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NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

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Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#241

Post by mrborgen »

distances wrote: post #227
mrborgen wrote: post #198

I’m curious as to how NFTs will compare to a sales contract from a legal point of view. E.g. if say an artist sells the rights to a digital artwork via both an NFT and via a normal sales contract. Both buyers claim ownership to the artwork and end up in court. Who wins? And what implications will a legal presedence have for the vaule of NFTs one way or the other?

Why would owning the NFT give you any rights over the goods? If I've understood correctly, you just own a token. It has no inherent value by itself anf you basically own a link to something.

The NFTs are meant to prove ownership over digital items, aren’t they?

Not ownership as in «I am the only one who can share this GIF in Facebook», but as in «I own the copyright to this GIF».

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#242

Post by detaro »

mrborgen wrote: post #241
distances wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would owning the NFT give you any rights over the goods? If I've understood correctly, you just own a token. It has no inherent value by itself anf you basically own a link to something.

The NFTs are meant to prove ownership over digital items, aren’t they? Not ownership as in «I am the only one who can share this GIF in Facebook», but as in «I own the copyright to this GIF».

No, not really. (without license terms saying so not even the former, but those can be a thing)

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#243

Post by pwm »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #107
anonymoushn wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hoping we can do our NFT trading on non-PoW chains within the next couple years. This should reduce the environmental impact to that of baseball cards.

One random idea I had was to use cryptomining to “soak up” excess power: so, for example, you could build nuclear out to meet peak load and then set up mining rigs to use the difference between peak and the current load, subsidizing the cost of power production. It’s probably a bad idea for other reasons, but it’s one way to reduce the environmental impact of PoW

Yup, this idea has already been explored, eg. here is an example of environmentally net-positive way of mining: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-06/why-bitco...

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#244

Post by runeks »

jamesgreenleaf wrote: post #37

NFTs make perfect sense for representing a claim on things that can be used, like event tickets or in-game virtual goods. But as certificates layered on top of collectibles... I'm not so sure. With something like CryptoKitties, you can do something with the tokens (play a virtual pet game). But with something like CryptoPunks you're essentially paying for digital beanie babies, which are worse than real ones since an…

> You can brag about owning such-and-such an image [...]

How? You don’t own a (digital) image. You own a token that references an image.

Everyone else can view the image and send it to their friends. But you have some token allegedly signed by the author of the image — who cares?

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#245

Post by distances »

megameter wrote: post #97
ajiang wrote: post #23

Regardless of what you think of NFTs, you have to recognize that the author's only counterargument against NFTs is that they're bad for the "rest of us" due to externalities that everyone else has to pay. The "rest of us" don't pay for the electricity use. The ETH miners are paying for it directly. And creators and buyers are paying for it indirectly through ETH usage. It isn't an externality. That's like saying the…

The electricity argument loses weight when you look at the world allocation of GPUs. Although mining has cut into supply, they're also being used for gaming, workstation, and cloud compute tasks. One way or another all of that chip supply would be sold, and then it is a case of benchmarking the social value, load and efficiency of the different uses to some utilitarian optimum. Much easier to cut off the framing earl…

> One way or another all of that chip supply would be sold, and then it is a case of benchmarking the social value, load and efficiency of the different uses to some utilitarian optimum.

I disagree. Cryptomining created a new market that increased the demand. There's no reason to assume the same numbers of GPUs with the same utilisation rate would be in use if we didn't have crypto. Thus, it does have direct environmental consequences.

Not all of that electricity use is a total waste: a friend of mine uses part of his mining heat to warm up the apartment in the winter. It's an expensive heater though.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#246

Post by StrLght »

127 wrote: post #175

Why can't NFTs be done without a blockchain? Please explain. Just add multiple hash, public/private-key cryptography, downsample discrete cosine transform, etc. You can just create a file format and a protocol. Why do you need to dump tons of CO2 into the atmosphere just for this purpose?

You’re trying to apply common sense to mania and speculation

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#247

Post by Hamuko »

cloudking wrote: post #109
ping_pong wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait so you can create an NFT on a tweet that you don't own? You're just claiming ownership in this NFT universe but it doesn't entitle you to anything related to the tweet does it? Meaning Jack Dorsey who "owns" the tweet didn't create an NFT on the tweet, a 3rd party did?

In this system https://v.cent.co/ anyone can bid for a tweet, and it's up to the actual Twitter user who created the tweet to verify ownership and mint/sell the NFT via their system. All you own by buying it is the token, the real owner of the tweet could delete it any time :) see what I mean about mania?

Live example: https://twitter.com/SLVTRMNDI/status/1368314035284873218

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#248

Post by cranium »

Problems I see with NFTs: - What prevents anyone from launching a competing chain and re-tokenize the same assets ? - As other chains: if you lose the access to your private key, you're done. - For real world assets (like a house), you have to enforce that the token is equivalent to the asset. That is: ownership of one implies the ownership of the other. Legally, it looks like a hell of a thorny problem: high-frequency house trading anyone ?

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#249

Post by HeadsUpHigh »

andreskytt wrote: post #112
anonymoushn wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hoping we can do our NFT trading on non-PoW chains within the next couple years. This should reduce the environmental impact to that of baseball cards.

Or, there’s an idea, just generate a random string, bundle it with the artwork and sign the whole damn thing using good old RSA. Achieves the exact same goal, uses a fraction of energy and no fancy tech.

If the artist signs the NFT to you, then you can't track resales. It will always be signed as belonging to the original person who bought it. So basically this "alternative" to NFTs would be impossible to trade. It blows my mind that people still don't understand stuff this basic.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#250

Post by wokwokwok »

TheColorYellow wrote: post #195
smt88 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Evaluating the capabilities of NFTs against the value offerings of something like rare art is an apples to oranges comparison. Someone should tell that to all the artists who are selling NFTs with the implication that they're analogous to owning original works. I agree that it's apples-to-oranges, which is why so many people are appalled at the charlatans who are successfully selling these oranges as apples. > It t…

> What is its potential? What can someone do with NFTs that they couldn't do before? The novelty comes from the underlying protocols that back the NFT. These protocols create marketplaces that are widely available and accessible and are reliably secure and robust. Take copyright for example. Copyright laws vary across regions and marketplace. The encoding and repudiation of these copyright laws is based on analog pro…

The point you’re making is valid, but you’re side stepping the key concern being raised.

The tokens you acquire are worth nothing.

Nothing about owning a token grants you any rights to anything other than what some other person is willing to pay/exchange it for.

So if a game developer chooses to accept tokens, you can use them; but that developer can at any time choose to stop accepting tokens or a subset of tokens making what you own worth actually nothing.

Now... for a regulated system of tokens (eg currency) a developer can’t do that: they are legally bound to accept fiat currency even though it is not redeemable for any “real” equivalent (eg gold).

Since a token is not bound to the DRM access to an item (say, image for example), it’s totally pointless to asset ownership with it, because it does not prevent the copy of the original digital asset.

The best you could ever hope for would be a regulated system, in which access to an asset via DRM was granted by a token.

...at which point, any “decentralised” benefit is lost.

So ultimately, the risk is 100% on the buyer here.

What you buy may be redeemable for something for some period of time... but that is true of any kind of token.

The “uniqueness” of the NFT is an illusion; it does not offer any strong guarantee of uniquely representing an actual asset.

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