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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

#471

Post by smaryjerry »

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…

As someone pointed out already in the baseball card example. NFTs do not give you copyright over the images. You may buy a baseball card but that doesn’t let you sell or license the image displayed on the baseball card. NFT is exactly the same in that sense. It is purely a collectible not explicit ownership of a likeness.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#472

Post by rvba »

baby wrote: post #67
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This would have been more interesting if the author had traced where all the money being plowed into NFTs is coming from. Not possible to trace where the money is coming from. In fact, someone can "sell" an NFT to themself in a wash trade between two wallets they control. The last trade price of the NFT is now recorded as the transaction price, but it's possible that money never actually changed hands. Want to have…

This is what happens whenever you see a large amount associated with an NFT. I bet that the art market started like that.

Art market started because people appreciate art. In fact rich people even commissioned art for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

It can be used for various scams and as an investment, but the whole premise is ridicolous: people pay for art since they like it and want to own it. (And in this NFT scam they dont own anything useful)

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#473

Post by seanhunter »

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…

Non-fungible doesn't mean something can't be divided, it means a specific one just can't be substituted for another one.

An example: If I trade oil, one barrel of oil with a certain spec[1] is fungible with another barrel of oil with the same spec. If I sell you some oil you don't care which specific barrel you get as long as it's the same kind of thing. Likewise if you borrow 10 dollars from me you can pay me back with any combination of notes up to the value of 10 dollars, you don't have to give me back the specific bills I gave you.

On the other hand, things like art are not fungible. If I loan a Van Gogh to a gallery I very much want the same piece to be sent back to me after the exhibition is done. It's not ok for them to send me something else. Even if it's "sunflowers" (since Van Gogh painted a few of those and they are quite similar), I want the actual one I loaned to be sent back to me.

Normal bitcoins or ETH are fungible whereas NFTs are non-fungible. The specific one you have matters usually because it represents a digital proof of ownership of some specific resource (a bored ape or whatever).

[1] The spec for oil types standardises particular grades and then people trade a standard barrel size (called a bbl which is short for "blue barrel" because they used to be painted blue). "Brent" and "WTI" are different grades. A barrel of brent is fungible with another barrel of brent but not with a barrel of WTI because that's a different grade.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#474

Post by cableshaft »

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'm still trying to wrap my head around the NFT thing (I get the base concept, and I know originally it was thought of for digital ownership of home deeds, etc, which makes perfect sense to me, but everything that I'm seeing from it lately just seems like beanie baby collecting, like art and avatars and buying with the sole expectation of selling to a bigger sucker later).

Where are you going to immerse yourself into this universe and seeing the community and experimentation? I don't know where I'd even start with that.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#475

Post by analog31 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #127
analog31 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my view there's a finite number of Picasso paintings, but an as yet unlimited possible number of digital artworks, and an unpredictable number of things that could compete with digital artworks for the dollars of buyers. To fix the supply of digital artworks, there has to be at least a loose consensus on what the accepted "canon" of those works consists of. For now, that's an unknown.

There's a finite number of Picasso paintings, but an infinite number of non-digital artworks. Digital art is no different from physical art in terms of availability.

True, all of the paintings in hotel rooms. In my view, the value of Picassos is partly due to a loosely accepted "canon" of paintings that are considered to be of particular value. If hotel paintings were discovered to be of equal artistic quality, it would not put them in the "canon." The supply is artificially limited by social convention.

Art prices are also driven in part by a partial record of sales, so at least we know what some paintings sold for in the past.

What we don't know about the digital art world is what conventions will emerge, that define the "supply" of works of particular value.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#476

Post by indigochill »

locallost wrote: post #409
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 are various vague touching points of NFTs and real world collectables like baseball cards, but they are not the same. Artificial scarcity is one of them, e.g. there is no reason why there couldn't be a billion baseball cards of the most expensive kind (which would make them stop being the most expensive). Somebody else could create fake ones, but they would have little value for the fact that they are not genui…

Yeah, I follow Peter Mohrbacher who's a surrealist fantasy artist. I've bought some physical prints from him (not even originals or anything, just normal art prints) because I like his art and wanted to have it on my wall and preferred to pay him for a proper print than print a digital copy myself. He also at some point made some NFT sales and I really tried to find a reason to get excited but just couldn't.

I can understand why he was, though, because on his particular platform, artists get a cut of future resale of their art. So he sells a piece for $100, someone later sells it for $200, and he gets a 5% cut (made-up number, I don't remember what exactly it was) for an extra 10 bucks, and so on (but it's still always just a digital token, not a physical piece).

But that doesn't require NFTs to happen. Since it was a proprietary platform, a plain old database could have done the exact same thing.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#477

Post by BiteCode_dev »

seanhunter wrote: post #473
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…

Non-fungible doesn't mean something can't be divided, it means a specific one just can't be substituted for another one. An example: If I trade oil, one barrel of oil with a certain spec[1] is fungible with another barrel of oil with the same spec. If I sell you some oil you don't care which specific barrel you get as long as it's the same kind of thing. Likewise if you borrow 10 dollars from me you can pay me back w…

Thank you for the correction. I particularly appreciate the kind tone, it's rare on the internet.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#478

Post by asenna »

MontagFTB wrote: post #343
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…

This is a great explanation. I’ve understood NFTs slightly differently, where they are akin to an _autographed_ baseball card. In that case, regardless of how many copies of that card exist in the world, you have a rendition of that card authorized by a special party (the autographer) that causes it to be unique. Where any number of digital copies of an asset may exist, the NFT is the “autograph” atop that asset that…

There's another aspect to this analogy - It's like an autographed baseball card + the person / entity autographing the card has declared (by code) that there won't be another one of these autographed series ever (eg - 10k CryptoPunks series).

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#479

Post by tel »

jameshart wrote: post #464
highfrequency wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But then I come by and scan your card and print a fresh one. This is fairly cheap to do. Why is mine not valuable? Does this process devalue yours?

NFTs posit that the answer is that yours isn’t authentic and the process won’t devalue mine because mine is. And they offer an algorithmic mechanism to enforce and verify authenticity.

In the baseball card world, that ought to be true, but may not be. Maybe my fake is sufficiently good to fool the market.

Then at that point we realize that what is really valuable is that authenticity. We can make cards themselves infinitely cheap to copy flawlessly and the proof of authenticity remains distinct and valuable.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#480

Post by BiteCode_dev »

cableshaft wrote: post #474
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'm still trying to wrap my head around the NFT thing (I get the base concept, and I know originally it was thought of for digital ownership of home deeds, etc, which makes perfect sense to me, but everything that I'm seeing from it lately just seems like beanie baby collecting, like art and avatars and buying with the sole expectation of selling to a bigger sucker later). Where are you going to immerse yourself into…

I have a lot of crypto nerds as friends, they have a trading platform, and so they are on all the reddit/discord/telegram important channels.

I wouldn't know where to begin, because I just got dunked into it a few days ago when one my friends asked my help to code a platform to create vanity user pages. I had nothing to do, it came to me :)

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