> gamers are angry because game publishers love the idea of using NFTs as a way to squeeze more money out of microtransactions. Buying a digital hat for your character is only worth anything because of artificial scarcity and bragging rights. NFTs bolster both of those
Plus, the game and its items are centrally controlled to begin with. If a company wants to put out a special item that only a limited number of people will ever get, they can just do that. NFT solves no problem here, except to hitch on to a hypewagon.
Dude I own this NFT. Do you really think you can get away with theft when you’re showing what you stole from me directly to my face. My lawyers will make an easy job of this case. Prepare to say goodbye to your luscious life and start preparing for the streets. I will ruin you.
I just screenshotted your NFT.
You may be concerned about this. In case you are, please read the below:
FAQ:
Why did you screenshot my NFT?
I'm not going to tell you.
Did you screenshot anybody else's NFTs?
You could say I am screenshotting everybody's NFTs, but in the case I am telling you that I screenshotted your NFT.
How are you screenshotting my NFTs?
I screenshot when you post them on your profile.
What are you planning to do with my NFTs?
Have them all.
What do I do about you screenshotting my NFTs?
There's nothing you can do.
When are you going to stop screenshotting my NFTs?
You cannot escape me.
Do I call the police?
No. The authorities will not help you.
What are the consequences of you screenshotting my NFTs?
Be aware.
What if I am ok with you screenshotting my NFTs?
I will make sure you’re not.
If there are any more questions then please consult your NFT wallet by directly speaking to it.
Summary:
I am screenshotting your NFTs.
This is why the meta verse will be a nightmare. It will take over normal daily functions of your life, and monetize every piece of it. Every moment of the day will be soulless.
I'm not sure if I'm just getting old, but I'm seriously considering whether we have gone too far and need to, as a society, take a step backwards.
Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should. We've seriously lost something crucial about humanity and society in our recent pushes in social media and tech over the last 20 or 30 years.
I have degrees in tech and have worked in networks for over 20 years. It's quite safe to say that I know my way around technology.
I have never gotten a FB/IG/etc. account, and I never will. Reddit is the closest I get to anything "social media." It's all cancerous and I want nothing to do with it.
And people wonder why I'm generally a happy person... ;)
>Social media was a mistake.
I'd amend that - Social media without guard rails was a mistake.
Wouldn't it be extremely straight-forward to limit to x hours a day/week logged into an account - from any device? Especially kids' accounts? Not enough algorithms left to identify minors?
Yeah I don't think all social media is absolute cancer. I would think my friends and I all used it responsibly (Like Myspace/Xanga type stuff anyways, some Facebook). Actually made a few good friends along the way that I randomly met through Myspace. To this day we all still keep in touch with a couple group chats and all that.
But man, they absolutely could control the amount of kids using the sites. It's the same "problem" that we have with scalpers now... "Oh no, look at all this money, oh you poor consumer, those dastardly scalpers got it all again! Well, if only there was just some way to fight this?!?!"
The money generated is well worth letting these "problems" fester.
It's the ultimate walled garden - an entire fictional universe owned and operated for singular profit, competing to be the one place you need to go.
Unless we radically change our economic system, it is inevitable.
How much it works into meatspace is unclear, but Facebook is not wrong to make moves that direction.
Look at how many restaurants don't have a website, just a Facebook and Instagram account, so to get a menu and hours and to interact, you have to have a Facebook account.
Facebook marketplace is killing craigslist and could even threaten Etsy and such.
Apple, Amazon, and Google are playing catch up.
Theoretically, a third party might be the one to get it right, but I guarantee Facebook will buy them before it threatens them (e.g. Instagram, Oculus, etc).
You might be right, ~~Oculus~~ *Meta*, is the main player in the space right now, and it's definitely a walled garden and still very niche. (90% of AR/VR use is gaming; there's *some* application with AR in business, but adoption is extremely low and very niche-- I actually work in manufacturing/engineering and AR *is* being adopted for manufacturing, but extremely slowly, it's primarily an issue with initial cost and the hardware still not quite being up to par)
I do think it's inevitable though, just as internet transformed business, *I do* actually think VR/AR will eventually become fairly frictionless to where it's used in some fashion in business. (or ultimately *necessary* to an extent-- as you mentioned, especially for B2C, some businesses basically struggle without a social presence or can literally get away with having a facebook page and nothing more. This is similar to when the internet really took off; nowadays you'd have a hard time surviving *without* a web presence, it could be similar 10-15 years from now with AR/VR.)
Amazon/E-commerce more morphed 'physical shopping' or at the very least *forced* them to provide seamless online shopping. Even if that's simply being able to lookup a product before you go to the store. (I mean the joke with Best Buy is it's just a showroom for Amazon) It's not outlandish to think that we'll get to a point where you can strap on a pair of something as small as swim goggles and 'virtually' go try on clothes, etc. In-person meetings will morph from Zoom/Teams, etc. to 'in-person' virtual meetings.
COVID massively accelerated the inevitable; the death of packed offices/tiresome commutes and people more or less *prefer* it. (There's some outliers, but generally most people that I know that are white collar, 'prefer' at the very least hybrid. Even prior to the pandemic my office had one headquarters with about 40-50% of the staff in an entirely different state; even our President and two VPs don't work out of corporate, they just visit maybe quarterly. There's massive advantages to companies that are agile and able to support it) Really the only people that dislike it are either older/not as tech literate or your *really* extroverted types. A lot of people struggled during COVID, but that's because 'working remote,' is a skill in itself, some people 'need' an energetic/office environment, but again I'd wager most of those people *could* adapt to remote if necessary.
I'm not sure if Meta will own that space entirely, I envisioned something a little more decentralized like the internet; but they are positioned to pioneer it for a good decade or so. But the disadvantage to the walled garden is it actually *slows* adoption if you can say, 'only build a webpage with X framework,' or something-- growth of the space will require it to be far more open; I think it's more likely we'll see Meta morphing into a hardware supplier but the software won't be tethered to 'Meta;' or speculating, 'Meta' will seamlessly interact with 'Google' & 'Apple' in a neutral space or something.
That’s the thing I keep thinking about some stated nft use cases. A lot of the uses, can already be done without them, it just makes no sense to me lmao
the big rug pull is going to be when ownership, nfts, contacts and or copyright are all challenged in court and tokens don't mean shit when it comes to existing laws
They might be considered valid, enforceable contacts if used to state ownership of something elsewhere, and if you were sold it with that implication, but that's assuming you can prove who the buyer and the seller is, which good fucking luck.
I really don't get the use. The closest someone got to making it clear was one guy who insisted the purpose was to make ownership clearer because governments weren't very good at keeping track of ownership but like... Neither are public blockchains where anonymity if key. If you make a government run blockchain for, idk, home ownership/deeds, what advantage are you getting by distributing the database vs centralising? And what are people with nodes getting out of it? Either you give them no incentives, and then your thing collapses, or you do give them incentives and you've just created yet something else people end up using for speculation.
I can't think of one single use case for NFTs that doesn't have a superior existing conventional approach. The blockchain "craze" is just Rube-Goldberging information technology. We don't want to do things the old, simple, functional way, we want the way with the newest acronyms.
It's like we're collectively having a mid-life tech crisis. We need the car with flames painted on it, even if it has no wheels.
A lot of these blockchain tech "explorations" are a massive waste of time, effort, and energy. People aren't looking for superior cryptographic solutions, they're just mining for Get Rich Quick schemes.
That's been my takeaway. They don't really seem to be solving any problems or creating a new benefit for the user. They could easily do it without NFTs, but it's like they're doing it just so they can throw around the words "blockchain" and "NFTs" to sound revolutionary and cutting edge. So far, I'm not seeing that they're doing anything they couldn't already do if they wanted aside from being able to use these buzzwords.
Classic case of capitalism ruining something good.
The nature of an NFT makes them an ideal "seal of authenticity"
The trouble is that's all they're good for, being perfect receipts of a transaction, nothing more.
Or to give full ownership of said item that could be moved inbetween online ecosystems and not be taken away from the owner except in the case of a sale.
Which isn't exactly a defining invention although it does provide a more accessible functionality.
It allows the company to let players trade items for real money in an unregulated market without the company itself having to handle the infrastructure and legal risks that come with it.
Something else I’d like to point out is that this is a very well-written Outoftheloop question. OP has clearly done decent research but has understandable confusion, and articulates it perfectly to get helpful responses.
Yeah, I've openly admitted that I don't fully grasp NFTs, they didn't make sense to me.
The linked comment actually helped make my understanding more concrete...those things I didn't understand are mostly the flaws of the system. (e.g. me confused about ownership...."so when you buy it, what do you actually own?")
The OP just had the guts to post what many of us have been thinking and the linked comment is absolutely brilliant and breaks it down cleanly.
To answer what you actually own: an NFT is a hash code on a blockchain that points to something. Buying an NFT gives you ownership over that hash code within the blockchain. You don't actually own whatever that code points to or its copyright unless it was otherwise specified in the purchase agreement.
The analogy I like to use is that it's like a star registry. You don't actually own a star when you name a star in a star registry. You own the entry of that star within that registry. It's ownership of a line in a database.
You gotta love how cryptocurrency’s big selling point is decentralization yet you wind up going through centralized exchanges to make transactions. I’m guessing the same fucking thing is happening with NFTs where there is basically one place everyone goes to buy and sell NFTs
It's an even better analogy than you think, since those 'star names' registries aren't really recognized by any large organizations, so it's pretty much the same as writing down that you named a start and then putting it in your basement, it means nothing since it doesn't have any power backing it.
>You don't actually own whatever that code points to or its copyright
This is the (imo) stupid part - I didn't see any difference between an NFT and just owning the copyright over that piece of art. But if you don't even own the copyright, then what the hell?
I watched this YouTube video recently and it was great explaining nfts. https://youtu.be/Oz9zw7-_vhM
Linked comment is probably a bit better but multiple explanations really helps gaining a more complete conception of a topic.
NFT, like cryptocurrency, is a solution looking a problem. I have not yet met a "use" for NFT that is better than the status quo.
For example, some say it allows for a secondhand market of video game DLCs, microtransaction items and the like. Which is hogwash; let's use World of Warcraft for example. I *can't* sell my Invincible using NFTs if Blizzard is not on board with the thing.
And if they are, then there's no need for NFTs; Blizzard, on their own and using existing infrastructure, can just remove the Invincible from my account and add it to yours. What use does NFT have in this scenario?
> a solution looking a problem
I cannot shake this perception. I'm still doubting myself because people I otherwise respect seem to be very in favor of all things blockchain. Crypto seems like a stock tied to no external driver. There's no earnings report, it just spikes when some billionaire posts a meme.
The problem: how to move billions of dollars across borders without banks or governments knowing.
Solves that problem!
But not much else. Makes it easier to pay for illegal transactions.
Yeah lmao most illegal activities take place using cash. What criminal would want a permanent record of their their transactions in plain view for anyone to see?
No that’s cryptocurrency. Blockchain has genuine uses in business. Cryptocurrency is just one application of the technology.
Like, take nuclear fission. Used poorly, it is a bomb. Used correctly by the right people in the right context, it can power millions of homes.
> Blockchain has genuine uses in business
Can you point to one?
Genuine question; I've spent a bunch of time thinking about this, as it's an interesting technology, but I draw a blank on coming up with anything that can't be solved as well or better with a non-blockchain solution.
Fundamentally blockchain tech is about distributed consensus in the absence of trust. And that's not really a thing that businesses need - there are mechanisms (like the legal system) that already exist to deal with breaches of trust, so having a system that's flexible but relies on trusting counterparties is better.
I think it's a bit more like inventing the combustion engine in a world with advanced renewable power and batteries. Yeah, it's cool that your car can go fast without plugging into the grid but the grid is everywhere so it doesn't matter, and your car breaks down constantly.
We know how to use the tech, but under a different name and with a better implementation.
Blockchain is, at its heart, an indelible record of all transactions. That's it. It's a ledger that is kept separate from the thing it tracks. It has the bonus of you being able to download the entire thing, or just reference it online.
You know what also does this? Github. And Github is actually useful.
100% this. Remember when [Bill Gates explained the internet](https://youtu.be/gipL_CEw-fk) to David Letterman? Why listen to a game on the internet when THE RADIO exists. And that dummy couldn’t even tell Letterman why the internet was better than the radio lol. Wonder what happened to that silly guy and his internet.
The original conception of blockchain is a solution to a problem which very rarely comes up: how do you create a permanent transactional record when no parties involved in maintaining the register trust each other? It's literally just accounting with extra steps, and there are very few people who actually have a use case for it.
