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NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

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Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#451
post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have artificial scarcity. It's called steam. You buy a game in steam, you can't resell it. This allows you to resell the things you buy.

You can't resell a game in steam because Valve doesn't let you, not because the game is being made artificially scarce. Which it is, but this is not the reason you can't resell it. The point is that reselling an NFT doesn't require a central ledger. The central ledger is necessary to prevent the same token from being sold multiple times by the same seller. In other words, to create the illusion that the seller doesn'…

Each NFT is separate. You can authenticate a digital game by owning the nft. The publisher can sell as many tokens as they wish, that's entirely different. The point is that they can't stop you from reselling, because it's on the blockchain, not on steam.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#452
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People pay for mods and skins all the time. People will pay secondlife furniture. They will pay to be be able to display it in their VR houses. They will display it like badges on their forum avatars. The speculation and whales will being the capital to generate a steady market and build out the partnerships and incentives for customers. Once people are used to digital wallets, sending a few bucks for instant deliver…

> People pay for mods and skins all the time. People will pay secondlife furniture. They will pay to be be able to display it in their VR houses. They will display it like badges on their forum avatars. All of those are neat ideas which do not require NFTs, and are not enabled by NFTs. People already pay for Second Life furniture.

And advantage I see is the shared protocols and blockchains offer quick and seemless ownership validation even after the original merchant has gone out of business or stopped selling. And for the merchants, its painless and seemless to sell and delegate ownership without having to manage that inhouse, or pay a large fee for the service.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#453

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…

> NFTs make perfect sense for representing a claim on things that can be used, like event tickets or in-game virtual goods. There’s absolutely no reason for that to be decentralized, only one party can honor the tokens anyways. Like most things crypto they don’t actually make sense for anything.

This assumes that the centralized minter (and ultimately redeemer) of the, say, tickets, is both willing and able to run a secondary marketplace for them.

Those two things are not a given.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#455

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

NFT is an initialism [0], not an acronym. Acronym is used when you say the initials as a single word (eg, “nift”). Initialism is used when you say each letter distinctly.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/initialism

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#456
post #353
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the tokens even mean anyway? It doesn't mean "I'm the owner of this one in five paper canvas art", it just means "I'm the owner of this one number, which someone decided is related to that digital piece of art for which there can exist infinitely many copies that are perfectly identical". What does it even mean? Let's say I buy a NTF $1000 and get a digital copy, what prevents me (barring legalities) to per…

> Let's say I buy a NTF $1000 and get a digital copy, what prevents me (barring legalities) to perfectly duplicate it and massively redistribute it (not the token, the distributed supposedly high quality file) for a fraction of $$$ and turn a profit The file is usually publicly accessible, why would anyone give you money for something they can just download?

Some rich dude has bought the "first tweet" for $2.5 million, despite the fact that it's publicly accessible [0]. I imagine it's about showing off how rich they are. They could achieve the same result by throwing $2.5 million into a furnace.

https://twitter.com/jack/status/20

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to in game items... why should one game honor another game's items? EVE Online and World of Warcraft dont exist in the same context. Even if you did it between Guild Wars, Elder Scrolls online and WoW, you still cant interchange the items due to stats, style and general game mechanics let alone the coding rework to have these items function the same way between games. If there was an mmo framework that…

In my opinion, it only has the possibility of making any sense if a game itself is (largely or entirely) an Ethereum dapp. I think a WoW NFT would make zero sense (and I think Blizzard would agree, barring the hypothetical potential of trying to exploit a fad purely for extra profit), but an NFT representing an asset in your Ethereum-based Second Life "d-game" could possibly make some sense. I know some dapp games ex…

I dont know about theres a "use".

Remember that crowdfunded, over engineered juicer? It was some $400 and claimed to do like 100 pounds of force on a pre-juiced juice packet to squeeze into a glass for you. Some other article showed you can just squeeze these packs by hand into your glass with barely any force. This was "the Keurig" of juicing.

Total shit show of over engineering and solutionism.

I see the same thing with crypto and NFTs currently. Everytime I have this discussion in person, I always say that I do believe there will be a viable digital currency of some sort in the near future. The current gen of tech has proved the want, which is important, but now a real how is needed along with commonsense.

Like, theres a real want for an easy to go, healthy juice. Just bottle it and sell it that way. Why go through the extra step of a juicer if the shit is already juiced. I won't doubt their drinks were good. But they got caught up in solutionism gimmicks. Digital currencies are caught up in the blockchain gimmick.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#458
post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They can verify ownership by signing something with the wallet that the token is associated to (signing is free). They're only able to do so if they own the private keys of the wallet. It should be noted that private keys can be shared if the owner wishes. In the case of using NFTs as event entry the event organizer would still need to keep a record of which NFTs have been used already for a given event because the w…

Exactly. It'll have to be like a software license key: in theory you can share your key, but the service can just authorize and lock in the first device/entity that presented the license key. This kind of DRM is often annoying for regular customers since you may have to manually contact customer support in order to request a transfer of the license to another device you own, but it does help mitigate non-paid use to an extent.

This could be enforced for real-life events by handing out a wristband with a GUID QR code to the first person to demonstrate they possess the private key that owns a particular ticket token, then never handing anything out for that token again, and also triggering an alert if the same QR code is ever seen on more than one person (to mitigate "pirates" who might offer identical or similar-looking wristband material and "replay attack" with an existing assigned QR code).

There are probably other attacks I'm missing (including obvious existing stuff like people just sneaking in and evading wristband checks), and there are lots of questions about whether an NFT or decentralized blockchain is a smart idea for a given live event, but from a security perspective I think it should probably be feasible if an event organizer does decide they want to do it for whatever reason.

However, there are other analogues that I think are much less feasible or perhaps totally infeasible. There are some NFT... apps? platforms? companies? DAOs? that are providing some service where an NFT grants you access to something like a restricted Discord server. Even aside from how valuable or sensible that may or may not be, there's absolutely nothing stopping a token-holder from just sharing their Discord account email and password with as many people as they want. The platform and the Discord servers would have no idea if anyone's doing this and how many people could be sharing any given account. (Discord employees could potentially detect some cases but I doubt they'd play any part in this.)

For a real-life physical event, someone can't just copy your body and make it a shared proxy for pirating, but any NFT ticket use case short of in-person events is probably often just going to rely solely on the goodwill of people to not abuse/pirate things, and we all know how that goes - especially in anonymous online communities.

The rubber-meets-the-road real-world crossover part is where NFTs and "Web 3.0" in general tends to become really shaky. I'm still mildly optimistic about it in the long-term, but I think a large percentage of existing use cases are going to fizzle as pointless dead ends that are surviving purely based on flavor-of-the-year hype and fad waves. Things are obviously stuck in one such fad right now.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#459
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teaching people that being "rich" is not a goal would help in the progress. The goal is enough: a point when one still yearns, so they can progress, but they don't suffer or live in fear for losing warmth, shelter, food, etc. But this idea seems far from the majority of the US mindset, and it's polluting many parts of the world as well.

Desire for superiority over other people is instinctive. I don’t believe it’s something that can be “taught” out of existence.

citation needed

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#460
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?

Blockchain like structures use consensus to uniqueness. A protocol that attempts to replicate this meets the loose definition of blockchain.

As the other commenter explained, concensus doesn't require CO2, but most of these have been recent developments.

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