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NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

seths.blog

381–390 of 786 posts

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CryptoPunks will be in the MoMA one day. They are a pioneer — and will be valued as such. Derivative works and obvious cash grabs are a bubble and low effort art will trend back to $0.

> low effort art will trend back to $0 This is being continuously disproved since decades by contemporary art.

But how good are they going to be at laundering money? I can't imagine they're going to be in the class that contemporary art is in, so they aren't really comparable.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#382
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preface: I'm not endorsing NFTs nor do I know much about them and personally I would never buy one. > Why can't NFTs be done without a blockchain? In the physical world it is rather involved to check wether eg. a painting is the original one and not a copy. A simple way to define original is that it came first, before any of its copies. In the digital world the blockchain acts as the canonical timeline. You or anyone…

PoW can't be non-CO2 producing even if solar powered. You still have to contend with e-waste and even the poop of the janitor in your calculations.

Everything is life uses energy. We can only minimise the harmful effects of energy production, not (yet?) eliminate it. I first and foremost want global warming to slow/stop and imho for that we need a global restriction and/or ban on harmful ways of energy production. I can't see any other way. Everything else is either a distraction or ideologically driven, eg. "crypto wastes energy" really means "I think crypto is useless hence is deserves no energy". Once everything is forced to run on renewable energy sources then we will be in a much better position regardless of crypto.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#383

NFT: non-fungible token. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token Expand your acronyms, peeps.

NFTs have been the wildest mania to sweep the internet in the last three weeks. If you're not watching, well, check it out. People are paying millions of dollars for artwork that doesn't exist. The bid for Jack Dorsey's "first tweet" is over two million dollars. (What does that even mean?!) Sure, I suppose you could link ownership of intellectual property or actual goods to NFTs, but what's the benefit? Who enforces…

I hadn't made the "first tweet" connection, though I'd seen that story. Thanks.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> Now... for a regulated system of tokens (eg currency) a developer can’t do that: they are legally bound to accept fiat currency even though it is not redeemable for any “real” equivalent (eg gold). This isn't true in general. Legal tender status is very loosely an obligation to accept for existing debts , but it is not an obligation to accept it as, say, a means of accepting a offer. So unless they are giving you g…

But that's really why everyone will always accept them, because they can pay their debts/taxes with them. It's probably a common misconception because it's so close to correct.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I’m in ticket selling business, if I can maintain a level of control with crypto I can, but back tickets and resell them, but most importantly I can capture any upside I missed by selling the tickets for too low of a price, and the purchaser resells the tickets for a profit given I get a cut of each and every transaction

How do you guarantee the person trying to get into the event is the owner of the ticket?

They pay their token when they want to go in?

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#387
post #332
post #295

NFT's are Bullshit: https://samim.io/p/2021-03-05-non-fungible-tokens-nft-are-bu... In Summary: 1. The NFT doubles down on the worst of copyright, the property metaphor, & tries to impose old ideas of scarcity & exclusion on the digital realm, where both are obsolete. 2.NFTs are an absolute ecological disaster

I know it sounds catchy to say that NFTs are an ecological disaster, but that statement is sensational and not accurate. NFTs do not cause carbon emissions themselves, just like you don't add carbon emissions by occupying a seat on a public transportation bus. The bus is doing its daily route and has a fixed amount of emissions per day whether it has any occupants or not. This analogy breaks quickly, so I wouldn't lo…

More accurate would be to say that NFTs are additional fuel for the ecological disaster that is ETH. Your analogy makes little sense in this context.

Mining hardware will always run at 100% capacity, regardless of the amount of transactions, unless mining becomes unprofitable.

The issue is, while the energy used by mining is not directly dependent on the amount of transactions, it is dependent on the amount of people and money invested into the network, which raises the price, which causes an expansion of mining effort. With more people investing, the amount of transactions also increases.

If NFTs were to become a popular thing, mining will obviously increase at an even faster rate

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#388
I can see use cases for this in the future applying to real world items to prove authenticity such as unique cars, expensive shoes, pet ownership, antiques and plots of land.

Digital artwork seems to be an easy go to item at this infancy stage of NFTs.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#389
> People can look at images of the Mona Lisa all day long without compensating you, because you simply own the original trophy, not the idea…

Your ownership isn't stamped or an inhenrant part of the Mona Lisa, your ownership comes from the certificate and trust in the certificate, history of sales and its legacy. NFTs are simply digifying this.

> [Creators will] become promoters of digital tokens more than they are creators. Because that’s the only reason that someone is likely to buy one–like a stock, they hope it will go up in value

Since this is such a new idea and market speculation is rampant but the comparison and suggestion is still unfair. Money may be one driving factor in buying stocks, but it often isn't the only factor. NFTs don't change much for physical artists but non fungiblility did not exist for digital art until now.

> NFTs aren’t usually aesthetically beautiful on their own, they simply represent something that is.

In both cases the certificate is a representation of the art. The certificate or idea that you own the Mona Lisa isn't what's beautiful, the piece of art your ownership represents is.

> BUYERS of NFTs may be blind to the fact that there’s no limit on the supply. In the case of baseball cards, there are only so many rookies a year.

Creating a new token is easy, just as doing a scribble and calling it art. There's still implicit trust that the creator won't make a duplicate token with the same representation just as there's implicit trust an artist won't certify identical paintings as originals.

The benifit for collectables is that the minting and supply is public. You can verify that your NFT is 1 out of X, and only X.

> THE REST OF US are going to pay for NFTs for a very long time. They use an astonishing amount of electricity to create and trade. Together, they are already using more than is consumed by some states in the US. Imagine building a giant new power plant just to make Christie’s or the Basel Art Fair function. And the amount of power wasted will go up commensurate with their popularity and value. And keep going up. The details are here. The short version is that for the foreseeable future, the method that’s used to verify the blockchain and to create new digital coins is deliberately energy-intensive and inefficient. That’s on purpose. And as they get more valuable, the energy used will go up, not down.

The energy costs of the NFTs are currently pretty high, but to claim it'll only go up is disingenuous. In the foreseeable future Bitcoin will be the only energy intensive blockchain as others move to proof of stake. Ethereum has begun to make this transition and most other large platforms have already made this transition.

Since blockchain is digital and public the ease to produce a concrete estimate of energy paints an easy target. Measuring energy from other recreational activities is much harder and fuzzy. Gaming is a similar target but is much harder to discredit.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#390
post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument has some flaws. So firstly, if nobody got on the bus, the number of buses on the route would be reduced, and depending on circumstances the route would be cancelled. Additionally, the weight of the passenger does slightly increase the power requirement. Ignoring that, while there's minimal direct effect of usage, ultimately the bus is only there due to demand. Similarly, for block chains, mining only oc…

> Similarly, for block chains, mining only occurs when the thing being mined has value. NFTs would not be mined if people weren't using them. Therefore I would absolutely call them an ecological disaster. The point is that energy consumption due to mining on the Ethereum network does not scale with transaction count. So it does not matter if NFTs are issued ("minted") or not. They add no marginal energy cost in the m…

I’m less familiar with ETH than BTC but my understanding is that this is true:

1. Minting an NFT costs ETH in the form of “gas”

2. The miner who mines a block gets that ETH

Assuming both of these are true, each NFT minted on the ETH blockchain increases the amount they can profitability spend on energy in economic equilibrium.

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