Live data from Hacker News

Beeple Mania

esquire.com

41–50 of 76 posts

Re: Beeple Mania

#41

Yesterday I was talking with a friend of mine to try to wrap our heads around what's happening, and we can't help but feel that a lot of this NFT hype is based on FOMO and the craving for having something unique with high perceived value: like, everyone wants a Black Lotus, without having to wait 30 years to find out that there's actually people that have also some emotional investment into these items, and are willi…

i agree. i have the same feeling of not getting it.. but they are skipping a step

look at what happened to baseball sports cards in the late 90s and still continue today

holograms, refractors, patch cards, "printing plates" cards. these cards are "valuable" because of the perceived scarcity but the issue is trying to get one is completely random and based on luck whereas the original value of baseball cards was people didn't keep them in mint condition and kids put them on their bikes to make cool sounds.

same thing with comic books. the comic book makers produced the scarcity or collectible, and then produced too much of that scarcity and the whole comic book market imploded.

this guy's art is cool, and good for him for making tons of money off it. but it does feel like partly FOMO and also some people have too much money during the pandemic that they don't know where to park so they dump it into stuff like this.

i think the biggest issue with this stuff is it's already skyrocketed well outside the range of even relatively well off individuals. i certainly don't have the money to outbid someone who put in nearly $800K for basically a blockchain entry. like how are you going to get normal people to care about this other than, "it sold for a lot of money" which is basically the only reason this stuff got an article in esquire.

Re: Beeple Mania

#42
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cardano doesnt even have smart contracts yet, how have they implemented nfts? otherwise yes, energy usage will be dropping massively on most networks with pos upgrades.

Cardano has a different approach of smart contract than Ethereum. For example, in Cardano, any tokens will be treated as native assets (except with the ability to vote in Cardano network, which you need ADA), so no need smart contract.

This is all coming this month/next, but at the time of posting this it is not live.

Re: Beeple Mania

#43
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cardano has a different approach of smart contract than Ethereum. For example, in Cardano, any tokens will be treated as native assets (except with the ability to vote in Cardano network, which you need ADA), so no need smart contract.

This is all coming this month/next, but at the time of posting this it is not live.

Sorry I guess I have to clarify, it is implemented on test net.

Re: Beeple Mania

#44
post #29

This morning I had a dream where someone named "Beepliani" was trying to talk to a lady who was tired of being hit on while she was just trying to make a train journey. And then I wake up and write that down in my dream journal and pick up the tablet next to my bed, and here's... this. Well okay, fuck it, I got rent to pay and I got a bunch of art lying around that's had a lot more love put into it than what I'm seei…

> despite my general misgivings about the huge energy cost of crypto. Are you really concerned about people utilizing electricity, or are you actually concerned about carbon footprint? If the carbon thing, look where crypto-mining happens. It's almost exclusively with overflow power from areas that get their energy from hydro, wind, geothermal etc, so the additional carbon produced by mining is negligible. Second, Et…

More the carbon footprint, yeah. But also general concerns about how much the crypto industry is about "converting energy into value and an asston of waste heat".

Re: Beeple Mania

#45
Huh. I did not see this coming but I think this actually kind of makes sense. I think many people see being a "patron of the arts" as something very high status, and having your ownership encoded publicly seems much more status-enhancing than just having something hanging in your home. Sure, you could brag that you just bought a piece of physical art on Facebook or Instagram, but that seems a bit like showing off - maybe a difference here is that there is no escaping from the public element, so no-one can judge you for it.

If a piece takes off in popularity, I can imagine that there is also extra status to being the first to own that particular piece, which will forever be visible on the blockchain. [Edit - it does seem kind of strange to be the second or later owner though, I wonder if that could actually hurt resale value.]

Very curious to see how this develops. If it opens up new possibilities for artists to get their work funded and it can lead to a flourishing of the arts I'm all for it.

Re: Beeple Mania

#46
post #37
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you spend $5k for the streaming rights to an mp4? Thats generally where people see NFTs going. Mark Cuban was talking about this yesterday on bankless podcast, how an NFT can contain all the royalty payments for e.g. a film or tv show, director/producer/actors/editors, and when someone wants to show it they rent it for a period of time (or buy it to rent to others), their rent payment instantly divided across e…

What rights do you own with an NFT? Say I bought a digital piece, can I print it on a million t-shirts and sell them? Or does the artist still retain the copyright etc.? I've seen people minting tweets as NFTs - again, how does the copyright work here. Genuine question - seen NFTs come up a lot over the last fortnight - don't really understand it at all (which makes me feel old!).

