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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

#491

Post by Jensson »

dls2016 wrote: post #468
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).

NFT's doesn't prove anything though. The art world care a lot about originals, but an NFT cannot prove that something is an original. Nothing would prevent the author from just issuing a lot of NFT's pointing to a lot of copies of the same art piece. They are even worse than that, NFT doesn't even represent the piece of art, if the service it is connected to goes down then the NFT points to nothing, you can't even prove that it at one time pointed to a specific image.

Lastly, there is no reason for a service provider to issue NFT's. Service providers earns a ton from taxing the market when people trade items, there is no reason for them to give this away by issuing NFT's. Rather every service I've seen issue NFT's did it to sell items that will never be valuable, but that NFT enthusiasts now think will be valuable thanks to the NFT.

Anyway, best case NFT's are just an untaxed market associated with a game or service content. That is the absolutely best case, in what way does that sound novel?

Edit: The untaxed part probably means that governments will shut it down if it becomes too popular. So even less reasons to invest.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#492

Post by jameshart »

tel wrote: post #479
jameshart wrote: post #464

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. 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 suf…

Your copy doesn't just lack 'authenticity', it also lacks something uncopyable, and which is only relvant to physical artifacts: 'age'.

The fact that digital copies can be perfect, and never age or deteriorate due to the inevitable march of entropy, is a fundamental difference and yes that affects how valuable 'owning' a digital artifact is versus owning a physical one.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#493

Post by Alex3917 »

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…

> The platform disappears, or bans you, or changes policy, or is blocked, or whatever, and your NFT is back to being a bare-bone blockchain contract number and a token id.

So what? You can obviously right click to save the JPEG, so if the platform goes down it doesn't really matter. What you're buying is ownership of the NFT of the JPEG, not the JPEG. Even if the platform goes down, you'll still be able to see the name of the piece in the metadata.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#494

Post by jallen_dot_dev »

jameshart wrote: post #481
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…

So I do wonder whether the NFT divide (between people who get it and people who don’t) might be a generational split, related to a larger societal shift away from ‘owning things’. We’ve definitely passed ‘peak thing ownership’. For those of us old enough to have grown up with the idea of ‘buying a book’, ‘buying a toy’, ‘buying a CD’ or ‘buying a magazine’ we have a particular mental framework for ‘owning’ stuff. But…

The difference between most[1] NFTs and Netflix/Steam/Apps is with the latter, you are buying access to something. With most of these NFTs that are just a picture, owning the NFT doesn't confer any special right to you. We can all enjoy the Disaster Girl meme, you don't have to have bought the NFT. The owner of the first ever tweet cannot actually do anything with it, edit it, destroy it, put it in a private collection so only they can look at it.

The only thing buying one of these NFTs gives you is I guess "bragging rights" but I think it remains to be seen why anyone should care that you paid money for 0x3B3ee1931Dc30C1957379FAc9aba94D1C48a5405,25046.

[1] The only exception is maybe these NFTs that interact with something on the blockchain like an item or place in a videogame, in that case owning the NFT provides some sort of utility.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#495

Post by cableshaft »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #480
cableshaft wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Gotcha. I've been into cryptocurrencies for a long time, but I've been feeling like a bit of a luddite when it comes to NFTs, or like most people who call crypto a ponzi scheme (some coins pretty much are, but not all), and that probably means I'm missing something.

I know where to go to find good information about crypto, but not NFTs.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#496

Post by chmsky00 »

I mean much of the economy is an MLM for elites.

The elites of Claire’s Boutique aren’t letting employees design novel items.

Adam Smith wrote hundreds of years ago that division of labor, taken to extremes, would lead to dumber humans than the dumbest animal.

Here we have people standing around retail shops, not working on their ideas, but minding a “booth” for a distant “owner” who does little real work to sustain themselves. We believe in them therefor they get to be rich and not work. It’s simple manipulation of brain chemistry built into years of forced belief.

It’s exactly the math of an MLM; keep selling others selling my value for me.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#497

Post by antasvara »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #463
hanklazard wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think the key here is that we've already as a society given up a lot of our ownership for the sake of convenience. Most people buy their phones through a mobile carrier, locking them in through the life of their contract. I'm not totally sure about how Google accounts work, but I'd wager that getting your Google drive data back if you're banned is difficult. Kids these days are even purchasing skins for video games with the full knowledge that if they get banned, all of those skins will be gone.

A lot of what we own these days is not "owned" in the traditional sense. Opensea is no different from purchasing a video game that you could be banned from in that both purchase prices aren't ownership, but rather a price to access a product.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#498

Post by nyhc99 »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #463
hanklazard wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Actually this is quickly becoming the standard. Once you mint an NFT on opensea, you have the option to "freeze" the metadata, which transfers the image and everything else to IPFS storage.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#499

Post by jameshart »

jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #494
jameshart wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I do wonder whether the NFT divide (between people who get it and people who don’t) might be a generational split, related to a larger societal shift away from ‘owning things’. We’ve definitely passed ‘peak thing ownership’. For those of us old enough to have grown up with the idea of ‘buying a book’, ‘buying a toy’, ‘buying a CD’ or ‘buying a magazine’ we have a particular mental framework for ‘owning’ stuff. But…

The difference between most[1] NFTs and Netflix/Steam/Apps is with the latter, you are buying access to something. With most of these NFTs that are just a picture, owning the NFT doesn't confer any special right to you. We can all enjoy the Disaster Girl meme, you don't have to have bought the NFT. The owner of the first ever tweet cannot actually do anything with it, edit it, destroy it, put it in a private collecti…

Yes, that's definitely the case for a lot of NFTs being minted and sold.

And if an NFT did represent the right to download and play a particular game from Steam (like, you had to present proof of ownership of an NFT to Steam to be allowed to play the game), such that I could sell that NFT outside of Steam to someone else... well, the value of that NFT is only as good as Steam's willingness to abide by the agreement it embodies, which they can unilaterally withdraw at any time, so there's little value in Steam honoring such a thing. If they wanted to permit game resale, they can do that, inside their own database, without any NFT nonsense.

So yeah, it's still a bit of a mystery if or whether this actually adds anything, but I'm just trying to put myself into the mindset of people who are excited by this and trying to figure out what excites them, rather than just assuming they're all dumb because they think buying numbers is going to change the world.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#500

Post by eli »

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…

I personally don't think baseball cards are a good investment either
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