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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

#321

Post by Igelau »

ALittleLight wrote: post #137
darcys22 wrote: post #87

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…

> I often think that I must be missing something about NFTs because they seem breathtakingly stupid.

That's exactly how you know you've got it. The difference is that you didn't feel the heat of FOMO convincing you to dive in without an understanding.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#322

Post by justincormack »

klodolph wrote: post #291
jljljl wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Marilyn Monroes are still limited by the number that Warhol prints, and you have ownership of the print that you bought. Maybe it’s not as valuable as it would be if there was only 1 Monroe print, but you are paying for a physical object made by Warhol. If I understand correctly, an NFT is like if someone, not necessarily Warhol himself, sold you a note posted on a wall somewhere that said “You own Andy Warhol’s…

Warhol mass-produced his prints using silk-screen, and verifying them as authentic is damn near impossible. The real ones may be limited, but he made a lot of them (you can really churn out artwork with silkscreening), and it’s hard to know which ones are the real ones.

They are also much cheaper than a lot of NFTs eg a late one for $18k https://www.artsy.net/artwork/andy-warhol-marilyn-announceme...

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#323

Post by ido »

highfrequency wrote: post #311

There’s a lot of confusion here about why NFTs are valuable if the buyer doesn’t get to own the image copyright. This should not feel mysterious - NFTs are just like baseball cards. If you buy a Barry Bonds baseball card for $1,000, you don’t own the artistic rights to the image on the card. All you own is the card itself, which has negligible manufacturing cost. It would be trivial for any card company to produce a…

If not for the energy costs NFTs would be just like you describe above - a somewhat pointless but harmless hobby for enthusiasts (what good does speculating on baseball cards do in the world? What good does speculating on art do for that matter? As far as I can tell "little to none" for both of these).

Unfortunately that's not the case.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#324

Post by spoonjim »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #210
spoonjim wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that’s exactly what the scarcity value of a Vermeer is (which is 99% of the value). People can make infinite numbers of copies. NFTs just kind of lay that bare. It’s almost like the concept itself a performance art. “Can we cleave off the scarcity from the art/history/je ne sais quoi that fuels the hoarding of other scarce artifacts, and just sell that disembodied scarcity in a marketplace?”

You seem to have missed the fundamental truth that NFTs are not scarce. With the example of a Vermeer, you create one original thing, and then imitations of that thing. Minting multiple NFTs of the same thing is creating more originals, but of the same thing. One is not somehow "more original" than the others. This is a difficult concept for people to get their heads around because of the obvious but incorrect parall…

Yes - NFTs are not scarce, but the only property of an NFT is scarcity! It's like something Marcel Duchamp Salvador Dali would have thought up. It's exclusivity without having to drag yourself out of bed and get to an exclusive nightclub.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#325

Post by paxys »

enlyth wrote: post #320
paxys wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Yes, you can sign it with your own private key because you are now the "creator". That's the point of digital assets, they are fungible by definition because it's a bunch of 1s and 0s, doesn't matter which system you run it on you will get an indistinguishable output.

Yet two fully bit-by-bit identical digital assets can have very different social and monetary value based on who stamped their name on it.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#326

Post by Igelau »

meheleventyone wrote: post #296
mathdroid wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean everyone can verify the ownership too since it's on the public blockchain?

Right but who verifies that the particular NFT is the original one that has all the feel good magic and not a copy someone else minted?

It's almost like Twitter is doing a great public service by building exactly what's needed to show that this is, in fact, bullshit.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#327

Post by deepsun »

flarg wrote: post #277
jljljl wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Marilyn Monroes are still limited by the number that Warhol prints, and you have ownership of the print that you bought. Maybe it’s not as valuable as it would be if there was only 1 Monroe print, but you are paying for a physical object made by Warhol. If I understand correctly, an NFT is like if someone, not necessarily Warhol himself, sold you a note posted on a wall somewhere that said “You own Andy Warhol’s…

Yeah, but what else can you do with digital art? Buy the PC it's sitting on and only share it via webcam of the screen?

The same as with any other intellectual property (books, movies, songs): buy the legally enforceable copyright. As in "right" and "copy".

PS: I'm immensely interested in the process of creating a digital image. It's actually pretty tricky and technical, to apply all those filters in right order and with right settings. I would buy a recording of how the digital art was created.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#328

Post by scoopertrooper »

tshaddox wrote: post #290
scoopertrooper wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your argument is about digital art, and has little to do with NFTs. No one is claiming that the owner of an NFT has different access to the piece of digital art itself, of course.

Then, what is the value of the NFT? You own the rights to a hyperlink?

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#329

Post by ravel-bar-foo »

paxys wrote: post #307
t_akosuke wrote: post #242

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.

So, are artists suddenly getting in on pgp key-signing parties to establish a web of trust, or is the public key of the artist really just a key claiming to be that of the artist? What is to stop me from buying "bank.se", "banksy.me" and "banksy.io," and actioning off three different NFTs (of three different digital representations of the same street art) to different online art communities? What is to stop someone who MITM's the artist's webpage from selling NFTs on their behalf?

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#330

Post by highfrequency »

tdeck wrote: post #316
highfrequency wrote: post #311

There’s a lot of confusion here about why NFTs are valuable if the buyer doesn’t get to own the image copyright. This should not feel mysterious - NFTs are just like baseball cards. If you buy a Barry Bonds baseball card for $1,000, you don’t own the artistic rights to the image on the card. All you own is the card itself, which has negligible manufacturing cost. It would be trivial for any card company to produce a…

When you have a baseball card, the first sale doctrine means that you at least have the legal right to display and transfer that card. With NFTs, even that is not necessarily the case because displaying the content of the NFT is making a copy, and you may not have a license to do that.

If you own an NFT, you have the ability to write someone else’s address on a socially recognized ledger of ownership. That is all that matters. If the NFT and the ledger have wide interest, this ability to transfer ownership has value regardless of any legal subtleties.
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