Earlier quoted context omitted.
Art market started because people appreciate art. In fact rich people even commissioned art for hundreds, if not thousands of years. It can be used for various scams and as an investment, but the whole premise is ridicolous: people pay for art since they like it and want to own it. (And in this NFT scam they dont own anything useful)
I disagree. Art was never expensive, and artists are known to make little money until their death. Price of selective art really went through the roof for no reason other than creating a market to make money.
NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
681–687 of 687 posts
Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
#682Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are an infinite number of potential cryptocurrencies Which is why alt coins are our generation's version of penny stocks. But specific coins have scarcity built in.
And certain NFTs also have scarcity built in. Both NFTs and crypto coins can choose the level of scarcity they want, and all of the value for that scarcity is determined by whatever people believe it to be. NFTs are the exact same thing as crypto coins.
Right, the "limited edition" sales ploy (limited to how many they can sell).
Because they can also mint a "new collection".
Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
#683Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Using a court of appeals assumes a shared widespread understanding of the topic of disagreement, often the only people with the expertise on the topic are going to be the parties involved and teaching a 3rd party can be impractical and prone to steering. I can see smart contracts working with very low volume specialized scenarios for this reason. Also traditional dispute resolution is expensive plenty of times where…
Whether or not that is an expensive process is orthogonal to the question: if a "smart" contract makes a mistake, how do you fix it? Right now there is just zero recourse and everybody shrugs their shoulders at it, "oh well, that's just how software bugs work, sorry about your loss". That's an awfully hard pill to swallow for the average person. Real contracts built up a lot of mechanisms to keep contracts fair and equitable by making sure that when one goes wrong there are ways to deal with it.
Right now with "smart" contracts it's a wild west of whether or not escrow accounts exist and you can maybe, optionally get people (or institutions) involved to fixed something about to go wrong or in the process of going wrong, and there's just about no way in most "smart" contracts to fix things after they've gone wrong. But critically it's a "right" in most contract law-based countries to challenge a contract in a court of law and get a human opinion from a jury of your peers, and I don't see how average citizens can trust a system where that "right" is not given as such and is an "optional" feature that they generally have no idea exists in a specific "smart" contract code (much less if that feature itself is buggy or not).
I realize (per above) that this is often a "feature" and not a "bug" in "smart" contract design today. Most of the designers don't trust institutions (and maybe not even people) and like the "freedom" of "smart" contract platforms with few regulations, few "required features", and few places for instutional/personal intercession. I just don't think that's a good situation for most people to ever trust "smart" contracts in the real world.
Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
#684Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly the sort of shallow understanding I mean to point at. NFTs are so much more than "owning jpegs." This is the same mistake as saying "owning bitcoin is just owning a cell in a spreadsheet." Can I have the title to your car? After all, it's just a piece of paper. NFTs are access tokens to social communities, where owning a particular token grants you access to a community that shares ownership. Collab.L…
If I have a NFT concert ticket, how do I get into the concert? What do the people at the gates do to determine that I may enter? Do I print a piece of paper? Do I show them a picture on my phone or something? Can't the previous owners of the NFT show the same picture? Can't anyone show the same picture on their own phone?
Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
#685NFT 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…
This is so wrong, I made an account to comment. While you are right that the NFT is just an entry to the blockchain with a URI to the actual media file, the file is NOT stored on a centralized platform. While it is possible to use a regular server to store the media file, it is certainly very bad practice and defeats the whole point of NFTs. The media files are stored on IPFS, which is a decentralized peer-to-peer st…
I’m pretty sure this is incorrect. IPFS is not permanent storage unless you host the content yourself or pay a pining service to host it. It may be cached on many computers but those caches are finite and get cleared.
Persistence | IPFS Docs https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/persistence/#long-term-storage
« Long-term storage
Storing data using a personal IPFS node is easy, but it can be inconvenient since you have to manage your own hardware.
[…]
[…] paying a pinning service to store data is a convenient workaround, it still requires someone to bear the cost of storing that data.
[…]
While IPFS guarantees that any content on the network is discoverable, it doesn't guarantee that any content is persistently available. »
Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
#686Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know, there are people in the space who talk a lot about adding utility to NFTs. This may well work for tickets or whatever, but the kind of NFTs we talk about here don't benefit from utility; art doesn't benefit from utility. I agree with the OP that a lot of people here seem unwilling to take a moment and think about this more deeply, and how NFTs might compare to existing ways of valuing things. To be fair, it…
The frustration those of us who are skeptical of this use case of NFTs -- creating artificial digital scarcity -- has with responses like yours and Exporectomy's is that you're pretty much saying "you're clearly not thinking about this deeply enough, because anyone who thought about this correctly would surely agree with us." This is not only not a very convincing argument, it's a little bit of an insulting one. The…
Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites
#687Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t those still rely on the gateway for wherever you mint it on IPFS staying up? The NFT link only points to a gateway which can go down then you’re at the mercy of it being replicated across nodes right?
Correct, it still only exists as long as someone on the IPFS network wants to keep it up. Similar to bittorrent in that way. Still, in the long-term, it seems that having the actual image/video/audio/other data replicated on a decentralized network rather than hosted on a single domain makes more sense to me (but then again, I'm very bullish on the future of IPFS/Filecoin).