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NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

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Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#131

Post by smt88 »

friedman23 wrote: post #52
purple_ferret wrote: post #30

NFTs, the new way to spin a copyright or incorporate into DRMs, but since it pumps and is bullish for crypto, all cool kids are lovin it.

This is a complete misunderstanding of what an NFT does. The content isn't protected by the NFT, ownership is.

Neither the content nor the ownership is protected by the NFT. The NFT has literally no connection to the content at all, except that someone said, "Hey, buy this and you own the 'original'!" Except in all things digital, "original" means absolutely nothing.

There's a guy who has been selling property on the moon[1]. This is exactly the same thing.

1. https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/03/25/meet-the-man...

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#132

Post by anonporridge »

andreskytt wrote: post #112
anonymoushn wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm hoping we can do our NFT trading on non-PoW chains within the next couple years. This should reduce the environmental impact to that of baseball cards.

Or, there’s an idea, just generate a random string, bundle it with the artwork and sign the whole damn thing using good old RSA. Achieves the exact same goal, uses a fraction of energy and no fancy tech.

Uh...no?

These can trivially be copied (double spent), which means they're just as scarce as any digital data. Valueless without some significant proof of violence and hyper censorship ability enforcing copyright protection.

The primary revolution of bitcoin was the invention of self enforcing digital scarcity.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#133

Post by arcticbull »

alexmingoia wrote: post #63
TheDong wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The environmental critique rings hollow. Our economy revolves around this unnecessary consumerism It is only proof of work which needs to be more wasteful the more efficient things become. If it turns out t-shirts are polluting massively, and someone finds out that by replacing one chemical with another they pollute much less, then people will do that. If a more efficient machine comes out for making a t-shirt, t-s…

Whether it’s a waste of electricity is a matter of opinion. You may think it’s a waste of time and energy, others do not. Electricity generation can come from non-polluting renewable resources (the sun, the water, the wind, etc.)

Can but doesn’t, and of course there’s a ton of generating capacity that would need to be replaced with green power first. Let’s operate in the reality domain.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#134

Post by egypturnash »

Somehow I feel like the message of this article is:

cryptocurrency is bad

and nfts are double bad because artists are the ones making a lot of money off of the absurdity of cryptocurrency instead of blockchain fanciers

maybe I'm just sleepy and cranky

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#135

Post by tal8d »

arcticbull wrote: post #122
tal8d wrote: post #104

It is odd, I've been involved in the cryptocurrency scene from the beginning, and I've seen the whole "Bitcoin kills Mother Gaia" talking point pop up every couple of years - but I've never seen such prolonged parroting as this last cycle. It is a silly complaint, because it never considers the wastefulness of the status quo. But it is an interesting method of attack, trying to conceal the fact that it is a call for…

That’s a dead easy argument to debunk. If each visa payment used 600kWh like a Bitcoin transaction visa alone would consume 3x as much power as the entire world generates and produce 100% of the worlds ewaste. So no, the status quo is orders of magnitude more efficient on a unit basis by definition.

lol, you seem to be forgetting every other system related to and directly supporting payment networks, clearinghouses, etc... oh, and all the regulatory frameworks. And the FED :)

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#136

Post by detaro »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #123
seibelj wrote: post #26

> They use an astonishing amount of electricity to create and trade. Together, they are already using more than is consumed by some states in the US. Imagine building a giant new power plant just to make Christie’s or the Basel Art Fair function. And the amount of power wasted will go up commensurate with their popularity and value. And keep going up. The details are here. The short version is that for the foreseeabl…

Weird that multiple people downvoted this. Mining wastes power on purpose. Transactions don't waste power on purpose, and there are designs that make them minimally expensive.

