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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

#631

Post by jameshart »

jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #628
kobasa wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It has an owner. Its copyright belongs to the photographer who took it - Dave Roth, father of Zoë Roth, the girl in the picture. If you ever see it reproduced in a newspaper article you’ll see him credited.

The NFT Zoë Roth sold doesn’t convey any rights over that image or its use. It’s got the faint frisson of exclusivity to it - kind of like if you had a print of that photograph signed by Zoë Roth. It’s a little bit special that it’s an NFT minted by her in specific reference to the meme; and it has some additional cachet as a historical artifact of being maybe one of the first meme NFTs, so there’s that.

So sure, I can sort of see there being some value in the bragging rights of being able to say “look, I have the private key to the ethereum wallet that has the right to transfer ownership of this binary string to someone else, and look - this cryptographically secure chain of numbers shows that that very same binary string is the one Zoë Roth cryptographically signed with her own private key way back in 2021…”

Just, that’s going to be a lot to explain, for the bragging rights, I think.

Compared to pointing to a picture in a frame and saying “yeah, that’s signed by the person in the picture”.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#632

Post by darcys22 »

enlyth wrote: post #320
paxys wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whatever rare NFT you have I can go make a visually identical NFT for and confirm that I own that NFT Can you sign that NFT with the creator's private key?

Yes, you can sign it with your own private key because you are now the "creator". That's the point of digital assets, they are fungible by definition because it's a bunch of 1s and 0s, doesn't matter which system you run it on you will get an indistinguishable output.

Except the world knows who the creator is and your 1s and 0s aint it

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#633

Post by jallen_dot_dev »

jameshart wrote: post #631
jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It has an owner. Its copyright belongs to the photographer who took it - Dave Roth, father of Zoë Roth, the girl in the picture. If you ever see it reproduced in a newspaper article you’ll see him credited. The NFT Zoë Roth sold doesn’t convey any rights over that image or its use. It’s got the faint frisson of exclusivity to it - kind of like if you had a print of that photograph signed by Zoë Roth. It’s a little bi…

Those are good points. The comparison to an autographed photo is actually really fair and puts it in a different light for me. But half a million bucks for an autograph from the girl in that meme? It still sets off my BS detector but I'm open to the possibility that I just don't get it.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#634

Post by jameshart »

thebean11 wrote: post #630
jameshart wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, I’m putting importance on the artifact.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#635

Post by polemic »

nyhc99 wrote: post #461
polemic wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The application owner gives up control to a secondary market for no gain. They'd do better to simply buy and sell directly, and maintain full pricing control. They already control scarcity, they don't need some other mechanism.

Meanwhile there is very little incentive for some other application to use those same tokens when their value is contingent on the whims of the original issuer. You're tightly coupling your business and liability to some other party who hasn't made any guarantees, promises or agreements to you. Its a can of legal problems.

Ultimately is like trading Apple gift cards, Pre-loaded debit cards, phone cards etc - its an abstraction in which then value of the token will only ever be less than the cash paid for it up-front, and most people trading them have some other reason for taking the hit (ie money laundering, fraud, etc)

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#636

Post by saurik »

rewma wrote: post #393
saurik wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I am personally shocked that anyone wants to buy small pieces of cardboard with photos of baseball players on them at all, much less for any appreciable amount of money just because one happens to be "rare" (whatever the hell that means, as clearly anyone with a printer and some cardboard can make their own)... that doesn't mean that someone else is valuing them for some reason, and they clearly do; that most s…

> FWIW, I am personally shocked that anyone wants to buy small pieces of cardboard (...) I fail to see the relevance of your personal preferences to the discussion, as my point was that the cases I'm aware of sound an awful lot like shills trying to inflate the value of something with no market value whatsoever. As a concrete example, there was a HN discussion a couple of months ago on how a kid reported a couple tho…

> But are they really? I mean, are there that many humans waiting in line to have a JSON pointing to a tweet?

This is just your belief in what people would want to do, and is irrelevant to whether people out there exist, and I am claiming (seemingly successfully, as my comment is resonating with a number of people) the same thing would probably be said with just as much confusion by anyone who really considers how utterly pointless a baseball card is.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#637

Post by thebean11 »

jameshart wrote: post #634
thebean11 wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, I’m putting importance on the artifact.

Yes my bad, that’s what I meant

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#638

Post by miracle2k »

ARandumGuy wrote: post #501
cle wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have value because people agree they have value. Trusted third parties (like courts) help people come to that agreement, by providing transparent, objective processes to settle legitimacy and ownership disputes (in the happy case, in the not-happy case they use physical force to reach agreement). Personally I don't understand the controversy, blockchains are a different kind of trusted third party that also help…

The problem with using NFTs to verify ownership is that they actually make it much harder to resolve any disputes. An NFT can't be transferred or modified without explicit permission from the owner of the NFT, which means that any dispute is impossible to resolve without bypassing the NFTs entirely. For example, let's say you have an NFT that represents something tangible (and not just some link to an image download)…

Right! Which is why NFTs are specifically not representing anything physical (despite certain people within the space admittedly pushing this misguided notion). They work because the NFT itself, the ledger entry, is valuable.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#639

Post by miracle2k »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #575
dkersten wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a stupid question, but where do I find the base64 encoded image in your linked token? The only thing I can see is a transaction moving it from one address to another, the contract bytecode (which I guess might encode an image but its definitely not obvious[1]) and the "extra data" hex in the transaction (that doesn't appear to be an encoded image either, from what I can tell). I'm probably missing something, so…

I'm not sure about that either TBH! If you copy the to address (0x22f542cd394fba213df8d1f6c46f454b74e05503) and paste it into testnets.opensea.io then you can see the collection here: https://testnets.opensea.io/0x22f542cd394fba213df8d1f6c46f45... The contract has no mention of opensea, so they must be reading it from the blockchain somehow - but I guess etherscan doesn't display these tokens in a similar way for som…

To query the URI of your tokens through your contract, you need to interact with its ABI through code; alternatively, you can upload the ABI to Etherscan, which will provide a UI to query it.

You can use the URI to store base64 encoded image or svg data, and that is super cool; but will be too expensive for larger images, at which point you will link to an IPFS-hosted url.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#640

Post by miracle2k »

jameshart wrote: post #631
jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It has an owner. Its copyright belongs to the photographer who took it - Dave Roth, father of Zoë Roth, the girl in the picture. If you ever see it reproduced in a newspaper article you’ll see him credited. The NFT Zoë Roth sold doesn’t convey any rights over that image or its use. It’s got the faint frisson of exclusivity to it - kind of like if you had a print of that photograph signed by Zoë Roth. It’s a little bi…

> It has an owner. Its copyright belongs to the photographer who took it - Dave Roth, father of Zoë Roth, the girl in the picture. If you ever see it reproduced in a newspaper article you’ll see him credited.

Note that we casually may call him the owner, but having certain legal claims such as copyright is not the same thing as the legal concept of ownership.

This is relevant, because pointing to a picture on the wall saying "yeah, that is an original Disaster Girl print" is a very different social flex than saying "I am the artist of this well-known photograph". The latter doesn't really need nor benefit from an authenticated digital print on the creators wall; of course the artist can print dozens of copies and they are all authenticated.

For Dave Roth to sell the the copyright or certain license rights to the image is just such an entirely different transaction that I am not sure why NFT critics keep mixing them up.

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