Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

every.to

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

661–670 of 687 posts

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#661

Post by Grustaf »

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…

As stupid as it is, what you describe IS exactly "baseball cards in the blockchain", because each individual card/nft can only be owned by one person at a time.

The difference with baseball cards (apart from not being physical) is that most nft projects are combinatorial, so they make 10000 different cards, constructed from combinations of a much smaller number of "traits". That way the artist only has to draw say 25 faces, 20 hats, 20 eye glasses etc.

With baseball cards you'd instead make 100 different cards, and then print 1000s of copies of each. You could do that with NFTs, but you don't. The reason for that is probably that you can't sell NFTs in sealed packages where 95% of the cards will be uninteresting. I guess you could, but again you don't.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#662

Post by [deleted] »

ninjaranter wrote: post #527
int_19h wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you can split NFT tokens and e.g. resell them separately?

Highly recommend this Matt Levine article on how ludicrous that is https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-09-09/money-... > Imagine writing the investment memo for “20% of a picture of a dog” and being like “the most we should pay is probably about $2 million because the whole picture of the dog sold for $4 million three months ago and it can’t realistically have appreciated more than 150% since then; even i…

[deleted]

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#663

Post by Vinnl »

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #572
Vinnl wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting - what is it that makes you care? (Possibly related question: why didn't you just donate ~100 to the artists you found and enjoyed?)

There's a couple things: I like the fact that it's normal to include royalties on secondary sales, I think that it much better for the artist. I generally like generative art and there's really been a huge explosion in generative art being produced. I already followed some of the artists that have minted and was excited to more fully participate by buying some of their NFTs I don't find NFT ownership that different t…

Thanks for sharing - I didn't know about the royalties, if that works then that's sensible. I'm afraid I don't quite understand why NFTs would be necessary for the rest though, other than just being a contingent catalyst stimulating the creation of generative art. If it's purely the fact that you're buying something from them, them sending you an autograph, or a video in which they say "thanks X6S1x6Okd1st for buying this video" seem to have the same effect (though with the "downside" of you not being able to resell it to make money off it yourself).

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#664

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

Vinnl wrote: post #663
X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a couple things: I like the fact that it's normal to include royalties on secondary sales, I think that it much better for the artist. I generally like generative art and there's really been a huge explosion in generative art being produced. I already followed some of the artists that have minted and was excited to more fully participate by buying some of their NFTs I don't find NFT ownership that different t…

Thanks for sharing - I didn't know about the royalties, if that works then that's sensible. I'm afraid I don't quite understand why NFTs would be necessary for the rest though, other than just being a contingent catalyst stimulating the creation of generative art. If it's purely the fact that you're buying something from them, them sending you an autograph, or a video in which they say "thanks X6S1x6Okd1st for buying…

Another property of NFTs I enjoy is that being an early supporter of an artist can yield you sharing in their future success.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#665

Post by mcintyre1994 »

miracle2k wrote: post #639
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah thankyou! In that course we did write a web frontend that interacts with the contract ABI to mint the NFTs, but we didn’t do the display side. I’m curious how opensea are doing it, because they can display NFTs from my contract without me ever giving them the ABI. Can you go from decompiled contract (like etherscan can generate) -> ABI maybe?

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#666

Post by tel »

jameshart wrote: post #492
tel wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this is basically true. Impermanence is part of what makes possession important. I can totally see the value of all NFTs decaying on long time scales because they're just boring.

But on short time scales all age is similar and authenticity seems to be sufficient to at least toss a bunch of liquidity from place to place.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#668

Post by danShumway »

miracle2k wrote: post #656
danShumway wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NFT people do not claim that non-fungible means "you cannot mint two tokens representing the same thing". What NFT people do is argue that the uniqueness of individual tokens matters. It doesn't. They try to have their cake and eat it too, they try to argue that the NFT's link to the individual artwork doesn't matter when evaluating the technology, but that it does matter when trying to determine whether or not NFT…

> The only reason why one NFT is worth more than another is because of who issued it and what it's linked to. So to argue that the individual token's uniqueness is the only thing that matters is to reject the entire relationship between NFTs and artwork. I don't really understand your concerns to be honest. It is exactly as you say. The connection to the artist and art matters. Yes if an artist releases 10-editions f…

The question becomes, what are NFTs adding to this system?

