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Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

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Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#221

I would describe myself, usually, as not a jealous man. I don't recollect the last time I've felt jealousy. But, something about NFTs provokes anger within me. Maybe that anger is jealously. It feels like NFTs are a mockery of the "market" for lack of a better word. When I think of what I would need to sell (items or time doing labor) to get these amounts and how incredibly useless NFTs actually are... It's frustrati…

I recently heard someone say "I'm not stupid enough to make money in this market", and I think it rings very true. With the short squeeze speculation on stocks, the crypto run+crash and NFT's. The market is a very confusing place nowadays. You'd have to be bonkers to invest in these things on paper, but yet, lot's of people are making bank from it every day (and vice versa). NFT is probably the most confusing of the…

What do you think of something like Veefriends where there is a real world value attached to it (tickets to a conference)?

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’ve ever played poker where you’re the only serious player at the table and everyone else is very loose you’ll know it’s almost impossible to win. By taking lots of risky bets the other players aren’t doing any favours for themselves personally but as a group they’re (unintentionally) teaming up to guarantee one of their number will have an unassailably large stack. That’s much how I feel about the current inve…

Anecdotes aside, I wonder if this is really true. I wonder if it has been tested. Poker bots are strong enough that it should be testable. Is there really a scenario in which a stronger bot reliably loses to a group of weaker bots?

I’m not bot-level strength of course but yes, this would be interesting to model/test!

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently heard someone say "I'm not stupid enough to make money in this market", and I think it rings very true. With the short squeeze speculation on stocks, the crypto run+crash and NFT's. The market is a very confusing place nowadays. You'd have to be bonkers to invest in these things on paper, but yet, lot's of people are making bank from it every day (and vice versa). NFT is probably the most confusing of the…

If you’ve ever played poker where you’re the only serious player at the table and everyone else is very loose you’ll know it’s almost impossible to win. By taking lots of risky bets the other players aren’t doing any favours for themselves personally but as a group they’re (unintentionally) teaming up to guarantee one of their number will have an unassailably large stack. That’s much how I feel about the current inve…

I don’t follow; can’t you play conservatively until you have a great hand and bet accordingly? If the other players are loose, they’ll call with anything.

If they observe you are doing this and don’t play so loose against you, then I would take issue with the claim that they are not playing seriously.

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

William Shatner is working with a startup that actually has a legal framework around NFTs, where the NFT denotes ownership of a collectible in a vault. You can trade the NFT around but the current owner can redeem it and take delivery of the physical item. It's similar to what's been done in the high-end art world for years. People who buy a $50M painting don't usually hang it on their walls, they just leave it in a…

>You can trade the NFT around but the current owner can redeem it and take delivery of the physical item. What happens if someone buys my NFT but I refuse to deliver the physical item? It seems we need to pull in the legacy legal system to enforce the transfer, at which point I wonder what value the blockchain added in the first place.

You don't hold the item. It's held in a vault by one of various professional vault providers with contractual obligations. If you want the physical item you turn over the NFT and it's destroyed.

Blockchains can be useful without totally replacing the legal system. Just making things a little better and more efficient is fine. In this case, it lets people easily trade collectibles without all the hassle of shipping physical items.

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#226

When someone bought this NFT (or in general), did someone sign a contract with you saying they transferred ownership in the intellectual property the NFT "represented"? (Ie, was at the other end of the URL, I guess?) Cause the NFT itself means nothing to courts or laws, does it? If someone owns the copyright in that video, they can send YouTube takedown notices. But what, if anything, makes NFT proof of ownership of…

This was kind of my question too. I am still yet to properly understand what the point in owning an NFT tied to a piece of digital art is. Traditionally owning art is meaningful because you get to display it in your home/office etc. The artwork is intrinsically valuable as a unique material object. Digital art, on the other hand, can be duplicated easily so there is nothing you can point to and say "this is the origi…

Art doesn't have any natural utility. No one is spending millions on a Picasso because they get millions of dollars of value out of looking at it.

Expensive art is just as much a vanity plate as NFTs are.

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#227

I seriously doubt that the high-end NFT economy is sustainable in the long term. The people who are buying these are just burning money.

I'm curious what will happen when an NFT for the same piece of art gets sold on multiple blockchains. Now you can "own" a "Charlie Bit My Finger" NFT on Ethereum and someone else owns it on the FooBar blockchain. Which one is "authentic"? Blockchain doesn't help you here - you're going to have to go to court to prove you own the "authentic" one or sue the artist for selling 2 copies instead of one.

How is that different from reality?

You might buy a piece of artwork from famous artist X, but society and the market decide that art by Y is also valuable.

You might buy a painting because we all agree that paintings are valuable. But what's to stop framed original poetry, or sculptures, or photographs, becoming more valued and supplanting paintings as the preferred form of desirable art.

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#228

I would describe myself, usually, as not a jealous man. I don't recollect the last time I've felt jealousy. But, something about NFTs provokes anger within me. Maybe that anger is jealously. It feels like NFTs are a mockery of the "market" for lack of a better word. When I think of what I would need to sell (items or time doing labor) to get these amounts and how incredibly useless NFTs actually are... It's frustrati…

That's because you're not seeing what they are.

Imagine buying a painting for a million dollars. Or a hand crafted watch. The markets for these talk a whole lot about the intrinsic value, the workmanship, the creativity. And people do love them for those things, but that's not why they pay so much for them.

Imagine being able to park a retirement fund into something that fits in your pocket. You can't even do that with gold bricks. But you can do that with watches.

It's just a way to store a very large amount of money in something you can take with you anywhere in the world without anyone noticing. NFTs are even smaller than a watch. They're just the new version of the art dealing hustle that has been going on for centuries.

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#229

I would describe myself, usually, as not a jealous man. I don't recollect the last time I've felt jealousy. But, something about NFTs provokes anger within me. Maybe that anger is jealously. It feels like NFTs are a mockery of the "market" for lack of a better word. When I think of what I would need to sell (items or time doing labor) to get these amounts and how incredibly useless NFTs actually are... It's frustrati…

I recently heard someone say "I'm not stupid enough to make money in this market", and I think it rings very true. With the short squeeze speculation on stocks, the crypto run+crash and NFT's. The market is a very confusing place nowadays. You'd have to be bonkers to invest in these things on paper, but yet, lot's of people are making bank from it every day (and vice versa). NFT is probably the most confusing of the…

Money laundering. That's what most of it is. It's confusing because the story they tell you about why they want them is not why they want them. Just like art dealing and expensive watches, the market must be propped up by this story about creativity and workmanship and aesthetic value and intrinsic value, but what it really is is the ability to park a lot of money in something that is easy to move around.

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right - seeing so much money thrown around with so little backing/reason/substance doesn't really motivate you to go back to your life and put in a full workweek in exchange for whatever your salary is.

There seem to be 2 economies: There's the 1% (0.1%?) economy where there is a lack of productive places to "put" money that might generate a return so people are buying up any shiny, new thing that comes along. Then there's the 99% economy where people need to buy food/clothing/shelter and money is getting increasingly tight. It's almost as if transferring some of the (marginally useless) money from the 1% to the 99%…

Your model for 1% should be “professional couple that owns a pretty good home in an expensive city” not “casually drops multiple hundreds of thousands on nonsense.” That’s like Saudi prince level wealth.
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