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The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

nautil.us

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Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#91

Post by heckerhut »

dralley wrote: post #72
Zamicol wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NTF's aren't on Bitcoin. They're on Ethereum which is switching over to PoS.

>They're on Ethereum which is switching over to PoS. It's been switching over to PoS for years. I distinctly remember articles in 2019 about how they'd switch by the end of 2020, articles in 2020 about how they'd switch by the end of 2021, and here we are in 2022. The point holds until they actually do make the switch.

Update your facts my friend this criticism is stale and has been superseded by a million major events by now. Read the news or hold back on your deprecated knowledge.

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#92

Post by threeseed »

dvt wrote: post #69
threeseed wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No the artist owns it. They have the copyright. So the funny part is that if you buy an NFT not only can I legally copy it but I can approach the artist, buy the copyright and then sue you for copyright infringement.

While this is (in most cases) true, you still own, say, a poster you bought of some artwork. The NFT is a sort of "poster" you own. You still own it, so I don't understand your criticism.

The difference is that people need your permission to make a copy of that poster.

I can take your NFT image, duplicate it and use it however I want. And you have no legal or moral right to say no.

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#93

Post by acdha »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #62
threeseed wrote: post #21

The worst thing is the constant and malicious lie being perpetuated. You do not own an NFT in any legal or moral sense. The ownership is not recognised in any country, by any court or international body. All you have is an entry in a logical database that says you own it. But unless you have signed a contract with the seller transferring or licensing copyright then it as meaningless as you buying a certificate saying…

Yeah. NFTs are not a bad idea but the current implementation is basically a scam. Ownership of these tokens means nothing, people pay for them and still own nothing. They could be good. Imagine if instead of the current licensing hell you could just buy an NFT that represents your ownership of a song, a film, a video game. Companies wouldn't be able to take it away from you remotely, you'd be able to resell it at a l…

> Unfortunately this would probably require an actual legal framework around it to guarantee these rights.

I'd go stronger to “would definitely require”. If companies wanted to offer this, there's no reason they couldn't right now so the question really needs to be how you'd get them to offer more consumer-friendly terms. One option is a legal requirement but that would be non-trivial to implement to avoid various scams (e.g. if I license a movie and sell it to you, how comfortable are they with the idea that I didn't save the decryption key when I legally had it?).

The most interesting example I've seen of what this could look like is Movies Anywhere. My understanding is that Disney's motivation was preventing a single tech company like Apple, Amazon, Netflix, etc. from having a large enough share of the market that they'd be able to dictate terms to the movie studies the way Apple was able to use iTunes to push the music industry to be less exploitative. That only works with a list of trusted parties and seems to be about as much as I'd expect to see in the current climate.

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#94

Post by tablespoon »

deergomoo wrote: post #75
threeseed wrote: post #21

The worst thing is the constant and malicious lie being perpetuated. You do not own an NFT in any legal or moral sense. The ownership is not recognised in any country, by any court or international body. All you have is an entry in a logical database that says you own it. But unless you have signed a contract with the seller transferring or licensing copyright then it as meaningless as you buying a certificate saying…

Even aside from the baloney idea of ownership they offer, the thing that continues to baffle me about NFTs is that the very nature of them assumes that ownership is inherently valuable. Buying a painting allows me to hang it on the wall and admire it, where is where I derive the value of owning that painting. Buying a digital videogame allows me play it, even though there is no physical good (and is also a questionab…

> ... Even aside from the baloney idea of ownership they offer, the thing that continues to baffle me about NFTs is that the very nature of them assumes that ownership is inherently valuable.

It's less baffling if you realize it's just BS "power of positive thinking" [1]. A bunch of people latched on to NFT's because they wanted to be in on the ground floor of the next big speculative bubble. However the thing is fundamentally BS, but to admit that would contradict their goals, so they use positive thinking to believe the BS in the hope that their belief will somehow make the BS true.

So, basically: I want NFT's to be valuable, so that means whatever it is they provide must be valuable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Positive_Thinking

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#95

Post by threeseed »

legutierr wrote: post #71
threeseed wrote: post #21

The worst thing is the constant and malicious lie being perpetuated. You do not own an NFT in any legal or moral sense. The ownership is not recognised in any country, by any court or international body. All you have is an entry in a logical database that says you own it. But unless you have signed a contract with the seller transferring or licensing copyright then it as meaningless as you buying a certificate saying…

"NFT" means "Non-fungible token". It means that one token of a type is not strictly equivalent to another token of the same type. It does not mean "a link to a JPEG that is hosted on OpenSea." > You do not own an NFT in any legal or moral sense. Often this is the case, but it doesn't need to be the case, it shouldn't be the case, and it was never intended to be the case. Yes, it is stupid that people are buying NFTs…

> attempt to convey an ownership right via contract

If that attempt was a serious one it would be an actual legally binding contract.