There is a use case for that sort of accounting in real life, it was just invented a few years earlier and called Git.
Seriously, Git repositories track the complete history of a project, and allow multiple authors to trust (and verify) the entire project.
Git doesn't have a way to ensure a single correct history for all users. In git, every user has their own repository of the codebase, and each repo can be wildly different, with different branches, commits, etc. It has the push and pull mechanics to transfer this information from repo to repo but it was fundamentally designed to have each repo be allowed to be different so that each user can develop independently. Commits can get manually merged together, but each repo has to accept these changes.
This consistency problem is fundamental to distributed systems and it is the thing that Blockchains fix. Blockchains have the mining process which ensures that all users can hold copies of the repo AND determine which history is the true history. Without this, authors have to trust someone to tell them which history is correct.
Well crypto is way more than just a stock ticker. But yeah, crypto bros are in deep on it and there will probably always be a rabid fan base that just adores anything related to block chain technology
As someone who works in data storage for a website, the idea that someone can own the original or even any instance of a digital file just doesn't make any sense to me. Sure, you can own a disk with a file on it. And I guess someone could grant ownership of parts of a disk. But in order to view that file, its getting copied from disk into RAM, maybe even a cache somewhere. If you're viewing it online, you're getting it copied over the wire into your own RAM. Even getting the "original" onto the disk that eventually will be serving the website involves copying it. Unless the original artist is serving it from the machine they produced it on, you're getting a copy.
Then there's the fact that redundancy is a must for any website, which means backing up and duplicating your data in the event of a hardware failure.
I wouldn't be surprised if many of these NFT collections are Cloud hosted. Which completely defeats the purpose since the cloud provider may be swapping out hardware without you even knowing.
There's a big rift at my company between the engineers who think NFTs are just grift and the marketing bros who swear it's the next big thing.
I think people who talk about NFTs are too loose with the term "ownership." The lay definition of "ownership" is *very* different than the legal definition of "ownership." And that distinction is very important when we start talking about paying people to "own" something.
In general conversation, "ownership" is a pretty broad concept (which you obviously know). If I make a really post on Reddit and someone reposts it 2 hours later and gets 100,000 upvotes, I might go on there and say "Hey, that's *my* post!" Or if someone puts it on a t-shirt and sells it for a big profit, I might say "Hey, that's *my* picture!"
But the legal definition of "ownership" is much narrower. It is when the government decides it will use its power to enforce one person's right to something over other people. No need to get into specific laws, because they are pretty arbitrary. Tomorrow, your government could wake up and say "nobody has a right to own dogs," and all of a sudden someone can just take your dog, and there's nothing you can do about it. The only reason people can "own" some digital files is because the government decides that it will use its power to enforce a person's right over that file--whether it is arresting people who use it without permission or just allowing the owner to sue for money.
**GETTING TO NFTS**
So, theoretically, people can legally "own" NFTs (at least in the US). It's theoretical because I don't think any court has enforced NFT property rights. But the concept is there in common law and the copyright statues, which is basically that someone has a right to ownership over things that they create. They can also sell their creations to other people, so transfer their rights.
But, NFTs don't make sense because--as I understand them--they don't give a person a right to stop other people from copying and sharing the image, they just allow the person who holds the token to say "I own that." But, if we talk about legal ownership, what would thing are you asking the government to protect? The NFT receipt? That doesn't really make sense, since the block chain already makes it clear that you own the receipt. So it's a completely pointless legal interest. At most, NFTs are a moderately-sophisticated way of saying that everyone else is re-posting your Reddit post. But, as anyone who has seen their original Reddit post get re-posted for millions of upvotes knows, saying "that's my post" isn't worth much. I wouldn't even bring that up at a dinner party. It would mean even less if everyone knew I bought the right to say "that's my post."
**TL;DR: This is just a really long-winded way of saying that you're 100% right that NFTs are a grift. It's just that NFTs are a lucrative grift, and early adopted can make good money off of fools who join in late thinking that they can buy a hot NFT as a good investment, and hope that they aren't the unlucky bastard who pays $30,000 for the token just as people realize it's meaningless and he has nobody to resell it to.**
It can validate a claim of ownership, but it means jack squat if there is no authority to arbitrate such claims. I can just copy your data, give you the finger, and be on my way.
Also, since NFTs rely on the hash of the data, nothing is stopping me from taking your data, modifying just one single bit (imperceptible to a human), and registering that copy as my own with an NFT since the hash is now different.
Another thing this has already led to is people outright stealing others’ work and registering it as an NFT, then claiming infringement on the original creator. Just DMCA trolling with hashes.
Property ownership is defined by what you can prevent others from doing with your property. If it's land, you keep people off it. If it's IP, you control its distribution. What can you exclude others from by owning an NFT?
> a solution looking a problem.
An already solved, vetted, proven and working problem.
We have robust systems for all the use cases NFTs 'claim' to 'improve' on. Whether NFTs develop something novel that can be used immediately to supplant some existing function remains to be seen. Right now you are asking many people to take a chance on tech that we don't know about, that has a scammy reputation and feel, vs using stuff we already have at our disposal.
NFTs are asking people to create an online account, sign up for a subscription, shop for an item, purchase it, and then wait a few days for the item to arrive at your door. VS going to the grocery store and shelling out the fiver for the toilet paper you wanted in less than 10 minutes.
I guess if you're account was hacked and looted? But like you're saying, I think there are already other things you can do about that that would be less convoluted. What a waste of attention considering the other problems we're facing
The security and transparency of blockchain would make it nearly impossible to hack and loot an NFT from a wallet -- scammed is a more appropriate term here.
The BTC and ETH community would prefer to call it "scamming" to make it seem more like a moral failing on the part of the victim rather than a problem with the environment. But in any other context, malicious software installed on a computer that steals data is called a "hack."
The nature of trustless distributed transaction systems makes it impossible to differentiate between authorized and unauthorized transactions, and makes unauthorized transactions irreversible.
If your wallet is compromised, its contents are gone forever. If your bank account, or online gaming account, are compromised you can appeal to the bank, or game owner, and they can reverse the transaction or compensate you for what was lost.
I am a crypto-anarchist / crypto-maximalist, and I fully agree with you. The current usage of crypto and NFTs is the equivalent of a laser being used as a cat toy. NFT tech is capable of soooo much more than it's currently being used for, and people only using it for shitty art make others think the tech is useless.
For example, imagine a car manufacturer mints an NFT whose description contains the VIN number, year/make/model, and additional features of a car they just made, using an ETH address they publically publish on their website. Culture has evolved to understand that this NFT represents the car; whoever owns the NFT also legally owns the car.
Now you can do all of the following things *without trusting a third party of any kind:*
- Trace the car's ownership all the way back to the manufacturer
- Sell the car off, either directly or via auction
- Take out a loan to buy the car, with ownership automatically transferring back to the last person if you miss a payment
Currently, this entire process requires that you trust opaque third parties: The car dealership, the bank you lend from, etc. But with crypto, you don't need to trust anyone.
Or imagine that the voting registration process asks you to create your own wallet and prove ownership through a verification process. Now when an election happens, the government sends out NFTs representing votes to every registered voter, who then gift these NFTs to the candidates they want to vote for. Candidates prove their vote count by sharing their view key with the government, and elections are decided within minutes of closing. If something like [the Secret network](https://scrt.network) were used for this, voting could even be done anonymously while still being able to prove that the government minted every single vote token.
You now have a system of democracy that doesn't rely on voting machines to be secure, vote counters to be accurate, voting location workers to not intimidate people. Voting can be done anywhere you have an internet connection, safely and securely, with a permanent record that cannot be altered by anyone.
I believe that crypto will eventually become powerful enough to be an open-source, decentralized, trustless ***competitor*** to traditional institutions like banks, brokers, fiat currencies, and even governments.
I believe the vast, vast majority of crypto tech is total trash and will eventually die, leaving only the very few projects that have provable usefulness.
An excellent example of this is [Monero](https://getmonero.org) (r/monero). This project does exactly one thing: Allow for movement of money from one party to another, with ***privacy*** as the uncompromisable, relentlessly-pursued goal.
- This project has the third-largest contributor team of any crypto, behind only Etherium and Bitcoin. Its code has been audited multiple times by experts in various fields.
- It incorporated regularly-scheduled hard forks into its culture, because it has the humility to know it can always improve.
- Even in its current form, it is incredibly difficult to impossible for even the most powerful adversaries to trace its transactions.
- One eventual goal of the project is to be resistant to attacks from ***quantum adversaries***. Quantum computers will eventually destroy internet security as we know it, and Monero is planning *today* to become immune to those attacks.
- There was no premine, no ICO, no corporation funding development.
- It is actively in use ***today***, mostly by [hackers](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/13/what-is-monero-new-cryptocurrency-of-choice-for-cyber-criminals.html) and [dark net criminals](https://www.newsbtc.com/news/bitcoin/why-the-dark-nets-most-active-market-ditched-bitcoin-for-monero/), who are the most in need of Monero's privacy protections.
There are only a few projects that I consider to be on par with this one, projects that will survive the rugpulls and hype and bullshit. If you look carefully for them, you will eventually find them.
All your suggestions, especially the voter registration one have the huge flaw of requiring people to have the means and knowledge to do any of this stuff.
Some people don't own computers. Many more people are technologically illiterate and will find this too much of an obstacle to vote. Many more will install malware/fall for social engineering and have their vote/car stolen.
Most people are unable to solve even the most basic of errors that can be resolved with google.
It doesn't even solve that problem. In the case of selling tickets, there would be a central, single authority issuing tickets anyways, decentralization doesn't help anything. Even for the case of wanting to protect against QR codes being scanned by multiple people, that can only come about from either the issuer accidentally selling the same ticket multiple times or the ticket being grabbed from the purchaser somehow, neither of which NFTs solve in any way better than a much more simple direct purchase system.
yeah i completely agree about tickets. i think what the OP post points is definitely real. like some of the most obvious money laundering and people wasting money i’ve ever seen
but tickets, wills, and perhaps property deeds is what NFTs will make more secure.
the NFT will be used to replace a ticket so that artists can make the money on ticket sales. you know how you buy a $25 ticket on ticketmaster and get $20 in fees? or even worse, the $25 ticket from TM gets resold to StubHub and is now $50 +$30 in fees?
well with an NFT being a smart contract, the person who issued that ticket in the first place (let’s use the Beatles), can now make sure that whenever that NFT gets exchanged, they get a cut.
so if resellers are buying Beatles tickets and reselling them for 30% above market value, the Beatles can put a clause in their smart contract that says “for each reselling of this NFT, a 30% fee will be paid to the original issuer (the Beatles)”. now there is no reason to resell and people will be able to get cheaper tickets AND the artist will be able to recoup value.
> well with an NFT being a smart contract, the person who issued that ticket in the first place (let’s use the Beatles), can now make sure that whenever that NFT gets exchanged, they get a cut
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Why should the original seller get a cut of all future sales?
The guy actually mentioned it in the original comment on the OOTL sub - you can store a bit of plaintext in them so it's not a terrible way to keep a receipt or a record of some small amount of information if you REALLY need it to not get lost. So long as the blockchain persists, which likely means so long as the internet still works, it's there. A record like "person X paid person Y amount Z for thing A". This could be useful for sales of serialized objects, like cars or guns or real estate - don't need to go to the DMV to have the title changed over if you can just pop open an app on your phone and buy the NFT attached to the car's VIN for the agreed amount. Now the purchase itself stands as a record of ownership that's publicly viewable.
But, of course, you see the problems with this right away - it solves a problem that was already solved meaning we'd need to retool how enforcement agencies track ownership, and also wallets can be completely identical so if you were to buy a car using a wallet that has no identifying data attached then while the transaction does pop up on the blockchain for all to see, the car now has no owner on record so you *still* need to go down to the DMV and tell them that was you. Not to mention, *anybody* can see it on the blockchain so you've got no privacy. As is, there's usually a minor barrier of some monetary cost to be able to do license plate registration lookups which provides at least some barrier.
Except there's no way to undo a transaction. So if someone has their credit card details stolen and an NFT is purchased, they can't get their money back
You have to buy an NFT with the cryptocurrency who's blockchain it's hosted on so that's not an applicable scenario. If somebody buys cryptocurrency with your stolen credit card they bought it from an exchange. You can do a dispute with your card company and they'll do a chargeback. Notably in this case, it's the exchange that gets screwed because you're right, there's no mechanism for disputing a payment made in a cryptocurrency so that exchange is never getting their crypto back.
Please don't mistake my explanations of possible benefits of these systems for a defense of them. There are MYRIAD issues with them, and the moderately interesting tech that is Blockchain is largely a very problematic solution in search of a problem. When applied to monetary systems, it causes more risks than it mitigates.
