of indirection, as always :-)
If Nvidia provided an nft for every graphics card they sold, and every online marketplace like ebay required that you provide that nft to resell the card, then that truck of stolen graphics cards becomes much harder to move.
I can't tell if you're being facetious, but Jesus what a terrible idea. What if you lose your private key and lose access to the NFT? Can you not use the graphics card? Or can you not sell it? What if NVidia goes out of business someday in the future and the card gets bricked because they stop maintaining the chain that held all the NFT's of the graphics cards?
Ahh, in that case, the problem this solves is the database owner has admin power, and could take away your graphics card.
This is similar to how I was always worried that Bank of America would arbitrarily change the balance in my account for some reason, but bitcoin solves this problem. Now I just have to worry about losing my password or getting hacked and losing all of my money, and that's just much less realistic than a major bank abusing their centralized admin powers to change my balance.
There is so much Poe's law content in this thread - not sure if you're being facetious or not. But I'll bite.
If Bank of America deducts money from your account, you can call customer support and threaten to file a complaint with a regulatory agency, threaten to close your account, or just take them to court. No guarantees that you'll get your money back, but at least there's a chance.
If you lose your wallet password. It's game over. 0% chance of ever recovering any of that money.
The difference is that nVidia would not be able to remove your NFT from its db of serial numbers, because the association between the number and you, instead of being in a DB it is in the blockchain itself, and the only one that can change that association is the holder of the NFT.
So in this scenario would the NFT be burned onto the card's ROM, and basically serve as a serial number you can trade without the participation of the manufacturer?
Until someone made a counterfeit, sold that (with the NFT) and kept the original. They can simultaneously "prove" they've sold the original and also reap the benefits of having the graphics card.
The same thing applies to other similar "NFT as certificate of authenticity" schemes I've seen, such as around luxury goods.
> (...) then that truck of stolen graphics cards becomes much harder to move.
That sounds like a convoluted and impractical solution looking for a problem. Mobile service companies and hardware vendors managed to implement services that support activation and bricking without getting any crypto-related buzzword in the way.
Yes, this is correct. For now, people are willing to participate in the collective delusion that these tokens are what they claim to represent: real ownership of an off-chain asset. I don't think that's going to last.
It's possible to imbue an NFT, itself, with real value. Like if it was a legally recognized title. Or if ownership of an NFT could be used to produce an authorization token for access to some physical or digital experience.
Smart contracts are a very generic concept. NFTs are a smart contract design pattern. They typically employ standardized smart contracts (e.g. ERC-721, ERC-1155) so that services can be built to interface with any standard NFT contract. But it's also possible to make custom smart contracts to manage non-fungible digital assets.
An NFT is a certificate of authenticity, but it applies to something easily copied. If you think the certificate of authenticity is worth something, great; if you think it gives you ANY kind of legal rights or protection, or any kind of DRM or digital anti-copying protection, you're in for a surprise.
TL;DR: NFT's are a money laundering and tax evasion scheme. There is no value for average consumers, unless the NFT appreciates in value over time and there remains a buyer's market for them. But that's highly volatile and uncertain.
It's like a certificate of authenticity that was just written on a napkin by some guy you found on the corner.
How much authenticity does such a certificate convey?
But then you make sure that napkin is really hard to copy! there's only going to be one napkin you got the guy on the corner to write on yesterday attesting to authenticity of something else. (There might be other napkins other guys on other corners wrote on, but only one copy of this one!)
Does it convey more authenticity by virtue of being really hard to copy?
Why does an NFT convey any "authenticity"?
From the OP:
> Alongside platforms that make no effort to prove ownership of artworks for sale, artists are waking up to find that their digital artworks are being sold by fraudsters to unwitting victims.
What authenticity do these NFT's "prove"? Authenticity in what?
Replying to myself, it's actually not even that, you didn't even have the guy on the corner write anything about authenticity on the napkin, you just had him write the title "Mona Lisa" and sign it.
But you can prove this is really the very same napkin you had a guy on the corner of Park and High write "Mona Lisa" on, at 9:45ET on November 9th 2020. It's the very same napkin! So surely you should pay me what the Mona Lisa is worth for it, right?
I can throw in a napkin with "Brooklyn Bridge" written on it if you like...
Everyone likes to talk about how NFTs are just 'a money laundering and tax evasion scheme' as it makes a good story but as far as I see most big investors don't treat it that way and nobody has shown if that's the case for more than a minority of sales.
my understanding was that you'd buy an NFT at some inflated price using cryptocurrency to be laundered, and on-sell it (having affected its perceived value with the previous inflated sale) but I could be off.
The other use I read about recently was using them as a proxy for buying some sort of illicit good or service, i.e "here's $600,000 for that wink NFT wink I wanted".
So what? Say you have an account X which holds funds from criminal operations (e.g. ransomware payments). If you cash it out directly there's no doubt you're a criminal. But if you use that money to pay yourself for an NFT, now you can possibly deny that you have any knowledge about source of X income.
Better yet send money from X through a bunch of privacy oriented tokens like monero, tumblers and mixing services, losing 20-50% in the process and consolidating the rest in account Y. Now you have plausibly clean money but you can't pay taxes yet as there's no paper trail for this income. Solution is easy, buy an NFT from yourself, declare it, pay taxes and buy a new yacht.
If buying a virtual good from oneself at any arbitrary price was easy, money laundering would be solved problem for criminals, regardless of NFTs or not, wouldn't you agree?
That's exactly what's happening right now. But before NFTs the most plausible ways were either opening a business accepting crypto (not unlike meatspace money laundering involving cash-accepting businesses) or having lucky strikes on gambling platforms (where you can play against yourself).
For a larger operation going business route is still preferable but on an individual level NFTs are much easier due to ridiculously high margins that have been normalized there.
How do you know this is exactly what's happening right now? Do you work in the sec space or with tax authorities? I'm genuinely asking, as I'm a layperson in regards to these subjects, and, in my ignorance, I don't see the difference between that and, say, Counter Strike skins selling for 15k USD.
To my understanding, all these things leave simple 1-1 paper trails that can be followed later and lead to consequences, but I might certainly be wrong.
I'm trying to separate people who simply don't like cryptocurrencies and NFTs (which might be your case, I don't know) from actually informed thoughts about what's happening.
Sure, but half the point of laundering is plausible deniability. Bob now has an explanation for why he's received a lot of money in a short space of time from foreign accounts he claims to know nothing about.
You need to pay me for some illicit activity. Instead of having you pay me directly, I produce a set of minimalist pieces of art and issue NFTs for them. You buy them or pay your associates to buy them. The transactions now appear as legitimate trade.
Since both parties have to (supposedly) declare their expenses/income (if the value is high) in their retrospective countries, this scheme is as failsafe as just sending the transaction directly between the two of them.
In your example you have successfully transferred the funds between two parties, but you have not laundered anything here.
> But how do you recover the funds again? You'll need to declare that you sold art for X, and tax it so you can actually use it.
Yes, in every respect you treat it as legitimate trade, when in fact it's payment for something illegal, in order to conceal that it isn't payment for a legal service or good. That's a basically a dictionary definition of money laundering.
I'm not sure what you expect of it here, or why paying taxes matters. The point is not to evade taxation, but to conceal the illegal transaction and make it appear as though it's legitimate and legal.
> Again, nothing has been washed here, you've just made a normal transfer with zero benefit.
Something has been washed in the sense that you've intentionally created a plausibly legitimate cover for the transaction in order to conceal the illegal goods/services the payment actually concerns.
I think there are several use cases people associate with NFT. One is money laundering and that is indeed hard as you mention.
The other is payment for illegal services and goods. I can't wire you money for "one assassination" but I can wire you money for "art" because who knows how much it's really worth.
Well, you're wrong. Seller declares income and pays taxes, but they don't have a duty to track down buyers real identity and check their income sources. Thus you could easily be both buyer and seller but only declare seller part.
This type of money laundering has always been possible somewhat easily. Shell companies can be used for that, and look way more legitimate than paying possibly millions of euros on speculative art - I'd imagine that declaring to the tax man that those extra millions you made this year came from a few ms paint drawings would eventually get one caught.
Physical art has strict laws about sell value and speculation exactly because of that, if NFTs really take off (somehow), it's easy to imagine that the same scrutiny would follow.
I'm curious to understand how NFTs would be used to launder, for instance, drug cash. I often see the expression "money laundering" being used in these discussions without a real understand of how it would work.
And anyone can create their own NFT for the same artwork. Now we just need a (centralized) registry of "official NFTs" to know which one you're supposed to consider, from a trusted authority :)
One use case I was wondering for NFTs; would it make sense for photographers?
So if I took some "amazing" photos of stuff, whether it was art, landscape or 'stock' style photos. I could list them on a website to be sold, and sell the NFT of the photo.
Yes - anyone can "right click -> copy" the photo, but we are talking about the licensing side of the photo. This proves the person using the photo(s) in their product or website etc has the "right" to use that photo, in the same way open source projects have licences that people are expected to follow?
The person who bought the photo could on sell those rights at a later stage if they no longer wanted to use my photo (since anyone can sell the NFT).
Basically shutterstock.com or something, but with NFTs? Its about the only genuine use case I can think of...
I think this is kind of the idea, but it has basically the same problems as other areas. You're relying on meatspace legal and copyright systems to associate "ownership" / "right to use" with the NFT, but you could just use that same system to associate those rights with the purchaser directly.
The only tangible different is that once you've establish the meatspace laws, the ownership can be transferred on chain and still hold a valid claim, instead of having to result in meatspace in order to transfer it.
If you want to transfer ownership (copyright) within the traditional legal framework, you’ll also loose your say in what happens next, so you can’t guarantee that a subsequent change in NFT ownership automatically means a change in ownership of the rights.
What you could do is retain the copyright yourself, but accord an open-ended copyright license (like the way oss licenses are written) that accords certain rights to the owner of the NFT (and have the license describe how to determine who is the owner of the NFT).
This is the value of blockchain in a nutshell. Programmable trust. All manner of tokens (represented things - both digital and not), can be moved, modified, leveraged, etc. It is a public ledger and api for trust.
Probably people still under-appreciate the utility, liquidity, and overall productivity boon this will be.
But we already have a mechanism for licensing, its copyright.
NFTs provide no new tools or even solutions for tracing, enforcing or indeed arbitrating licensing of a thing. Its just a hash. Photo stock sites already have perceptual hash tracing.
However for them its useless as they only ever sell licenses to use the artwork, not "ownership". They still retain the original copyright, which allows them to sell licenses to use the image/sound/thing
One problem that I have noticed in the NFT space is that the platforms only deal with transaction between wallets, not persons. The association between wallets and persons is tenuous (by design). You don't know if you are buying from the real right holder (e.g. the author), and on the other side it is difficult to prove that the owner of a particular wallet is you.
How does this improve upon copyright in practical terms? Because finding out who the rights holder is becomes more straightforward? I’m not aware how minting an NFT works exactly, but wouldn’t the person to whom the NFT points still have to prove they’re the rights holder and have engaged in some legal contract for that claim to be valid?
Here’s a general issue I don’t yet understand yet for NFT’s.
Suppose you take an amazing photo (or create digital artwork), and pack it up as an NFT on platform A using token/blockchain technology Alpha. Alice buys this token, and has some sort of limited ownership of your picture.
I (a nefarious user) take the same digital photo you displayed on your website, and sell it to Bob on platform B with blockchain Beta.
I also take your digital photo, make some minor alterations and put it up again on Platform A with Blockchain alpha and sell it to Charlie.
Alice, Bob, and Charlie all think they own the picture, and while they do own their own versions, how do we know Alice is the “right” owner of your photo?
