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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

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of which in any way responds to what I said. NFTs, by design, have no fraud prevention mechanism and no mechanism for getting your money back if you were scammed. They allow for arbitrarily many tokens to be minted of the same thing, with no obvious mechanism for people to realize that's what's happening.

Smart contracts can and do limit the amount which can be minted. And fraud exists everywhere, regardless of institutional controls - this is where community matters.

Funny how community came up in the article as one of the ways NFT is really just MLM...

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of which in any way responds to what I said. NFTs, by design, have no fraud prevention mechanism and no mechanism for getting your money back if you were scammed. They allow for arbitrarily many tokens to be minted of the same thing, with no obvious mechanism for people to realize that's what's happening.

Smart contracts can and do limit the amount which can be minted. And fraud exists everywhere, regardless of institutional controls - this is where community matters.

But you can just make a new smart contract that does the same thing, no? Smart contracts themselves can just be copied.

And saying that the "community" will take care of the fraud issue - isn't this a step backwards?

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#303
Strange that no one mentions Algorand in this context. There are several NFT marketplaces on Algorand and the fees for transactions are less than a penny. It costs around 20-40 cents (depending on ALGO price) to fund the escrow for a sale or auction on our site. Transactions complete within about 5 seconds, with confirmation within around 15-20 seconds. https://gifeconomy.com if you are interested. You can also exchange ALGO easily on places like Coinbase. And if you search you will find multiple other NFT sites using ALGOs.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#304
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would this matter? Would still have "legit" logo like the authentic one.

It wouldn't matter if you're intention is to fool the gullible or uninformed.

The Twitter verification is for status, if the status also requires the person seeing the profile has to find the contract existing with the profile NFT and then exhaustively find out if there is an “original” then the whole verification process isn’t fit for purpose.

Basically everyone ends up ill informed.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#305
post #50
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gai…

The point is that the application owner does not become a central authority of authenticity though, the blockchain does. The application owner is just one of many acknowledging authenticity.

Many different applications can build on top of this open authenticity verification. This decentralised layer for authenticity verification is much more powerful than a single application builder can achieve with their own database. The concept itself is very powerful for interoperability but some of the valuations of assets currently feel ludicrous.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#306

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.

The guy who came up with the idea and has been paying me for the last few months to build our NFT auction site is a musician trained at the New England Conservatory, working doing performances in a band and as a music teacher, paying out of his savings, and he definitely cares about artists since he is one. Also these systems do use public/private keypairs and signatures (Algorand). https://gifeconomy.com

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#307

Ok, let's see if I'm following the discussion right. let's say you buy an NFT for using a GIF of the Techno Viking, from the Viking himself, and Reddit verifies it. Now you are the only person on Reddit that can have a Techno Viking GIF signature, yippee! Except I can make a new NFT of the same GIF and nothing in the NFT itself betrays that it wasn't issued by the real Techno Viking, so it's up to him, Reddit and you…

> nothing in the NFT itself betrays that it wasn't issued by the real Techno Viking

This part is incorrect. Every token is signed can be verified against the content creator's public key. You can absolutely verify a "genuine" NFT.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#308
post #307

Ok, let's see if I'm following the discussion right. let's say you buy an NFT for using a GIF of the Techno Viking, from the Viking himself, and Reddit verifies it. Now you are the only person on Reddit that can have a Techno Viking GIF signature, yippee! Except I can make a new NFT of the same GIF and nothing in the NFT itself betrays that it wasn't issued by the real Techno Viking, so it's up to him, Reddit and you…

> nothing in the NFT itself betrays that it wasn't issued by the real Techno Viking This part is incorrect. Every token is signed can be verified against the content creator's public key. You can absolutely verify a "genuine" NFT.

You have to first know which public key is genuine.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#309

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

Can you sign that NFT with the creator's private key?

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You might enjoy this project that got a lot of excitement behind it. https://www.lootproject.com/

Serious: is this a joke?
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