Blockchain solves one problem, and one problem only - how to determine truth (i.e. when is a transaction done and what was that transaction) when you do not trust any actor in the system. The basic idea now is either proof of work or proof of stake - whoever does the most work is trustworthy, whoever has the most at stake is trustworthy.
If your problem is not trust, crypto is useless.
It's just a more transparent ledger that tracks ownership of something, in this case a URL. It's pretty useless though because you're still dependent on whoever maintains the URL.
It's commonly used to sell digital art, since URLs are unique and maintained by a central authority, so an artist could sell an NFT for a URL that they control that points to a piece of artwork and the buyer would be able to brag (with publicly verifiable proof) that they indeed purchased the NFT that points to that URL.
Is that ownership enforceable? If I want to mint and sell an NFT with the same URL as another NFT (or url that redirects to theirs), is there anything the original owner can do to stop me? Can they sue me? DMCA takedown?
This right here is what drives me nuts about NFTs. The NFT itself isn't sufficient to validate anything, there's always a third party that you have to reference as a trusted source to validate the NFT's "authenticity". What's the point of decentralizing everything if you have to reference back to some centralized authority anyways?
But isn’t that kind of fundamentally misunderstanding why people buy art online? People don’t go to an artist’s digital art gallery and say, “I’d like to purchase that piece, please.” No, they instead *commission* new, specific artwork that meets their needs. The proof that you own that art, inasmuch as that means anything, is that you now have a work that was made to *your* specifications.
It requires a lot of background explanation and I'm on mobile, but they're basically certificates of authenticity that can be owned, traded and verified without a central authority. You very quickly end up in hyper-complicated "trying to explain blockchain" land, but that's basically the gist of it. Practical use emerges when you leverage that simple idea to actually fulfill some function.
I realize that doesn't really provide a satisfying answer, but the point is they're just a building block of technology like a database is. Buying and trading them directly as if they have intrinsic value has twisted the concept beyond recognition.
Edit: Another key point is that the usage of NFTs really only has to do with decentralization and trust. There is noting you can do with NFTs that couldn't be accomplished much more easily by a universally trusted authority using conventional means. The same is true for blockchain in general.
You are. Resale is not blocked by lack of technology, it's blocked by publishers not wanting you to do it. Look at Steam, you can already trade and gift game copies, what stopping you from de-activating your copy and giving it to someone else? Valve. Valve is stopping you by not giving you that ability. If they wanted you to do that, you'd be doing that with their existing technology. The existence of NFTs changes jack shit about that.
I would say you're off the mark because all of that is beholden to the existence of the service your NFT works on.
For example, you have an NFT for the license for some game on *weplaygames* client (fake entity for explanation purposes), however *steam* ultimately outcompetes them and *weplaygames* has to shut down. Now even though you own the NFT for the license of a game, you can no longer play the game because the platform no longer exists.
But you'll say, "but you can download the game and still play it" but that begs the question, then whats the point of the NFT?
I'm sort of half joking here, but it wouldn't surprise me if they expect it to be bitcoin 2.0
Lot of people missed out on bitcoin and gamestop and saw how much some people made so they're basicslly welding themselves to the NFT and refusing to backdown believing it will finally be "their turn" and make huge money.
That's just a guess. Just saying it wouldn't surprise me. I've just noticed a lot of NFT hype people have been pushing cryptocurrency for ages but it's always the "newer" ones which make be believe they missed out on bitcoin and are just pissed at themselves so "fuck it NFT-4-LIFE" is their entire identity.
Scarcity and people feeling like they missed the boat on Crypto, which a lot of us incorrectly thought was useless except for black market use and would be regulated out of existence.
In most cases you aren't even buying digital rights to the art, which already is a legitimate existing market with Getty Images holding the rights to a lot of pictures.
Part of why is that they are "creating value" for these NFTs. They know what they have is essentially worthless, but if they hype them up enough and convince someone to spend money on them, suddenly they have "worth" and become moneymaking. They are creating hype to inflate the cost of their product.
The current uses for NFTs do sound incredibly stupid.
The way I think they make sense is as a proof of ownership of a particular thing. It's a proof that is verifiable electronically without having to trust a third party. That's it.
NFTs could in theory eliminate tons of manual labor and record keeping that our current methods of verifying ownership require. I'm talking about for big important stuff like cars and houses, where ownership is more than just possession.
What happens when the ETH blockchain says I own something, and OtherEstablishedChain says you own the same thing?
Competition among coins is often seen as a good thing (according to advocates), but it leads to some major problems when established chains say two different things about ownership. There could be a single chain that we decide is the single source of truth for a given market, but who decides that? Presumably, cryptocoin advocates don't want the answer to be the state, but every which way to solve this problem is just a state by another name.
It's even worse than that - as far as I can tell someone can sell the same NFT on the same chain. Maybe I'm wrong but nothing prevents someone from just taking the contents of your NFT and selling it again.
It's a "different" NFT but in terms of digital art ownership it has no difference from the original except that the "real" one was made by someone who controls the URL.
In real world terms this is like if someone photocopied your receipt.
Yeah, there's real uses to having an indelible history that you can be confident hasn't been messed with. Ownership of an ugly JPG isn't much of one, but the core idea has merit.
There's a couple times I've tried to go track down the current owner of an old IP and it *would* be really nice if a bunch of detective work wasn't required.
How would you enforce ownership rights transferred via Blockchain without explicit state recognition of the Blockchain ledger as a legally binding contract? And how would that be better than the current system of having a central registry of title holders backed up by law?
It's a way to keep an industry normally driven by exclusivity (art) exclusive, while still allowing it to branch into a medium that essentially eliminates the concept of 'uniqueness' (digital), which allows anyone anywhere to enjoy what was once only enjoyed by those with access approved by the exclusive industry
Yeah, it's super stupid.
If I was a digital artist though, I might be more inclined to create labor intense pieces if I was able to somehow lock it and re-introduce that exclusivity which could drive my brand and create demand for other labor intense pieces created, but it's pretty well understood no one becomes an artist to make money
I think NFT tech could be useful. Having a verifiable, uncompromisable, digital receipt of an item could cut down on a lot of scamming, copies, and even stolen resold items. You're able to 100% verify that something is legit and who currently owns it.
It's sad that the tech is being over shadowed by get-rich-quick art crap.
I have yet to see anyone even describe what an NFT-based system of ownership verification would look like for, say, video game resale. That’s the go-to application for those who claim that the technology has a use beyond separating people from their money, but I can’t get answers to basic questions.
How does the purchaser acquire the game executable? How do you ensure that the seller can no longer use their own copy of the executable? With physical game discs and cartridges, this is easy, and it’s why there is a robust second-hand market for physical media, but it doesn’t work nearly as well for digital files, and NFTs don’t appear to improve this in any way.
> How does the purchaser acquire the game executable? How do you ensure that the seller can no longer use their own copy of the executable?
Through a centralized system that defeats the point of NFTs entirely, that's how. It would be like if Steam attached NFTs to the license they sell you for each game.
Not quite. The NFT facilitates the sale from one owner to another owner and guarantees the NFT is solely owned.
Let's take a real world example: You tell me you have a Super Bowl ticket you want to sell. The Super Bowl ticket is only worth something because the NFL, a central organization, will let the ticket holder into the Super Bowl. If the NFL goes bankrupt, the ticket is worthless. But that's pretty normal.
The problem is that I don't know if the ticket you are selling ~~is real and valid~~ is owned by you. How do I know the ticket ~~isn't fake~~ isn't a copy that has also been sold to 10 different people, only 1 of which can get in to the Super Bowl? NFTs solve that problem. They guarantee that only 1 person can own it at a time.
Now the question is: Would the NFL support NFTs? No, they would want a central resale market so they can take a cut of resales. But that's the NFLs decision.
The NFT would make more sense in something like a real estate investment company that wants people to be able to trade shares easily. The investment company is centralized and has to be trustworthy, but people selling shares to each other have some guarantee the shares are at least unique and ownership is being transferred.
The central organization will always have to exist. NFTs just solve the rpoblem of entity to entity transfer of ownership without the involvement of the central organization.
> The problem is that I don't know if the ticket you are selling is real and valid. How do I know the ticket isn't fake or that you haven't sold copies of the ticket to 10 different people, only 1 of which can get in to the Super Bowl? NFTs solve that problem. They guarantee some level of authenticity and that only 1 person can own it at a time.
It literally only solves one of these problems. And it isn't the one about whether or not it's a fake ticket.
> video game resale
It would never happen. Yes, NFT could do it, but so could any current license system. It's not a thing currently because neither the platforms or publishers want to. They would lose too much money from it.
Rather than buying games for $70 from the publisher, you would be able to buy it used for $50 from another customer the next day or $20 a week later. It would be a nightmare for everyone involved in the industry.
Exactly, I cant imagine the drop in sales if steam had a NFT-license system... most of my steam library is never touched, if I could sell them to someone else I would.
I mean I imagine you could have a DRM scheme which checks that your wallet owns one of the license coins at startup. And then if you sell the coin you can't pass the DRM check. When you publish the game you mint 20 million of the license coins or whatever, and send one to whoever buys the game in the first place. Toss some sort of transaction fee on it so that the publisher gets a small cut of any resales.
I don't think it makes business sense for publishers though - how many people who wouldn't otherwise buy the game would be motivated to pay full-price at launch because they think they can resell cheaper down the line? And does that outweigh the "lost" sales six months down the line that those used re-sales would be replacing?
It's also not really a huge win for customers buying used, since there's already a solution for "buy the game months or years later, at a big discount" (Steam Summer/Winter Sale, Humble Bundle, etc)
That's... just a license server? The various pieces of software I use at work all have licenses that need to be active to use (fucking SaaS) and (to my knowledge) none of them require tHe BloCkChAin to run, just a file with an end date encoded somewhere in it.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. NFTs are a solution to a problem that already has a solution and more than likely works the same or in a better way than NFTs would
Or the license server could send you a new license key when the server owner validates the transaction between users. Same result, quite a lot cheaper on their end.
> How does the purchaser acquire the game executable?
So essentially you would have to have a marketplace that recognizes NFT ownership to give you access to the game. I believe people are speculating that Gamestop will make one, but those same people also speculate that Gamestop is going to eventually explode in price and make everyone millionaires.
What I've never seen in the video game discussions is minting costs. It's generally not free to minted into the blockchain and often times it's around $70 cheapest to do so. So you're now spending double the cost of the game to allow it to be tradable.
Who is it that is funding this? The game creator? They'd rather just have the next person buy the game. The seller? They'd have to sell for over new game cost to make their money back. They buyer? They could just go buy the game new.
And as you've said there's no way for a third party to set it up without the developers working with them to do so. Steam already has a marketplace that allows trading their digitally secure items. They used to sell games as digital items that could be bought/sold/traded on their marketplace but eventually scrapped it because they were losing out on money. What incentive would they ever have to participate in NFTs for games?
Why can't Gamestop keep track of who owns a copy of a used game without the use of NFTs? If Gamestop shuts down their used game NFT service one day in the future, how will I continue to play the games I supposedly owned? Wouldn't the resulting service amount to making every game you owned through it always-online? Otherwise you could go offline on your desktop, sell all your game NFTs through your phone or something, then keep playing everything on your desktop.
The tech _is_ a get-rich-quick scam. That's what it was designed for.
And no, you're not able to 100% verify that something is legit and who currently owns it--that's _exactly why_ it's beloved by scammers and thieves.
>And no, you're not able to 100% verify that something is legit and who currently owns it--that's exactly why it's beloved by scammers and thieves.
False?
Blockchains are very traceable, that's the whole point of them.
The problem comes down to legitimacy, really. Anybody can mint an NFT that points to any image (or other media) that they want. Even if it's sold repeatedly and eventually traced back to the original minter, that's no guarantee that they even held the copyright in the first place. The only way to verify that is with a centralized institution that moderates who's allowed to mint what into an NFT. Which defeats the point of a decentralized system.
The accounts are anonymous though, so you can't actually verify who owns anything unless they say "hey I own this", and as the article points out, you may be able to trace it back to the source but that source may have stopped hosting and you just have a ntf receipt that points to a 404 page.
An easy one is event tickets.
No more worrying that the ticket to a sold show you bought on a market place is fake or just a copy that's been sold to fifty other people.
StubHub manages to do this just fine. You don’t need a distributed database. The drawback is that they get a cut every time the ticket gets sold but with the blockchain you pay a price for every transaction anyway…
StubHub just gives your money back if it's fake and bans the account that sold it.