Especially in the future when you’re not around to confirm the version Alice has is the right one?
No, you understand it well. NFTs are completely divorced from anything that does not exist on the blockchain. All recourse for establishing ownership in the eyes of the law requires consulting external, centralized sources of authority, making the involvement of a blockchain utterly pointless.
No crypto expert but I was thinking something like this:
Artist decides to make a run of 100 copies of the work, and generates 100 work signing keys and generates a list of "1/100, work public key 1" etc. Artist then signs this list with their artist signing key, gets a signed timestamp, and publishes this somewhere on their site, along with the public portion of their artist signing key.
Artist then signs the (uncompressed) pixels of each copy of the work using the corresponding work signing key. Signature is embedded in the image file along with the work copy details, "1/100", say as a PNG chunk or similar.
NFT is created for the work copy, and I'm presuming there's something akin to a signature of the image file in the NFT to link them.
If you then get a NFT you can verify that the image file is indeed what the NFT refers to. You can download the work public key from the artist and verify that the public work key is from the artist, and then verify that the work (pixels) is what the artist signed.
Then again I don't know the domain enough so might be completely silly and or flawed idea. And obviously it requires a non-lossy image format ala PNG.
it still doesn't solve anything. You have no way of knowing if the pixels were originally signed by the real artist or not.
The only reason it works right now is because that NFTs are so recent that you can just send a DM to artist's twitter to verify if the original set of crypto keys/wallet belong to them. When the artist himself is promoting it, it's not hard to figure out if it's genuine or not. But what happens in 10 years or if you can't trace the original artist?
How would you know if I took the picture myself or if I stole it from flicker? if reverse image search doesn't work, it would be impossible.
That's no different from a real picture/painting though is it?
Regardless, if you get the current verifiable statements signed by a trusted entity every now and then, you should be able to verify the trust chain, no?
Before the old keys expires you get someone to verify and sign with a new key, rinse repeat?
what you are describing just proves that the blockchain adds absolutely no value to the art. You still have to rely on a piece of paper on which someone pinky swears they are the original owner. The blockchain doesn't make it more secure in any shape or form and you would have absolutely no way of knowing the picture I'm selling as an NFT was taken/created by me or stolen from reddit.
If we're doing cryptography, then why go through the blockchain at all then? I could sell the original private key I used to sign the picture to somebody, and they can prove their ownership all day long. I don't see the value add of a fancy database.
You can't sell a private key because you can't provably delete any potential remaining copies you might have. You could continue to sell the private key to others.
Artist still could sell the same artwork multiple times on a single or multiple exchanges. Or someone could steal their keys and sell the artwork multiple times.
> I also take your digital photo, make some minor alterations and put it up again on Platform A with Blockchain alpha and sell it to Charlie.
That's the same as making unlicensed prints from a manipulated copy. That's a copyright violation. The physical world doesn't protect you from that either. You need to sue either way.
Yes, but that's not the point
We're trying to find a use case for NFTs, a problem they solve. But there doesn't seem to be one, at least not one I could find in this thread
So now the race to prove ownership is to upload it to a blockchain first? If you publish your art on deviantart but while you’re uploading it to the blockchain, I sneak in first and upload it, suddenly I can say that I have a tamper proof ledger showing that I uploaded it before it was copied by you.
Kind of. It would be desirable to put your work on the blockchain before anyone else.
There are other things people could consider though, in terms of evaluating the history/authorship of something. The blockchain is just one data point.
Suppose someone scoops the artist’s work and sells their artwork first, without their permission?
Eg, I recently saw the “Charlie bit my finger” family will sell an NFT of their video. Is there anything stopping someone else from selling NFT’s of other viral videos before their makers do so?
Timestamping would only work for works that are tokenised at the same time as (or prior to) their public release.
When you take someone to court over a copyright violation having proof that you control a wallet that was the first to have minted an NFT representing the work in question would be one piece of evidence that you may be the original author.
If there is other evidence, e.g. the other party has a YouTube account which uploaded a video years ago of the work, and is publicly known to be the author of the work, then the judge will probably rule the NFT is not sufficient evidence of ownership/you are not the copyright holder.
There is nothing technically stopping people uploading NFTs of things that they don’t own the rights too. That won’t hold up in court though, not even the court of public opinion.
How do you check who was the first in practice? Blockchain is large and will grow larger. NFTs hold URLs not hashes, so the same artwork could be represented by multiple hashes. The url could also point to a different artwork now compared to what was there before.
This happens all the time. What is worse is someone minting someone else's art, and then the buyers starts posting takedown requests to the original artist. Amongst others, this happened to Simon Stålenhag of Tales from the Loop fame...
This happens outside of NFTS, this happens with everything, US dollars, physical contracts, licenses. They can all be faked. NFTs actually do a better job at allow people to identify fakes, lmao. Do better research.
There is nothing wrong with my research. I reported a fact. OP explains how NFT doesn't solve these problems. But it also confuses a lot of people about what it means to own something.
Simple: Have the government recognize NFT ownership and enforce it. Perhaps that's the future of blockchains: Automated records for the masses enforced by central government, with courts to provide exceptions.
But aside from re-minting it with alterations, you can mint the exact same digital artwork on different NFT platforms, so how do we know which platform is “right”?
The right one is the one the original author of the artwork released it on. The thing about NFTs is the connection between digital items and their authors.
If you're like most art collectors you'd follow the author anyway. You'd buy one because you're a fan of the author and enter their nft sales funnel.
This doesn't address the problem either. How do you know which platform the original author released it on? How do you verify who the original author is? The answer: by consulting a trusted external source. Which raises the question, if we're involving a trusted external source, why not just use that source to track the token rather than involve a blockchain? NFTs are a solution in search of a problem.
Well, you don't. Things don't have identities, not really, and so all the superstructures built upon such concepts collapse the moment when demonstrating this dirty philosophical secret becomes practical ― and digital entities are perfect for such demonstrations.
The simple answer is provenance and blockchain provided this much more than the physical world.
The old world analogy to your scenario is you go to a museum and take a picture of an Ansel Adams work, make a print and try to sell it to Bob. Why would bob pay for this. you have to convince him it's a real Ansel Adams.
Same thing with NFT. You would have to know artist on alpha is real and beta is not. It's non trivial but again I don't think it's actually that different from the real world today. NFT does not attempt to solve this part. Instead it let you check that the nft you're buying is from alpha and the original artist.
I think whether its perfect or not is irrelevant. You can make a high enough quality one that Bob wont know the difference. Same with any traditional art like paintings. Forgeries are not impossible.
Photographers (and digital artists) commonly already use something called a “Certificate of Authenticity” or COA, a physical document signed by the artist verifying that the item is one of a batch, and that the batch has a fixed, limited size.
NFTs aren’t providing anything beyond what a COA provides, and the COA comes with a physical handwritten signature. Neither is any actual protection against determined forgers. As an occasional artist and photographer, I wonder if the solution to authenticating and valuing digital art is to sell the copyrights along with only a single digital and/or physical copy of the art, and then delete it. Make it unique to the buyer the same way a sculpture or painting is unique.
Yes. Except NFTs, for one reason or another, have introduced a whole new set of people to the idea of paying for an COA; they are suddenly really easy to buy, easy to sell, and the ledger creates a community of owners who recognize each other's COA as meaningful.
That's incredibly powerful; because a physical COA in my cupboard that none of my friends gives a shit about is less interesting.
how does this help with enforcement of the license terms? There's no technological enforcement, so lawyers would need to be brought in... if legally the nft had the same standing as a regular license contract.
So I claim this is worse than a regular license because you have to jump through crypto hoops that most people don't understand.
Imagine a world where all or most of our interactions are in the digital realm. When you wake up in this place you are naked, cannot show anyone anything about yourself, but you are very rich. Now how do you show others that you are rich? Simple, you buy Gucci nft clothes that other naked peasants can see. That's what's happening.
If that's what's happening, why are most of the Twitter-famous whale collectors completely anonymous?
Granted, it's probably happening to some degree amongst the rubes. But I'm more convinced by the argument that the main driver behind NFT sales is a kind of pyramid scam: artists at the top get paid by anonymous "collectors" (read: crypto investors), which causes swarms of smaller artists enter and the price of eth to go up.
They are not anonymous, they are pseudonymous, that's a very different thing. This allows them to participate in communities and engage in posturing with an added benefit of being able to dump their online persona if something goes really wrong.
Now, I'm not agreeing with parent comment in sentiment that this is all, or most, of what's happening (although introducing scarcity for the sake of it has to be related to creating perceivable value through inaccessibility), but if someone is twitter-famous, they are not anonymous. They are twitter-famous. There's nothing stopping one from identifying strongly with their handles or wallets.
The other peasants would be running around in their own Gucci clothes since there is nothing to stop them from just copying them, and really, who even knows enough to check if your nft is for a Gucci as far as anyone cares it might as well be for a used roll of toilet paper.
How this differ from real life? Other hand you know that you have fake Gucci and getting caught especially if you some celebrity is at least embarrassment. NFT are like no brainer way to monetize games and some fortunate people are going to make billions when they nail platform which helps games to monetize NFT.
> some fortunate people are going to make billions when they nail platform which helps games to monetize NFT
AHA! There we have it.
I was wondering the whole time what this is about, because it doesn't seem to solve any problem other than being a convoluted trading scheme that costs tons of energy and resources.
It all seems to be a case of 'who bets on the right horse' but this time with a pollution bonus on top - right before a climate crisis.
People are frustrated with the economy and this gives them the feeling of being in charge of something promising. An escape so to speak. But in the end it's just a slightly different group that exploits them.
The example seemed to focus mostly on something poor naked people would want to use. Now we are down to very rich people being momentarily embarrassed as target audience. So it is neither solving a problem nor does it have any mass appeal.
The only reason people sell NFT's is that "investors" pay a lot for NFT's even if it is completely stupid, because they think that other "investors" will pay much more for those NFT's later. It serves no other purpose.
This way you find that NFT's sell for much more than other micro transactions, and for much higher prices. And by "much more" I mean, non NFT's wouldn't sell at all since this isn't really a game.
Create a "new way" to monetize gaming by... selling games? That's not new, and that doesn't require a blockchain. Even if your goal is to further empower IP and impoverish consumers by obliterating the doctrine of first sale by parasitically taking a cut of every re-sale, you could just use a database for that.
Besides the fact that each NFT has a unique ID, and if Gucci would start selling NFTs, they would make it trivial to see a list of their own produced NFTs. Websites to check authenticity would pop up and you would just need to enter the ID to check if it's real or not.
"Perfect replicate" except it's a clone with new ID, sure.
Games (especially multiplayer/MMORPG) usually have some sort of "player details" button, to see the player statistics and more. The game could easily embed a "Validate" button in there.
I just realized something, are any high end clothes designers selling skins for DotA or LoL? The validation would be already build-in since you cannot use skins without the games approval. A Gucci Suit for Dragon Knight, a Rolex for Axe, ... the possibilities seem endless.
We just talked about this further up in this very same thread. Let's go through the process so hopefully you'll see how easy this is to solve:
1. Gucci decides to create "NFT clothes", whatever the fuck that means, but let's just go with it
2. For each item they release, they also release a .txt file with all the valid IDs for items they have released (or better, link their address that is doing the minting from their official website)
2. Game decide they want to integrate these "NFT clothes", so they download and integrate the .obj/.mat files for viewing, and hooks things up to the Gucci address/website
3. Game UI can now display a "Validate" button that will take the item ID, check if it comes from the Gucci address/published in the official "Gucci NFT .txt file" or similar.