It sounds like the current system is working, that the social system for determining value based on context is working. NFTs aren't making that better or worse, we're using the same social process that we used before.

And I mention elsewhere, NFTs aren't even really helping that much with the distributed ledger either, they still have to hook into the existing systems for determining seller trust and authenticating that the NFT you're buying is "real". There's little benefit in decentralizing the ledger when sellers have to coordinate with each other to ban bad actors anyway.

So we have two systems that already work, that have worked for ages, and now they're linked to the blockchain because... why? All of the use-cases people talk about with NFTs are stuff that you could always have been doing, you don't need a blockchain for any of this. And it's not clear that the blockchain makes any of it easier to do.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#669

Post by danShumway »

baby wrote: post #650
danShumway wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But whether the link is a URL in the contract, a hash, or simply collective memory/agreement amongst collectors doesn't matter. You voice your objection to this point below, and I'll get to that, but I just want to be clear: the NFTs are adding nothing to the existing social systems we use to determine value. We could have a collective memory/agreement without NFTs. We're going to get to having a shared ledger belo…

Value added by NFT: easier to trade and easier to verify.

> easier to trade and easier to verify.

Except no, not easier to trade/verify if you have to hook into off-chain validators to verify that the token is legitimate. The part of transaction security that matters for most people are the trust parts that NFTs explicitly don't try to solve.

The big problem with trust in any token system (and really any art market) is figuring out which tokens are being issued by whom and whether the token/work you're looking at is "real" and actually issued by the artist.

Which NFTs don't even try to help with; they leave that to off-chain validators.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#670

Post by danShumway »

miracle2k wrote: post #655
danShumway wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But whether the link is a URL in the contract, a hash, or simply collective memory/agreement amongst collectors doesn't matter. You voice your objection to this point below, and I'll get to that, but I just want to be clear: the NFTs are adding nothing to the existing social systems we use to determine value. We could have a collective memory/agreement without NFTs. We're going to get to having a shared ledger belo…

I mean, you are certainly right that, again, an NFT is just a blockchain ledger entry, and there could be other kinds of ledger entries. Some examples include: - Paper certificates of ownership of ideas/ingantible works, which have been used for art in the past going back some decades, and maybe somewhat more common now with certain conceptual / digital art pieces. - A centralized leger, as the folks from Blain|South…

If the argument is that tokens in general have a use-case, then I agree with you, they do. My concern is specifically with NFTs (not the general concept, the specific example that springs to mind when most people say the word). I have problems with:

A) the technology

B) the average consumer's understanding of the technology

I think we need art-tokens to be on a blockchain, and in a lot of ways the blockchain might even make this kind of stuff even harder. It's often desirable when working with non-fungible tokens to be able to easily update their metadata, block them, or link them together. NFTs are slowly making movement in this direction, but they're moving very slowly, and it's not clear how the blockchain is helping with any of those features.

I also think it's worth asking why this scene exploded specifically with NFTs even though the systems to make it work existed long before NFTs were on the scene. Frankly, I don't believe you that the average NFT investor understands that the ledger is just a ledger. I've talked to people who are involved in casual NFT collection, and they think the technology is magic. They think that the blockchain magically makes their tokens valuable.

> but when OpenSea kicked off a Cryptopunk Clone project no one lost their tokens, they continued to be traded elsewhere, and the community still chose to value their possessions, even if it maybe inhibited their growth.

It's not really the blockchain that makes this happen though; federated systems can split from each other and route around each other just as easily. If a federated ledger tries to remove tokens, communities can still choose to recognize those tokens and either fork the ledger or run in parallel alongside it.

What you're seeing with OpenSea and clone projects is the social side of this, not the blockchain part.

Post reply on HN