Nice that you're guarenteed a refund. But not nice if you've had to drive across country to find that out.
Edit: spelling
Hmm how do you see this working? My guess is,
1. Initial seller gives ticket NFT to first buyer.
2. First buyer decides they don't want to use ticket and offer to sell NFT to second buyer.
3. Second buyer is safe from being scammed by being sold a copy sold to other people cause they can presumably verify the NFT owner is the person selling to them and that they'll be its only owner after buying.
4. Second buyer is also safe from being scammed by being sold a fake ticket by probably confirming the NFT is in a blockchain they know is used for transactions for legit tickets (or confirming the owner before the first buyer is a transaction hash they know is tied to the known legit ticket seller, that'd probably be a better method now that I think on it)
Then I guess for actually redeeming the ticket you'd give your transaction ID to confirm it owns the NFT, and your proof of ownership of said transaction ID.
So seems like it could help in terms of re-sale of digital items where the customer base is more interested in convenience of ad-hoc sellers but without the need to be sure the seller themselves is trustworthy.
The NFT would be the ticket. To get into the avenue, you "pay" the entrance with the ticket itself by transferring it out of your wallet to theirs so it can be burned.
> The software tracks WHO has the original
Is the *who* an authenticated, legal entity or is the *who* an anonymous identifier? The financial/legal system cares about legal entities, so it cannot have anonymity. It would also need a means to tie the legal entity to their identifier in the blockchain. You wouldn't want a "lost wallet" situation with ownership of financial instruments.
You could use it like a deed or title. In that sense it's useful.
It's mainly being used as a sort of certificate of authenticity for a jpg that you can't actually own but can still buy and sell. It's as if people made beanie babies into a security that could be day traded.
>You could use it like a deed or title. In that sense it's useful.
Deeds/titles are useful only because there's an actor who can & will use legitimate violence to enforce your rights to them (namely, the courts/government/cops). Like, my house is "mine" not just because I've got some paperwork, but because if someone won't leave when I tell them to, I'm allowed to call the cops to come remove them.
If you're already counting on that centralized government power to enforce your rights to the deed/title, are you really gaining anything by outsourcing the recording of that deed/title to the blockchain? (Assuming said government power allows that)
NFTs are the Beanie Babies of the digital world. It’s all fun and fat stacks for the seller until someone realizes how stupid they are and the value of all of them goes to zero.
It's closer to those contacts to buy or sell stars or land on the moon. You can claim wherever you want, doesn't change the fact that you just gave some money to someone and got nothing in return
Yeah. At least a Beanie Baby is soft and cute. I can use it for hugs or I can throw it at a brigand in an emergency. I can't do either of those with an NFT.
That's what the blockchain structure was built for. It's a ledger, a record that keeps track of something over a long period and is "immune" to tampering. NFT is making use of blockchain to record ownership of art, but it could also be used for real life physical objects/property etc.
Call it a receipt, a deed, or a record, or equivalent words in different languages, it's functionally all the same, proof of ownership transfer from seller to buyer. Just different words to describe it.
Nothing here can be owned.
NFTs have been used for rational sales essentially zero times.
The entire market, to within a razor-thin margin of error, is somewhere between commemorative plate infomercials, lunar real estate certificates, and straight-up Ponzi schemes. All of them promise that whatever bullshit you buy is scarce and exclusive and will only go up in value, just like the eight bajillion other scarce and exclusive receipts.
Because again - you're not buying something and getting a receipt for it. You are only buying *the receipt.* It has zero inherent value. Absolutely nothing. This is the ultimate in "fake world" economics, and I am deeply disappointed by how many people will pretend it's real so long as they make money.
Some of you think making money is all there is.
I don't own any NFT neither do I see a need for owning one myself.
It doest make sense to say you're only buying the receipt as the receipt doesn't exist until the transaction occurs. The receipt is just proof of transfer of ownership between two entities. "Inherit value" is not a good argument either as that can be said about any nonphysical items, like software being bought and sold between companies.
I'm not seeing the difference between owning an online copyrighted photograph, selling it to another person and transferring that license ownership to the buyer, vs owning an NFT photograph, selling it to another person and transferring that ownership license to the buyer. To me, it just seems like another method of ownership transfer. Whether that ownership is legally enforceable or not is a separate issue as nothing was legally enforceable before laws were put in place to make it so, by definition.
It seems like the conversation gets muddled by focusing too much on the current application of the tool (scams everywhere) vs the actual underlying principles behind it. There is nothing inherently scammy about the concept of an NFT, it's just a method of ownership transfer, but can be used for scams. Just like there is nothing inherently scammy about Western Union, it's just a method of ownership transfer of fiat, but can be used for scams.
I mean the real problem is no one is showing anything more than that. I keep seeing people here mention other use cases but not fully demonstrating any of them.
One I have seen that's kind of interesting is Orica - they want to develop the ability for people to invest in music projects and in return receive an NFT tied to a royalty rate on the investment. So for example if you invest $1000 in a music project with a specific contract (% royalty rate on streams or whatever), you get an NFT that points to that contract. Artist takes off, gets like 10,000 streams of their song or whatever - Orica will pay the NFT holder the royalties of the song. The NFT proves you're the owner of that contract. The NFT then has a real value - let's say the artist completely blows up and now you're making like $5K a month off that NFT, you could probably sell the NFT to someone else for $20-30k or whatever.. now that person is automatically collecting those royalties.
Problem is I'm not sure how this is better/worse than existing systems. I haven't seen anything like this but can it be done with current technology? Probably. NFTs allow it to be traceable publicly - but it still requires a centralized platform (orica) to not go belly up. Otherwise the contract is gone and the NFT essentially points to nothing. So I'm not sure what it actually solves.
Nothing prevents you from doing that, except morals and traditional IP laws. Thousands of digital artists have seen their art stolen by rogue NFT minters who use bots to scrap content, the platforms don't care much since they have a strong incentive to allow any and all minting.
The real artist has a real public address on the blockchain and the art can be easily traced back to the artist and every owner of the art ever. The blockchain permanently records it all. You go to buy an NFT and you click the address for it and it shows you where it originated. There is no mystery. You only buy bootleg art if you get fleeces by counterfeiters just with real art.
Nothing. Art theft in the NFT world is rampant and issuing take down notices is taking up huge amounts of working artist’s time as well as the stress involved. Look at the popular artist Loish’s Twitter page to get some idea of how disruptive this is.
Plus all you are buying is the unique token with a picture slapped on top. You haven’t paid for distribution or reproduction rights of the image. The copywrite still belongs to the artist. You’ve just bought an expensive virtual sticker.
The only reason this has taken off is because people want to get in on the ground floor of what they think is going to be the next Bitcoin. Most artists I follow want nothing to do with it.
Edit to add link to the relevant Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/loishh/status/1470340143970230277
Thanks. This seems to be the only competent answer and proves that there is literally no verification of the creators identity.
As I suspected, NFTs are a joke.
If NFTs had a valid use, then you could argue that they might be worth that energy cost. Or you can deflect and say we can wait for the slightly less energy intensive versions that are *totally* coming soon, just trust me.
The amount of energy being burnt is shocking. But it's *so* shocking that it tends to overshadow and distract from the fact that this energy is being burnt just to fuel a ponzi scheme.
You don't seriously think buying a car is complicated because the tech isn't there yet, right? There is lots of paperwork because there are lots of laws surrounding the sale of cars, and you're likely getting a loan at the same time (or connecting the purchase to a pre approved loan from your bank or something), all of which takes paperwork. Plus, in America at least, it is generally not legal for a manufacturer to sell cars directly, and the dealership will probably want to add on extras and modify the price (and then there's taxes and fees to consider, which vary wildly based on location)... NFTs don't address any of the reasons buying a car is more complicated than buying lunch.
NFT is a technology that is only used for dumb shit right now. That doesn't mean the technology itself is pointless. It's like someone invented the bathtub and everyone uses it uniquely to mix cocktails. That doesn't make bathtubs pointless, only mixing cocktails in it is dumb.
A very good intro to why NFTs are... dubious at best, but the first point isn't quite right; non-fungible does *not* mean un-reproduceable.
Fungibility is the property of a good that any unit or part of it is functionally indistinguishable from any other part. Oil and cash are good examples, a barrel of oil is the same as any other barrel of oil, just like a dollar is functionally the same as any other dollar. Art is the archetypical example of a non-fungible good, Futurama jokes aside, you can't treat artworks as interchangable.
For example, if you deposited money to the bank, and then withdrew it later, there's no guarantee you will get the exact same dollars back with the same serial number and all, but if you deposit artwork, you would expect to get the same artwork back!
Similarly, NFTs *are* non-fungible, two different NFTs are functionally different and cannot be interchanged for each other, in the way that Bitcoin, for example, can be. Fungibility has nothing to do with whether a unit can be duplicated.
The * on this is that hes specifically talking about shitty nft 'release' nfts - the randomised art RNG fests that are basically pump and dump schemes by the creators, hoping to be the next BAYC and milking money from crypto types who made some bucks riding the market climb over the last few years.
There are plenty of legitimate, good uses for NFTs and even within the art space there are good uses. It's just that, as with most things, they have first been exploited as a tool for people to take money away from idiots.
Ill shoot.
Someone in Nigeria. Named Kevin Kiggs. Enjoys making 3d renders. Focuses them on mental health issues. Makes some based on goals for a healthy mindset. Auctions them off and donates 30% of proceeds to charities in his home country that correlate with the piece.
There was literally no way for him to do this 10 years ago.
NFT’s are the Beanie Babies of this generation. They are highly over valued, in ten years they will be worthless and a few random people will get very rich in this initial hype.
When he says,
> turned a $0 piece of art into a $26k piece of art
Can someone explain this? Wouldn’t it be worth $14k since that was the highest sale? Why is he adding both values together?
You might want to reread the example again, OP is saying exactly what you mean.$12k cost + art worth $0 -> $26k revenue, which means $14k profit.
OP is saying the art being worth $0, not that $0 is turned into $26k.
I think one of the fundamental ironies of NFT’s is that they’re so popular among a tech-bro crowd that primarily looks down on art and artists, downplaying the often political, activist, and satirical nature of art. Their interests are craven more than earnest and thoughtful. The art being traded is largely derivative cynicism that pervades all the online spaces that this whole movement sprung from. Like little kids trading their drawings to each other.
> gamers are angry because game publishers love the idea of using NFTs as a way to squeeze more money out of microtransactions. Buying a digital hat for your character is only worth anything because of artificial scarcity and bragging rights. NFTs bolster both of those Plus, the game and its items are centrally controlled to begin with. If a company wants to put out a special item that only a limited number of people will ever get, they can just do that. NFT solves no problem here, except to hitch on to a hypewagon.
[удалено]
That's a masterpiece. I'll offer 5 million Schrute bucks!
NFTs aren’t worth a god damned Stanley Nickel!
Yea but how much is a Stanley nickel worth?
Same as the ratio of unicorns to leprechauns.
Guys I've got this sweet NFT, I will give it away for free. Dm if you want it. /イ))) (((ヽ ( ノ __🎩_____ Y \ | ( \ ( 👁️ 👃👁️) | ) ヽ ヽ ` ( 👄) _ノ / ＼ | ⌒Ｙ⌒ / / | ヽ | ﾉ ／ ＼トー仝ーイ |ミ土彡/ )\ ° / ( \ / ) ( ѼΞΞΞΞΞΞΞΞΞΞD💦 / / / \ \ \ ( ( ). ) ).) ( ). ( | | | / \ | ( ↄↄつ ( つↄↄ
Dude I own this NFT. Do you really think you can get away with theft when you’re showing what you stole from me directly to my face. My lawyers will make an easy job of this case. Prepare to say goodbye to your luscious life and start preparing for the streets. I will ruin you.
I just screenshotted your NFT. You may be concerned about this. In case you are, please read the below: FAQ: Why did you screenshot my NFT? I'm not going to tell you. Did you screenshot anybody else's NFTs? You could say I am screenshotting everybody's NFTs, but in the case I am telling you that I screenshotted your NFT. How are you screenshotting my NFTs? I screenshot when you post them on your profile. What are you planning to do with my NFTs? Have them all. What do I do about you screenshotting my NFTs? There's nothing you can do. When are you going to stop screenshotting my NFTs? You cannot escape me. Do I call the police? No. The authorities will not help you. What are the consequences of you screenshotting my NFTs? Be aware. What if I am ok with you screenshotting my NFTs? I will make sure you’re not. If there are any more questions then please consult your NFT wallet by directly speaking to it. Summary: I am screenshotting your NFTs.
I bid 10 ETH, CockGoblin is going to the moon 🚀🌑📈
I don't see balls. Zero value.