The validation happens by the user, by checking that the NFT is actually released by Gucci. Gucci is the ones that need to publish which NFTs are legit. Game developers need to do nothing except adding UI/content.
> 2. Game decide they want to integrate these "NFT clothes", so they download and integrate the .obj/.mat files for viewing, and hooks things up to the Gucci address/website
Game now has to implement X number of items at significant developer cost.
There's literally zero incentive for devs to do this.
> There's literally zero incentive for devs to do this.
I mean overall I agree that NFTs serve little purpose, but hyperbole like this doesn't help to argue against NFTs, it just makes you look bad.
Yes, having cosmetic items in games seems ridiculous, I certainly don't "get" it, but lots of people seem to like it. Since cosmetic items seems to add some sort of value, it's not hard to argue that cosmetic items locked to NFTs probably also have some sort of value to some type of person.
But again, "literally zero incentive" is seemingly not true for anything today. Just because you don't understand/see a market for something like cosmetic items, doesn't mean that there is "literally zero" value in it.
But as a developer, why would I devote my resources to support these Gucci clothes when I get 0% of the cut of the sales of these clothes?
Developers like paid cosmetics because they get to sell the cosmetics. If its Gucci selling the cosmetics, and the people are just clicking a "Validate" button and somehow proving their ownership of the NFT, what incentive is there for the developer to add those clothes?
> What I do have a problem with is the idea some folks have that NFT’s are magically portable into other games. They’re not.
Where have anyone in this specific thread claimed such thing? No one has, and in fact I explicitly wrote about that the game developers have to get the content into the game (if Gucci for example published the NFT, ID and assets (.obj/.mat files)).
But how is this relevant to what we're even talking about here? Yes, Gucci would have to do work to create designs and minting the NFTs. Yes, the game developers would have to do work to integrate those assets into the game, and support the chain they are on. Yes, the users would have to actually purchase/sell stuff in order to access it.
None of those things have been argued against in this thread, yet you argue for that "Yes, those things have to be done!". Yeah, duh, we know this, what new information are you trying to provide but fail miserably at actually provide?
NFTs are also a pre metaverse type setup to get people used to digital goods, that you will need to see through an spectacles. Spectacles that require spectacles.
Much like an online game when you buy cosmetic digital goods to improve the look or performance of your game/player, to show off really.
In the meta/game world there will be unique digital goods that could be built to use an ownership/db system that isn't proprietary to the game/app/world. This is almost a psychological operation or training mission for that type of setup from games to the "real" meta world.
Besides that, NFTs at the root were created as a product to buy with crypto that still essentially stores value. Like art today, they are a way to pass value, in some cases that will be to evade oversight, in other cases that will be to share, on other cases to own, in others to speculate. People buying actual goods with crypto would make it go down, so NFTs are a hedge to offset that essentially to keep speculation high.
Essentially cryptocurrency creators/developers wanted a way to increase circulation, but not decrease the value, so they chose art/interactives as that product. It was a product created for crypto and potentially the future. Whether NFTs are that solution or not, digital goods do need some way outside systems to share across other worlds/views/apps/games.
We have this already pretty much there with just the internet, but some want a large market within these systems with unique products being a way to create scarcity and potentially demand by limiting supply, but an external digital rights system.
In the end though the root cause of NFTs being created was increasing cryptocurrency circulation with a way to essentially "lock up" some value like a vault or staking would do.
I invite you all to open your eyes a little. Sure, NFTs are a little ridiculous... but there's an evolving marriage between crypto and IPFS which I find very exciting.
We've all been complaining about the dangers of centralization, censorship, and impermanence on the modern web for years, and now there's billions flowing into an absolutely ridiculous application of decentralized tech.
Crypto is currently a very expensive toy, but I think there's immense opportunity for those who can help it mature.
Edit: If you're still arguing about whether NFTs are useful or cypto is currency, you're missing the point. We have a new substrate. It's fun, it's interesting. Go play!
>We've all been complaining about the dangers of centralization, censorship, and impermanence on the modern web
This a social/economic problem, not a technological one.
The Internet itself is built on open protocols and could well be decentralized. Instead we've allowed corporations to build walled gardens on top of it.
Blockchains won't magically solve this. They're just infrastructure, like a cloud database. From a meaningful decentralization perspective, it doesn't matter who's offering their computing resources to make it work.
What matters is the applications and access points that are built on top of the infra. Like the modern Web, this is exactly where we'll see centralization, censorship, etc. happen. Again.
The problem is that the blockchain substrate you're talking about is actually a very poor fit for decentralized applications.
Let's compare it to it's earliest predecessor technology: Git[0]. This is a very useful technology within the problem domain of how to store and synchronize source code repositories (although it's UI sucks). However, individual users still need to choose who to synchronize with and what commits to accept. What blockchains add are restrictions to this model that make sense for the problem domain of digital currency: namely, you need to burn energy in order to commit, and you have to follow specific validity rules in order for your commit to be valid. These rules are specifically crafted to ensure scarcity and control over the resource the blockchain ledger tracks.
The problem is that most decentralized applications do not need a notion of scarcity. The whole damned point of P2P is to punish artificial scarcity. If I want to communicate to someone else over a decentralized network, I don't need a Sybil-resistant ledger to do so. I just need a private/public key pair and some means to match interested recipients and senders. Same with a lot of other decentralized use cases, which also don't need to be able to track scarce assets.
If NFTs actually solved problems around centralization, FAANG companies wouldn't be interested in them.
Twitter isn't promoting Mastodon, it's promoting NFTs. Reddit isn't opening up its APIs to 3rd parties, it's minting tokens. The fact that the same sites that centralized the web in the first place are interested in NFTs is strong evidence that they don't see NFTs as a threat to their control.
Think about the ecosystem. Think about how you could potentially use it to do something real. We actually have real money flowing into a space that no one ever cared about. There is new possibility here.
Just brainstorm for a while. Maybe you get nowhere. Maybe you get somewhere. It's the wild west. Have fun, and stop being a grouch!
Again, if the ecosystem provided an opportunity for real decentralization, FAANG companies wouldn't be investing in it.
I can brainstorm about federated technologies and Open clients that actually solve problems: Peertube, Mastodon, Nitter. I can brainstorm about legislation that actually opens up APIs and makes it easier to move data around. There is a ton of stuff to be excited about on the web, you don't need to waste your time trying to turn NFTs into something positive. There are already interesting things to invest time and money into.
> We actually have real money flowing into a space that no one ever cared about
We have real money flowing into a specific space that is fundamentally not designed to democratize the web, and that in some cases may actually be harmful to attempts to build real subversive technologies.
Be more of a grouch about this, and focus your attention on efforts and paradigm shifts that have more potential. If the people running around having "fun" with NFTs took that energy and devoted it instead into exploring/developing more federated communities and technologies that actively repel centralization, we could radically transform the web.
This would be more valid if crypto didn't start as something accessible by everyone (I remember many years ago mining bitcoin, successfully, on a macbook) and become an expensive toy over time.
Sure, it might go back down to being a genuine decentralised currency as it was always meant to be, but the same could be said for the old currencies that became investment vehicles like gold.
As for NFT's, I'm steering clear of them for now, but from what I know they're actually quite centralised, even though from a technical standpoint they don't have to be.
I actually agree about the fun new substrate part. It‘s a shame that was basically ruined by the huge value pop.
If ethereum was 0.001 as valuable and thus could be x1000 more resource efficient and x1000 more affordable to build on, it would be neat. At this point the only thing that seems worth building are things to further pump value, and POW is a monster that we will not be able to get back into it‘s cage.
blockchain as a mechanism for doing things that are not financial speculation, scams, energy-waste-machines, etc., sure. IPFS seems like a legitimately interesting concept, as do many other things you could have on a blockchain like identity management. I want to be clear here: cryptocurrencies and blockchain are both not the same thing and should not be talked about in the same way.
Can I mint my own land ownership token? Obviously not, which means there's still a centralised authority on who owns what.
The game client could just change how it interprets address 0x32c12... as a plot of land and point it somewhere entirely different. This is still completely centralised!
The client for the game still has to explicitly only acknowledge a set of NFTs. Why do you even need the blockchain when the client already has a hardcoded list of NFTs it's willing to accept?
An SQL database, some APIs for trading, and the same set of things you can buy solve the problem infinitely more efficiently.
I'm not talking about a video game. I'm talking about real-life land.
The answer to your first question is in the name. The city would run via a DAO and there will be some sort of democratic process that governs the city. Ran on the blockchain.
Using the blockchain is important for a few reasons:
1. Infrastructure. Minting NFTs is an easy process and transferring ownership via an NFT transaction is super simple. The blockchain is the SQL database and it's already there ready to use.
2. Transparency. If I sell you my land via NFT then it's easy for others to verify. Same thing with the DAO that manages the city. People can see what the DAO is doing because it's all on the blockchain. People can raise a red flag if something looks wrong.
3. Efficiency. Running all of this via software is much more efficient than normal government processes and a higher level of automation is possible. Yes you could do this via SQL database but you sacrifice the above two points.
the whole "centralization = bad, decentralization = good" argument strikes me as very half-baked. The assumption is that decentralization is inherently liberatory. That assumption isn't guaranteed.
Every cryptocurrency that exist is built on the same fundamental principle: people with the most existing wealth (hash power in PoW, existing crypto in PoS, storage space in PoST) make the most income (whatever crypto in question). All cryptocurrency fundamentally is built on the basis of enriching the already-rich. Yes, cryptocurrency is decentralized, but decentralization alone is not a magical recipe for something being of benefit to all mankind.
Take BAYC, for example. Tradeable membership to a "community" whose only significance is that you purchased membership into an ever-expensive community to belong to. We can say what the price of a membership is quite easily, but can we say what the value of that membership is? If the price of membership goes up, does that make the community "better"? It is decentralized, is it therefore good? The drug trade is decentralized, is it therefore good?
In non-crypto assets, what percentage of wealth is owned by the top 1%? How about in crypto assets?
as for IPFS: You put something on IPFS, what is the guarantee that it will continue to exist on IPFS? It's entirely consensual; there's no guarantee that such a thing will continue to exist on the network unless someone consents to store it. So if you want to actually deliver on that guarantee, what do you do, run an IPFS node that always hosts that file? Feels like you're back at square one, needing to run a server to guarantee that a given file continues to be available.
Now, that's not to say IPFS isn't useful at all! It's very cool! The promise of duplicability and the way in which frequently-accessed data will be more widely replicated is incredibly fascinating on its own, and has tremendous value. I'm a server operator, so the notion of setting up a node to permanently host a particular item in IPFS doesn't bother me. But we shouldn't pretend that IPFS is a magic solution that guarantees the permanent storage of everything put on it. It's a nice addressing and content replication system.
I'm really optimistic about the concept of NFTs in the long run, and about the applications of solutions to the double-spend problem generally. My pessimism is not in the concept of NFTs, it's in the concept of blockchains, which are fundamentally only capable of increasing inequality. The entire concept of what makes blockchains secure is "in order to attack it, you have to have a lot of wealth, so you'd be destroying your own wealth": the security paradigm is "a rich person would not elect to sacrifice their own riches". The entire system is based on this premise.
When we have non-blockchain solutions to the double-spend problem, or NFTs that can be implemented without this promise of increasing inequality, I'll be excited about the space.
A copy of digital art has (to an approximation) no value because it is infinitely reproducible. But an hour of an artist's time has value due to scarcity. The obvious answer — that the article doesn't mention for some reason — is that artists make money from commissions, not from selling copies of the art.
