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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

#331

Post by Igelau »

doopy1 wrote: post #62

This whole rant assumes that people just buy NFTs to sell them to the next guy, but that's not the case. Some people buy NFTs to support artists (like Patreon) - others are gamified to represent something in a dapp, for example metaverse parcels are like domain names. And of course some just collect them for the flex. It's not really an MLM anyway you slice it.

Why wouldn't you just support an artist on Patreon? Or by actually buying something from them? What's the point of buying NFT instead? It's to sell to the next sucker before the bubble bursts. That's the only thing it does that other platforms don't already do better without having a blockchain involved.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#332

Post by meheleventyone »

Igelau wrote: post #326
meheleventyone wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Similarly all the crypto metaverse projects although they're not as mainstream suffer this problem. There's a reason Will Wright's new "NFT" game runs its own chain.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#334

Post by rbanffy »

ChrisKnott wrote: post #259
jimbob45 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they pull the plug? I was under the impression that it was done halfway on purpose.

It apparently malfunctioned. He posted a video on Instagram of it a few days later of practice run that fully shredded it with a caption saying something like "worked in rehearsal"

It’s interesting how the malfunction itself created a very unique work of art depicting a moment suspended in time.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#335

Post by Jyaif »

Doxin wrote: post #249
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…

You're both correct and underestimating how broken NFTs are. If you buy an NFT that gives you nothing except bragging rights that you "own" this NFT. What ownership actually means when devoid of the associated rights is anyones guess. Buying an NFT of a GIF doesn't stop anyone from using that GIF on reddit. No one is going around checking if posted GIFs have a matching NFT out there and enforcing property rights base…

I think you underestimate how important bragging rights are. That's the reason people purchase Rolex watches! And because you can't show off your Rolex watch in the online world, instead you'll use an NFT as a profil pic.

I think it's hard for people that don't care about bragging rights / status symbols to understand NFTs. Conversely, I think that status symbols are a very important part of the lives of the people that understand and advocate NFTs.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#337

Post by chinathrow »

highfrequency wrote: post #330
tdeck wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If you own an NFT, you have the ability to write someone else’s address on a socially recognized ledger of ownership

If that "socially recognized ledger of ownership" ceases to exist, then what?

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#338

Post by danShumway »

vokep wrote: post #228
danShumway wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> minting a new beanie-baby-NFT takes less effort than making an actual beanie baby. I'll add onto this that the core technology has no way of verifying which beanie baby NFT is "valid" outside of traditional centralized mechanisms like IP law and large validators. You can duplicate NFTs that point to the same beanie-baby-NFT link, are totally indistinguishable, that don't have any artwork that you own, and nobody ca…

Is this really a meaningful thing? I mean, of course it is somewhat in terms of how things are viewed. But, theres no religious law that NFTs must be a pure blockchain thing. Possibly they're finding their niche, and that is to be a sort of intermediate, which uses traditional systems as the origin of verification/trust, but can then go forward on its own with no further verification. (Of course, your wallet keys cou…

What does the addition of a blockchain help with here? Selling? Not really, because the recommendation to avoid copycat NFTs is to sell/buy them through official platforms that will verify them. Display? NFTs do nothing to prevent link rot, and in fact make it harder to correct when it does happen. Coordination/portability between platforms? There's nothing that guarantees that platforms will respect each other's NFTs.

> But, there's no religious law that NFTs must be a pure blockchain thing.

Every time someone tells me that verification and enforcement are inherently social/legal processes and not processes that the blockchain is designed to solve, I feel like they're just one step away from finally understanding why people don't like NFTs. The only value of adding all of this math and environmental impact and complication and fragility to the system of buying digital assets is if doing so decreases the social/legal burden of verification. And NFTs don't do that, they don't do anything. They don't even make the secondary market safe.

There are of course systems you could build on top of NFTs that would help solve some of these problems. But you could also build these systems without using NFTs. None of the proposals I've heard about enabling decentralized verification on the secondary market, or making it easier to pay artists, or building a web of trust for issuers -- none of those proposals need NFTs to exist before they can be built. The vast majority of these proposals don't require anything other than basic federation, and many don't even need that.

The blockchain part isn't adding anything, it's useless. We could have the exact same conversation we're having right now, and come up with all of the same solutions for verifying and distributing digital assets without ever needing to talk about or consider a blockchain. It's not adding anything, it's just kind of there.

And you're right, there's no strict law that everything must happen on the chain. So we could also just drop the chain entirely, use the same token issuance systems that have existed for ages, and focus only on solving the problems that actually need to be solved.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#339

Post by kwhitefoot »

system2 wrote: post #265
kwhitefoot wrote: post #160

I wish that HN would implement an automatic acronym and abbreviation expander! What is an MLM? Ah, multi-level marketing. A euphemism for a pyramid scheme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing .

I think MLM is as known as CEO or HDD. Or to anyone over 25 years old age with moderate news exposure.

In the US perhaps. And if you are a native US English speaker.

I'm well over 25, almost 66, and it meant nothing to me. I read a reasonable amount of news but not very much from the US (mostly UK and Norway).

In fact I think I would like to go further than my original comment and simply forbid abbreviations in titles.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#340

Post by WA »

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…

NFTs are not like baseball cards.

NFTs are a JSON string on a proprietary entity that point to the image of a baseball card. The image can be viewed by everyone. The bragging rights of owning a JSON string depend heavily on whether or not the proprietary entity will become the dominant player in the I own a JSON string-world.

This also has zero to do with blockchains. The proprietary entity could've used any database they wanted.

It's all a ridiculous scam, but have fun trading JSON strings.

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