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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

#171

Post by devoutsalsa »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #14
SrslyJosh wrote: post #3

This would have been more interesting if the author had traced where all the money being plowed into NFTs is coming from. I suspect that most of it does not come from outside of the current ETH (or whatever) ecosystem. I'd bet that most of the volume comes from people who are either treating it as play money, or trying to pump the NFT scam for their own benefit (real or imagined).

> This would have been more interesting if the author had traced where all the money being plowed into NFTs is coming from. Not possible to trace where the money is coming from. In fact, someone can "sell" an NFT to themself in a wash trade between two wallets they control. The last trade price of the NFT is now recorded as the transaction price, but it's possible that money never actually changed hands. Want to have…

Are there mining fees to pay when you do that? I'm not up to speed on selling NFTs.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#172

Post by neuralzen »

larsiusprime wrote: post #165
neuralzen wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 real…

"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."

So like bitcoin? - The value is in what someone believes it is worth to be provably in control of a given asset. It also provides a great deal of social currency...certain NFT owners have identity wrapped up in them such that owning it extends social latitudes, as the reputational harm which could be done for being a ingeniousness actor far outweighs making a quick buck.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#173

Post by detaro »

darthvoldemort wrote: post #164
detaro wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ass…

You talked about selling prints above...

Many NFT platforms attach legal terms that explicitly allow you to print or otherwise display the media for NFTs you own, artists generally grant permission for it or consider it a social convention that it is allowed.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#174

Post by duskwuff »

neuralzen wrote: post #131

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…

> They can and do manage commercial and IP rights, artist royalties [...] and assure the authenticity and provenance

They literally do nothing of the sort. An NFT has no capability to restrict or monetize the usage of the work it is linked to, nor does its existence prove anything about the origin or authenticity of the work it is attached to. These are myths with no basis in fact.

By way of example -- I could, if I wished to, create a NFT associated with a public-domain photograph of the Mona Lisa, and assign that NFT to myself. This doesn't give me any capability to manage rights to that image, nor should it assure anyone that I painted it.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#175

Post by marvinkennis »

devoutsalsa wrote: post #171
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This would have been more interesting if the author had traced where all the money being plowed into NFTs is coming from. Not possible to trace where the money is coming from. In fact, someone can "sell" an NFT to themself in a wash trade between two wallets they control. The last trade price of the NFT is now recorded as the transaction price, but it's possible that money never actually changed hands. Want to have…

Are there mining fees to pay when you do that? I'm not up to speed on selling NFTs.

Yes, if you trade it on a marketplace such as OpenSea. You could argue that the benefits and upside of wash trading outweigh the cost (about $10 per tx).

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#176

Post by scoopertrooper »

tshaddox wrote: post #106
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's kind of like saying there could be an infinite number of paintings, so why should Picassos be worth very much? We could mint an infinite number of Picasso NFTs, though. None of them are the actual piece of art. You could argue that one particular NFT is the official Picasso NFT because it was sold by the owners of the Picasso painting, but it’s still just a fancy hyperlink to a page that says “This is a Picass…

> You could argue that one particular NFT is the official Picasso NFT because it was sold by the owners of the Picasso painting I’m pretty sure the analogy would be that Picasso himself actually issued the NFT. Anyone can “argue” that Picasso issued an NFT, but that’s just like arguing that your extremely skillful forgery is a Picasso original. What’s important is if it actually is an original.

With an NFT everyone has access to the exact same byte-for-byte copy of the art work, but one person gets to hold a special token saying that they have some special pseudo-ownership relation to it.

So, a more apt analogy would be Picasso donating a painting to a museum, but trying to sell you a certificate saying that you own the artwork, but you're unable to move it to your private collection or gain any additional access than the general public.

That seems like a pretty raw deal to me.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#177

Post by 0xB31B1B »

neuralzen wrote: post #161
0xB31B1B wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That there are real visionaries in NFTs does not change the fact that the zeitgeist of the community is centered in the shitNFTs, not in the visionaries, nor does it change the fact that for the huge majority of participants the phrase “I love the art and the community” is largely a lie and a basis for a pump and dump.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#178

Post by mleonhard »

iAm25626 wrote: post #33

Car/bag/cloth/jewelry/art - these type of things are sometime considered status symbol. It help people convey certain “message” to other. NFT might could be the same in the ever more virtual world. I might not be be the target audience; but it does not meant that it hold no value to other. People spent lots of money on game skins, rare weapon. So there is a market. When one goes to a physical conference: flair/badges…

The term for this is "Veblen good" [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#179

Post by eh9 »

root_axis wrote: post #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.

Hasn’t Banksy setup a whole pipeline to do just that?

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#180

Post by Buttons840 »

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…

If I have a NFT concert ticket, how do I get into the concert? What do the people at the gates do to determine that I may enter?

Do I print a piece of paper? Do I show them a picture on my phone or something? Can't the previous owners of the NFT show the same picture? Can't anyone show the same picture on their own phone?

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