Actually what we have found I think with the internet is that some things have value no matter how many copies you make. Computers can copy digital things at essentially no cost, and some digital things have great value. So we have a way to copy value for free. We can do a lot with that if we really try. For example, wikipedia has produced incalculable value but the users don't generally pay anything for it.
My personal economic theory is that we should try to maximize this effect. Make as much value as we can digital and try to make all digital value as free as we can make it. This should in theory create huge value in the world at very low cost. So to me, even if NFTs could prevent copying, it would be going in entirely the wrong direction. The whole desire to lock down digital goods in the first place seems like the biggest economic foot gun I can think of.
Honestly when I look at the whole equation: we have machines which can produce value for free, but because people need to eat we keep trying to shut the free value machine down...
The obvious solution is that we should make food free. We should automate the hell out of the systems that produce our food, and we should make all of that automation open source so that all extraneous costs can be worked out. I think if we did that, food would be so genuinely cheap to produce we could give it away.
So that's what I am trying to do. I am working on a farming robot, thinking about machines which can produce high volumes of free hot meals from basic ingredients (like the Sikhs do in India[1], but automated), and trying to understand crowd funded engineering to pay for it all.
Like, the idea that we could produce way more value for free and we're stopping that from really happening because people need food? I think we can solve that. We just have to look at things differently.
And we can do the same with rent, and shoes, and clothes. I think the upside is so incredibly high it is worth doing it.
As I understand it we don't even have to change farming to achieve that. We have abundant food for the current population size. It's distribution and the global economic system that make it extremely unequally available.
I think automation and open source can help drive prices down further, but it’s true that all of this can be achieved without that. The Sikhs have been doing it for hundreds of years.
Thanks! Well it’s good to point out that automation isn’t a silver bullet and humans systems need to change too. But yeah I do think that we can really improve things if we dispense with the idea of work for survival, and we achieve it in part by actually making things cheaper through automation (as opposed to wealth redistribution which becomes a source of endless fighting).
We live in a world of post-scarcity when it comes to displaying pixels on a screen. Markets don't make any sense at all in post-scarcity contexts, but we've spent the past few centuries structuring our entire world around markets, and we have so little imagination that people have trouble imagining any different model. The era of selling a single digital illustration to many people is ending. Artists can adapt to a post-scarcity of pixels by making money through patrons and commissions, rather than through trying to awkwardly and wastefully shoehorn scarcity back into the system by NFTs.
Indeed, this is not to say this will not disrupt artists or influence the art they create. I do know of developers that make a living via patrons (Tarn Adams of Dwarf Fortress) and plenty of legendary games that have been "commissioned" via Kickstarter (e.g. Undertale, Hollow Knight (neither of which had any prior fame to carry them)), but that's not to say that these models will necessarily work for whatever game you yourself are developing.
Right but they're exceptions in the case of DF and Kickstarters are run waaaaay below the actual cost of production for lots of reasons. If all games were funded that way you'd have a tiny number of games made.
Could we instead think of this as two different types of marketplaces?
The first covers physically scarce high value items. The second covers more easily reproducible lower-value items. The first is the market where people transact to make the compensation they need. The second is, instead, almost a social network. It helps create economic value by enabling broader exchange of assets while also decoupling those assets from compensation needs of the artists. It boosts/hurts the artists profile.
Maybe in the first you are selling a painting that took months and can attract a high price whereas the second is where as an artist you distribute scribbles. You aren’t worried about making money from those when you mint NFTs from them.
Not at all familiar with art market and if this is how things work today but curious if this is a logical take.
nfts dont prevent copying, the content is easily accessible by anyone with standards for doing so.
hence why us crypto people find the "but you can right click save" as pretty funny. yes, you can! its freely available to everyone.
"Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive, and that tension doesn't go away"- Stuart Brand, wrote this in whole earth catalog in the 70s. we're still learning what this means.
> "wikipedia has produced incalculable value but the users don't generally pay anything for it."
and it is built on the back of free labour, and unquestionable authority. (ever tried to edit something that a wiki editor disagrees with- banned).
I think its better we find ways to pay people. if paying artists and musicians looks like nfts ,so be it. better than what we had before. The ceo of spotify is worth $5billion. The musicians get fractions of cents.
The musicians on https://zora.co/ and https://beta.catalog.works/ are getting paid decently, and are distributing the work to the whole world for free at the same time. Sounds great to me.
Even if we find ways to pay people, a world where everything is open source would make life cheaper for artists. Their car would be cheaper to repair, medical treatment would be cheaper. Really we need to cost down the economy no matter what other things we do.
I agree, cryptocurrencies and nfts are built on FOSS and CO-OP philosophy, thats what it is all about. But I also dont think we should continue sacrificing artists and musicians for a vision of a star-trek post-scarcity world that doesnt exist (yet/ever?).
I think a lot of the backlash against nfts(and crypto in general) is that people have an abusive relationship to money, it is a point of pain and stress in everyones lives. So the idea of bringing that financialization and tokenization into more of our lives feels wrong. But the problem is we are already suffering under the system that does exists, with other people profiting off it. Doesn't it make sense to build systems for collective ownership, for supporting public goods, and for paying people for the work (art,music,foss) they do.
Maybe it wont work. maybe it will be co-opted by others. Maybe it will be better. Cant we at least try without a hysterical group calling us scammers and thieves in a new anti-nft article every single day. because they read some other bad take and made assumptions about "the kind of people involved".
It doesnt go unnoticed that the critics seem to be offering nothing more than "we can already pay for art". Great. Such a useful response. Thats going shift power in the world. Keep things as they are.
The irony of the article is that two of the highlighted artists (Anders Hoff, Lia) are now selling their work through NFTs. The market for generative art prints is extremely niche.
Importantly, what the technology gives digital artists (myself included) is a strategy to distribute, document provenance/ownership, and monetize primarily digital media in a primarily digital manner, rather than expecting them to rely on non-digital print media & spatial activations. It becomes yet another avenue for artists to earn revenue on their work.
It should also be noted that this article is several months old, which is basically a decade in crypto/NFT land.
The game has value for its utility and fun. It has no inherent value outside of that. If your game was a number on a blockchain such that only one owner could play it would that make your game more valuable? What if anyone could play it but only the blockchain owner could say they own it since the playing is just looking for art nfts?
For art nfts anyone can look at and enjoy the art without owning the blockchain. Now some speculator can claim to actuakly own a rare pepe, is all
It is a speculation scam. I know a dozen artists pumping them out now and they're all in on this speculation scam turning out high res icons attached to a piece of blockchain some poor idiot will speculate is valuable.
If it's so valuable why don't they just keep it for themselves? Why have a market? Because it's all just a speculation scam. Why don't you just hold your super valuable game to yourself so no one else can play it? Because it only had value if it's played. Art nfts value is in owning something anyone can look at and gain the same function for without any nft at all. Rare Pepes
Artists have had Patreon and donation pages and art sales without any sort of nft. The nft just provides a speculation scam to attach to a url pointing to a piece of art. The speculation scam is the problem. Its selling to suckers who think they can resell for more money to other suckers.
I know of a former comic artist that couldn't crowdfund 15k for a comic book but made hundreds of thousands of dollars on nfts of monkeys with zero artistic merit and a lot of generative type work.
Its just a scam with people trying to get in on the ground floor thinking it's the new Bitcoin.
very mature. It's no surprise to me that an advocate of this MLM speculation scam is unhappy people recognize it for what it is, I'm just surprised you couldn't do a better job defending it before resorting to nonsense.
NFT's are a crap solution to a very important problem that needs solving.
The "shares" idea is a MUCH BETTER ONE; i.e. flip the model. Make giving money to artists a collective and inclusive thing that we can all participate in and reap the benefits of multiple works, as opposed to the silliness of fake exclusivity over individual works.
that to me is just patreon or something. Like sell me a postcard or a print or a book. I can get into that.
the NFT thing is fine, but I just don't think it hits the same as wandering around a friends house and seeing a cool painting on the wall. You having a NFT with a link to an image that's hosted on some site that's in some kind of NFT wallet or on your personal website just doesn't have the same effect.
Not sure why some NFT prices are so high, maybe some people are just very rich and are having fun.
I don't know about this art stuff, but NFTs seem made for solving the problem of deepfakes. Say a politician does a speech, it is recorded, hashed, a corresponding token is generated and archived. We can all verify that the token exists and has not been tampered with. When someone posts a video of that speech, we can verify whether it's the original "as aired", modified in some way, or fully synthetic. The politician may very well be lying through their teeth, but we can at least verify that the recording is authentic, and of reality as it happened.
I'm not sure, but I think the trust part (münchhausen trilmma) is handled differently between pgp and blockchain.
In pgp you have the web of trust and you choose your "entry" point and who you trust. With nfts you're on blockchain, and have the hole network have a consensus. Therefor the "entry" point for trust is different.
> With nfts you're on blockchain, and have the hole network have a consensus.
Consensus of something completely different than the element you are trusting with the web of trust, so ... basically ... blockchain is better because it does not address the problem at all but instead solves a problem that does not even exist in PGP? Or what is it exactly that you are saying?
With blockchain, is it not the person who spends money to verify it gets trusted? There's no sense that the other nodes endorse the message, just that it won the auction.
If you're speaking and two different news agencies record it, there will be two slightly different recordings, which will have two different files, with two different hashes.
Hell, NFTs don't work like this. They are a hash of an entire file. If I take a slice of a speech for a deep fake, that's a different "file" from the whole speech and will have a different hash.
Every defense of NFTs is always like this, flailing around, misunderstanding basic reality, human interaction, even their own technology, just to try to keep the grift going. It's frustrating.
More importantly people don't work like that. In practice most "fake news" are based on quote mining which is easy to disprove without any knowledge of cryptography whatsoever by just checking the original source, but people share this crap without any verification because it conforms to their beliefs.
Hmm, but where would we put the data that we know will be safe and trusted?
We need a shared database we can all use. One that keeps a record of the changes of its state over time, and anyone can verify it and host a node!
Ah but it might get spammed. We could add a small fee for each write action. But if someone gets too many of the tokens could they alter the history by rewriting it? we need some kind of consensus mechanism, we could reward participation but make it expensive to lie? Make cooperation the winning move in the game. How do we give the tokens value? maybe some kind of natural scarcity to their issuance, or a fee burning mechanism. As more people use the database the value of the tokens will go up too as they are needed for writing to it, which in turn makes it more expensive to attack and safer storage.
It's amazing! You could use it for so many things! But what if honest participation becomes expensive? What if speculators find some way to make money off of this and the whole system's purpose is hijacked away from its original purpose?
All of these technologies come with such incredible promise. None of them solve the original intended purpose.
A blockchain wouldn't solve the chain of trust problem, of how do you know that a given public key actually belongs to Joe Biden. The problem that blockchains solve, of distributed consensus, is a different problem.
That only really solves the problem of authenticity if all speeches are “NFTed”. If you see a video of a politician making offensive remarks outside of a speech setting, you can’t say it didn’t happen just because it wasn’t in NFT format.
Or when the politician in question releases an edited video and "NFTs" it or signs it with their DID. Then you're just back to trusting a consensus of trusted media disagreeing with them.
and then you can skip the whole blockchain and use IPFS directly. NFTs do absolutely nothing for this use-case. They're merely a security hole that is plugged by something else off-chain.
In reality, an implementation that authenticates footage would use classic public-key cryptography with a private key embedded in a HSM in the camera, signing the output. You can't make it trustless with blockchain software, because necessarily the chain of trust has to end on the hardware (the hardware can be verified in theory, but blockchain is irrelevant for this, sinec there's no double-spend protection needed in this security model).
