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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

#391

Post by miracle2k »

Deestan wrote: post #378
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…

> 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…

I will not disagree that there is confusion and bad arguments on both sides of the debate, which is why you are essentially arguing within the wrong framing.

At the same time, people buying NFTs are generally quite a bit less confused about what you consider "lies" than you seem to think.

Importantly, the blockchain is not useless because they have to exist within the universe's rules of impermanence. You may want to ponder the differences and shared properties between something like seditionart.com, MASS MoCA's ownership of Sol Le Witt wall paintings, and an NFT on a blockchain.

Finally, let me point out that the URI issue is very much a misunderstanding that is widespread within the NFT community as well. It helps to think of the URI as a convenience feature rather than someone implying anything about the value of the token. There are fascinating experiments with tokens that have no url, tokens that have no visual representation, tokens with changing urls, or arbitrary urls; tokens that point to the same url. There are of course tokens that use data uris, and have the image-representation on-chain, or generate it dynamically; or they do so but not in URL form. There are technical implementations where the database of urls is separate from the ledger of tokens; there are early experiments by artists with blockchains (many years before anyone cared about NFTs) where there is no ability to store a URL in the first place.

Cryptopunks, a really early project, simply stored a hash to a file containing the assembled images, and that is all that is needed.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#392

Post by nradov »

lugorrr wrote: post #385
rewma wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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! But are they really? I mean, are there that many humans waiting in line to have a JSON pointing to a tweet? There were a fe…

"art blocks" had a trading volume of $100M last week [1]. And that's only one of the more notable nft projects. [1] https://nonfungible.com/market/history

Were those real trades, or just the same few people trading back and forth between themselves as part of a pump-and-dump scam?

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#393

Post by rewma »

saurik wrote: post #384
rewma wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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! But are they really? I mean, are there that many humans waiting in line to have a JSON pointing to a tweet? There were a fe…

FWIW, I am personally shocked that anyone wants to buy small pieces of cardboard with photos of baseball players on them at all, much less for any appreciable amount of money just because one happens to be "rare" (whatever the hell that means, as clearly anyone with a printer and some cardboard can make their own)... that doesn't mean that someone else is valuing them for some reason, and they clearly do; that most s…

> FWIW, I am personally shocked that anyone wants to buy small pieces of cardboard (...)

I fail to see the relevance of your personal preferences to the discussion, as my point was that the cases I'm aware of sound an awful lot like shills trying to inflate the value of something with no market value whatsoever.

As a concrete example, there was a HN discussion a couple of months ago on how a kid reported a couple thousands of dollars worth of sales from NFTs, but it all sounded like a mix of straight up fraud and money laundering. A few comments in the discussion point out that the kid's father works in finance and it sounds he is trying to case in on the NFT trend.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28326220

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#394

Post by Dagonfly »

larsiusprime wrote: post #89

I summed up all my complaints about NFT's in this (short) article: https://www.fortressofdoors.com/the-degraded-blockchain-prob... > In short, the minute you connect your blockchain to an app frontend you now have a degraded blockchain, one that cannot even in principle guarantee immutability, trustlessness, and decentralization – at least not for assets that the app's customers actually care about. Scratch the surfa…

This has to be elephant in in room right? There is so much cryptographic potential and none it is realized by most NFTs currently sold. Signing an http link to an existing .jpeg has to be the least imaginative way to implement this concept.

How about: Sign the image and generate a MAC. Then use steganography to include that information in the file. For the NFT sign create a certificate with the same key and include the MAC information. Publish that together with an IPFS link to a blockchain.

Then we can have discussions about IP law, art and what art ownership means.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#395

Post by jsvaughan »

nradov wrote: post #392
lugorrr wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"art blocks" had a trading volume of $100M last week [1]. And that's only one of the more notable nft projects. [1] https://nonfungible.com/market/history

Were those real trades, or just the same few people trading back and forth between themselves as part of a pump-and-dump scam?

Have a look at the sales (lower down the page) of say these:

https://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks lowest price available $386k(!)

or more detail on artblocks: https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/art-blocks average price $39k

or these: https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/boredapeyachtclub 90th percentile = $168k

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#396

Post by denton-scratch »

rsj_hn wrote: post #282
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…

Fun Fact: Rodin was one of the first sculptors to take advantage of reproduction, as he employed craftsmen in his workshop that could build you a custom thinker that was 2 inches tall for a paperweight or another full sized thinker statue for your public park. These statues had his special patina added. When he died, Rodin destroyed the recipes for his patina but the workshop, run out of an old hotel and eventually b…

> special patina

Sounds like standard trade-secrets.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#397

Post by steerablesafe »

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 author of PPSSPP also sells a "gold" version. The only difference is the icon.

https://central.ppsspp.org/whygold

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#398

Post by imtringued »

eoo wrote: post #342
WA wrote: post #340

Earlier 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…

An NFT is a virtual title of ownership on a blockchain, that's it. You don't own neither a string or an image or a JSON. https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721

It's actually simpler than that. It's just an entry in a database with your name attached to it. It's like an autograph.

Why do database entries have value? Well, usually because there are processes attached to them. Often it is as simple as having a court enforce the process.

I don't know why but the whole cryptocurrency space feels like a philosophical parody of the real world. Money without people. Contracts without enforcement. Ownership without property.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#399

Post by chrisco255 »

osigurdson wrote: post #262
chrisco255 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to parse your question, for the digital answer first. An NFT is verifiable metadata that can link to any other arbitrary data, such as a PNG, JPG, MP4, or whatever. Following the standards set forth by ERC721, you can add an image, external URLs, names, and various attributes that define the item's traits in relation to a broader collection that it belongs to. It is very common to use IPFS for hashing the cont…

Thanks, this is helpful. I had a look at this link ( https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721#simple-summary ) based on your response (specifically the json schema). Is it correct that the actual NFT is three strings: name, description and image? It seems that "image" contains URL that you mention. Is there any limit to the size of the NFT (i.e. could you save the entire jpg base64 encoded in the image field for exampl…

Technically yes you could use base64 as your url in the image field, however, I wouldn't recommend it unless it's an SVG or something small (a few KBs) since the metadata cannot be cached or asynchronously fetched by browsers on page load. So a massive metadata file could cause issues viewing your NFT in most marketplaces or galleries.

There are other fields you can add to meet marketplace standards, such as OpenSea's: https://docs.opensea.io/docs/2-adding-metadata

To learn more about ERC721 highly recommend the auditing firm OpenZeppelin's implementation. It's one of the most used and battle tested: https://docs.openzeppelin.com/contracts/3.x/erc721

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#400

Post by lucumo »

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…

Thank you. That made it click for me. I get it now.

It's still weird to me, but it's weird in the same way other collectibles are weird to me. It's undeniable that they are valuable to others.

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