"Don't worry, we'll be on PoS soon!" is what the crypto space has been saying for years, and as far as I can tell right now the majority of NFTs are done on PoW chains, and still people doing them trumpet "but soon!!" instead of putting their money where their mouth is and actually using a PoS setup today. As mentioned elsewhere, some actually do, props for that, but the overall impression of the crypto space is that they're completely fine with deflecting to some point in the future, and then they shouldn't be surprised if people judge what's actually done and not what's possible and are a bit tired of that argument.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#137

Post by arcticbull »

tal8d wrote: post #135
arcticbull wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a dead easy argument to debunk. If each visa payment used 600kWh like a Bitcoin transaction visa alone would consume 3x as much power as the entire world generates and produce 100% of the worlds ewaste. So no, the status quo is orders of magnitude more efficient on a unit basis by definition.

lol, you seem to be forgetting every other system related to and directly supporting payment networks, clearinghouses, etc... oh, and all the regulatory frameworks. And the FED :)

I’m not. I’m saying by scaling just one small corner to bitcoins inefficiency it cannot be true as it would use 3x the worlds power supply. It cannot be true by induction. If we scaled those aspects up too we’d be taking hundreds or thousands of times more power than the world generates. By doing that id actually be making my argument stronger.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#138

Post by smt88 »

TheColorYellow wrote: post #94

Pretty bad take on NFTs. There are numerous configurations, networks, and commercial structures that can be created for NFT offerings that can mitigate "problems" described in the OP and accommodate for different tradeoffs. A simple retort would point to the many alternative NFT networks that don't use POW-based consensus algorithms or the NFT offerings that enable value add offerings very differently than purchasing…

> Evaluating the capabilities of NFTs against the value offerings of something like rare art is an apples to oranges comparison.

Someone should tell that to all the artists who are selling NFTs with the implication that they're analogous to owning original works.

I agree that it's apples-to-oranges, which is why so many people are appalled at the charlatans who are successfully selling these oranges as apples.

> It turns the conventional model of third-party hosted digital assets on its head

How so? The assets that are "sold" as NFT are still hosted somewhere.

Owning the NFT for something does nothing more than copyright already does. You can store the digital asset on your computer with or without the NFT. You can "consume" it either way as well.

So what if the digital asset is an item in a video game? The game can check to make sure you own it before you use it!

Yes, it can. But the creator of that game can also choose not to do that, just as anyone can choose not to respect copyright.

> I mean to acknowledge its limitations and its potential at the same time

What is its potential? What can someone do with NFTs that they couldn't do before?

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#139

Post by nickysielicki »

gfodor wrote: post #84

OK, so what happens if, say, the worlds energy demands jump 100x in 2-3 years due to out-of-control feedback loops like crypto? Energy prices go up. People suffer. There are two possible responses: - Regulation/laws to stop the feedback loop - Investment + deployment of new energy technologies to increase supply Will be interesting to see which of the two scenarios above happen, or if the fears of this crypto wave le…

The reality is neither. No feedback loop will be removed, and no new energy will be ready (at scale) in time. China has been building a lot of coal plants, I expect more of that.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#140

Post by __float »

dingaling wrote: post #124
TheDong wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bikes have unique serial numbers. https://bikeindex.org runs a free website to let you lookup serial numbers and mark them as stolen, and there's also various other regional websites that do a similar sort of thing. If you want to buy a bike, make sure it has a serial number (and if the number was filed off, then yes it was probably stolen), and look it up on the index. How would an NFT be better than the above datab…

> How would an NFT be better than the above database in any way? It wouldn't depend on the benevolence of a third-party absorbing the cost of running the index. It would be geographically and culturally agnostic. Zoom out here and notice how little of the World's population is involved: https://map.bikewise.org/#0/84/-77 It would be globally unique and would not require the cooperation of manufacturers. Neither of my…

> It would be geographically and culturally agnostic

Who's to say everyone is using the same NFTs for this? We already see a variety of different platforms for NFT art.

> It would eliminate the privacy and security risks of maintaining a central database of PII and associated valuable assets.

How are there now fewer privacy and security risks when the entire blockchain is completely public? Where's the privacy?

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