Has this problem not already been solved by digital signature schemes, and are NFTs not built on these very digital signature schemes, and have the digital signature schemes not been utterly useless for solving the deepfake problem, and have deepfake problem not been completely exaggerated to begin with?
I'm actually unsure what you gain from NFTs over simple PGP except the buzzword factor.
The key problem with NFTs is that they are advertised as decentralized, zero-trust, proof of ownership.
But minting doesn't prove authorship and selling the tokens isn't exclusively transferring the data.
Say you want to prove authorship. Prove without a shadow of a doubt, prove mathematically, that you own this MOV of your indie film. You can't. You can't do it in the real world, you can't do it in the digital world. In the real world, we register copyright and then sue violators for damages in courts governed by laws put on the books by legislatures elected by citizens. That's the very system the NFT is trying to avoid.
And say you want to create exclusion for the data. You'd have to create a DRM system. But we can't even get DRM to work when we do have legitimate proof of ownership in physical media sales through authorized retailers. So even if DRM could, would, and should be implemented, then it's only as good as the teeth behind it. So now you're back in court, invoking the DMCA.
The concepts of Ownership and "decentralized, zero-trust" are incompatible. Ownership requires exclusion, exclusion requires a credible threat of violence if violated, and violence is monopolized by the State.
I would personally go so far as to say the entire concept of zero-trust is a boondoggle, it's really all just "shifting the point of trust", but that's a different argument for another day.
I'm not sure that media NFTs have much merit besides being an alternative to things like Patreon/OnlyFans.
On the other hand I bought and traded many Magic the Gathering cards and people buy stamps, even if both are copied quite easily.
You can only view or listen to media NFTs "content". Here ownership doesn't give you much more "features". But I own non-media NFTs and here ownership gives me more "features".
I can change where my ENS domain is pointing and I can access a DAO community because I own these NFTs.
>This is just another gaming "UX" (cards, skins, features) for kids created from scammers.
As far as I can tell every one I see talking about or collecting NFTs are adults. I doubt you are looking at them honestly if you think they were designed to take money from kids. NFT art could be bad or good regardless but you seem motivated by your ties to the 'old way' based on your comment.
It’s important to note that the “thing” you “own” is the receipt, not the art.
The NFT is not the art and doesn’t contain the art, it’s (in the vast majority of cases) just a link to the art. You have no ownership or claim to the art itself.
The deed is backed by an actual legal contract and enforced by the government.
An NFT transfers no legal authority or rights to the thing it points to. The only thing you own is the NFT which is some JSON and a URL. You don’t own what is at the URL.
> These artworks are infinitely reproducible and therefore hard to value, if anyone can own a perfect copy of the work with the click of a button, what value does it have?
From the perspective of non-dual Shaiva Tantra, the value of rasa (aesthetic, beauty, art), is its transformative experience of the consciousness as consciousness experiences art. From such a frame, it is uniquely valuable to the specific viewer and the art; no two experience are ever the same, not fungible or reproducible. The transformative experience can expand meaning and significance to one’s journey in life, how to better contribute to the world. It is not monetary value, and yet can have great value to both individuals and society.
On the other hand, modern art has spent an (imo excessive) amount of effort deconstructing classical notions of art, so it shouldn’t be surprising that among what gets deconstructed are the societal valuation of art itself.
All those poo-pooing NFT's will miss NFT gaming and gambling like a freight train to the face.
Reading the comments, I see too many people focused on the art aspect (of course this is OP's articles focus). NFT's applied to art is a bit stupid and makes only nominal sense. NFT art is really just flexing for the rich, because as anyone realizes, right-click save-as is all you need to have the art too, just not the "key" or "ownership proof" to that art.
However when it comes to gameing, its a whole different story. Think of it more like a key to unlock something unique in some digital world.
Want to own the unique special edition sword with rare attributes in the Zelda-verse or the uber lazer in your favorite open world space game? Buy the NFT block chain address to it that says you and only you can have it (check out Phantom Galaxies). Want to own the penthouse apartment in the zuckers-verse? Buy the NFT key that says only you have ownership rights. There are already people buying up digital lots in VR games in development. Want to be a unique character with unique pets in World-of-crypto-craft? Buy the NFT's to unlock these. Want to own a special randomly generated horse in a horse race gambling game? Buy the NFT to unlock, and feed your NFT in with someone else to "breed" a new horse with chances of getting the same rare attributes (this is the concept of D-race). Want to own the rare uber-pokemon in the poke-verse to battle with others (check out Illuvium, same concept)? Buy the NFT to unlock. Sell them if you get bored for more/less money, and the game developer gets a cut!
The gaming and even the gambling application scenarios are enormous. That's why crypto gaming will likely be huge and I myself have invested in it's foundations for the long term (Enjin, Seedify-fund, D-race, etc). It's one of the few applications that makes sense outside of rich snobs flexing.
Doesn't the gaming applicaiton seem to negate some of the core aspects of crypto-currencies - the decentralization. If you want a rare artifact in the Zelda-verse, why wouldn't you buy it from nintendo? And why would nintendo want to support a 3rd party market place. I've bought some NFT from some guy - why is Nintendo going to abide by that? Why wouldn't Nintendo just set up their own store and let you trade your items there, and while they're at it they can create new items and issue them and tweak the store to control in-world inflation?
What you seem to be describing is "Here's something you might want to do in a game, and here's how you could implement that with NFTs" but what you seem to be missing is I can do exactly the same thing without NFTs, and in most of your scenarios as the game developer the NFT solution gives me less flexibility, less control and potentially restrict my ability to monetize. As a game developer I need to be able to step in and fix the economy if it breaks.
What you need to be doing is demonstrate scenarios that we can't trivially solve through traditional methods. The steam store already exists, you're not solving a problem by re-writing it to use NFTs.
The steam store is very limited because Valve is worried about violating AML (anti-money laundering) requirements. With blockchains these worries can be alleviated because all transactions are visible. It could allow developers to create in-game currencies that can then be exchanged for currencies in other games: Imagine selling all your World of warcraft gold for some gold in Zelda.
Why would the blockchain help you circumvent anti-money laundering laws? Do you think Nintendo are going to be less worried about a money laundering operation than Valve?
Not circumvent them. You can create a system that addresses the concerns of regulators wrt money laundering. Valve offering such functionality on their steam store (without some blockchain just all transactions in their own DB) would likely get them shutdown in most countries.
Its excitingly easy to imagine a Ready Player One-like metaverse that could only exist thanks to NFTs. The set of iron plate iron I wear is expressed as a cryptographically-verifiable token within the game's world, which is itself powered by a connected network of peer-to-peer servers.
Don't imagine Fortnite. Imagine Counter Strike. Old Counter Strike, back in the day, when Valve never ran any servers, and you had your Favorites list of the best community servers, the same crowd of people showing up every evening to play. Thousands of these servers existed. Valve produced the game, and (most of) the code these servers ran. But, they were ultimately independent entities; many would re-skin players, or have custom weapons, or even custom physics engines.
These items were cool. But they were ephemeral; they didn't have any intrinsic value. So, Valve added Official weapon skins, and the Steam marketplace where they could be purchased and sold. They "christened" the providence of these digital items (and, of course, produced many of them).
Now, imagine Valve's christening of that item isn't necessary. The alternatives you outline look more like "how our world works today, with linear extrapolation". It's a recipe for further centralization of control into entities like Nintendo and Facebook. Yes, if Nintendo built a "metaverse" they'd run a MySQL database in a data center in Oregon that registered your ownership of some cool weapon skin; but what does a world look like where not only you and I can run servers for people to play on, independent of Nintendo, but where the concept of ownership of valuable digital items is still maintained, and a vibrant economy can exist in the exchange of these items?
Blockchain tech is truly a "have your cake and eat it too" situation in this regard. Valve's argument is that, yeah public servers are awesome, but their authority is necessary in this marketplace of weapon skins existing. Most gaming companies aren't even this open; their authority is necessary in both the marketplace, and servers (think: Fortnite). Blockchain tech says that none of that is necessary; the role of the game developer is to "set the stage".
This also has the potential to significantly change how developers are compensated. Valve takes XX% of every steam marketplace transaction (not to mention, the disgusting loot crate system they helped to pioneer). It's a tax on every transaction in the network, which acts as a negative force against usage of the network. Reframe this to the dev's only significant role being to "set the stage"; they invent the currency that is used to make these transactions, so their compensation is in owning a large amount of this currency (what they don't distribute). Now, their compensation is in growth-in-value of the currency; proof of stake! This is a positive force; their compensation goes up when more people value the currency.
Exactly! All the counter arguments of "but I can already do that with a database" and "why would any developer want to maintain such a clunky system" miss all the avenues NFT's unlock for gaming for those developer who DONT wall off thier gardens and DONT screw up their own in-game assets by nerfing interpretation, causing their value to drop and the eyeballs to get angry and move on.
>Want to own the unique special edition sword with rare attributes in the Zelda-verse or the uber lazer in your favorite open world space game? Buy the NFT block chain address to it that says you and only you can have it (check out Phantom Galaxies).
Where's the decentralised part there? A game maker can already add a row to their database saying your account owns the item with a lot less overhead. You already have to rely on the game maker anyway to allow you to use it in the game, whether it's a row in a table, a digitally signed message, an NFT or a paper certificate.
NFTs would add lots of complexity to the cases you mentioned, but I don't see that they're bringing any value other than buzzword compliance.
If the developer was smart, he would build the NFT on an existing market place so as NOT to have control over its price, and in a sense de-centralizing it (even though all currencies have a foundation group pulling the levers at their core). Think Steam coins to buy steam NFT's, across multiple games. Focus on the unique aspects for your NFT to unlock whatever and create hype for your game. If someone wants to sell or trade the NFT for other NFT's in other games in said market place, then they have the ecosystem to essentially escape that in game asset to the real world and assign a real world fiat price to it. You suddenly have something that can accrue real world value the more rare/scarce it is. Like they do for in game loot, people will go nuts for it and keep farming / trading, especially if you keep adding features to someone unlocked item rather then take away from it. This also lets the developer create hype to attract players. Like owning a classic car only produced when the game launched or in the early years with long since nerfed overpowered attributes, and oh by the way you can put a modern engine inside if you want, but only if you have the NFT to unlock the engines for that type. If the dev does anything to screw that up like spamming an item or screwing with how its interpreted in game, they will have a lot of angry people deleting their game as their NFT values crash. Competition of eyeballs. I'm not saying its not going to be fraught with problems and people struggling to figure out what works and what doesn't. Some will choose to wall off their ecosystem, some won't, may the best prevail. Markets will evolve. Developer will lean the direction that makes the most money and I think that will be the direction where you have the least control over it once the NFT is in the wild. Its going to be the wild west, but so is crypto currencies in general. In fact I think crypto currencies is still in its infancy stages. Look at all the alt-coins struggling for unique aspects they bring to the table. At some point their may be one or a handful that do it all, but right now its a shit show of entrenched technologies and up and comers struggling to steal each others market cap.
Sorry that this will come off as quite flippant but: I love playing games and this sounds absolutely awful.
As a game developer, now I don't just have to worry about new features getting blowback from players who don't want to adapt to them... now I have to worry about what will happen to people who are using my game as an investment vehicle for real money and will attack me if I make changes that drop the value of their investment?
Edit: but if you really think this is the future, what you're describing is a huge amount of code and systems that all these games will need to build and support long-term - so you should probably get started building middleware for that and make a killing...
Its the wild west baby! The same can be said with crypto currency development, yet some are willing to take the risk, endure the nightmare and press forward. It's never perfect.
