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Ask HN: NFTs legit or mania?

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Re: Ask HN: NFTs legit or mania?

#41

Post by jka »

jka wrote: post #16
carmen_sandiego wrote: post #3

I’m personally at the stage where it seems like such obvious silliness that I feel like I must be missing something, and so I avoid expressing this opinion anywhere that I might be held accountable for it at some point in the future. But I still suspect that I’m right, naturally. Definitely interested to hear arguments to the contrary though.

Given that content creators retain copyright over work they upload to platforms, that platforms explicitly provide that guarantee, and that much of the current NFT craze is around speculation on already-potentially-valuable digital content, I agree. One possibility that occurs is: for decentralized infrastructure, where no organization can attest to the identity of an original author, then it might make sense for tha…

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26373108

A risk that springs to mind is: unlike the legal concept of copyright ownership, an NFT could easily be accidentally lost by the person who holds it.

Re: Ask HN: NFTs legit or mania?

#42

Post by Skhalar »

carmen_sandiego wrote: post #3

I’m personally at the stage where it seems like such obvious silliness that I feel like I must be missing something, and so I avoid expressing this opinion anywhere that I might be held accountable for it at some point in the future. But I still suspect that I’m right, naturally. Definitely interested to hear arguments to the contrary though.

To me it just looks like another way to get scam everyday and stupid rich people...

Re: Ask HN: NFTs legit or mania?

#43

Post by Barrin92 »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #10

Mania for now but long term it will bring scarcity to the digital realm something that's important to fully develop the digital economy. Right now digital has been very profitable for a relatively few since it takes lots of money to develop a product but scarcity will let many more people make a living. A simple example are artists. Artists have been mostly locked out of making a good living with their digital works…

>it will bring scarcity to the digital realm something that's important to fully develop the digital economy[...] The future is very bright, as they say. There's finally a way to monetize cyberspace for the everyman.

This isn't the future, this is enclosure of the commons feudal style, except for the fact that the physical commons were actually scarce so the proponents I suppose had some sort of point, whereas in the internet age we're actually making free and ubiquitous information artificially scarce to make the internet obey our insane economic logic

Re: Ask HN: NFTs legit or mania?

#44

Post by efficax »

rektide wrote: post #17

It's not mania. It's a vision for competition, control, restriction, & ownership. It's the value system of limited natural resources, imposed on a much more open place where bits are cheap, where copying is basically free, where vast amounts of computational capabilities are everywhere. It's not going to go away. This camp of control & authority & power will find enough adherents to make that which is without value h…

Woah woah easy there pardner

Re: Ask HN: NFTs legit or mania?

#45

Post by rektide »

efficax wrote: post #44
rektide wrote: post #17

It's not mania. It's a vision for competition, control, restriction, & ownership. It's the value system of limited natural resources, imposed on a much more open place where bits are cheap, where copying is basically free, where vast amounts of computational capabilities are everywhere. It's not going to go away. This camp of control & authority & power will find enough adherents to make that which is without value h…

Woah woah easy there pardner

That is what I continually want to ask of the world, some easiness. But the din & the stink persists, the civil world is continually menaced by arrogant loud persistent forces, & it feels like we have so little defense, so few a ways to cry out & beg for peace. Competition and greed root so much more easily, require so much less nutrients to develop & spread.

Nothing will stop NFTs. Sure enough, mankind is generating a new enduring upward-spiralling mania, a new way to squabble, inventing scarcity so that some might profit. Just one of a long long series of there being so little means to ask for a cessation in society, there being no means to slow the gathering of war-wagons & takers.

It's techno-mysticism. There's no more value here than a credits page, where you give thanks to your backers, your supporters. Or dedicate a piece of work to someone. But it's dressed up as something fancy, understanding slightly out of reach. The inability to pinpoint it's value is itself the core value, an esoteric tapping into something that feels bigger than us. It's a play into our emotions, into those steep undercurrents of desire & control. The logos is not here, the ethos is largely negative, and I am left with only a pathos for the poor world, subject to this artful hackery re-imposing the zero-sum upon the world by a sad malappropriation of the digital.

Re: Ask HN: NFTs legit or mania?

#48

Post by dqpb »

If you look at it from the point of view of an engineer, it appears to be mania: it doesn’t provide DRM despite implying it does (to some extent), and it’s unclear to what extent it actually encodes and stores the content.

However, if you don’t look at it from that point of view, then clearly it’s filling a previously unserved niche (though that may end if users find it violates their expectations). In other words, the need for it appears to be real.

The DRM issue could be addressed on the client side - if enough client applications (e.g. games) enforce the implied DRM, then that may be enough to satisfy this expectation on the user side.

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