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NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

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161–170 of 687 posts

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#161

As someone who was early in both crypto and NFTs, I really don't get the hate from the crypto community especially. They are a powerful tool for artists and creators to manage their works, especially digital artists who could never control their art before. They can and do manage commercial and IP rights, artist royalties, help self-organize DAOs and other efforts, and assure the authenticity and provenance with a ca…

The hate is because the realized instantiation of the supposed value creates a bunch of collections of four thousand images of a rabbit or something stupid. The NFT community is largely a bunch of people hyping up crappy animal picture collections on twitter as the next big thing. The attraction to the medium is not through aesthetics or craft, but through FOMO.

I agree there are issues, but the same was (and still is) true in crypto - shitcoins and shitNFTs. That doesn't mean there aren't valuable use cases, or real artistic value and utility in some NFTs, and it doesn't mean there aren't real visionaries building things with authenticity and heart behind them.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#162
post #65

For me nfts provide an easier way for me to support digital artists I love that I've been following for a while. I don't really like the collectable scarcity kind of thing, but I like building a collection and having an easy way to explore and find art and artists. Also a lot of these websites are providing this art at higher resolutions and quality than social media would allow for (IPFS) and without direct hosting.…

What makes NFTs easier than sending them cash on paypal for a commission, backing their patreon, or using a service like Skeb?

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#163

I summed up all my complaints about NFT's in this (short) article: https://www.fortressofdoors.com/the-degraded-blockchain-prob... > In short, the minute you connect your blockchain to an app frontend you now have a degraded blockchain, one that cannot even in principle guarantee immutability, trustlessness, and decentralization – at least not for assets that the app's customers actually care about. Scratch the surfa…

This isn't true - sure there are projects that use IPFS to host token assets too big to store on-chain (3d assets, photos, etc.), but those assets can be assured to be perfectly correlated with their hashes. Not to mention many projects are fully on-chain, like CryptoPunks and AutoGlyphs.

Yeah this is one of the reasons I love hicetnunc and am suspicious of most of the NFTs hyped on Ethereum, so many that I checked are hosted on some random host, I even saw a very $$$ one hosted on heroku...

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#164
post #114

If you buy an NFT for a piece of art, you can't even sell prints of the piece of art. You can't take a pic of it and sell a t-shirt of the art. You own nothing associated with that piece of art, except for the NFT itself. It's such a strange, strange concept to want to invest in. What if they create a new NFT blockchain standard. Does the previous NFT become invalid? Is there anything contractual saying you can't hav…

If you bought let's say a signed physical print of the piece of art you can't do that either. Even if you own an original painting you can't do that unless you explicitly got granted permission. So why expect it from NFTs?

Because when I buy a piece of art, I can hang it on my wall and look at it.

If I buy an NFT, it doesn't give me the right to print a picture of the art and hang it on the wall. I have no rights to display the picture of which I own the NFT. All I can say is that I own the NFT of that piece of art.

So, I can hang the hex code of the NFT on my wall and look at that I suppose. But the actual piece of artwork that is associated with that NFT? I can't even display it on a digital display in my house, because that's copyright violation.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#165

I summed up all my complaints about NFT's in this (short) article: https://www.fortressofdoors.com/the-degraded-blockchain-prob... > In short, the minute you connect your blockchain to an app frontend you now have a degraded blockchain, one that cannot even in principle guarantee immutability, trustlessness, and decentralization – at least not for assets that the app's customers actually care about. Scratch the surfa…

This isn't true - sure there are projects that use IPFS to host token assets too big to store on-chain (3d assets, photos, etc.), but those assets can be assured to be perfectly correlated with their hashes. Not to mention many projects are fully on-chain, like CryptoPunks and AutoGlyphs.

Ah, so in some cases you’re able to stuff an entire JPEG into the blockchain itself, I’ll grant that. In which case we move on to all the other problems. But For NFTs that are meant to be used in applications, I think my argument still holds.

For fully disembodied NFTs where you just stuff a jpeg or it’s hash into a blockchain, my other complaint is that you’re just creating a speculative instrument that doesn’t really do anything except hope someone else will pay more for it. And I still have to rely on trust outside the blockchain that the artist approved these NFTs in the first place (there are many done with unauthorized art)

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except twitter profile pictures now right? Verified NFTs are in the pipeline. https://twitter.com/af_mada/status/1443243702156206089?s=20

How? Your Twitter profile picture is an image. What stops me from saving your profile and setting mine to the same thing? Are you suggesting Twitter validates that a Twitter account owns an NFT and shows a check/badge/whatever? I also don't think that works. Whatever rare NFT you have I can go make a visually identical NFT for and confirm that I own that NFT. I often think that I must be missing something about NFTs…

> Whatever rare NFT you have I can go make a visually identical NFT for and confirm that I own that NFT.

Yes but your NFT would be deployed on a copycat (ie. replica, inauthentic) smart contract.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#167
post #111

If you buy an NFT for a piece of art, you can't even sell prints of the piece of art. You can't take a pic of it and sell a t-shirt of the art. You own nothing associated with that piece of art, except for the NFT itself. It's such a strange, strange concept to want to invest in. What if they create a new NFT blockchain standard. Does the previous NFT become invalid? Is there anything contractual saying you can't hav…

If you buy a Babe Ruth baseball card you aren't buying the rights to Babe Ruth. It's the card itself which is valuable, as a product of the context it was issued in. I don't know why that part, as it translates to NFTs, is so difficult for people to understand.

Because I can look at the baseball card. I can display the card as well.

If you want to print out an NFT display that, go ahead but it's pretty meaningless.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except twitter profile pictures now right? Verified NFTs are in the pipeline. https://twitter.com/af_mada/status/1443243702156206089?s=20

How? Your Twitter profile picture is an image. What stops me from saving your profile and setting mine to the same thing? Are you suggesting Twitter validates that a Twitter account owns an NFT and shows a check/badge/whatever? I also don't think that works. Whatever rare NFT you have I can go make a visually identical NFT for and confirm that I own that NFT. I often think that I must be missing something about NFTs…

Twitter is building exactly that apparently, you would get an ethereum checkmark next to your profile pic if that image is verified.

There is definitely discussion happening on exactly your point, but i imagine there are options to combat the fake NFTs given that you can't fake a signature from a known public key.

Given that there are so many NFT projects I speculate that the twitter verification will only happen for a small subset though.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#170
All of this gushing hype for the future of artistry is transparently performative. Nobody in this tech cares about art or artists, any of the useful functions of NFTs have long been possible and many orders of magnitude less expensive using public key cryptography or digital signatures.
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