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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

#621

Post by ausbah »

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 think your point on scarcity and attention are well put, but can't apply to NFTs in the way as physical commodities because I think there has to be some notion of originality intertwined.

Like for art pieces, sure people can make copies and put the copies on a wall - but only I have the original to hang up my wall. There is value to most people between having a copy vs the actual thing.

There is obviously a massive disconnect with this and NFTs because anyone can save a copy of a NFT (or the image a NFT represents) and not have its value diminished because all the "copies" of the NFT are the same - since "originally" doesn't apply to digital goods.

It doesn't matter if there is some hash on a blockchain out there saying so-and-so "owns an image", I can still copy the image and get the same value. That is not the case with say having a copy of the Mona Lisa vs the actual Mona Lisa.

NFTs are worthless to me for the above reason aside from the value that other people think they have.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#622

Post by jameshart »

thebean11 wrote: post #610
jameshart wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The fact that digital copies can be perfect But you've hit on exact problem the blockchain solved from day 1, you can copy the image (just like you can download hi resolution scans of baseball cards) but the underlying "cardboard" cannot be copied, or copies can be detected with 100% accuracy (depending on how you look at it).

Some day, the last original 1986 Barry Bonds rookie baseball card will disappear, lost in a housefire or an alien invasion or something. There might still be high quality digital images of what that card looked like, in archives of eBay auction pages and the digitized records of the baseball hall of fame and whatever other ephemera wind up in the Svalbard vault.

And in fact, the photo reproduction on that card was already a poor 1980s print quality reproduction of an original photo of Barry Bonds, which probably - no matter how well it was looked after - will have suffered and faded with age as print tends to; and that actual original photo was probably reproduced in a bunch of other places outside of that run of baseball cards - and maybe the original negative of that film exists in some archive somewhere, with a high quality digital copy available - from which you could reproduce an even higher quality picture than was presented on that card.

But you would never be able to replace that card, because the point of the card was its physical connection to the moment in time where a legendary career started.

"Humans preserved this specific lump of matter and kept it safe over a long period of time even though that was difficult and, let's be honest, not very important" is what gives value to antique collectibles.

"Humans preserved the cryptographic chain of custody of this sequence of binary digits that reference a specific widely archived piece of digital media over a long period of time, by creating a distributed computing system that just automatically ensured it would be passed on to posterity whether posterity wanted it or not," doesn't create the same human connection.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#623

Post by Sargos »

Buttons840 wrote: post #616
Sargos wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 privat…

>If I keep the car and the title, what stops me from selling my NFT?

Nothing, but you lose all of the benefits that come with the NFT along with making the car much harder for you to sell in the future.

>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."

This already happens with things like airport lounge access and other things like Netflix where you share your credentials with your friends. Nothing is stopping you but if the services find out they will likely ban you and you will lose access and the resale value of your car will also go down.

Most of this is common sense and people won't even give it much thought in the future but it's interesting that a lot of these cases need to be explained when technology is new.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#624

Post by Buttons840 »

Sargos wrote: post #623
Buttons840 wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 privat…

>If I keep the car and the title, what stops me from selling my NFT? Nothing, but you lose all of the benefits that come with the NFT along with making the car much harder for you to sell in the future. >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." This already happens with thin…

I'm not seeking an explanation. I'm trying to draw attention to my argument that NFTs won't allow us to do anything fundamentally new.

NFTs are hyped as a grand new thing, then someone asks about some tricky edge cases or how abuse will be handled, and then NFT proponents say those abuses already happen and it will be no different with NFTs. Like a lot of blockchain technologies, it's just another way to do what we already do.

edit:

Actually, I see your original argument is that NFT's are an "open API". You never did claim that NFTs allow us to do things we cannot already do.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#625

Post by doopy1 »

Igelau wrote: post #331
doopy1 wrote: post #62

This whole rant assumes that people just buy NFTs to sell them to the next guy, but that's not the case. Some people buy NFTs to support artists (like Patreon) - others are gamified to represent something in a dapp, for example metaverse parcels are like domain names. And of course some just collect them for the flex. It's not really an MLM anyway you slice it.

Why wouldn't you just support an artist on Patreon? Or by actually buying something from them? What's the point of buying NFT instead? It's to sell to the next sucker before the bubble bursts. That's the only thing it does that other platforms don't already do better without having a blockchain involved.

