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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

#181

Post by anotherqqq »

bawolff wrote: post #160
pmulard wrote: 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 contents seem much more stupid than the metadata issue. If you're going to claim "ownership" over an arbitrary "thing" pointing to it with metadata is a reasonable method. Its the claiming "ownership" over arbitrary crap that's stupid.

Arbitrary crap like property? I'm down for some anarchy in the traditional sense.

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

#182

Post by sneak »

sschueller wrote: post #153
wglb wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the conference essentially just borrows the name, in effect. The conference is highly vendor oriented, unlike Blackhat or Defcon. The speakers, however are RSA themselves. Keep in mind that they are no longer associated with the company. And the theme "crypto means cryptography" is a losing battle, I think.

Either defcon or blackhat had as their keynote speaker the head of the NSA. Wtf. Try that at the CCC conference . Never going to happen.

Defcon, being in Nevada (a state owned 95%+ by the US federal government and the home of the Nevada Test Site and Area 51) has always been super friendly to the US military (including its spying apparatus) and adjacent industries.

It's super gross.

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

#183

Post by geofft »

twox2 wrote: post #140
geofft wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because "the IRS" (not sure which jurisdiction you're in, but here in the US, it's actually the local and state government) is an entity controlled by elections that is obligated to spend its budget in ways decided on by elections, and therefore can reasonably exist forever. The royalties are not for the benefit of the IRS. A state or local government is sort of like an offline DAO, if you're familiar with DAOs. A pr…

I'm not talking about literal royalties. If I have an item that I buy new (or used) and it's not a depreciating asset, and I sell it, then I owe income tax or capital gains, don't I? And then when the new owner sells it a few months or years later as is common in the case of collectibles, they have to pay income tax or gains on their sale as well, and this continues for the entire life span of the object.

Oh, I assumed you were talking about sales taxes, which is the most obvious case of a DAO-like organization taking money on every sale, as a percentage of the selling price.

Income taxes and capital gains taxes are on your profit, not on the sale itself, so they're less analogous. If you as a taxable entity don't net make any money, you don't owe any income taxes (more or less); if you as a taxable entity don't make any profit on an asset you bought some time ago, you don't owe any capital gains taxes (more or less). So both of those are much more reasonable than a royalty on every sale - they don't follow the asset around forever, and you only have to pay a percentage of the money you made if you're in fact making money. It seems like, if I buy an NFT at $10000 and then sell it a month later for $9000, some of that $9000 goes to the creator of the NFT and not to me.

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

#184

Post by hluska »

btilly wrote: post #170
hluska wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m over forty and quite frankly, I’m tired of this ageist crap. This entire premise is complete fucking bullshit. Do yourself and everyone over 40 you come into contact with a favour and pretend you never believed anything so toxic.

And I'm over 50. My point remains. Very often things invented when we are older seem to be utterly pointless to us. We literally can't get why people are excited about them. And I see this tendency in people in my age range more than in my teenagers. I personally have to back up and go from first principles to avoid it.

Everything is exciting - innovation is exciting and new inventions are exciting. If you can't feel it, that's sad and I hope you can get it back but please don't impose your own issue upon an entire age group.

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

#185

Post by billytetrud »

crazygringo wrote: post #173
billytetrud wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between making royalties for distribution of copies of an item and making royalties for transferring a single item from one person to another. One makes sense, the other is a weird misleading way to rent to people.

> the other is a weird misleading way to rent to people. There's nothing weird or misleading about it, and it's got zero to do with renting. It's simply like a real estate broker commission, gallery commission, or whatever. The concept of a commission has existed for a long, long, long time.

> It's simply like a real estate broker commission, gallery commission, or whatever.

Except that its not at all like that. You pay a commission to someone who helped you sell something - they did work to help you sell it and you compensate them. Paying an automatic comission fee to the artist upon sale makes no sense. What are they doing to earn that commission? You already paid for their art. It makes no sense to pay again. What this is cannot be called a "comission".

I can see a situation where the artist is paid in total a very small fraction of the total price the art was sold for. Eg in the situation someone brought up where an artist sells a painting for $10,000 and then a few years later its sold for $1 million, I can see the artist maybe getting 10% of the margin between those sales (eg 0.1*(1 million - 10,000)). But even that is dubious to me, since a sale already took place. It just seems really weird to me and I think it has to be justified further than just "this is good for artists" or "artists need more money". Certainly calling it a commission is not at all accurate.

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

#186

Post by bawolff »

anotherqqq wrote: post #181
bawolff wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contents seem much more stupid than the metadata issue. If you're going to claim "ownership" over an arbitrary "thing" pointing to it with metadata is a reasonable method. Its the claiming "ownership" over arbitrary crap that's stupid.

Arbitrary crap like property? I'm down for some anarchy in the traditional sense.

Which nfts give you property rights to the underlying asset?

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

#188

Post by smegger001 »

Pils wrote: post #95
supernova87a wrote: post #28

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…

I believe this is wrong. Creator percentage isn't coded into the Ethereum-based NFT's themselves, it's done at the marketplace level. Currently, if you bought an NFT on Foundation and sold it on Opensea, there isn't a way to encode directly into the NFT a guarantee Foundation's royalty agreement would be followed. EIP-2981 is the draft protocol-level NFT royalty implementation, but you will note that it's opt-in and…

pardon my ignorance but how exactly does it force royalties to transfer? couldn't a owner just transfer the underlying etherum coin that is used for the NFT to another wallet address just like any other ethereum coin? and likewise exchange it in a new smart contract?

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

#189

Post by mirekrusin »

Pairing nfts with reality makes sense if ownership can be enforced by sole fact of having an ownership, ie:

1. for things that live in digital world (easy), or

2. weaker but probably acceptable in some cases - if physical good would be painted/printed on/made out of material containing ie. fingerprinted nanoparticles that match nft or has some unique chip that cannot be detached/duplicated – is as difficult to forge and as easy to verify as paper money

3. all ownership transfers would be verified by centralised (or whatever) system ie. government official confirming that digital and physical transfer happened correctly or ie. amazon/ebay would hold temporary custody of both digital/physical as intermediary in ownership transfer

…otherwise pairing with reality looks like “lets have this cryptographically secure thing and pretend that it means X” – if this “pretend” part can be removed or minimised to be close to zero, then it starts making more sense, without it it’s just nothing more than cargo cult like “let’s pretend” arrangement.

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

#190

Post by rcxdude »

klodolph wrote: post #176
crazygringo wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the NFT is supporting them directly, if they minted it. I personally think NFT's are silly, but there's zero argument to be made that they aren't supporting the artist. The artist minted them in the first place.

> The artist minted them in the first place. That's completely false. Anyone can mint an NFT. Artists have minted some of them, and other NFTs are created without the artists' permission. I don't get why people are saying this when it's so obviously false, like, it does not pass the smell test for basic credibility.

Are pirate NFTs selling for a significant price? Clearly people are making them without permission, but are people buying them? The high-profile mega-money examples for sure are being minted by the artists.
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