This whole discussion here shows that NFT are really confusing. And this is the point. NFT is art - it makes you think.
NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
371–380 of 687 posts
Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but that may be nitpicking. The salient part is if it is a get rich quick scheme based on convincing people to join.
I know I'm a hopelessly naive hippy, but isn't there some option where we make our case by saying things that are true, rather than saying things that are untrue but alarming in the right direction? I feel like I personally would find online discourse much more helpful if we could do that.
Yes. Words matter, and accuracy is important. I'm still dirty on "literally" being rebranded to mean "figuratively".
Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
Beeple actually got paid, though, and (smartly) cashed it all out into fiat.
...and then returned it quietly to the person who had loaned it to him temporarily to elevate his brand?
Huh, I didn't know that. Geez, this is scammier than I thought, and it was already pretty scammy.
E: I looked around a bit and can't find any source for this, so I guess it's just a rumor?
Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
Either there remains interest and social consensus around this ledger, in which case it can be rebooted on a different network, for example, or even by a centralized party; or maybe you are the only one with an interest in your NFT collection, in which case you can keep a copy of the ledger yourself.
I'm not convinced. Art galleries are easy to launch, even in 500 years time. What you're describing is hard to do.
I can fork a centralized copy of a chain much more easily than I can start a gallery.
Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think you could argue that the 'upline' acrues value even if they aren't paid directly. Greater interest in an NFT drives the value up. right, but uplines getting paid in a necessary but not sufficient condition for MLM. In a MLM it's usually derived through their downlines. The mechanism described is a general benefit to all participants in the system which isn't very MLM-like. platforms (eg. youtube) tend to ha…
I think it has many of the characteristics of an MLM * value is accrued by getting new people involved who buy something * that they are buying in part because they believe they can make more value by selling it to someone new they recruit * non-salaried workforce * built on relationships and word of mouth In the end, its an analogy not a proof of work...
Those points also apply to a wholesaler of physical goods
Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people on here are aggressively expressing skepticism of NFTs while only giving simple easily refutable reasons. It seems like they're trying hard not to understand. That's what happens when people have cognitive dissonance. Perhaps they've spent their whole life building a slightly incorrect mental model of how society works and NFTs don't fit that model. It's easier to deny the value of NFTs than to change…
> giving simple easily refutable reasons I didn't vote you down, but I do think it would have been a better use of time to explain why NFTs are the future, rather than ad-hominem attacks on people who disagree with you. Please tell me why NFT are valuable and useful, with very concrete examples of utility. If you use the word "ownership" please explain in context what this means.
You know, there are people in the space who talk a lot about adding utility to NFTs. This may well work for tickets or whatever, but the kind of NFTs we talk about here don't benefit from utility; art doesn't benefit from utility.
I agree with the OP that a lot of people here seem unwilling to take a moment and think about this more deeply, and how NFTs might compare to existing ways of valuing things. To be fair, it does take some time to wrap your head around, and maybe an open mind.
People complaining about a lack of "real" ownership often seem to mean ownership as in owning the copyright, but note that during the piracy debates of 00s the tech world spent a lot of effort trying to convince the world that a copyright claim is fundamentally different than physical ownership. And so it is.
There is physical ownership over a digital file; and that is having physical access to the bits that make of that file.
NFTs work because of the realization that a significant part of the value of physical artworks has nothing to do with there physical form.
Now there remain a lot of open questions; for example, it may well be that the physical form is still somehow essential, even if a small part of the value. Yves Kleins Immaterial Zones don't seem to be trading a lot at Sothebys, as interesting as a concept they may be. People may well feel the value of hanging your Rothko in a home is a very important part of the experience, even if 99.9% of the value is simply provenance (which an NFT artificially creates for digital goods).
It's not very strange that people instinctively feel that NFTs are nonsense; but a lot of the arguments being made are entirely unengaged with the actual issues at play, and seemingly no interest in doing so.
Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
#377Earlier 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…
> If I understand correctly The funny thing about NFTs. The emperor has no clothes. Confusion is evidence of understanding -- there's that little substance. No Fscking Thing. > a note posted on a wall somewhere that said “You own Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe” It's basically a pointer. It's not hard to scrounge the sites that track the ETH blockchain, find where a NFT changed hands, and then find the URI for the full…
Does the GIF reside on the blockchain or is it hosted on whatever webserver? What if the webserver is shutdown? Now you "own" a pointer to nothing?
Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
#378There’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…
> There’s a lot of confusion here about why NFTs are valuable if the buyer doesn’t get to own the image copyright.
Mostly because of two persistent lies around NFTs: 1) That you buy a piece of artwork. 2) Blockchain makes it automatically watertight.
All you get is transfer rights of a single number via a blockchain, optionally (usually) with a URI pointing to some media.
Now, why is owning blockchain transfer rights to that number valuable? Because an artist was involved in creating it, and they stated somewhere that the number refers to a specific artwork.
Outside the blockchain, more things have to be trusted for this to hold up:
- The artist in question must be the seller. Sure, you bought it from "banksy44" on nftgox.com, but is that the artist? There are soft ways to verify it, and you can get all sorts of receipts, promises, or statements from semi-official authorities.
- Whatever links the number or the URI to the artwork must remain up. If it's on a regular URL, the host owner gets to decide when to delete it, or when to replace it an ad for their gambling site. If a IPFS resource goes dead, it's gone. If the number referring to the artwork is stored on a 3rd party ledger you rely on them being honest, online, and correct.
AND NOW you have two weaker links in your trust chain, on the level of "humans trusting humans", rendering the blockchain basically useless. The premise is a lie, intentional or not.
Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 databas…
Surely the baseball card’s value does not come from the fact that you can hold a piece of cardboard in your hand. Whether the data representation is a piece of cardboard or a JSON string replicated on 10,000 Ethereum nodes or a tulip or a Venmo balance is arbitrary; it just matters whether a lot of humans are looking at the same thing. And for the time being, a lot of humans are looking at crypto ledgers!
> Surely the baseball card’s value does not come from the fact that you can hold a piece of cardboard in your hand.
That is definitely part of it. We are physical beings, you can't pretend like physical existence is irrelevant.
Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 databa…
> central authority of authenticity
But authenticity of what exactly?
If everyone agrees that, for example, a particular distributed ledger provides authenticity of some class of artwork, that is fine. But soon the real world happens eg. a court in one country orders the art to be seized and handed over to a third party , but they don't have the ability to force the NFT to be transferred because the former-owner is in a different country. Would the art world suddenly pretend that the artwork is not real because the current owner does not have the NFT? We are back to square one.