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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

#461

Post by nyhc99 »

polemic wrote: post #50
seibelj wrote: 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…

You don't think there's value to the application owner? They get a secondary market for the accounts in their application that they don't have to manage and they get royalties automatically paid to them for every resale. The scarcity of accounts drives up the value of those accounts, which also financially benefits the application holder because now they can sell the extra accounts they held on to for more money, and they get bigger royalties on every resale. And on the consumer side, someone is more willing to buy in to check it out because if they get tired of it or they don't like it or they beat the game and want to move on they know they can sell their account easily.

And on top of all that, assets from one application can be integrated into another application. If I build a game and I allow people to use the "sword of NFT" they have from another game in my game then I've created a big incentive for people who like that other game to also play mine.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#462

Post by navd »

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…

Huh? You would have to authenticate with Twitter using your crypto wallet to prove you own the wallet associated with the NFT. Twitter would know the contract addresses of the original NFT so even if you created your own smart contract with identical images it wouldn't be the original...

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#463

Post by BiteCode_dev »

hanklazard wrote: post #452
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #446

NFT always felt ridiculous to me, but I though I understood the mechanism: "it's like baseball cards but in the blockchain". This week I learned it's not. NFT are Non Fungible Tokens, which means tokens that can't be divided, unlike crypto currencies like Bitcoin that can be divided in Satoshis. So you exchange the totality of it, or not. Basically it's a unique number in the blockchain you change ownership by applyi…

> I mean, opensea.io does allow you to mint (the term for magically turning a media into an official NFT backed by the blockchain) up to 100MB of content. So where is it? Not in the blockchain, obviously, it's already fat enough with tiny transaction data. Well, it's just stored in the centralized platforms like opensea, rarible, etc. You’re right that this is the way many have been created so far, but that will not…

Agreed, and I hope it will become more popular. But right now, since you can't browse IFPS with firefox or chrome, and manual minting is harder than clicking a button on open sea, I wager private platforms will keep their appeal.

Maybe when decentralized service will do all the decentralized hard work for you, take your metamask, upload your content on IFPS, mint it, then let you sell it, it will take on.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#464

Post by jameshart »

highfrequency wrote: post #345
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…

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.

Oh but surely it does.

Cardboard is fragile, and degrades if not looked after. Over time, the average condition of cardboard cards will deteriorate. So, if you own a baseball card in good condition, and can look after it better than the average, over time you will end up with one of an increasingly rare class of pieces of cardboard - an old baseball card that is in good condition.

It’s not hard to imagine that in the distant future there will still be people who place value on the history of baseball who are interested in owning, for example, a collection of mint original baseball cards dating to the original era of each player, for every hall of famer who ever played for the Giants.

So the speculative value of any baseball card includes some expected value estimate based on the possibility that it might, someday, be the last of its kind, and some millionaire needs to buy it to complete a collection.

Can you really tell a similar story to yourself for why the expected future value of any NFT isn’t zero?

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#465

Post by miracle2k »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #459
BukhariH wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite right. The assets aren’t necessarily stored on OpenSea. You can see how OpenSea gets the metadata like asset url via the docs: https://docs.opensea.io/docs/metadata-standards If you scroll down you’ll see that the assets can be hosted on decentralised networks too like IPFS. Also, not all NFT projects are built the same. I suggest you check out Pak’s Poets project - it’s a very exciting piece of performance…

I agree, you can store it on IPFS. But most people don't, they don't even know it's possible. I mean, most people could host their own video, but they upload on youtube, and just youtube. Well, this is the same, only even more niche, so the easy "upload" on open sea is very, very attractive. I'd wager if one the most popular NFT trading plateform disapear, 99% of all NFT would go poof.

The majority of all NFTs are stored in IPFS; source: I run a platform indexing NFT media files.

Also, the art is the token. Data storage is a orthogonal problem entirely.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#466

Post by BiteCode_dev »

miracle2k wrote: post #465
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, you can store it on IPFS. But most people don't, they don't even know it's possible. I mean, most people could host their own video, but they upload on youtube, and just youtube. Well, this is the same, only even more niche, so the easy "upload" on open sea is very, very attractive. I'd wager if one the most popular NFT trading plateform disapear, 99% of all NFT would go poof.

The majority of all NFTs are stored in IPFS; source: I run a platform indexing NFT media files. Also, the art is the token. Data storage is a orthogonal problem entirely.

> The majority of all NFTs are stored in IPFS

Oh, I would never have believed it. Thanks for the info. Most people that I know don't even know what IPFS is. Are those human uploaded, or bot uploaded?

> the art is the token

Yes, but why isn't the token displayed in the centered of the page on most popular platforms?

Because human needs a symbol that represent that token.

For most people, the animation and the number are the same. NFT work because people share a believe about them, after all.

And all the strong believe in humanity are sustained using symbols.

BTW, what's the name of your platform?

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#467

Post by SantalBlush »

echelon wrote: post #55
SantalBlush wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this email is supposed to describe NFTs. This email describes cryptography being used as an artistic medium, which is different.

I disagree. That email describes their scarcity, desirability, tradability, and monetary exchange. It's prescient. Twenty years ahead of implementation. Absolutely wild.

It fails to describe what is unique to NFTs, specifically that they are secured and exchanged cryptographically.

It's discussing collector cards that celebrate different methods of cryptography on the actual card. That is not even close to an NFT.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#468

Post by dls2016 »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #446

NFT always felt ridiculous to me, but I though I understood the mechanism: "it's like baseball cards but in the blockchain". This week I learned it's not. NFT are Non Fungible Tokens, which means tokens that can't be divided, unlike crypto currencies like Bitcoin that can be divided in Satoshis. So you exchange the totality of it, or not. Basically it's a unique number in the blockchain you change ownership by applyi…

I think the best explanation is that NFTs are a very fancy system of provenance (which the art world already takes very seriously).

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#469

Post by hanklazard »

chollida1 wrote: post #426
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…

The one thing that gets lots in the card analogy is that 99% of cards will get destroyed and the ones that are left will mostly get damaged. This increases scarcity in a way that just can't happen for NFT's, what would it mean for an NFT to get damaged corners?

It’s thought that something like 20% of BTC are “lost” (1) (ie, private key is lost). This will certainly happen to NFTs as well since people will inevitably fail to back-up their wallets.

1. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d580747908cdc0001e67...

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#470

Post by jameshart »

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.

None of this needs NFTs or blockchains though.

We already have a concept of ‘ownership’ in the real world.

If an artist wants to sell a digital work to someone they can do so - just write up a contract, sign it, exchange some value, and you’re done. Selling things is a well understood concept. We have a legal framework for it.

If an NFT represents a transferable sellable set of rights, then those rights have to be expressed in a sale agreement of some sort (implied or explicit).

Sure, the blockchain gives you an easy way to handle the ‘transfer of ownership’ portion of a subsequent sale, but items not some radical new form of ownership - it rests on an underlying legal framework that is indistinguishable from selling deeds to acres on the moon or selling numbered prints of an artwork with a certificate of authenticity.

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