These largely remain open questions.

Or rather, as far as I can tell the default off-chain answers apply in the absence of explicit directions otherwise.

Physical fine art has come up with answers (you don't get the copyright just because you bought the original), though, and I'm sure NFTs will eventually.

There's also the possibility of putting code into the smart contracts to explicitly give you the royalties earned on-chain. Not really a thing yet, but it's obviously possible to do.

Re: Beeple Mania

#47
post #31

Using blockchain to identify ownership of digital art is imo the first use case that makes sense. Who would want to own a coin number when you can own a masterpiece.

How do you "own" something that everyone else can consume and replicate? Owning a physical item implies a degree of control over it. Owning a public digital item doesn't seem to grant any kind of control. I feel like this is a classic case of "tree falls in a forest, does anyone hear it?" where the confusion relies on the word "hear" being used in two ways (objective sound waves travelling through air, vs subjective…

I think the point is that NFTs are a way to verifiably prove ownership of a digital asset - i.e. the most recent position on a verified chain of purchases.

It's like, imagine if you bought an original Picasso, but a device existed where someone walking past your house could magic a copy of your painting right into their hands, down to the molecule. Sure, you'd still have the original, but the only way to prove it is by referencing the paper trail from the auction house that you're the last person who purchased it through "official" channels. Same for these NFTs - the blockchain is the irrefutable source of who "officially" owns the art.

Personally, I think this is only a thing because people generally want to show off the fact that they "own" something rather than "just" having it in their house. Like, why bother spending $XX millions on an original painting when you could just pay a talented artist to copy it for you with real paints for a fraction of the cost? As long as you're not trying to pass it off as an original for sale, no one would care if you cloned a famous painting.

It's because being able to show off your name on the "who owns this" line is more important than the actual thing.

Re: Beeple Mania

#48

I submitted this a few days ago without any traction: https://joanielemercier.com/the-problem-of-cryptoart/ Honestly I can’t do anything but shake my head in disapproval about crypto-art (and crypto currency in general) when it involves wasting so much energy.

PoS blockchain like Cardano network now only consumes an energy as big as a household. They already have NFT implemented.

I always see people point to 'just round the corner' future Proof of Stake systems when the energy waste topic comes up, but it seems like there are still a lot of big unsolved challenges with that, as well as new problems introduced by it.

As long as there's no actual widespread fully working currency using only PoS, it's a bit like justifying the emissions from flying by pointing to experimental solar powered aircraft, and saying all flights will be solar powered any day now.

Re: Beeple Mania

#49
post #11

I bought one of his "Into the Ether" NFTs[1] but now I'm in a fairly interesting position. If I prove ownership of the artwork (via a signed message from the address) then Beeple will send the physical artwork to me but it'll immediately lose a high percentage of its value (currently trading at ~$90,000 from $969 original). Right now it's owned/stored by the artist and someone buying the piece from me would be able t…

>Right now it's owned/stored by the artist and someone buying the piece from me would be able to get it delivered directly from Beeple. That's a new level of unboxed where the piece of art is basically unseen at this point in time and can easily be guaranteed original. But doesn't this defeat the goal of NFT? If you are the owner, then if it's stored by the creator or not it's irrelevant, right? It's just like buying…

> But doesn't this defeat the goal of NFT? If you are the owner, then if it's stored by the creator or not it's irrelevant, right?

Assuming the creator is trustworthy, then I don't think so. Isn't this common in the art world? I thought lots of expensive art is stored in expensive secured vaults. Or maybe I'm thinking of the film Tenet (I don't actually know anything about the art world).

Re: Beeple Mania

#50
post #45

Huh. I did not see this coming but I think this actually kind of makes sense. I think many people see being a "patron of the arts" as something very high status, and having your ownership encoded publicly seems much more status-enhancing than just having something hanging in your home. Sure, you could brag that you just bought a piece of physical art on Facebook or Instagram, but that seems a bit like showing off - m…

Maybe I'm missing the point, but doesn't this then only apply to the blockchain, and not necessarily the art? Therefore this status symbol can be applied to anything (supposedly) sacred: books, movies, sexual partners, etc.

To me it may devalue art, seeing how I feel it's the NFT and not the art that people value.

Post reply on HN