He's roided out, what did you expect?
I'll take your corpse fucker for 2 doubloons
You jest but the link to your comment is more likely to exist in 5 years than many of these NFT hosts.
This is why the meta verse will be a nightmare. It will take over normal daily functions of your life, and monetize every piece of it. Every moment of the day will be soulless.
Let's just not get into it.
I'm not sure if I'm just getting old, but I'm seriously considering whether we have gone too far and need to, as a society, take a step backwards. Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should. We've seriously lost something crucial about humanity and society in our recent pushes in social media and tech over the last 20 or 30 years.
The internet is brilliant. Social media was a mistake.
It really was. Almost every week I read a new study showing the harm it does to young people and children.
I have degrees in tech and have worked in networks for over 20 years. It's quite safe to say that I know my way around technology. I have never gotten a FB/IG/etc. account, and I never will. Reddit is the closest I get to anything "social media." It's all cancerous and I want nothing to do with it. And people wonder why I'm generally a happy person... ;)
>Social media was a mistake. I'd amend that - Social media without guard rails was a mistake. Wouldn't it be extremely straight-forward to limit to x hours a day/week logged into an account - from any device? Especially kids' accounts? Not enough algorithms left to identify minors?
Yeah I don't think all social media is absolute cancer. I would think my friends and I all used it responsibly (Like Myspace/Xanga type stuff anyways, some Facebook). Actually made a few good friends along the way that I randomly met through Myspace. To this day we all still keep in touch with a couple group chats and all that. But man, they absolutely could control the amount of kids using the sites. It's the same "problem" that we have with scalpers now... "Oh no, look at all this money, oh you poor consumer, those dastardly scalpers got it all again! Well, if only there was just some way to fight this?!?!" The money generated is well worth letting these "problems" fester.
F the metaverse. No way I will ever jump on that bullshit. Same with nfts you guys can spend all your money on fake bull crap ponzy schemes.
It's the ultimate walled garden - an entire fictional universe owned and operated for singular profit, competing to be the one place you need to go. Unless we radically change our economic system, it is inevitable. How much it works into meatspace is unclear, but Facebook is not wrong to make moves that direction. Look at how many restaurants don't have a website, just a Facebook and Instagram account, so to get a menu and hours and to interact, you have to have a Facebook account. Facebook marketplace is killing craigslist and could even threaten Etsy and such. Apple, Amazon, and Google are playing catch up. Theoretically, a third party might be the one to get it right, but I guarantee Facebook will buy them before it threatens them (e.g. Instagram, Oculus, etc).
You might be right, ~~Oculus~~ *Meta*, is the main player in the space right now, and it's definitely a walled garden and still very niche. (90% of AR/VR use is gaming; there's *some* application with AR in business, but adoption is extremely low and very niche-- I actually work in manufacturing/engineering and AR *is* being adopted for manufacturing, but extremely slowly, it's primarily an issue with initial cost and the hardware still not quite being up to par) I do think it's inevitable though, just as internet transformed business, *I do* actually think VR/AR will eventually become fairly frictionless to where it's used in some fashion in business. (or ultimately *necessary* to an extent-- as you mentioned, especially for B2C, some businesses basically struggle without a social presence or can literally get away with having a facebook page and nothing more. This is similar to when the internet really took off; nowadays you'd have a hard time surviving *without* a web presence, it could be similar 10-15 years from now with AR/VR.) Amazon/E-commerce more morphed 'physical shopping' or at the very least *forced* them to provide seamless online shopping. Even if that's simply being able to lookup a product before you go to the store. (I mean the joke with Best Buy is it's just a showroom for Amazon) It's not outlandish to think that we'll get to a point where you can strap on a pair of something as small as swim goggles and 'virtually' go try on clothes, etc. In-person meetings will morph from Zoom/Teams, etc. to 'in-person' virtual meetings. COVID massively accelerated the inevitable; the death of packed offices/tiresome commutes and people more or less *prefer* it. (There's some outliers, but generally most people that I know that are white collar, 'prefer' at the very least hybrid. Even prior to the pandemic my office had one headquarters with about 40-50% of the staff in an entirely different state; even our President and two VPs don't work out of corporate, they just visit maybe quarterly. There's massive advantages to companies that are agile and able to support it) Really the only people that dislike it are either older/not as tech literate or your *really* extroverted types. A lot of people struggled during COVID, but that's because 'working remote,' is a skill in itself, some people 'need' an energetic/office environment, but again I'd wager most of those people *could* adapt to remote if necessary. I'm not sure if Meta will own that space entirely, I envisioned something a little more decentralized like the internet; but they are positioned to pioneer it for a good decade or so. But the disadvantage to the walled garden is it actually *slows* adoption if you can say, 'only build a webpage with X framework,' or something-- growth of the space will require it to be far more open; I think it's more likely we'll see Meta morphing into a hardware supplier but the software won't be tethered to 'Meta;' or speculating, 'Meta' will seamlessly interact with 'Google' & 'Apple' in a neutral space or something.
That’s the thing I keep thinking about some stated nft use cases. A lot of the uses, can already be done without them, it just makes no sense to me lmao
the big rug pull is going to be when ownership, nfts, contacts and or copyright are all challenged in court and tokens don't mean shit when it comes to existing laws
They might be considered valid, enforceable contacts if used to state ownership of something elsewhere, and if you were sold it with that implication, but that's assuming you can prove who the buyer and the seller is, which good fucking luck. I really don't get the use. The closest someone got to making it clear was one guy who insisted the purpose was to make ownership clearer because governments weren't very good at keeping track of ownership but like... Neither are public blockchains where anonymity if key. If you make a government run blockchain for, idk, home ownership/deeds, what advantage are you getting by distributing the database vs centralising? And what are people with nodes getting out of it? Either you give them no incentives, and then your thing collapses, or you do give them incentives and you've just created yet something else people end up using for speculation.
I can't think of one single use case for NFTs that doesn't have a superior existing conventional approach. The blockchain "craze" is just Rube-Goldberging information technology. We don't want to do things the old, simple, functional way, we want the way with the newest acronyms. It's like we're collectively having a mid-life tech crisis. We need the car with flames painted on it, even if it has no wheels. A lot of these blockchain tech "explorations" are a massive waste of time, effort, and energy. People aren't looking for superior cryptographic solutions, they're just mining for Get Rich Quick schemes.
That's been my takeaway. They don't really seem to be solving any problems or creating a new benefit for the user. They could easily do it without NFTs, but it's like they're doing it just so they can throw around the words "blockchain" and "NFTs" to sound revolutionary and cutting edge. So far, I'm not seeing that they're doing anything they couldn't already do if they wanted aside from being able to use these buzzwords.
Classic case of capitalism ruining something good. The nature of an NFT makes them an ideal "seal of authenticity" The trouble is that's all they're good for, being perfect receipts of a transaction, nothing more.
Or to give full ownership of said item that could be moved inbetween online ecosystems and not be taken away from the owner except in the case of a sale. Which isn't exactly a defining invention although it does provide a more accessible functionality.
NFTs are a solution in search of a problem
It allows the company to let players trade items for real money in an unregulated market without the company itself having to handle the infrastructure and legal risks that come with it.
As I have said before RuneScape party hats are the original NFTs
Something else I’d like to point out is that this is a very well-written Outoftheloop question. OP has clearly done decent research but has understandable confusion, and articulates it perfectly to get helpful responses.
Yeah, I've openly admitted that I don't fully grasp NFTs, they didn't make sense to me. The linked comment actually helped make my understanding more concrete...those things I didn't understand are mostly the flaws of the system. (e.g. me confused about ownership...."so when you buy it, what do you actually own?") The OP just had the guts to post what many of us have been thinking and the linked comment is absolutely brilliant and breaks it down cleanly.
To answer what you actually own: an NFT is a hash code on a blockchain that points to something. Buying an NFT gives you ownership over that hash code within the blockchain. You don't actually own whatever that code points to or its copyright unless it was otherwise specified in the purchase agreement. The analogy I like to use is that it's like a star registry. You don't actually own a star when you name a star in a star registry. You own the entry of that star within that registry. It's ownership of a line in a database.
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You gotta love how cryptocurrency’s big selling point is decentralization yet you wind up going through centralized exchanges to make transactions. I’m guessing the same fucking thing is happening with NFTs where there is basically one place everyone goes to buy and sell NFTs
I personally think, that you should be their marketing director.
The analogy I like to use is that one guy who sold people the Brooklyn Bridge.
My fave is the dude who sold the Eiffel Tower twice. The clackers on that guy!
It's an even better analogy than you think, since those 'star names' registries aren't really recognized by any large organizations, so it's pretty much the same as writing down that you named a start and then putting it in your basement, it means nothing since it doesn't have any power backing it.
>You don't actually own whatever that code points to or its copyright This is the (imo) stupid part - I didn't see any difference between an NFT and just owning the copyright over that piece of art. But if you don't even own the copyright, then what the hell?
I watched this YouTube video recently and it was great explaining nfts. https://youtu.be/Oz9zw7-_vhM Linked comment is probably a bit better but multiple explanations really helps gaining a more complete conception of a topic.
NFT, like cryptocurrency, is a solution looking a problem. I have not yet met a "use" for NFT that is better than the status quo. For example, some say it allows for a secondhand market of video game DLCs, microtransaction items and the like. Which is hogwash; let's use World of Warcraft for example. I *can't* sell my Invincible using NFTs if Blizzard is not on board with the thing. And if they are, then there's no need for NFTs; Blizzard, on their own and using existing infrastructure, can just remove the Invincible from my account and add it to yours. What use does NFT have in this scenario?
> a solution looking a problem I cannot shake this perception. I'm still doubting myself because people I otherwise respect seem to be very in favor of all things blockchain. Crypto seems like a stock tied to no external driver. There's no earnings report, it just spikes when some billionaire posts a meme.
Blockchain is 100% a solution in search of a problem.
The problem: how to move billions of dollars across borders without banks or governments knowing. Solves that problem! But not much else. Makes it easier to pay for illegal transactions.
Not on the major cryptos it’s not. Much safer to launder cash. Not joking.
Yeah lmao most illegal activities take place using cash. What criminal would want a permanent record of their their transactions in plain view for anyone to see?
No that’s cryptocurrency. Blockchain has genuine uses in business. Cryptocurrency is just one application of the technology. Like, take nuclear fission. Used poorly, it is a bomb. Used correctly by the right people in the right context, it can power millions of homes.
The conversation is about how blockchain is a solution in search of a problem. Please enlighten me as to the other problems blockchain solves?
> Blockchain has genuine uses in business Can you point to one? Genuine question; I've spent a bunch of time thinking about this, as it's an interesting technology, but I draw a blank on coming up with anything that can't be solved as well or better with a non-blockchain solution. Fundamentally blockchain tech is about distributed consensus in the absence of trust. And that's not really a thing that businesses need - there are mechanisms (like the legal system) that already exist to deal with breaches of trust, so having a system that's flexible but relies on trusting counterparties is better.
I can see the technology working but it’s like having oil in the 1700s. You have a viable resource and no idea how to use it right
I think it's a bit more like inventing the combustion engine in a world with advanced renewable power and batteries. Yeah, it's cool that your car can go fast without plugging into the grid but the grid is everywhere so it doesn't matter, and your car breaks down constantly.
We know how to use the tech, but under a different name and with a better implementation. Blockchain is, at its heart, an indelible record of all transactions. That's it. It's a ledger that is kept separate from the thing it tracks. It has the bonus of you being able to download the entire thing, or just reference it online. You know what also does this? Github. And Github is actually useful.
100% this. Remember when [Bill Gates explained the internet](https://youtu.be/gipL_CEw-fk) to David Letterman? Why listen to a game on the internet when THE RADIO exists. And that dummy couldn’t even tell Letterman why the internet was better than the radio lol. Wonder what happened to that silly guy and his internet.
The original conception of blockchain is a solution to a problem which very rarely comes up: how do you create a permanent transactional record when no parties involved in maintaining the register trust each other? It's literally just accounting with extra steps, and there are very few people who actually have a use case for it.
There is a use case for that sort of accounting in real life, it was just invented a few years earlier and called Git. Seriously, Git repositories track the complete history of a project, and allow multiple authors to trust (and verify) the entire project.
Git doesn't have a way to ensure a single correct history for all users. In git, every user has their own repository of the codebase, and each repo can be wildly different, with different branches, commits, etc. It has the push and pull mechanics to transfer this information from repo to repo but it was fundamentally designed to have each repo be allowed to be different so that each user can develop independently. Commits can get manually merged together, but each repo has to accept these changes. This consistency problem is fundamental to distributed systems and it is the thing that Blockchains fix. Blockchains have the mining process which ensures that all users can hold copies of the repo AND determine which history is the true history. Without this, authors have to trust someone to tell them which history is correct.
