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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

#611

Post by thebean11 »

rewma wrote: post #349
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!

> 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…

> are there that many humans waiting in line to have a JSON pointing to a tweet

There are a lot of humans waiting in line for other digital assets that don't do anything, like Fortite skins. That's also just a row in some database, what's the difference?

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#612

Post by user-the-name »

jcelerier wrote: post #606
user-the-name wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No?

... you think counterfeits are not a thing ? People spend inordinate amounts of time and money to ensure that the painting the buy is indeed from the painter it is said to come from

Yes, for very expensive paintings, and it takes incredible amounts of effort do it.

You and I, however, will never encounter any of this. It is the most niche of niche issues.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#613

Post by rocho »

kobasa wrote: post #564
jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Pretty much every profile pic NFT now (hottest form of NFTs right now) comes with some huge list of utility and roadmap behind it (look into BAYC for a good example), if that's the sort of thing you're looking for. Also, "bragging rights" or flexing, it turns out, is a pretty huge part of not only the physical realm but also digital as well if you look at the existing digital skins market.

Roadmaps! Like those spicy ICOs in 2017! I wonder if 90% of them failed, or is it 95%?

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#614

Post by eric_cc »

jollybean wrote: post #503
highfrequency wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a small leap. The balance in your bank account is also a number without a physical presence. It has value because you can convert it to physical goods. The same is true of a Bitcoin balance.

Currency is a contract, it's inherently intangible. Bitcoin is not a currency, and it's not used for anything, so it's a really just a number, that someone may speculatively want to pay money for, due to the fact a small number of other people will pay for it, but unless there's a more broad acceptance of it, the implied value will also fade. If NFT's implied ownership of the Baseball card itself, I think this would…

> Bitcoin is not a currency, and it's not used for anything

Is that so? I just tipped bitcoin to a twitter account I enjoy (using lightning network). Keep lying to yourself..

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#615

Post by caeril »

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…

> community bonding, money laundering and genuine experimentation

To be fair, the real-life art auction world is basically all money laundering, too.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#616

Post by Buttons840 »

Sargos wrote: post #596
tantalor wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> only Aston Martin owners can join How would that even work? Supposing I bought the car and received the token, what's to stop me from selling the token and keeping the car?

Selling a car and not transferring the NFT is akin to selling a car and not transferring the title. Sure it's possible and you could con some really dumb people but it would be an expected part of the deal and the kind of people who buy used cars are already wary of scammers for this reason.

> keeping the car

> Selling a car

You're answering a different question. If I keep the car and the title, what stops me from selling my NFT? Or, even, transferring my NFT to a wallet and then giving the wallet away in the physical world (like selling a MMORPG account)? Or sharing my wallet containing the NFT with several people who can all use it to gain access to the exclusive benefits? "Hey bro, send me your private key so I can get into this club."

There's no legal reason any of those things can't be done.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#617

Post by baby »

danShumway wrote: post #76
baby wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t make sense to say that an NFT is not scarce. Every NFT is unique by design.

Most NFTs are just links to a publicly hosted asset. They're not meaningfully unique in any of the ways that matter. Sure, technically you're making a new NFT when the same creator mints an NFT that points to the same work as before. But also technically you're making a new dollar with a new serial label when the government prints money, and we don't call paper money "non-fungible". It's not a kind of uniqueness that…

> Most NFTs are just links to a publicly hosted asset

That's metadata, to display or use it in dapps, this is not how you uniquely identify an NFT. The metadata is optional.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#618

Post by exporectomy »

teruakohatu wrote: post #295
exporectomy wrote: post #275

Earlier 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.

I don't believe they're the future, nor do I really understand them much at all. I'm just critical of the way people say "I don't understand them, therefore they're stupid". There may be valid reasons why NFTs are terrible but these people are not expressing those reasons. They're expressing reasons that a quick skim through any popular HN NFT comments page, such as this one, would answer.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#619

Post by jameshart »

kobasa wrote: post #564
jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Pretty much every profile pic NFT now (hottest form of NFTs right now) comes with some huge list of utility and roadmap behind it (look into BAYC for a good example), if that's the sort of thing you're looking for. Also, "bragging rights" or flexing, it turns out, is a pretty huge part of not only the physical realm but also digital as well if you look at the existing digital skins market.

I think 'utility' might be a stretch for the BAYC roadmap.

That model of NFT is very much on the MLM end of the scale.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#620

Post by danShumway »

baby wrote: post #617
danShumway wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most NFTs are just links to a publicly hosted asset. They're not meaningfully unique in any of the ways that matter. Sure, technically you're making a new NFT when the same creator mints an NFT that points to the same work as before. But also technically you're making a new dollar with a new serial label when the government prints money, and we don't call paper money "non-fungible". It's not a kind of uniqueness that…

> Most NFTs are just links to a publicly hosted asset That's metadata, to display or use it in dapps, this is not how you uniquely identify an NFT. The metadata is optional.

> The metadata is optional

For the vast majority of people hyping NFTs, the metadata is the only part they care about. The metadata is the part that links the NFT to an actual piece of artwork -- the issuer and the work that it's linked to are the only reasons why some tokens are worth more to collectors than others.

Without the context of the person who issued it and the work that the token is being paired with, you're just trading numbers around and assigning completely arbitrary values to them.

Which to be fair is a common criticism of NFTs. It's just weird to hear an advocate lean into that argument themselves, normally advocates are trying to convince me that NFTs mean something.

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