NFTs have perpetual royalties baked in which are much better for the artists. Buying an NFT from an artist IS buying something from them.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#626

Post by jameshart »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #589
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…

Maybe. Or maybe it's that people less used to the concept of ownership can be more easily defrauded by "as a Service" businesses and people peddling crypto alike. > consider some of the things you likely have bought recently: a ‘twelve month Netflix subscription’, a ‘Steam library game’, an ‘app’… you bought those things with no expectation you could resell them later because you don’t think of those as ‘things’ Yes…

“Look what I found in the loft! Grandma’s old Netflix subscription from 2021!”

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#627

Post by jallen_dot_dev »

WorldMaker wrote: post #597
the_snooze wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really shows the dishonesty in crypto "innovation:" they claim "security" and "trustlessness," but it all reduces to simple human/institutional/contractual trust relationships as soon as you need to deal with anything with real-world practical value, whether that be access to games on Steam or tracking a package or whatever. With all this fancy software and energy spent on mining, what then is the point of all tha…

I think some of that directly connects to the (intentional) confusion in terms of "smart contracts" and old fashioned "contracts". "Smart contracts" are programs and there's a sense that they are "better" and easier to "trust" than old fashioned "contracts" because computer's enforce them ("fairly and equitably", or so proponents believe [1]) and not people and institutions. But people don't run "smart contract softw…

Yeah I agree, and that's why I'm generally skeptical of any smart contract ideas that have to interface with real life (supply chains, land registry, and so on). I think they make more sense when they are concerned with things entirely contained within the blockchain, like swapping tokens or mapping names to addresses. Frustratingly enough, it's the former type ("let's put cows on the blockchain") that seem to get the most mainstream attention.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#628

Post by jallen_dot_dev »

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.

Skins are an interesting comparison. I feel like that falls under the utility category I mentioned, like when you buy a skin you are really buying the right to use something at a particular place and time (a cool looking gun during a match), and nobody else has the right to use it. In contrast, whenever I see the Disaster Girl meme posted somewhere on the Internet I don't see any indication of who "owns" it.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#629

Post by WorldMaker »

jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #627
WorldMaker wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think some of that directly connects to the (intentional) confusion in terms of "smart contracts" and old fashioned "contracts". "Smart contracts" are programs and there's a sense that they are "better" and easier to "trust" than old fashioned "contracts" because computer's enforce them ("fairly and equitably", or so proponents believe [1]) and not people and institutions. But people don't run "smart contract softw…

Yeah I agree, and that's why I'm generally skeptical of any smart contract ideas that have to interface with real life (supply chains, land registry, and so on). I think they make more sense when they are concerned with things entirely contained within the blockchain, like swapping tokens or mapping names to addresses. Frustratingly enough, it's the former type ("let's put cows on the blockchain") that seem to get th…

I've passed beyond skeptical of smart contracts that try to apply to real life to a concern that much more real contract law needs to apply to smart contracts.

Ethereum is already full of fun stories where "smart" contracts did extremely dumb things because they took a programmer's word extremely literally rather than a programmer's intent.

In a world where programmers are assumed to be ordinary, fallible humans that's a ton of pressure to put on a programmer to never make a single mistake. While there's a lot of active research into trying to bring technical solutions to that human problem such as strict "formal proofs" and such of the programs being made into smart contracts, I'm increasingly of the opinion that would benefit them the most would be political and sociological solutions such as classics like "courts of appeals", "trials by jury of peers" to determine intent over literal substance, and so forth.

Those aren't "fun, technical" solutions, and would require placing trust again in institutions and people, so I absolutely have zero optimism that any smart contracts system would embrace them. I just think that they need such political structures to exist otherwise you left with merely a lowest common denominator tyranny of software bugs (no matter how formally the best contracts mathematically prove their claims/efforts).

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#630

Post by thebean11 »

jameshart wrote: post #622
thebean11 wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that digital copies can be perfect But you've hit on exact problem the blockchain solved from day 1, you can copy the image (just like you can download hi resolution scans of baseball cards) but the underlying "cardboard" cannot be copied, or copies can be detected with 100% accuracy (depending on how you look at it).

Some day, the last original 1986 Barry Bonds rookie baseball card will disappear, lost in a housefire or an alien invasion or something. There might still be high quality digital images of what that card looked like, in archives of eBay auction pages and the digitized records of the baseball hall of fame and whatever other ephemera wind up in the Svalbard vault. And in fact, the photo reproduction on that card was al…

I disagree, I think you are putting a lot of importance on the image. Think Runeacape party hats, attachment to digital goods is not theoretical.
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