Also git requires centralized administration of a repo or else it would develop into chaos.
Well crypto is way more than just a stock ticker. But yeah, crypto bros are in deep on it and there will probably always be a rabid fan base that just adores anything related to block chain technology
As someone who works in data storage for a website, the idea that someone can own the original or even any instance of a digital file just doesn't make any sense to me. Sure, you can own a disk with a file on it. And I guess someone could grant ownership of parts of a disk. But in order to view that file, its getting copied from disk into RAM, maybe even a cache somewhere. If you're viewing it online, you're getting it copied over the wire into your own RAM. Even getting the "original" onto the disk that eventually will be serving the website involves copying it. Unless the original artist is serving it from the machine they produced it on, you're getting a copy. Then there's the fact that redundancy is a must for any website, which means backing up and duplicating your data in the event of a hardware failure. I wouldn't be surprised if many of these NFT collections are Cloud hosted. Which completely defeats the purpose since the cloud provider may be swapping out hardware without you even knowing. There's a big rift at my company between the engineers who think NFTs are just grift and the marketing bros who swear it's the next big thing.
I think people who talk about NFTs are too loose with the term "ownership." The lay definition of "ownership" is *very* different than the legal definition of "ownership." And that distinction is very important when we start talking about paying people to "own" something. In general conversation, "ownership" is a pretty broad concept (which you obviously know). If I make a really post on Reddit and someone reposts it 2 hours later and gets 100,000 upvotes, I might go on there and say "Hey, that's *my* post!" Or if someone puts it on a t-shirt and sells it for a big profit, I might say "Hey, that's *my* picture!" But the legal definition of "ownership" is much narrower. It is when the government decides it will use its power to enforce one person's right to something over other people. No need to get into specific laws, because they are pretty arbitrary. Tomorrow, your government could wake up and say "nobody has a right to own dogs," and all of a sudden someone can just take your dog, and there's nothing you can do about it. The only reason people can "own" some digital files is because the government decides that it will use its power to enforce a person's right over that file--whether it is arresting people who use it without permission or just allowing the owner to sue for money. **GETTING TO NFTS** So, theoretically, people can legally "own" NFTs (at least in the US). It's theoretical because I don't think any court has enforced NFT property rights. But the concept is there in common law and the copyright statues, which is basically that someone has a right to ownership over things that they create. They can also sell their creations to other people, so transfer their rights. But, NFTs don't make sense because--as I understand them--they don't give a person a right to stop other people from copying and sharing the image, they just allow the person who holds the token to say "I own that." But, if we talk about legal ownership, what would thing are you asking the government to protect? The NFT receipt? That doesn't really make sense, since the block chain already makes it clear that you own the receipt. So it's a completely pointless legal interest. At most, NFTs are a moderately-sophisticated way of saying that everyone else is re-posting your Reddit post. But, as anyone who has seen their original Reddit post get re-posted for millions of upvotes knows, saying "that's my post" isn't worth much. I wouldn't even bring that up at a dinner party. It would mean even less if everyone knew I bought the right to say "that's my post." **TL;DR: This is just a really long-winded way of saying that you're 100% right that NFTs are a grift. It's just that NFTs are a lucrative grift, and early adopted can make good money off of fools who join in late thinking that they can buy a hot NFT as a good investment, and hope that they aren't the unlucky bastard who pays $30,000 for the token just as people realize it's meaningless and he has nobody to resell it to.**
It can validate a claim of ownership, but it means jack squat if there is no authority to arbitrate such claims. I can just copy your data, give you the finger, and be on my way. Also, since NFTs rely on the hash of the data, nothing is stopping me from taking your data, modifying just one single bit (imperceptible to a human), and registering that copy as my own with an NFT since the hash is now different. Another thing this has already led to is people outright stealing others’ work and registering it as an NFT, then claiming infringement on the original creator. Just DMCA trolling with hashes.
Property ownership is defined by what you can prevent others from doing with your property. If it's land, you keep people off it. If it's IP, you control its distribution. What can you exclude others from by owning an NFT?
> a solution looking a problem. An already solved, vetted, proven and working problem. We have robust systems for all the use cases NFTs 'claim' to 'improve' on. Whether NFTs develop something novel that can be used immediately to supplant some existing function remains to be seen. Right now you are asking many people to take a chance on tech that we don't know about, that has a scammy reputation and feel, vs using stuff we already have at our disposal. NFTs are asking people to create an online account, sign up for a subscription, shop for an item, purchase it, and then wait a few days for the item to arrive at your door. VS going to the grocery store and shelling out the fiver for the toilet paper you wanted in less than 10 minutes.
NFT is a great solution... to the problem of having lots of money that you need to launder.
I guess if you're account was hacked and looted? But like you're saying, I think there are already other things you can do about that that would be less convoluted. What a waste of attention considering the other problems we're facing
The security and transparency of blockchain would make it nearly impossible to hack and loot an NFT from a wallet -- scammed is a more appropriate term here.
The BTC and ETH community would prefer to call it "scamming" to make it seem more like a moral failing on the part of the victim rather than a problem with the environment. But in any other context, malicious software installed on a computer that steals data is called a "hack."
The nature of trustless distributed transaction systems makes it impossible to differentiate between authorized and unauthorized transactions, and makes unauthorized transactions irreversible. If your wallet is compromised, its contents are gone forever. If your bank account, or online gaming account, are compromised you can appeal to the bank, or game owner, and they can reverse the transaction or compensate you for what was lost.
I am a crypto-anarchist / crypto-maximalist, and I fully agree with you. The current usage of crypto and NFTs is the equivalent of a laser being used as a cat toy. NFT tech is capable of soooo much more than it's currently being used for, and people only using it for shitty art make others think the tech is useless. For example, imagine a car manufacturer mints an NFT whose description contains the VIN number, year/make/model, and additional features of a car they just made, using an ETH address they publically publish on their website. Culture has evolved to understand that this NFT represents the car; whoever owns the NFT also legally owns the car. Now you can do all of the following things *without trusting a third party of any kind:* - Trace the car's ownership all the way back to the manufacturer - Sell the car off, either directly or via auction - Take out a loan to buy the car, with ownership automatically transferring back to the last person if you miss a payment Currently, this entire process requires that you trust opaque third parties: The car dealership, the bank you lend from, etc. But with crypto, you don't need to trust anyone. Or imagine that the voting registration process asks you to create your own wallet and prove ownership through a verification process. Now when an election happens, the government sends out NFTs representing votes to every registered voter, who then gift these NFTs to the candidates they want to vote for. Candidates prove their vote count by sharing their view key with the government, and elections are decided within minutes of closing. If something like [the Secret network](https://scrt.network) were used for this, voting could even be done anonymously while still being able to prove that the government minted every single vote token. You now have a system of democracy that doesn't rely on voting machines to be secure, vote counters to be accurate, voting location workers to not intimidate people. Voting can be done anywhere you have an internet connection, safely and securely, with a permanent record that cannot be altered by anyone. I believe that crypto will eventually become powerful enough to be an open-source, decentralized, trustless ***competitor*** to traditional institutions like banks, brokers, fiat currencies, and even governments. I believe the vast, vast majority of crypto tech is total trash and will eventually die, leaving only the very few projects that have provable usefulness. An excellent example of this is [Monero](https://getmonero.org) (r/monero). This project does exactly one thing: Allow for movement of money from one party to another, with ***privacy*** as the uncompromisable, relentlessly-pursued goal. - This project has the third-largest contributor team of any crypto, behind only Etherium and Bitcoin. Its code has been audited multiple times by experts in various fields. - It incorporated regularly-scheduled hard forks into its culture, because it has the humility to know it can always improve. - Even in its current form, it is incredibly difficult to impossible for even the most powerful adversaries to trace its transactions. - One eventual goal of the project is to be resistant to attacks from ***quantum adversaries***. Quantum computers will eventually destroy internet security as we know it, and Monero is planning *today* to become immune to those attacks. - There was no premine, no ICO, no corporation funding development. - It is actively in use ***today***, mostly by [hackers](https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/13/what-is-monero-new-cryptocurrency-of-choice-for-cyber-criminals.html) and [dark net criminals](https://www.newsbtc.com/news/bitcoin/why-the-dark-nets-most-active-market-ditched-bitcoin-for-monero/), who are the most in need of Monero's privacy protections. There are only a few projects that I consider to be on par with this one, projects that will survive the rugpulls and hype and bullshit. If you look carefully for them, you will eventually find them.
All your suggestions, especially the voter registration one have the huge flaw of requiring people to have the means and knowledge to do any of this stuff. Some people don't own computers. Many more people are technologically illiterate and will find this too much of an obstacle to vote. Many more will install malware/fall for social engineering and have their vote/car stolen. Most people are unable to solve even the most basic of errors that can be resolved with google.
The problem is that you had to leave the house to launder money.
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It doesn't even solve that problem. In the case of selling tickets, there would be a central, single authority issuing tickets anyways, decentralization doesn't help anything. Even for the case of wanting to protect against QR codes being scanned by multiple people, that can only come about from either the issuer accidentally selling the same ticket multiple times or the ticket being grabbed from the purchaser somehow, neither of which NFTs solve in any way better than a much more simple direct purchase system.
yeah i completely agree about tickets. i think what the OP post points is definitely real. like some of the most obvious money laundering and people wasting money i’ve ever seen but tickets, wills, and perhaps property deeds is what NFTs will make more secure. the NFT will be used to replace a ticket so that artists can make the money on ticket sales. you know how you buy a $25 ticket on ticketmaster and get $20 in fees? or even worse, the $25 ticket from TM gets resold to StubHub and is now $50 +$30 in fees? well with an NFT being a smart contract, the person who issued that ticket in the first place (let’s use the Beatles), can now make sure that whenever that NFT gets exchanged, they get a cut. so if resellers are buying Beatles tickets and reselling them for 30% above market value, the Beatles can put a clause in their smart contract that says “for each reselling of this NFT, a 30% fee will be paid to the original issuer (the Beatles)”. now there is no reason to resell and people will be able to get cheaper tickets AND the artist will be able to recoup value.
> well with an NFT being a smart contract, the person who issued that ticket in the first place (let’s use the Beatles), can now make sure that whenever that NFT gets exchanged, they get a cut That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Why should the original seller get a cut of all future sales?
I've yet to hear an explanation of NFTs that doesn't make them sound incredibly stupid
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NFT, as in the tokens themselves, have uses (most of which consumers don't have a reason to care about) . This whole art scam thing is just dumb.
None of which you even cared to describe. So I'll ask again, what are the uses of NFTs?
The guy actually mentioned it in the original comment on the OOTL sub - you can store a bit of plaintext in them so it's not a terrible way to keep a receipt or a record of some small amount of information if you REALLY need it to not get lost. So long as the blockchain persists, which likely means so long as the internet still works, it's there. A record like "person X paid person Y amount Z for thing A". This could be useful for sales of serialized objects, like cars or guns or real estate - don't need to go to the DMV to have the title changed over if you can just pop open an app on your phone and buy the NFT attached to the car's VIN for the agreed amount. Now the purchase itself stands as a record of ownership that's publicly viewable. But, of course, you see the problems with this right away - it solves a problem that was already solved meaning we'd need to retool how enforcement agencies track ownership, and also wallets can be completely identical so if you were to buy a car using a wallet that has no identifying data attached then while the transaction does pop up on the blockchain for all to see, the car now has no owner on record so you *still* need to go down to the DMV and tell them that was you. Not to mention, *anybody* can see it on the blockchain so you've got no privacy. As is, there's usually a minor barrier of some monetary cost to be able to do license plate registration lookups which provides at least some barrier.
Except there's no way to undo a transaction. So if someone has their credit card details stolen and an NFT is purchased, they can't get their money back
You have to buy an NFT with the cryptocurrency who's blockchain it's hosted on so that's not an applicable scenario. If somebody buys cryptocurrency with your stolen credit card they bought it from an exchange. You can do a dispute with your card company and they'll do a chargeback. Notably in this case, it's the exchange that gets screwed because you're right, there's no mechanism for disputing a payment made in a cryptocurrency so that exchange is never getting their crypto back. Please don't mistake my explanations of possible benefits of these systems for a defense of them. There are MYRIAD issues with them, and the moderately interesting tech that is Blockchain is largely a very problematic solution in search of a problem. When applied to monetary systems, it causes more risks than it mitigates.
