It may be a bad idea, it may be a place for scurrilous people to take advantage of credulous people, but in what sense is it a pyramid scheme exactly?
NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
131–140 of 268 posts
Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
NFTs don’t sell ownership. They sell NFTs. It’s like creating a contract that sells the contract itself. Then maybe you stamp a photo of Michael Jordan on the cover and call it a Michael Jordan contract, even though the contract doesn’t give the buyer any rights to anything Michael Jordan related, except the contract itself. Then you can go out and make more Michael Jordan contracts, because there’s nothing in the fi…
The contract would give the buyer rights to use the content. When I'm the owner of a physical Picasso then I have the right to sell t-shirts with the motive on it. If someone else would do that, I could sue him. The same idea is behind this NFT hype, you buy the right to use the content. As far as I understand it.
It's theoretically possible that the contract could be structured in such a way that "The bearer of this token has rights X, Y, Z over this real or intellectual property", but that's definitely not what is being hyped right now.
More commonly, people are just buying an authenticated digital asset which confers no rights over the source material.
For example, An artist could sell unsigned instances of their digital art as .JPG files, and they could sell authenticated copies as NFT.
In both cases, you get a copy of the art. In neither case are you getting an implicit copyright to the work that would allow you to redistribute the work.
Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blockchain doesn’t need to make it impossible to counterfeit real-world items to be useful, it just needs to reduce counterfeiting levels by reducing the profitability. It’s more than capable of doing that. If you can only sell at most one counterfeit item per authentic item, that’s already a multi-trillion dollar innovation.
I have a bicycle. I sell you the NFT for that bicycle. I then sell the bicycle to my neighbor. How did that work out?
10x better than you selling 10 bicycles. Your example actually demonstrates why blockchain is hugely valuable.
Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
What capableweb said is correct. NFTs do not confer any ownership of, rights over, or special access to anything else, real-world out digital. When you buy an NFT of an artwork, you aren't buying the artwork, you are only buying the NFT. As far as I know, the inventors of NFTs do not claim that they do. But it seems like a lot of people talking about and perhaps buying NFTs don't understand that.
In your description, what's the difference between an NFT and a gag USD million bill with Bush, Obama, Trump or Biden's face on it? This makes it even harder to understand why anyone should care. Hell, it starts to make the people who thought Beanie Babies were a long term investment seem smart.
NFT Art, imo: They are future contracts for ideas in the metaidea market. They have monetary value because crypto believers think and some work and some gamble to make it go HUGE and make all believers a lot of money. It's an emergent marketing scheme and donation mechanism. It's actually genius. Triple-entry accounting has a huge number of desirable real-world applications, not to mention it's a living part within the larger ecosystem of crypto, which people believe holds IMMENSE value for the future.
Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
#135Let people do whatever the F they wanna do with their money. If they lose it, shrug , it’s their money. I hate this idea of people telling other people what to do or what’s good for them.
Except they're shitting on our planet in the process!
Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
#136Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
#137I wrote my first Fortran program in 1969. I have been active in the field of computing since then, both as an academic and as a programmer in industry. During this time, there have been several times when I first heard about something new, something potentially game changing. I remember some of them very clearly: 1. Around 1971: a Wang desktop computer. Imagine: a computer that fit on a desk! 2. Visicalc (spreadsheet…
At the risk of going slightly off-topic: I think it's interesting you mention "proving programs correct". My hunch is that formal proofs on code are currently too laborious to be useful in most business situations, but that they will become extremely useful as we start letting the machine/"AI" code for us. I might not have spent enough time in this field (so there might be some Dunning Kruger at play) but I think code proofs might be similar enough to Chess/Go that they can be automated, and I think they will be able to add guarantees to computer-generated code so that we can trust it more.
Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
#138It's stupid at face value. No pyramid required. You cannot intrinsically link real world items to tokens. The source of truth is the real world, not the token. Add an unlimited supply of unique things, and how could anyone expect to make money from this?
It does seem really stupid, but I don't see how it's substantively different than (also stupid-seeming) physical collectibles like baseball cards or Bearbricks. The supply of the "special" versions of those two collectibles is also constrained in a totally artificial manner.
Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
#139It's stupid at face value. No pyramid required. You cannot intrinsically link real world items to tokens. The source of truth is the real world, not the token. Add an unlimited supply of unique things, and how could anyone expect to make money from this?
Why would you not be able to attach certain rights to tokens that you mint and sell?
Re: NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still can't see how a blockchain here would do something that a database wouldn't. A DB of authentic serial numbers with a way to mark them as claimed is all you need. If your new widget's serial is already marked as claimed on the manufacturer's website then you most likely have a counterfeit, no blockchain necessary.
What if you want to sell your thing? Who is hosting this db?
Somebody always host the NFT image, it can be taken down from ipfs or from a cloud service like s3 at any moment. Also NFT are only worth something because someone provides a frontend to serve the "NFT metadata".
NFTs are essentially sleek frontend UIs mixed in with a speculative volatile currency less juridicial than dollars. It also helps that blockchain assets led by bitcoin are in a bull run.
The innovation is now a company like Dapper Labs can provide a marketplace like NBA Topshot providing a digital experience with licensed content. This digital experience can be traded using Paypal but using a traditional method comes with tradeoffs. Dapper Labs created an in-house blockchain called Flow. The benefits of a blockchain is it is harder for double spends to occur. Blockchain makes it hard for race conditions to occur when the source of truth is distributed among computers in a network.
It would be easier to make a database of hash values but traditional databases are less transparent than blockchains. Blockchains are too expensive. Some digital experiences are worth it, most probably aren't, enough people care about the frontend.