It can make you rich and simultaneously hated. Those who can walk the balance beam will get the rewards. There are definitely games coming out with this very concept, so one developers nightmare is anther's opportunity to try his luck. I'm sure new laws will be written also to give immunity to developers who crash their assets by tweaking interpretation or going out of business.
You got me thinking with your middle-ware comment... sell the weapons needed for those who venture into the nightmare of crypto gaming.
Nintendo can do this all currently. NFTs, crypto, Blockchain all have nothing to do with it.
> I myself have invested in it's foundations for the long term
Ahhhhhhh there it is.
Normally its etiquette to start the post off with *Disclaimer: I have financially invested in foo, bar, baz which are companies that do the idea im promoting"
I think those who wall off their garden rather then make their NFT's open and tradable with other games on a larger market will lose. I can't trade my Nintendo unique items for a a ship in Eve Online. A dev could even play the competition of eyeballs game and say that one games NFT (built on a decentralized non-company controls platform) will unlock equivalent items in their game, so come jump ship!
And honestly I was not trying to shill. Just saying I think there is an application enough to invest a little see where it goes.
The fact that other games can refer to other <items> on the blockchain doesn't implicitly mean that they'll work in every game though?
The amount of effort it would take to support every item for every single game in every single game is impossible.
That means developers will:
1. Have to actually care about implementing items from many other games.
2. Have to choose a subset of items to implement (the valuable ones)
meaning that the only things worth owning NFTs of are the most valuable items in the game.
Also, NFTs are literally just pointers to data, there would be absolutely nothing stopping any game developer from inferring hash 0cd42e... as an entirely different item, or one with entirely different stats.
What appeal does this actually serve? Developers of different games and companies have to collaborate still, and they could just do that with an SQL database and APIs. Infact, that approach would be millions of times quicker, more efficient, and with no blockchain overhead.
I dont think you need to support multiple games, but a dev with a similar game could say that some other NFT from some other competitor game will unlock equivalent items in my game, so come on over and jump ship! Competition of eyeballs. Expecially if those NFT are not in some walled garden and built on a common platform. You could then trade NFT's from one game for NFT's in another. I'll trade you my zucker-verse penthouse for a unique ship in Eve Online!
Yes, a dev could screw with interpretation, but that would likely create a lot or angry people and kill your cash cow as they move on. Zuck makes your pentouse smaller you are going to be pissed.
> Zuck makes your pentouse smaller you are going to be pissed.
And what the hell are you going to do about it?
How is this any different to the arguments against centralisation that they could ban you/remove your belongings at any time?
This is just centralisation again!
> a dev with a similar game could say that some other NFT from some other competitor game will unlock equivalent items in my game
Firstly, gamers absolutely do not want to constantly have to jump ship between clients -- that is a horrific inconvenience and you completely underestimate the network effect.
Secondly, why would any developer ever implement NFTs if the benefit of them is that another developer could pluck your customers?
> Want to own the unique special edition sword with rare attributes in the Zelda-verse or the uber lazer in your favorite open world space game?
Isn't my favourite open world space game ultimately managed by a centralised developer, creating a centralised game; and recognition of my "ownership" only as meaningful as the developer happy for it to be?
Put it another way, what difference is there for me as a user compared to "owning" a ship in my open-world space game today?
The keys to your unique ship (possibly with randomly generated attributes) don't accrue in value the more its traded.
I see your point, but I don't think anyone getting into NFT gaming is going to care about the centralized nature of it. Save that talk for the currencies. Especially if the dev builds the game on top of a existing NFT engine that multiple games are built on, then they can't really "control" the market and are forced to focus on the creative and unique aspects of the generation of the NFT to the uniques in thier game and create some hype and artificial scarcity to bring in more players, rather then just spam everyone with the same ship that you can buy in game for 1,000,000 space sheckles. Even if the ship is unique in game asset, you can only trade it in game. What if I wanted to trade my ship for a uber character in some other world, and some other guy wants to get into the space game and has keys in the game I want to sell to me. Deals are made.
An NFT doesn't include the assets, it's just a receipt ID.
For a recent example, Riot has just released a bunch of tie-ins for with other games. Like the character Jinx is now in Fortnite. You could use an NFT that says this person owns the Riot character Jinx and thus the Fortnite developers could let you pick the Jinx skin in game.
Although a realistic example I think it would be stupid to do in practice because why would would Epic want to give away Jinx for free just because you bought it from Riot? Then there's a much smaller advantage of having the tie-in, sure you could get cross-play between Riot games players and Fortnite players but you also lose on a quick cash win of getting Riot fans to buy a Fortnite skin.
Every example of "well developers come to an agreement and.." has already bypassed the entire concept. Riot can just publish an API for Epic to consume and be done with it - less work then the legal contracts that need to be signed to cover everybody for the use of art and assets for "Jinx" by someone who was not the copyright owner.
You've given an example where by doing something more complicated an NFT could be involved, but no problem that an NFT is actually solving.
None of it requires an NFT, I mean nearly everything crypto related is "this doesn't require crypto but crypto is one way of doing it". At least with an NFT it'd be a bit standardized? I don't actually think NFTs are useful, that's just an example of what people mean when they say an NFT could be used in games. But then I was taking it to the realistic conclusion that it's just useless because there's no advantage to giving away free stuff between different games of different companies. Which only leaves shared stuff between the same company, like digital Amiibos, but then that's also just a centralized API replaced with crypto for no real reason.
Lets say you’re a Fortnite competitor. To lure people to your game you let them import their Fortnite weapons or clothes and convert them to your game equivalent.
Everything you describe has been possible for decades, without the need of NFTs or other cryptocurrency concepts. Even the market aspect has been done in the past, you have for example Diablo 3's Auction House where users could trade for real money, and was a horrible gaming experience.
That was mostly a walled garden trading something in 1 game for fiat. I think building your NFT on a platform that allows you to essentially escape that in game asset and let it accrue value and be tradable to assets in other games is the key. A competitor may even let your NFT from some other game unlock the equivalent weapon/item/whatever in their game. Competition of eyeballs. The dev does anything to nerf that asset or screw up how its interpreted, causing the value to crash and angry gamer, they lose the eyeball. Markets will evolve. I don't think anyone that walls off their garden will prevail. If Nintendo NFT's / coins only apply to Nintendo games, then who cares. Steam coin/NFT's for the win.
> All those poo-pooing NFT's will miss NFT gaming and gambling like a freight train to the face.
This seems like a win-win to me. Gambling is a waste of money and NFT gaming sounds like an awful slog ("play to earn" indeed) combined with "pay to win" for those that can afford it.
I think good devs will try to balance that pay to win aspect out. If me and my guild get together for a day long slog into level 50 of some dungeon for a guaranteed rare NFT loot drop worth $10,000 in real world fiat tradable on a open market for assets in other games, then it might be worth my while.
Saying in the open that cryptocurrencies are good because they allow gambling is an interesting development in the ever-evolving field of excuses for why cryptocurrecy is useful. What is next, saying that ramsomware is actually a good thing?
Those exchanges with NFT's don't do anything different from storing that ownership information in a normal database, do they? The novelty in the situations you propose would be that the general public can verify ownership.
You can do this too already. IIRC there's a web-based character viewer for WoW that lets you see equipment/stats/etc. I'm not sure what NFTs add here other than the remote possibility that you will be able to use the same NFT in a different game. The chance of this happening across franchises is vanishingly remote in my opinion though.
Using NFTs for loot like this also gives a great excuse for publishers to make more games online-only, which is a net-negative as far as I'm concerned.
If the developer can insert items outside of the blockchain, then it isn’t a decentralized game. The developers are free to mint more copies of the same item as they wish, just like the US government is free to print as much cash as they wish. If they do, the markets will react and it will devalue the items drastically.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. Pretty much 100% of games today aren’t trying to push for decentralization, and we haven’t abandoned them for an NFT based MMO because the concept for gaming is extremely new, but there’s a reason people want MMOs backed by a blockchain, so to basically say it’s useless because nearly 100% of games are part of the status quo, therefore such changes are useless (or unwanted) is not a valid reason in my opinion. Just because a status quo exists, doesn’t mean the status quo shouldn’t be changed.
A blockchain doesn’t stop devs from spawning objects — that’s not a concept that blockchain is trying to stop or intends to stop, but at least we’ll be able to audit exactly how many exist in the world to determine actual rarity and freely trade the items outside of the ecosystem.
Is it "missing it" when I see the train, I understand the train, I believe it will be going very fast, but I don‘t want to board because it‘s going to a terrible destination?
You could easily say your NFT will unlock an equivalent in my come, jump ship and give me your eyeballs!
True, but then again that may have to factor into the price. A game like Eve has been running for years, if not more then a decade. The longevity of your game will just increase the price. But yes, as some point your NFT may go to the graveyard unless someone else picks up the ball and says their game will support it.
Imagine Kant had issued the “categorical imperative” as an NFT. It could be worth billions today. Other ideas such as hell or courage or irony are so old no one knows who invented them. But a market in ideas conceived as NFTs could solve this. I envision such a market as a powerful tool to determine the value and originality of ideas, while providing a powerful social incentive for the development of more and better ideas. Notice that because ideas are purely abstract, they are exceedingly fit to be represented by purely abstract entities like NFTs.
The point is that digital art is hosted on a domain (relying on centralized authority) and the NFT barely links to it. There are ways to circumvent that (i.e. by uploading the actual artwork to the blockchain), but it's prohibitively expensive to do so.
This is indeed a problem with OpenSea (generally regarded as a crappy platform) using centralized hosting, but nowadays most new marketplaces and contracts will use IPFS to decentralize the hosting, ensuring it is not linked to a single point of failure.
i think you are underestimating reputation, legitimacy, and community.
sometimes this metadata matters, other times it doesnt at all. its just a handshake between two people.
relationships matter. if you mess up your metadata, rugpull your audience, remint the same works, break the trust with your audience, thnen your not gonna have a good time. but if you understand your community, be transparent and giving, and participate, you will have much stronger connections with others.
What happens if you rug pull after 5 years while being a model NFTer until then? If your customers are buying "real" art or products from you they don't just go poof at that point (with some exceptions, like IoT or some software). Many NFTs do because they hyperlink content hosted on real servers with real costs to run.
And no online community lasts forever either. How does an NFT community wind down? Does the value of those NFTs drop? Slowly or quickly?
It's easy to claim it's about the community when things are going well, but one day some part of the community will be left holding the bag of worthless assets. Is the rest of the community going to bail them out?
What's interesting is that in the ~240 comments so far, no one has actually engaged with the topic of the article, which is the real world display of digital art.
I did, what the author is saying is that Nfts are not DRM (which is true and well known). They assume DRM is a problem that can be solved, but it can't.
OK, but then why did you expect that NFTs would solve the problem of art display? It's a bit of misrepresentation of what NFTs do, the closest thing of which is, it's like a certificate of authenticity. In other words, i dont think most people expected NFTs to solve that problem anyway
In any case even if someone makes a display that only works with original NFTs it doesnt change the fact that anyone else can make a screen that doesn't. We re back to the Napster and Kazaa problem.
Real world displays for digital art, like photo frames, could be the next step in digital art enjoyment. But will the hardware manufactures enforce ownership of public keys so only the owner's NFTs can be displayed?
The author doesn't address the biggest issue: ensuring scarcity of digital artifacts. How does a digital artist create limited editions of their digital artwork?
NFTs don't create scarcity either. The image is freely available to anyone. Nobody knows you own an NFT unless you explicitly drop in and mention you own the image every single time it's posted somewhere, in which case people will mock you.