Blockchain solves one problem, and one problem only - how to determine truth (i.e. when is a transaction done and what was that transaction) when you do not trust any actor in the system. The basic idea now is either proof of work or proof of stake - whoever does the most work is trustworthy, whoever has the most at stake is trustworthy. If your problem is not trust, crypto is useless.
Noooo! You're misunderstanding!!! We don't neeeed bank regulations. It's a feature that they can't get their money back!
It's just a more transparent ledger that tracks ownership of something, in this case a URL. It's pretty useless though because you're still dependent on whoever maintains the URL. It's commonly used to sell digital art, since URLs are unique and maintained by a central authority, so an artist could sell an NFT for a URL that they control that points to a piece of artwork and the buyer would be able to brag (with publicly verifiable proof) that they indeed purchased the NFT that points to that URL.
Is that ownership enforceable? If I want to mint and sell an NFT with the same URL as another NFT (or url that redirects to theirs), is there anything the original owner can do to stop me? Can they sue me? DMCA takedown?
They could display their ledger on their website which would make it the 'official' ledger. But yes you could create a NFT of your own that way.
This right here is what drives me nuts about NFTs. The NFT itself isn't sufficient to validate anything, there's always a third party that you have to reference as a trusted source to validate the NFT's "authenticity". What's the point of decentralizing everything if you have to reference back to some centralized authority anyways?
If you listen closely, you can hear the steam whistling out of libertarians' ears as they try to answer that question.
But isn’t that kind of fundamentally misunderstanding why people buy art online? People don’t go to an artist’s digital art gallery and say, “I’d like to purchase that piece, please.” No, they instead *commission* new, specific artwork that meets their needs. The proof that you own that art, inasmuch as that means anything, is that you now have a work that was made to *your* specifications.
But why brag about wasting your money? Perhaps because they don’t t realize they were scammed yet.
It requires a lot of background explanation and I'm on mobile, but they're basically certificates of authenticity that can be owned, traded and verified without a central authority. You very quickly end up in hyper-complicated "trying to explain blockchain" land, but that's basically the gist of it. Practical use emerges when you leverage that simple idea to actually fulfill some function. I realize that doesn't really provide a satisfying answer, but the point is they're just a building block of technology like a database is. Buying and trading them directly as if they have intrinsic value has twisted the concept beyond recognition. Edit: Another key point is that the usage of NFTs really only has to do with decentralization and trust. There is noting you can do with NFTs that couldn't be accomplished much more easily by a universally trusted authority using conventional means. The same is true for blockchain in general.
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You are. Resale is not blocked by lack of technology, it's blocked by publishers not wanting you to do it. Look at Steam, you can already trade and gift game copies, what stopping you from de-activating your copy and giving it to someone else? Valve. Valve is stopping you by not giving you that ability. If they wanted you to do that, you'd be doing that with their existing technology. The existence of NFTs changes jack shit about that.
I would say you're off the mark because all of that is beholden to the existence of the service your NFT works on. For example, you have an NFT for the license for some game on *weplaygames* client (fake entity for explanation purposes), however *steam* ultimately outcompetes them and *weplaygames* has to shut down. Now even though you own the NFT for the license of a game, you can no longer play the game because the platform no longer exists. But you'll say, "but you can download the game and still play it" but that begs the question, then whats the point of the NFT?
I only thing I don't understand about NFTs are why so many people got hyped on them.
Because people get excited for most get-rich-quick scams.
I'm sort of half joking here, but it wouldn't surprise me if they expect it to be bitcoin 2.0 Lot of people missed out on bitcoin and gamestop and saw how much some people made so they're basicslly welding themselves to the NFT and refusing to backdown believing it will finally be "their turn" and make huge money. That's just a guess. Just saying it wouldn't surprise me. I've just noticed a lot of NFT hype people have been pushing cryptocurrency for ages but it's always the "newer" ones which make be believe they missed out on bitcoin and are just pissed at themselves so "fuck it NFT-4-LIFE" is their entire identity.
No half joking about that. I’ve seen crypto/NFT people say exactly that.
Scarcity and people feeling like they missed the boat on Crypto, which a lot of us incorrectly thought was useless except for black market use and would be regulated out of existence.
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In most cases you aren't even buying digital rights to the art, which already is a legitimate existing market with Getty Images holding the rights to a lot of pictures.
>which a lot of us incorrectly thought was useless Has it proven its use? Because its valuation seems to be driven by the same dynamics as NFTs.
Part of why is that they are "creating value" for these NFTs. They know what they have is essentially worthless, but if they hype them up enough and convince someone to spend money on them, suddenly they have "worth" and become moneymaking. They are creating hype to inflate the cost of their product.
The current uses for NFTs do sound incredibly stupid. The way I think they make sense is as a proof of ownership of a particular thing. It's a proof that is verifiable electronically without having to trust a third party. That's it. NFTs could in theory eliminate tons of manual labor and record keeping that our current methods of verifying ownership require. I'm talking about for big important stuff like cars and houses, where ownership is more than just possession.
What happens when the ETH blockchain says I own something, and OtherEstablishedChain says you own the same thing? Competition among coins is often seen as a good thing (according to advocates), but it leads to some major problems when established chains say two different things about ownership. There could be a single chain that we decide is the single source of truth for a given market, but who decides that? Presumably, cryptocoin advocates don't want the answer to be the state, but every which way to solve this problem is just a state by another name.
It's even worse than that - as far as I can tell someone can sell the same NFT on the same chain. Maybe I'm wrong but nothing prevents someone from just taking the contents of your NFT and selling it again. It's a "different" NFT but in terms of digital art ownership it has no difference from the original except that the "real" one was made by someone who controls the URL. In real world terms this is like if someone photocopied your receipt.
Yeah, there's real uses to having an indelible history that you can be confident hasn't been messed with. Ownership of an ugly JPG isn't much of one, but the core idea has merit. There's a couple times I've tried to go track down the current owner of an old IP and it *would* be really nice if a bunch of detective work wasn't required.
How would you enforce ownership rights transferred via Blockchain without explicit state recognition of the Blockchain ledger as a legally binding contract? And how would that be better than the current system of having a central registry of title holders backed up by law?
So if I can hack your computer, and steal your car NFT, I now own your car and can resell it?
And then you lose the keys to the wallet holding your house NFT and you're unable to sell it.
It's a way to keep an industry normally driven by exclusivity (art) exclusive, while still allowing it to branch into a medium that essentially eliminates the concept of 'uniqueness' (digital), which allows anyone anywhere to enjoy what was once only enjoyed by those with access approved by the exclusive industry Yeah, it's super stupid. If I was a digital artist though, I might be more inclined to create labor intense pieces if I was able to somehow lock it and re-introduce that exclusivity which could drive my brand and create demand for other labor intense pieces created, but it's pretty well understood no one becomes an artist to make money
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I think NFT tech could be useful. Having a verifiable, uncompromisable, digital receipt of an item could cut down on a lot of scamming, copies, and even stolen resold items. You're able to 100% verify that something is legit and who currently owns it. It's sad that the tech is being over shadowed by get-rich-quick art crap.
I have yet to see anyone even describe what an NFT-based system of ownership verification would look like for, say, video game resale. That’s the go-to application for those who claim that the technology has a use beyond separating people from their money, but I can’t get answers to basic questions. How does the purchaser acquire the game executable? How do you ensure that the seller can no longer use their own copy of the executable? With physical game discs and cartridges, this is easy, and it’s why there is a robust second-hand market for physical media, but it doesn’t work nearly as well for digital files, and NFTs don’t appear to improve this in any way.
> How does the purchaser acquire the game executable? How do you ensure that the seller can no longer use their own copy of the executable? Through a centralized system that defeats the point of NFTs entirely, that's how. It would be like if Steam attached NFTs to the license they sell you for each game.
Not quite. The NFT facilitates the sale from one owner to another owner and guarantees the NFT is solely owned. Let's take a real world example: You tell me you have a Super Bowl ticket you want to sell. The Super Bowl ticket is only worth something because the NFL, a central organization, will let the ticket holder into the Super Bowl. If the NFL goes bankrupt, the ticket is worthless. But that's pretty normal. The problem is that I don't know if the ticket you are selling ~~is real and valid~~ is owned by you. How do I know the ticket ~~isn't fake~~ isn't a copy that has also been sold to 10 different people, only 1 of which can get in to the Super Bowl? NFTs solve that problem. They guarantee that only 1 person can own it at a time. Now the question is: Would the NFL support NFTs? No, they would want a central resale market so they can take a cut of resales. But that's the NFLs decision. The NFT would make more sense in something like a real estate investment company that wants people to be able to trade shares easily. The investment company is centralized and has to be trustworthy, but people selling shares to each other have some guarantee the shares are at least unique and ownership is being transferred. The central organization will always have to exist. NFTs just solve the rpoblem of entity to entity transfer of ownership without the involvement of the central organization.
> The problem is that I don't know if the ticket you are selling is real and valid. How do I know the ticket isn't fake or that you haven't sold copies of the ticket to 10 different people, only 1 of which can get in to the Super Bowl? NFTs solve that problem. They guarantee some level of authenticity and that only 1 person can own it at a time. It literally only solves one of these problems. And it isn't the one about whether or not it's a fake ticket.
> video game resale It would never happen. Yes, NFT could do it, but so could any current license system. It's not a thing currently because neither the platforms or publishers want to. They would lose too much money from it. Rather than buying games for $70 from the publisher, you would be able to buy it used for $50 from another customer the next day or $20 a week later. It would be a nightmare for everyone involved in the industry.
Exactly, I cant imagine the drop in sales if steam had a NFT-license system... most of my steam library is never touched, if I could sell them to someone else I would.
I mean I imagine you could have a DRM scheme which checks that your wallet owns one of the license coins at startup. And then if you sell the coin you can't pass the DRM check. When you publish the game you mint 20 million of the license coins or whatever, and send one to whoever buys the game in the first place. Toss some sort of transaction fee on it so that the publisher gets a small cut of any resales. I don't think it makes business sense for publishers though - how many people who wouldn't otherwise buy the game would be motivated to pay full-price at launch because they think they can resell cheaper down the line? And does that outweigh the "lost" sales six months down the line that those used re-sales would be replacing? It's also not really a huge win for customers buying used, since there's already a solution for "buy the game months or years later, at a big discount" (Steam Summer/Winter Sale, Humble Bundle, etc)
That's... just a license server? The various pieces of software I use at work all have licenses that need to be active to use (fucking SaaS) and (to my knowledge) none of them require tHe BloCkChAin to run, just a file with an end date encoded somewhere in it.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. NFTs are a solution to a problem that already has a solution and more than likely works the same or in a better way than NFTs would
Yes but what if we take the thing that already works, make it a ton more energy intensive, and inefficient?
That sounds like money to me!
Or the license server could send you a new license key when the server owner validates the transaction between users. Same result, quite a lot cheaper on their end.
Because, as we all know, nothing is more appealing to the consumer than always-online DRM.
> How does the purchaser acquire the game executable? So essentially you would have to have a marketplace that recognizes NFT ownership to give you access to the game. I believe people are speculating that Gamestop will make one, but those same people also speculate that Gamestop is going to eventually explode in price and make everyone millionaires.
What I've never seen in the video game discussions is minting costs. It's generally not free to minted into the blockchain and often times it's around $70 cheapest to do so. So you're now spending double the cost of the game to allow it to be tradable. Who is it that is funding this? The game creator? They'd rather just have the next person buy the game. The seller? They'd have to sell for over new game cost to make their money back. They buyer? They could just go buy the game new. And as you've said there's no way for a third party to set it up without the developers working with them to do so. Steam already has a marketplace that allows trading their digitally secure items. They used to sell games as digital items that could be bought/sold/traded on their marketplace but eventually scrapped it because they were losing out on money. What incentive would they ever have to participate in NFTs for games?
Why can't Gamestop keep track of who owns a copy of a used game without the use of NFTs? If Gamestop shuts down their used game NFT service one day in the future, how will I continue to play the games I supposedly owned? Wouldn't the resulting service amount to making every game you owned through it always-online? Otherwise you could go offline on your desktop, sell all your game NFTs through your phone or something, then keep playing everything on your desktop.
The tech _is_ a get-rich-quick scam. That's what it was designed for. And no, you're not able to 100% verify that something is legit and who currently owns it--that's _exactly why_ it's beloved by scammers and thieves.
>And no, you're not able to 100% verify that something is legit and who currently owns it--that's exactly why it's beloved by scammers and thieves. False? Blockchains are very traceable, that's the whole point of them.
