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Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference

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Re: Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference

#81
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The creator is almost always the artist. Provenance is what gives NFTs their value. The value of a Beeple NFT minted by a random user is $0.

The value of a Beeple NFT minted by Beeple is $0. The market just hasn't discovered that yet. An NFT has no more value than a JPG. I'll longbets anyone that says otherwise.

I agree but it's worth noting that Beeple was selling JPGs for $5000+ in the mid 2010s as a commissioned artist in the music industry. So the NFTs have also brought some transparency to a successful digital artist along with the crazy valuations.

Re: Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Artist sells painting for $1k. Buyer then sells painting for $1M. Next buyer sells for $10M. Original artist only made $1k on a $10M painting. Shouldn't the original artist be able to participate in the upside of their creation? I'm not seeing the "evil" here. Just a way for creators to cut out the middle men. Or, just a different way of structuring a contract. There's a lot of moralistic FUD against crypto on HN rig…

Do you feel the same way with collectible cars? Every time a 69 Thunderbird is sold, Ford should get a cut in the upside? How do you feel about the inverse? If a painting goes down in value, is the artist on the hook for the downside of their creation? The answer is no, the creator handed over the creation on sale. Anything else would need to be hashed out in a contract which would drastically reduce sale price.

I don't have feelings about it either way. I think you're reading way too much into my comment. It's just a new interesting way to structure a contract. Neither good nor evil. I certainly don't think it's "evil" like the comment I replied.

Re: Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference

#83
post #68

I was really hoping they were going to dunk on the technology itself, like how the media of the NFT is lost if the platform hosting it is ever compromised - only the meta data is stored on the blockchain. Instead, they just attacked the contents of the NFTs, akin to my mom telling me my pokemon cards are a waste of money all those years ago. Value is only whatever someone is willing to pay.

The metadata is an IPFS hash in most cases that you can use to validate against the file regardless of where the file is stored. At any rate NFT market places are working on surfacing quality data to users to show them this information. Some NFTs are small enough to be embedded on-chain. Some use IPFS + Filecoin or other decentralized archive service like Arweave. Some don't. Surfacing that to users will become more important as the space evolves.

Re: Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference

#84
post #68

I was really hoping they were going to dunk on the technology itself, like how the media of the NFT is lost if the platform hosting it is ever compromised - only the meta data is stored on the blockchain. Instead, they just attacked the contents of the NFTs, akin to my mom telling me my pokemon cards are a waste of money all those years ago. Value is only whatever someone is willing to pay.

Art Blocks has everything on chain. A few other projects do as well.

Re: Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference

#85

I don't mean to distract from the main conversation, but I want to talk about how insidiously evil it is that NFTs can be coded to send the original creator a percentage $ cut off of every subsequent transaction for all time. If that's not hard coding wealth inequality and a new class of asset owners, I don't know what is. This is disturbing, along with the whole thing itself anyway. Imagine if cryptocurrency started…

Artist sells painting for $1k. Buyer then sells painting for $1M. Next buyer sells for $10M. Original artist only made $1k on a $10M painting. Shouldn't the original artist be able to participate in the upside of their creation? I'm not seeing the "evil" here. Just a way for creators to cut out the middle men. Or, just a different way of structuring a contract. There's a lot of moralistic FUD against crypto on HN rig…

That's not how things are supposed to work AFAIK. I go buy a book, DVD, CD, video, etc for $10. I can then resell it for $8 or if it becomes rare for $20. The original creator only gets the first $10

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

Re: Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you feel the same way with collectible cars? Every time a 69 Thunderbird is sold, Ford should get a cut in the upside? How do you feel about the inverse? If a painting goes down in value, is the artist on the hook for the downside of their creation? The answer is no, the creator handed over the creation on sale. Anything else would need to be hashed out in a contract which would drastically reduce sale price.

I don't have feelings about it either way. I think you're reading way too much into my comment. It's just a new interesting way to structure a contract. Neither good nor evil. I certainly don't think it's "evil" like the comment I replied.

Yes, I did forget the OP. I don't understand how people getting paid is evil either. Whether that comes in a huge lump sum at the beginning or in interest overtime, it doesn't really matter. There is going to be a cash flow analysis that will tell you how much one version of the contract is worth relative to the other. My comment was more that these contracts aren't new, they just aren't particularly useful because it is hard to think of a contract in perpetuity.

Re: Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference

#87

I don't mean to distract from the main conversation, but I want to talk about how insidiously evil it is that NFTs can be coded to send the original creator a percentage $ cut off of every subsequent transaction for all time. If that's not hard coding wealth inequality and a new class of asset owners, I don't know what is. This is disturbing, along with the whole thing itself anyway. Imagine if cryptocurrency started…

Some people don’t appreciate the existence of kulaks, it is true.

Re: Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference

#88

I don't mean to distract from the main conversation, but I want to talk about how insidiously evil it is that NFTs can be coded to send the original creator a percentage $ cut off of every subsequent transaction for all time. If that's not hard coding wealth inequality and a new class of asset owners, I don't know what is. This is disturbing, along with the whole thing itself anyway. Imagine if cryptocurrency started…

Behind the scenes the NFT is just a smart contract standard. The royalty isn't really baked into the contract itself, but the platform that's using to exchange it.... So lots of projects with this perpetual royalty might get moved to another platform like opensea or rarible, and the royalty goes poof.

Also, the royalty is just artists getting commission on their work. Most NFT minting platforms worth anything allow the artist to mint from their wallet.

Re: Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference

#89

I don't mean to distract from the main conversation, but I want to talk about how insidiously evil it is that NFTs can be coded to send the original creator a percentage $ cut off of every subsequent transaction for all time. If that's not hard coding wealth inequality and a new class of asset owners, I don't know what is. This is disturbing, along with the whole thing itself anyway. Imagine if cryptocurrency started…

just sounds like automated royalties to me (with infinite copyright). AT least when an NFT does this, it is known in advance; as opposed to legistative action changing the goal posts during the match.

Also, I suppose there can be a way to cancel the royalties by making a meta-NFT (of sorts) that "owns" the NFT which stays in one place forever so that the meta-NFT can be traded instead.

Re: Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference

#90
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things. First, in the real world, creators stop getting royalties after the item expires and goes into the public domain, and there's a pretty strong view that the time for that is already too long and the beneficiaries of that long period tend to be companies instead of creators. I would say that there is in fact a widespread belief that the heirs of Walt Disney are too wealthy, despite the fact that Walt himsel…

There's another thing you're missing: First Sale Doctrine. In the world of physical goods, once you've sold a copy of something, you have no rights whatsoever to constrain what people can do with that copy. Authors don't see a dime for used book sales, for example.

But the IRS still gets a perpetual royalty on every subsequent sale. Why can't the producer?
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