But it's not. And the sellers know this because it allows them to scam more money out of people.

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#96

Post by hnbad »

golemotron wrote: post #36

> The much bigger question, though, has less to do with these emergent upstarts in our informational world and more to do with humanity’s overall trajectory. Any species that endlessly grows, and continually invents energy-hungry processes, may not be destined for a happy ending. Unless energy consumptive processes lead you off-world for more resources. I'm surprised that the author, an astrobiologist, doesn't see a…

Too bad we don't live in sci-fi land. Crypto is burning resources here and now as we already face a climate catastrophe and drag our heels in replacing fossils with renewables.

There's currently no pressure to drive anyone "off-world" for more resources. "Off-world" is not only completely speculative and untested but also prohibitively expensive. Even if we could solve all the technological problems overnight simply by thinking really hard and running simulations (and that's a ludicrous assumption for any time scale), it would still be extremely resource and labor intensive to build the necessary infrastructure to actually implement it. In other words it would require burning more resources, creating more pollution and damaging the climate even more during an ongoing climate disaster.

And then what? Asteroid mining? This would solve resource scarcity but not actually help the climate. Sure, lithium and precious metals are cost factors when producing batteries but you still need to transport those resources back to Earth and refine them. All of this is still extremely energy and resource intensive and creates pollution.

No, an astrobiologist with a good head on their shoulders probably isn't naively pursuing some speculative VC promises of a high-tech future with off-world carbon capture and space elevators. They're probably more concerned with the one world we have not totally going to shit in the next few decades.

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#98

Post by Zamicol »

acdha wrote: post #76
friendlydog wrote: post #42

Commercial aviation makes up 918 million metric tons of carbon. Bitcoin mining makes up 22 million metric tons. I'm less worried about NFTs than I am air travel.

Commercial aviation is at least useful: every year many millions of people travel for business, school, family, and pleasure needs which would be non-trivial to replace and aviation cargo is a key part of the global supply chain. If Bitcoin turned off tomorrow, some speculators would be very upset and nobody else would notice because 13 years in it still hasn't found something it can do competitively with alternative…

The current monetary system has absurd levels of hand wavy magic.

Are you familiar with what is being done on these systems? Uniswap alone did $1 billion in fees last year, a distributed, permissionless, unstoppable exchange. Ethereum did $10 billion in fees last year.

I know someone who bought their house with a loan from Dai, which is far less hand wavy magic than Wells Fargo. It took them 30 minutes and no permission for the powers that be was needed.

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#99

Post by mikeg8 »

gruez wrote: post #85
deergomoo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even aside from the baloney idea of ownership they offer, the thing that continues to baffle me about NFTs is that the very nature of them assumes that ownership is inherently valuable. Buying a painting allows me to hang it on the wall and admire it, where is where I derive the value of owning that painting. Buying a digital videogame allows me play it, even though there is no physical good (and is also a questionab…

>Buying a painting allows me to hang it on the wall and admire it, where is where I derive the value of owning that painting. That's true, but why do people spend millions on an original [famous artist] painting? If all they want to do is admire the painting, surely a high quality replica (ie. the type that can fool the naked eye) would be more than sufficient?

“People” in your comment being an extremely small class of wealthy individuals whom have the luxury of trading art. Most people would be totally fine purchasing a high quality replica, as that is their only option.

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#100

Post by friendlydog »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #86
friendlydog wrote: post #42

Commercial aviation makes up 918 million metric tons of carbon. Bitcoin mining makes up 22 million metric tons. I'm less worried about NFTs than I am air travel.

This is a bad argument. Just because something we currently do is worse than something we want to do, doesn’t mean the new thing is good. Nor does it mean we should add to our current burden unnecessarily. It also ignores what we use the old thing for. Flight has enabled so much: fast response to disasters, faster shipping of goods, saving human lives. The entire planet can benefit from flight. Crypto is used by a sm…

Aviation makes up only 1.9% of the big pie and bitcoin barely is a blip. It would be nice not to have those tons, but addressing big pollution first makes the most sense for triaging the problem. Personally I would enjoy the lower prices for graphics cards if bitcoin went away.

No one said eliminate all air travel. Cutting it down to once a week for non-emergency use world wide would have a huge effect, but even then aviation is only 1.9% of the problem. Making tarrifs, even within the same country, on food grown by milage from consumption would reduce the transport and farming slice of the pie. Eat locally for the cheapest cost.

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