But the actual solution has been around for centuries. An artist can sign their work or tailor it directly for the purchaser. Artists have been doing commissions online forever now and you can have them write your name if you want. Anyone out there "stealing" work you bought is either saving something with your name on it, or they're modifying it to remove your name.
No artist views NFTs as a solution to an already solved problem. They're either seeing it as a scam and avoiding it, or they're seeing it as a scam that they can quickly cash in on. Countless artists are on twitter and various places online making rock-solid careers out of selling art commissions. NFTs were never a part of it. The people proposing it as a solution are the ones "investing" in NFTs.
> No artist views NFTs as a solution to an already solved problem. They're either seeing it as a scam and avoiding it, or they're seeing it as a scam that they can quickly cash in on.
Lord forbid there are artists who (somehow) see value in NFTs. Look, I myself have no interest in NFTs, and I think most uses are indeed scammy right now, but that doesn't mean the entire idea is void.
There are artists who see it as a modern way of managing usage of art. They might not be a lot, but some do see value in NFTs besides "scam I can quickly cash in on", otherwise the market wouldn't exist in the first place.
> otherwise the market wouldn't exist in the first place.
That's not even remotely true.
Bubbles, scams, and artificially inflated markets have existed as long as artists have been signing their works to ensure scarcity and value exists. NFTs do absolutely nothing new. It's the 21st century version of beanie baby sellers saying "dude trust me it's totally worth investing in these haha you'll be rich haha these are totally rare hahaha."
NFT is scarce by definition, hence their "non-fungibility."
Unlike traditional physical art, the economic value of an NFT is not driven by scarcity of access to the media that it represents (such as a JPG or GIF), as the token remains provably scarce despite the abundance of its associated digital media file. This is a rather interesting, albeit polarizing, new paradigm.
> This is a rather interesting, albeit polarizing, new paradigm.
its not really, its basically the same as fake paper shares from the late 17th century. Sure everyone knows they are fake, but they still have a value because they can talk a good game.
"I've just sold 15 shares in the south sea company to Jacob, I have a few left, I can do you a good price."
but how do I know they are real?
"look they have the seal, and they are numbered. plus shares only give you a tiny part of the company anyway, its totally new and valuable. The prices keep going up, you can sell them to your friends"
How do you know a signed print is really from the artist? If the artist themselves gave it to you, then you can probably be fairly certain. If the provenance of that artefact can be reliably tracked over the years, then you can also be fairly certain.
Obviously, a signed inkjet print can be forged more easily than a NFT, as it is just ink and graphite on paper.
I can go and make an NFT by absolutely any artist I want and there's nothing that can be done to stop me. Nobody is forcing me to provide several levels of documentation to prove my identity before selling my image online.
In fact, it's pretty much daily that I see fellow artists warning people that fake NFTs are being sold in their name.
A signed inkjet print is harder to forge than an NFT. A hand-written signature is possible to forge, but it's substantially harder to forge than a copy-pasted digital file.
I mean, there are documented cases of it happening as well[1]. Faking an NFT is an incredibly easy way to get rich and there's no liability. It's wonderful for scammers.
You can easily copy the CryptoPunk contract and mint your own token[1], but the new token will be very easy to spot as a fake (as it will have a different contract address), and will have no market value, and likely zero buyers.
Compare this to physical prints, which can and often are forged in such a way that the original becomes very difficult if not impossible to detect.[2]
EDIT: The Banksy example you gave is one of impersonating the artist, rather than forging an artwork, and depends on the artist's accounts or website becoming compromised. It's not something NFT as a technology prevents; and, of course, the same problem could have occurred had it been a physical print sale distributed via the website.
> How do you know a signed print is really from the artist?
you don't, that's partly why they are cheaper, that and there are more of them.
> If the provenance of that artefact can be reliably tracked over the years, then you can also be fairly certain.
This is why auction houses are a thing, its also why eBay are spending loads of cash with their verification services. They have provenance tracers, and "experts" who try to assert that something is "real"
> Obviously, a signed inkjet print can be forged more easily than a NFT,
Apart from looking at the specs, you can only embed the URL in the NFT: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721 so the only thing thats really guaranteed is the URL and metadata. as soon as you download the NFT, it ceases to be the NFT anymore.
Signed prints are not necessarily cheap—see Ansel Adams prints going for nearly $1M USD[1]. It becomes a matter of what price society (or, perhaps just a handful of buyers) is willing to place on the artefact.
One of the great things with provenance on the blockchain is that it is not solely dependent on private for-profit auction houses like Christie's and Sotheby's to track provenance of the art we are creating.
By the way, NFT is programmable: it can define whatever you are willing to upload & embed onto the blockchain.
I'd recommend [2] if you are curious to understand this topic a little deeper.
> Individually owned, but free to share and use by anyone. When it’s freely shared and used it’s not detracting value from the original, it’s adding value. The Mona Lisa is an exceptionally valuable artwork that lives in the public domain, it is individually ownable yet publicly available for reuse. Mona Lisa Instagram posts, poster prints, remixes, reuses all do not detract value from the original, they add value to it.
It didn't. The Mona Lisa was a work specially commissioned by a family.
The modern version of that is someone paying an artist to commission a unique work. What changed? Nothing. The Mona Lisa was copied, and digital works can be copied. But nobody else is getting the custom ordered work that you paid for. Only you got your dream painting--everyone else just copied or downloaded a nice looking painting.
Mona Lisa is on the weak end of great pieces, but by and large, a jpg of a great piece it is nothing like seeing the real thing in person. Totally different experience.
Lack of scarcity is the unique selling point of the digital. I think future generations will look back at the madness of manufacturing scarcity because society refused to adapt to abundance.
Good question. I think I can best answer this by example:
People get paid to develop Blender. Blender even has an in house film studio, with paid artists. The software and artwork is made available for free. No artificial scarcity is imposed. And no one is starving.
Trying to emulate the restrictions of the material realm is the wrong direction.
It's a good example but I can't help feeling that we would end up with a much smaller ecosystem if that was how all software was funded.
I work in a very narrow niche selling B2B and my experience tells me it just wouldn't be viable if it was open source. I'd end up selling support which is not how I want to work.
It is an example of how to think outside the constraints of scarcity when dealing with immaterial ”property”.
But if you are looking for individual artists there’s Patreon.
I’m sure people can think of reasons why Patreon does not fulfill some criteria which to them is important for a healthy artistic community. After all, people are imaginative. What I’m encouraging you to do is to use that imagination to think of ways to embrace digital abundance, instead of trying to shoehorn the property rights that humans constructed to distribute physical goods onto something inherently non-physical.
If humanity can not handle the virtually infinite supply of digital goods without artificially enforcing scarcity, what does that say about us?
Not an universal solution, but you can get paid once by a person or a group to paint/draw/program/record what they want.
I see people showing of what they can do and then accepting requests on patreon, if the client shares the thing later is something is probable that will happen.
Today DRM exists that is quite hard and time consuming to crack (Denuvo). Some games exists that has not been cracked for 1+ year.
Has anybody tried to use this to provide scarcity for a digital artifact besides game developers?
A picture can always be screenshotted, so instead think more a 3D digital environment, sort of like a FPS but without the guns, instead a painting or sculpture you can walk around in.
Denuvo is easily cracked for games people care about. It's not put in games to stop crackers, it's put there to allow the game to go through the first weeks (where 90% of the sales happen) without competition from pirated versions.
After this time some companies even remove the DRM because it already did it's job.
The whole game industry is based on hype in the hope people buy on day 1 or, even better, pre-oder the games. One reason most big games are released broken or in a very buggy state.
NFTs, what a scam. I had no idea what the process was. I was a photographer in my younger days, published. Thought I could make a buck or two turning them into an NFT.
NFTs are the people selling shovels during the gold rush, a for someone to make money off of you during the process of making and auctioning the NFT.
If I cannot do the process without paying anyone, it's just a scam. Just like Bitcoin.
you can create nfts and have them minted upon sale, that way you dont have to pay anyone as its gasless. all you need is a signature, that doesnt cost anything.
its actually a really neat way to onboard users to chain without needing to go through a cex and spend money.
> you can create nfts and have them minted upon sale, that way you dont have to pay anyone as its gasless. all you need is a signature, that doesnt cost anything.
by whom? What NFT platform/gallery allows the free creation of a NFT? As far as I know, artists need to pay to create NFT (buy ETH or whatever).
The Internet was designed and built by hippies (literally bearded dudes out of Berkeley). Open protocols, bits are free. Copying is a core function.
Open Source, BSD, GNU, ... all an extension of that thought.
While this was awesome for the spread and easy build out of the modern apps we all use, it had a massive "flaw" when it comes to property rights.
This was exemplified by what happened to music through p2p file sharing, e.g. Napster. Bits don't have copy protection.
The industry tried to roll back this fundamental freedom of the web via DRM schemes, with massive pushback from the old guard of netizens. But, freedom is never perfect, the devastating effect on artists is real. Streaming kind of solved the copy problem, but the amount you can charge for music now is miniscule. (Just using music as an example).
NFTs, web3, metaverse are all now being positioned to rollback this fundamental flaw of the Internet - copy protection, ownership on the bit level. Digital scarcity. There will be no Right-Click Copy in the metaverse, no screenshots in web3. The struggle with NFTs right now is that it is this idea of digital ownership on top of bits that don't support it, hence this mind-boggling maelstrom of crazy.
Personally, having grown up in HACKER CULTURE (see the name of this very forum, oh the irony) e.g. having spent time at copy parties in shady buildings, admiring the intros/demos on cracked games, the BBS scene ... this whole web3 thing creeps me out. I totally get why it's kids doing it, they don't know it better, and maybe this is just normal, the pendulum always swings.
Some VCs will get ultra-rich pumping this, big corps will be all over it (charging for bits? ironclad copy-protection? price arbitrage on premium bits?), even government will see the upside - no more anonymity, every bit is signed.
How do any of these technologies stop data copying, exactly?
NFTs seem pretty ineffective. At best you can argue a walled garden might end up being the most popular incarnation of the metaverse, but its not fundamental to it.
The metaverse will be built on closed protocols. Crypto is at odds with free bits.
both are trying to bring real world concepts into the digital.
they are at fundamental odds with the foundational tech and protocols of the current Internet.
people complain about Apple's "walled garden". Just watch what happens if the whole web3 is one big controlled ecosystem, pay for play. I can create bits out of thin air right now - I don't need to MINE them.
just insane how everything is going into hard reverse.
The actual problem is how society determines value. It's based on supply and demand, which can be gamed, rather than inherent value. For example, compared to jobs in the stock market, education is a low-paying sector, as is janitorial work and other fields that contribute disproportionately to the well-being of civilization because the focus is not about artificially gaming the system to increase financial reward.
I don't want to get too far into the weeds of whether or not some industries are worth their salt (e.g. entertainment, sports, etc.)- but the point is that financial value and real-world value are inherently disconnected.
This affects more than just raw economics. Just look at the MeToo movement- how many people are considered valuable due to their financial success as opposed to their inner psychological work and kindness towards others, and are therefore (wrongly) placed into positions of power.
Of course this affects the art world too. A painting of rare skill that stirs the heart and intrigues the mind is worth money, because it makes us more human and lifts the world up a notch. The other stuff is not worth it. Professional (as in its how they make their living) artists know this and game the system for financial rewards.
The NFT craze is just symbolic of the bigger issue. It works because it's a self-sustaining greed machine. Pure supply and demand, no inherent value. I would say it's a bubble but throughout human history, value and value have been unrelated, with no end in sight.
craze is an important word though. The mechanism of NFTs can be used for actual value, such as paperless tickets, real estate deeds, digital assets with utility etc. Even in a basic sense they can be an improvement over bespoke mobile apps and QR codes.
