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The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

nautil.us

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Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#101

Post by hnuser847 »

api wrote: post #15

I checked out OpenSea a few days ago to see what was selling. I went in with low expectations but I was still shocked. The hottest NFTs are all trash. It's a bunch of dumb ape doodles and piles of variations on the same few templates. Some of them are algorithmically generated. It's just shockingly dumb, yet I have smart people I follow on Twitter and elsewhere who are convinced this is all world changing. I keep ask…

It's not dumb, it's gambling. You buy a stupid monkey doodle for $100k and hope to sell it to somebody else for $200k. Nobody wants the monkey doodle. The NFT craze has nothing whatsoever to do with art, novel technology, decentralized ownership, or any of the other high-minded concepts people keep bringing up in these discussions. It's about gambling.

CrytoKitties did it back in 2017. NFTs are not new and there were flurry of articles back then along the lines of "How I Made $100k Trading CryptoKitties in My Free Time".

https://hackernoon.com/how-we-made-100k-trading-cryptokittie...

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#102

Post by legutierr »

threeseed wrote: post #95
legutierr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

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

Yes, the idea is to have a legally binding contract that assigns ownership to whomever controls the token.

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#103

Post by hnuser847 »

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…

> You do not own an NFT in any legal or moral sense.

But you do own the very real sum of money that's earned by flipping one. Which is the whole point.

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#104

Post by deergomoo »

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?

To me—and I'm not at all a high art person, so take this with a pinch of salt—I think the value in owning an original painting would be knowing that it is the original, crafted first hand by the artist, rather than the notion that it is mine and not someone else's (which to me continues to be a worthless concept in isolation). If The Lourve said I could keep the Mona Lisa above my mantelpiece forever more, I would not be looking to place bids on it.

For digital art that obviously doesn't apply as the concept of "the original" artefact is borderline meaningless, however that leads neatly onto the other thing I dislike about NFTs, which is the introduction of artificial scarcity in a medium not burdened by it.

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#105

Post by acdha »

rvz wrote: post #24

Here we go again. 'NFTs is a scam', 'web3 is a bubble', 'This is a going to crash', etc. They already know it is a scam, ponzi and a bubble which is why everyone is cashing in on the hype before it collapses. 90% - 98% of these NFTs will not survive and will be worthless, so let us ignore this common form of NFTs (images, videos, etc) and look at NFTs that have utility and value like blockchain domain names like ENS,…

The rest of us have to live in the planet being polluted right now. Many of us will have friends or relatives lose money to scammers. Many of us have retirement funds invested with companies or live in cities which are being pressured to “invest” in transparently-overbilled blockchain funds.

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#106

Post by dvt »

threeseed wrote: post #92
dvt wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> people need your permission to make a copy of that poster.

No they don't, I can literally walk in my friend's living room and take a picture of his poster. I can do that in the store, too, by the way. The "I can copy-paste it" is just a terrible and bad-faith argument.

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#107

Post by brian_cloutier »

Astonishingly low quality article for a publication as wonderful as Nautilus.

For now I just want to comment on one piece, this meme that NFTs are killing the planet through consumption of insane amounts of energy is silly and falls apart with a moment's thought.

All estimates of per-txn energy usage take the total number of transactions and divide by the total energy usage of the chain. However... bitcoin (and other chains) happily consume a lot of energy even when no transactions are being processed. The more important question is: when you make a transaction how much more energy is consumed than in a counterfactual world where you did not make that transaction.

This number is very difficult to estimate, but seems to be at most 10kwh, or as much as driving your tesla ~30 miles, or running your dishwasher 5 times, or running your air conditioner for 5 hours, or doing any of a number of other things which people happily do every day without thinking twice. It would be nice if energy consumption was much lower, this is a non-trivial amount of energy, and multiple chains are working toward lowering it, but popular articles all seem to believe your NFT could power Berlin for a day if only you weren't being so selfish.

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#108

Post by echelon »

Hasu wrote: post #29
randomdata wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been buying "high end" artwork as a tax shelter for a 100 years. Proving ownership through digital means instead of paperwork is insignificant to the practice.

NFTs do not confer, imply, or prove ownership of artwork.

You own this URL to the thing until someone else buys the domain name.

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#109

Post by brian_cloutier »

Zamicol wrote: post #79
dralley wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Ethereum is already running PoS for over a year. Just not all of Ethereum is running PoS. All of Ethereum will switch over and it's currently planned for July.

This is only true in an extremely technical sense. For practical purposes Ethereum is not running PoS. When you make an Ethereum transaction you are interacting with the PoW chain. Every single NFT transaction runs on the PoW chain.

Yes, there is also a PoS chain, confusingly also called "Ethereum", and yes it will soon become the primary chain, but that does not negate the fact that today nearly all activity happens on the PoW chain.

Re: The Worrisome Rise of NFTs

#110

Post by mandmandam »

api wrote: post #37
nikanj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet people keep putting their life savings into it - and coming out significantly richer. It’s rather frustrating how well the market has been rewarding bad decisions

It's all built on historically low (or even effectively negative) interest rates. We've been in a crazy low rate environment since 2008 and COVID pushed the money printing into overdrive. When inflation eventually forces interest rates to be raised a lot of these crazy bubbles are going to pop almost instantly. The alternative, a deflationary depression, would probably have been a lot more painful and destructive. In…

Mass defaults and bankruptcies and worse are still coming, I promise you. You can't funnel money upward this hard for decades and not pay a price.
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