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NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

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Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#41

Post by toomanydoubts »

taylorfinley wrote: post #24
ryan93 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have to dig in to understand there is a distributed ledger saying you “own” a jpeg

This is exactly the sort of shallow understanding I mean to point at. NFTs are so much more than "owning jpegs." This is the same mistake as saying "owning bitcoin is just owning a cell in a spreadsheet." Can I have the title to your car? After all, it's just a piece of paper. NFTs are access tokens to social communities, where owning a particular token grants you access to a community that shares ownership. Collab.L…

Why would you put a concert ticket on a distributed ledger if there's only a single party who can honor this ticket? There's a company who issued the ticket, and it's the same one that will either let you in or not at the date and time the concert is supposed to happen. Why would they put it in a distributed ledger instead of a database managed by themselves?

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#42

Post by chipotle_coyote »

teruakohatu wrote: post #15
shiftpgdn wrote: post #5

eyeroll I won’t deny that there are tons of NFT projects that are nothing more than modern day tulip mania. On the other hand there is an entirely new world of opportunity that has never existed before for both common people, artists and corporations in the form of DeFi projects. Basically any distributed form of ownership you can imagine is now possible through NFT and DAOs. There has never been a better time to lea…

> there is an entirely new world of opportunity ... any distributed form of ownership That is what people say, but what I don't understand is what ownership is actually conferred with NFTs. The only "ownership" is the ability to transfer the NFT to another person, which simply gives them the ability to transfer it to another person (which sounds a bit MLMy). For ownership to be worth more than that, you need a legal…

> For ownership to be worth more than that, you need a legal system and a legal contract ... so back to square one.

That's the part about NFTs that I keep getting hung up on, yes. I get the abstract notion of creating artificial scarcity for digital goods, and how that could have market value. But we've seen absurd things like "use this service to create an NFT for any individual tweet," with no verification that the NFT is being created by anyone who has any legally-recognized right to the tweet's content. If an artist tweets out an image of a new art piece of theirs and I mint an NFT from the tweet, what exactly do I have "ownership" of? I sure don't have any rights to the artwork. I don't even have any rights to the tweet text, which is implicitly copyrighted by its author.

And it's that sort of foofery, more than anything else, which makes me more inclined to be skeptical. Obviously there are NFTs created by legitimate copyright holders who can legally transfer ownership or other rights to you, but the legal recognition of the ownership doesn't seem to have anything to do with the inclusion of the NFT in the transaction -- the NFT itself can't verify that it was minted by someone who had the necessary legal rights to assign ownership of the thing the token represents.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#43

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

stickfigure wrote: post #31
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Scarcity is fundamental to any store of value. There are an infinite number of potential NFTs. I'm a pretty big crypto-skeptic, and I'm especially an NFT skeptic, but this is a weird argument. It's kind of like saying there could be an infinite number of paintings, so why should Picassos be worth very much? Even more, it's possible to create extremely high quality reproductions of famous Picasso paintings, but they…

Scarcity is necessary but not sufficient. What sets BTC apart from NTFs is its fungibility. In theory, there are an infinite number of potential cryptocurrencies, sure. But everyone has already embraced bitcoin (and a small handful of others), and replacing that userbase is an incredibly tall hurdle. On the other hand, minting a new beanie-baby-NFT takes less effort than making an actual beanie baby.

I think you're missing the purpose of NFTs. Again, I think the best analogy is really the art market.

Most art in the art market is pretty worthless (at least monetarily) - just go to one of a bajillion garage sales to see why. But a few pieces of art will be worth a lot because something about them is desirable.

It's the same with NFTs. There will be a bajillion "beanie-baby-NFTs" that will be close to worthless. And then there will be a few of the "Charlie Bit My Finger" variety that people actually have desire to uniquely "own".

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#44

Post by arthurcolle »

stickfigure wrote: post #2

> The venn diagram of NFT haters are almost exact matches of Crypto haters Nonsense. I'm pro-crypto but think NFTs are absolutely idiotic. Scarcity is fundamental to any store of value. There are an infinite number of potential NFTs.

Yeah, agreed. Seems like someone is interested in painting a picture, despite any threats to their potentially incomplete image of reality

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#46

Post by doublerebel »

stickfigure wrote: post #38
agravier wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with paintings, etc. So yeah it's a wonky argument because it ignores subjective judgement

You can hang a painting on your wall and flaunt it. Nobody looks at the bits on your hard disk.

Many NFTs either come with or are designed for a physical representation. 100s or 1000s are already installed and viewable IRL. Being an NFT does not preclude the art from being traditionally enjoyed.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#47

Post by p1necone »

devetec wrote: post #35
RNCTX wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is framed as the ultimate crypto use case, because crypto doesn't have a use case. No one needs money capped at 8 transactions per second world-wide, which costs ever-increasing amounts of electricity to trade. All of these things end up being an exercise in cryptocurrency people in a round-about way proclaiming to the world that they don't know what a thing is. For example: NFTs are a great idea to people…

You do realize there are blockchains that don't suffer from just... not working? like PoS fixes the electricity issue, and there are many solutions to making transactions much cheaper, quicker, and having more bandwidth.

Sure but a large portion of the current crypto market cap is in currencies that do have these issues, and I'm not sure how to explain that other than by assuming that that value is probably mostly speculation and not actual usefulness.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#48

Post by rattlesnakedave »

stickfigure wrote: post #2

> The venn diagram of NFT haters are almost exact matches of Crypto haters Nonsense. I'm pro-crypto but think NFTs are absolutely idiotic. Scarcity is fundamental to any store of value. There are an infinite number of potential NFTs.

I’m also pro crypto, and this is a silly argument.

Consider this statement: Scarcity is fundamental to any store of value. There are an infinite number of potential cryptocurrencies.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#50

Post by polemic »

seibelj wrote: post #29
teruakohatu wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is an entirely new world of opportunity ... any distributed form of ownership That is what people say, but what I don't understand is what ownership is actually conferred with NFTs. The only "ownership" is the ability to transfer the NFT to another person, which simply gives them the ability to transfer it to another person (which sounds a bit MLMy). For ownership to be worth more than that, you need a legal…

If an application (videogame, social network, website, etc.) gives the holder of the NFT special rights, then that is the utility of the NFT. It does not matter about legal ownership of a graphic.

But this is the wrong abstraction.

The application becomes the central authority for some arbitrary token. Yes, in theory they could use "an NFT" to represent a key to some in-application capability but at best the owner of the NFT has an exclusive right to that capability at the whim of the application owner. The NFT owner can't really claim to own any real "thing" in and of it's own right.

The application owner gains very little – they could just implement a Plan Old Database within their system.

The owner of the "NFT" gains very little – except the theoretical value of a token they could trade, and might have value, as long as it's backed with some capability provided by the application.

None of this applies to things like "a gif on the internet", for which the NFT means exactly nothing if you have no enforceable rights.

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