Anyway, what do I know, I'm barely making ends meet, and I'm one of the dummies who dabbled in BTC back in the day and lost my wallet carelessly because it seemed so worthless anyway.
Maybe I'm the problem and should just get on board with the whole greed thing. Maybe if I make enough money my opinion might be valuable.
Two swindlers arrive at the capital city of an emperor who spends lavishly on clothing at the expense of state matters. Posing as art dealers, they offer to provide him magnificent clothes that would be backed by a digital token which proves value to those smart folks who understand digital. The emperor hires them, and they go to work in a special minting room. A succession of officials, and then the emperor himself, visit them to check their progress. Each sees that the room is empty but pretends otherwise to avoid being thought a fool.
Finally, art dealers report that the emperor's suit and its token are ready for release. They mime dressing him and he sets off in a procession before the whole city. The townsfolk uncomfortably go along with the pretense, not wanting to appear inept or stupid, until a child blurts out that the emperor is wearing nothing at all. The people then realize that child is very stupid, not understanding simple principles of digital DeFi-fueled web3.0 economy. Still smirking at the child, the emperor continues the procession, walking more proudly than ever.
Awesome comment. Took me a bit to realize it was the emperor has no clothing.
I think NFT's applied to art make only nominal sense, and I assume that's what you were going for. I myself had to come to the realization that NFT's are really just flexing for the rich, because as anyone realizes, right-click save-as is all you need to have the art to.
However when it comes to gameing, its a whole different story. Want to own some unique special edition sword with rare attributes in the Zelda-verse? Buy the NFT block chain address to it that says you and only you can have it. Want to own the penthouse apartment in the zucker-verse? Buy the NFT key that says only you have ownership rights. Want to be a unique character with unique pets in World-of-crypto-craft? Buy the NFT's to unlock these. Sell them if you get bored for more money, and the game developer gets a cut!
The gaming application scenarios are enormous. That's why crypto gaming will likely be huge and I myself have invested in it's foundations for the long term (Enjin, Seedify-fund, etc). It's one of the few applications that makes sense outside of rich snobs flexing.
None of this requires NFTs, you're describing microtransactions. Diablo 3 in 2012 released with the infamous "real world auction house" that allowed players to sell random virtual loots to each other using real money, with Blizzard taking a cut of the transactions.
- Central authority over your ownership (The game developer/publisher)
- The right flag needs to be set to check if you own a specific item
- You buy the item from a central authority, who grants it to you in the game world (and can just as well choose to take it away from you again, they might not be able to delete the flag, but they can certainly ignore it)
You discovered databases.
If you move to player <-> player transactions, you have a basic ingame/platform marketplace...which exists already. Again no value is added here by adding NFTs.
> The gaming application scenarios are enormous.
The only way NFTs provide anything other than a slower, way less efficient database is if all publishers and developers somehow got together and agreed on a standard to carry your items across games from different publishers:
1. Why would any developer want this?
2. Why would developers want to develop and maintain a spec to make this work?
Lets say I buy the NFT the penthouse apartment in Zucker-verse. What is to stop Zuck from selling 100 copies of my penthouse on other planets in his second life clone?
If you want to pay to be the only person in the Facebook VR world to own a Yacht, you need a legal contract that gives you ownership of that. If you don't have a contract you cannot sue him for selling Yachts to other people inside of his VR world.
Now if you built a VR application where objects were only displayed if you could prove ownership of the private keys that would work, but there would be nothing stopping someone from modifying the VR application, or building their own VR application to give you access to a Yacht.
The trick here with Web3/DeFi is that there is so much indirection and abstraction.
What do these people do?
They are involved in DeFi projects.
What do those projects do?
They provide an infrastructure for DeFi.
But what does that infrastructure do?
It allows the DeFi transactions.
But what are those transactions?
Well it could be anything due to the open nature of smart contracts.
But what does it actually do today?
It moves digital tokens around.
When is it going to provide real value?
Many people have made a lot of money in Crypto already
And how did they make their money?
By owning tokens that went up in value
And how is that not a pyramid scheme?
Well the US Dollar is a scam. No one should be long US Dollar.
TLDR; Because the US Dollar is at risk of inflation, you should buy and hold onto a variety of digital trading cards. Somehow the Metaverse will include digital scarcity and those trading cards will make your meta rich.
and with DeFi I have taken out loans and bought "real world" things, all with trustless/permissionless contracts. I value that and so do many others. If you dont thats ok, its opt-in.
We are having fun, making things, and building community. At some point the critics have to show us what alternatives and new things they've been building, what their attempts look like, what they are offering that is so much better...
Take code collaboration (https://radicle.xyz/) Code Collaboration and team programming is a real use case that people can get value of.
I've been using git for 10 years to collaborate with other developers. Google docs has supported live document collaboration for years. Microsoft has a great tool as well. https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live-share/
If you prefer radicle.xyz over git or Google or MSFT, that is fine. But lets be clear that the technology to perform code collaboration is not dependent on Web3. Web3 is being inserted into an existing real world application.
sure, if that works for you then you dont need it.
its useful for the co-ops i work with. allows easy group ownership of repos and also basically gives us a group bank account and voting system all at once. like instant community group infra. It probably isnt needed for corporations or solo devs. but for smaller evolving communities it is an improvement on a github org or a google doc.
and id like to point out that we've gone from you saying "pyramid scheme" and talking about money, too "if you prefer..thats fine" in like two comments. maybe we can start toning down the moral panic on these things, and recognising there is useful stuff here, maybe not to you, but to some of us. thats why we are building it in the first place.
I only buy products from Multi Level Marketing companies. The sales people at MLMs are more friendly in comparison to just using a website like Amazon.com. Maybe that isn't useful to you, but to me it is. Therefor, MLMs are legit businesses and no one should ever criticize them.
I really like the Metaverse cherry on top of this cake. Originally a strategy trick made to steer attention away from fundamental ethical problems of Facebook brand, it just adds so nicely to that whole situation.
“Why? Because we will need it in Metaverse (the illusory future I have just invented).”
if anyone wants some positive, optimistic takes from actual artists and musicians working in the space i'd recommend https://interdependence.fm
its not as attention grabbing as a sweary youtube video, but it isnt trying to enrage you for clicks, and has actual conversation on the issues artists face and how we might build alternatives.
people arent all evil, its not the end of the world. the sky isnt falling. the kids are alright.
The NFT space has already defined that NFTs and ownership is all about clout - which means absolutely nothing to anyone outside of the NFT space, who isn’t actively daily trying to gain internet points and/or followers.
CryptoKitties are cool. Art NFTs not so much. With art NFTs all you get is bragging rights that you bought X from Y. A CryptoKitty on the other hand actually has utility; not only in the game itself but also in other apps that are using them, e.g. HyperDragons eating CryptoKitties to grow stronger.
I think that's the only (if any) viable future for NFTs. A unique set of items or objects on the blockchain that follow a standard, making them interoperable between different apps. Since the blockchain is an open API by nature no-one can prevent you from building your own game utilizing the same NFTs. So when you buy a sword you can use it in all games that support it or, as in the case of HyperDragons, sacrifice it to get something else.
I still think that the composability is intriguing. You don't need my permission to build an application that talks to my application, as with the example of HyperDragons eating CryptoKitties.
You can have composability just by assets being permissively licensed. For example freesound.org or the various asset stores that are chock full of free stuff as well as paid things.
What I suspect people want is free co-marketing rather than composability. HyperDragons is famous because it did something interesting with CrytoKitties that were already famous. In that case you also need to be very careful using other peoples IP so probably want a license anyway.
My current #1 side project is "three-sided cards" which live in both the physical and digital worlds.
There was that time I got a "free" inkjet printer and discovered that the ink would dry out if I didn't use it regularly, so I challenged myself to print something every day.
I have been through a year of continuous improvement and thinking a lot about how to develop more physical-digital objects, performances, etc. I am still dismissive of Facebook's "metaverse", but my current work and planned work is all metaverse-ready.
so it's very much an old thing (possession of unique things) that people are trying to fit into the new world that no longer works the same way. There I say it will not work. Somebody needs to figure out new ways of making art that fit the new age instead.
I'm not in love with NFTs, but many of these points are trivially easy to shoot down.
> artists are waking up to find that their digital artworks are being sold by fraudsters to unwitting victims.
As the author attests; this is just a problem with art, not a problem with NFTs. The potential reward for counterfeiting an NFT isn't significantly higher than traditional art, especially given how much cooler the NFT markets have become over the past few months, and the degree to which we understand how prevalent traditional art counterfeiting is (you'll notice this as a theme; cryptocurrencies don't generally create new problems, they simply make the existing problems of our world much more open and obvious).
The vastly more correct criticism to lobby in this domain is that, generally, the systems and mechanisms to prove the providence of an NFT will fundamentally rely on some kind of centralized identity verification (maybe just a Twitter verified badge); this is antithetical to the goals of crypto, in general.
Though, in practice, it is not antithetical to the goals of most NFT holders. And that's far more important.
> This comes hot on the heals of what feels like mania
History would remember "tulip mania" as a "tulip investment opportunity" if it had never crashed.
Point being, yes there are some signals which suggest that an investment domain is in "mania", and NFTs did relay some of those signals. At this point, the mania has died down quite a bit; but only time can say for sure.
A critical piece of information that many people fail to consider when seeing the prices these NFTs are sold for; they're purchased with ETH (or another cryptocurrency). CNN lists the price in USD. There are tons of people who, over the past five years, became "ETH millionaires"; they may have thousands of ETH, but that's different than millions in cash. There's nothing to spend ETH on. Converting it into USD, to go buy yourself a McClaren, would require a massive tax payment at best, and in many countries the laws surrounding this are so unclear, or straight illegal, that a fiat bank account suddenly receiving a $50M transfer may draw the ire of authorities. So; something comes along they can actually buy; they buy it.
You can argue against the utility of such a transaction. I'm not sure that's relevant, but I'd argue its actually massively utilitarian: Early adopters believe, one day, they will be able to buy a Big Mac with their ETH. Buying a random piece of art for $5M USD in ETH generates news headlines. Its an investment, both in an asset they can eventually, hopefully liquidate, and also in buzz to get more people into the system.
> Transactions made through the Ethereum wallet of Beeple are responsible for 78,306 kilograms of CO2 emissions
One could, with some amount of validity, argue that securely transferring millions of USD in wealth while only creating the pollutive equivalent of six UK adults is actually an improvement on traditional systems, considering the massive amount of "hidden pollution" our traditional financial system consumes.
The bigger issue is that this is an argument of per-transaction scale, and similar carbon outputs are generated even with smaller transactions. Gas prices are the biggest criticism of ETH right now, and the best solutions the community has generated to date are mostly new sub-chains (like MATIC) which don't have the same marketing momentum ETH does.
> there is still no clear timeline in sight for Ethereum
This is the big question. The timeline outlined on the official Ethereum site is quite clear; mid to late 2022. Whether they can stick to that timeline is another matter; democratic systems are messy, as anyone who has participated in the US government can attest.
People say NFTs open a huge new opportunity to sell art, but the only reason why the demand is higher is because of hype. Once that has died down, it will return to before: people not wanting to pay artists for commissions, no one contributing to their patreon, etc.
The one problem NFTs solve perfectly: How to do decentralized and pseudonymous proof of community membership.
Successful projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club are not about the fancy drawings, but about the exclusivity of a social club. You may find that silly, but that does not diminish the human craving for status.
NFTs are the digital equivalent of designer clothes, luxury watches, and fancy cars.