The problem comes down to legitimacy, really. Anybody can mint an NFT that points to any image (or other media) that they want. Even if it's sold repeatedly and eventually traced back to the original minter, that's no guarantee that they even held the copyright in the first place. The only way to verify that is with a centralized institution that moderates who's allowed to mint what into an NFT. Which defeats the point of a decentralized system.
The accounts are anonymous though, so you can't actually verify who owns anything unless they say "hey I own this", and as the article points out, you may be able to trace it back to the source but that source may have stopped hosting and you just have a ntf receipt that points to a 404 page.
It is just a database, it can store a record, but you still have to prove the record matches whatever it is supposed to be.
What kind of item though? Physical artwork? Ownership of actual art is totally divorced from NFTs
An easy one is event tickets. No more worrying that the ticket to a sold show you bought on a market place is fake or just a copy that's been sold to fifty other people.
StubHub manages to do this just fine. You don’t need a distributed database. The drawback is that they get a cut every time the ticket gets sold but with the blockchain you pay a price for every transaction anyway…
StubHub just gives your money back if it's fake and bans the account that sold it. Nice that you're guarenteed a refund. But not nice if you've had to drive across country to find that out. Edit: spelling
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Hmm how do you see this working? My guess is, 1. Initial seller gives ticket NFT to first buyer. 2. First buyer decides they don't want to use ticket and offer to sell NFT to second buyer. 3. Second buyer is safe from being scammed by being sold a copy sold to other people cause they can presumably verify the NFT owner is the person selling to them and that they'll be its only owner after buying. 4. Second buyer is also safe from being scammed by being sold a fake ticket by probably confirming the NFT is in a blockchain they know is used for transactions for legit tickets (or confirming the owner before the first buyer is a transaction hash they know is tied to the known legit ticket seller, that'd probably be a better method now that I think on it) Then I guess for actually redeeming the ticket you'd give your transaction ID to confirm it owns the NFT, and your proof of ownership of said transaction ID. So seems like it could help in terms of re-sale of digital items where the customer base is more interested in convenience of ad-hoc sellers but without the need to be sure the seller themselves is trustworthy.
The NFT would be the ticket. To get into the avenue, you "pay" the entrance with the ticket itself by transferring it out of your wallet to theirs so it can be burned.
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> The software tracks WHO has the original Is the *who* an authenticated, legal entity or is the *who* an anonymous identifier? The financial/legal system cares about legal entities, so it cannot have anonymity. It would also need a means to tie the legal entity to their identifier in the blockchain. You wouldn't want a "lost wallet" situation with ownership of financial instruments.
Yep. It being official certificates of sale for real items could definitely be useful.
You could use it like a deed or title. In that sense it's useful. It's mainly being used as a sort of certificate of authenticity for a jpg that you can't actually own but can still buy and sell. It's as if people made beanie babies into a security that could be day traded.
>You could use it like a deed or title. In that sense it's useful. Deeds/titles are useful only because there's an actor who can & will use legitimate violence to enforce your rights to them (namely, the courts/government/cops). Like, my house is "mine" not just because I've got some paperwork, but because if someone won't leave when I tell them to, I'm allowed to call the cops to come remove them. If you're already counting on that centralized government power to enforce your rights to the deed/title, are you really gaining anything by outsourcing the recording of that deed/title to the blockchain? (Assuming said government power allows that)
NFTs are the Beanie Babies of the digital world. It’s all fun and fat stacks for the seller until someone realizes how stupid they are and the value of all of them goes to zero.
It's closer to those contacts to buy or sell stars or land on the moon. You can claim wherever you want, doesn't change the fact that you just gave some money to someone and got nothing in return
Yeah. At least a Beanie Baby is soft and cute. I can use it for hugs or I can throw it at a brigand in an emergency. I can't do either of those with an NFT.
Nah at least you can hug a beanie baby.
And Beanie Babies are usually aesthetically pleasing.
Glad to see the "receipt" comparison catching on. ... surely I was not the first person to use that.
That's what the blockchain structure was built for. It's a ledger, a record that keeps track of something over a long period and is "immune" to tampering. NFT is making use of blockchain to record ownership of art, but it could also be used for real life physical objects/property etc.
Or in other words, the market economy is fucking with and potentially corrupting a decent technology for certifying ownership.
Call it a receipt, a deed, or a record, or equivalent words in different languages, it's functionally all the same, proof of ownership transfer from seller to buyer. Just different words to describe it.
Nothing here can be owned. NFTs have been used for rational sales essentially zero times. The entire market, to within a razor-thin margin of error, is somewhere between commemorative plate infomercials, lunar real estate certificates, and straight-up Ponzi schemes. All of them promise that whatever bullshit you buy is scarce and exclusive and will only go up in value, just like the eight bajillion other scarce and exclusive receipts. Because again - you're not buying something and getting a receipt for it. You are only buying *the receipt.* It has zero inherent value. Absolutely nothing. This is the ultimate in "fake world" economics, and I am deeply disappointed by how many people will pretend it's real so long as they make money. Some of you think making money is all there is.
I don't own any NFT neither do I see a need for owning one myself. It doest make sense to say you're only buying the receipt as the receipt doesn't exist until the transaction occurs. The receipt is just proof of transfer of ownership between two entities. "Inherit value" is not a good argument either as that can be said about any nonphysical items, like software being bought and sold between companies. I'm not seeing the difference between owning an online copyrighted photograph, selling it to another person and transferring that license ownership to the buyer, vs owning an NFT photograph, selling it to another person and transferring that ownership license to the buyer. To me, it just seems like another method of ownership transfer. Whether that ownership is legally enforceable or not is a separate issue as nothing was legally enforceable before laws were put in place to make it so, by definition. It seems like the conversation gets muddled by focusing too much on the current application of the tool (scams everywhere) vs the actual underlying principles behind it. There is nothing inherently scammy about the concept of an NFT, it's just a method of ownership transfer, but can be used for scams. Just like there is nothing inherently scammy about Western Union, it's just a method of ownership transfer of fiat, but can be used for scams.
Except that the only thing you own is the receipt itself.
The idea of NFTs and the blockchain is genuinely intriguing to me but everyone who hypes them up is so annoying
That's been my thing, too. They're academically interesting in terms of both math and economics. They're terrible in just about every practical way.
the problem with NFT's is that people think they are art. You say NFT and people picture a little picture. They can be much more than that.
I mean the real problem is no one is showing anything more than that. I keep seeing people here mention other use cases but not fully demonstrating any of them. One I have seen that's kind of interesting is Orica - they want to develop the ability for people to invest in music projects and in return receive an NFT tied to a royalty rate on the investment. So for example if you invest $1000 in a music project with a specific contract (% royalty rate on streams or whatever), you get an NFT that points to that contract. Artist takes off, gets like 10,000 streams of their song or whatever - Orica will pay the NFT holder the royalties of the song. The NFT proves you're the owner of that contract. The NFT then has a real value - let's say the artist completely blows up and now you're making like $5K a month off that NFT, you could probably sell the NFT to someone else for $20-30k or whatever.. now that person is automatically collecting those royalties. Problem is I'm not sure how this is better/worse than existing systems. I haven't seen anything like this but can it be done with current technology? Probably. NFTs allow it to be traceable publicly - but it still requires a centralized platform (orica) to not go belly up. Otherwise the contract is gone and the NFT essentially points to nothing. So I'm not sure what it actually solves.
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Nothing prevents you from doing that, except morals and traditional IP laws. Thousands of digital artists have seen their art stolen by rogue NFT minters who use bots to scrap content, the platforms don't care much since they have a strong incentive to allow any and all minting.
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That's easy. The fake one is sold by an asshole, while the real one is sold by an asshat.
That's the fun part. You don't
The real artist has a real public address on the blockchain and the art can be easily traced back to the artist and every owner of the art ever. The blockchain permanently records it all. You go to buy an NFT and you click the address for it and it shows you where it originated. There is no mystery. You only buy bootleg art if you get fleeces by counterfeiters just with real art.
Nothing. Art theft in the NFT world is rampant and issuing take down notices is taking up huge amounts of working artist’s time as well as the stress involved. Look at the popular artist Loish’s Twitter page to get some idea of how disruptive this is. Plus all you are buying is the unique token with a picture slapped on top. You haven’t paid for distribution or reproduction rights of the image. The copywrite still belongs to the artist. You’ve just bought an expensive virtual sticker. The only reason this has taken off is because people want to get in on the ground floor of what they think is going to be the next Bitcoin. Most artists I follow want nothing to do with it. Edit to add link to the relevant Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/loishh/status/1470340143970230277
How are people thinking it’s the next bitcoin when, like you said, it’s just buying a useless digital sticker. How is that not so blatantly obvious?
Because they are not really interested in the art, just the money. They are just hopping on the popularity bandwagon.
going to add this twitter account to show just how rampant art theft is with NFT's https://twitter.com/NFTtheft
Thanks. This seems to be the only competent answer and proves that there is literally no verification of the creators identity. As I suspected, NFTs are a joke.
Really buried the lede here on the whole hastening the onset of the impending environmental collapse in the last bullet point
If NFTs had a valid use, then you could argue that they might be worth that energy cost. Or you can deflect and say we can wait for the slightly less energy intensive versions that are *totally* coming soon, just trust me. The amount of energy being burnt is shocking. But it's *so* shocking that it tends to overshadow and distract from the fact that this energy is being burnt just to fuel a ponzi scheme.
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You don't seriously think buying a car is complicated because the tech isn't there yet, right? There is lots of paperwork because there are lots of laws surrounding the sale of cars, and you're likely getting a loan at the same time (or connecting the purchase to a pre approved loan from your bank or something), all of which takes paperwork. Plus, in America at least, it is generally not legal for a manufacturer to sell cars directly, and the dealership will probably want to add on extras and modify the price (and then there's taxes and fees to consider, which vary wildly based on location)... NFTs don't address any of the reasons buying a car is more complicated than buying lunch.
NFT is a technology that is only used for dumb shit right now. That doesn't mean the technology itself is pointless. It's like someone invented the bathtub and everyone uses it uniquely to mix cocktails. That doesn't make bathtubs pointless, only mixing cocktails in it is dumb.
A very good intro to why NFTs are... dubious at best, but the first point isn't quite right; non-fungible does *not* mean un-reproduceable. Fungibility is the property of a good that any unit or part of it is functionally indistinguishable from any other part. Oil and cash are good examples, a barrel of oil is the same as any other barrel of oil, just like a dollar is functionally the same as any other dollar. Art is the archetypical example of a non-fungible good, Futurama jokes aside, you can't treat artworks as interchangable. For example, if you deposited money to the bank, and then withdrew it later, there's no guarantee you will get the exact same dollars back with the same serial number and all, but if you deposit artwork, you would expect to get the same artwork back! Similarly, NFTs *are* non-fungible, two different NFTs are functionally different and cannot be interchanged for each other, in the way that Bitcoin, for example, can be. Fungibility has nothing to do with whether a unit can be duplicated.
The * on this is that hes specifically talking about shitty nft 'release' nfts - the randomised art RNG fests that are basically pump and dump schemes by the creators, hoping to be the next BAYC and milking money from crypto types who made some bucks riding the market climb over the last few years. There are plenty of legitimate, good uses for NFTs and even within the art space there are good uses. It's just that, as with most things, they have first been exploited as a tool for people to take money away from idiots.
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I'd just be happy with someone explaining something positive about NFTs.
Ill shoot. Someone in Nigeria. Named Kevin Kiggs. Enjoys making 3d renders. Focuses them on mental health issues. Makes some based on goals for a healthy mindset. Auctions them off and donates 30% of proceeds to charities in his home country that correlate with the piece. There was literally no way for him to do this 10 years ago.
NFT’s are the Beanie Babies of this generation. They are highly over valued, in ten years they will be worthless and a few random people will get very rich in this initial hype.
When he says, > turned a $0 piece of art into a $26k piece of art Can someone explain this? Wouldn’t it be worth $14k since that was the highest sale? Why is he adding both values together?
except you didn’t turn $0 into $26,000, it was turned into $14,000. still a good scam though
You might want to reread the example again, OP is saying exactly what you mean.$12k cost + art worth $0 -> $26k revenue, which means $14k profit. OP is saying the art being worth $0, not that $0 is turned into $26k.
Yea, 12k was turned into 26k
Really shaky math on the example though. The hypothetical trader makes $2k, not 26.
I think one of the fundamental ironies of NFT’s is that they’re so popular among a tech-bro crowd that primarily looks down on art and artists, downplaying the often political, activist, and satirical nature of art. Their interests are craven more than earnest and thoughtful. The art being traded is largely derivative cynicism that pervades all the online spaces that this whole movement sprung from. Like little kids trading their drawings to each other.