141–150 of 786 posts
I think the immediate value of NFTs lies in industries where you need to keep the producer honest to protect against artificial scarcity. For example, what stops baseball card printers from re-printing "rare" cards? And how do we know they're not hoarding some of the best cards for a few years, then selling them individually? I could see NFTs being demanded in situations like this to force producers to create digital…
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…
Wouldn't you rather just have it run by an entity the legal system can point to?
If you don't trust the legal system...then I really doubt that having a third-party website is going to help you with a bike thief in anyway.
It’s easy for a famous entrenched artist who mass produces their work thanks to legacy infrastructure to talk down on this but I’m seeing lots of independent creator artist friends making some money for their work
What property of NFTs has suddenly made them make money where previously they weren't? Like how did adding NFTs to the mix suddenly make their art start selling?
NFTs make perfect sense for representing a claim on things that can be used, like event tickets or in-game virtual goods. But as certificates layered on top of collectibles... I'm not so sure. With something like CryptoKitties, you can do something with the tokens (play a virtual pet game). But with something like CryptoPunks you're essentially paying for digital beanie babies, which are worse than real ones since an…
> NFTs make perfect sense for representing a claim on things that can be used, like event tickets or in-game virtual goods. There’s absolutely no reason for that to be decentralized, only one party can honor the tokens anyways. Like most things crypto they don’t actually make sense for anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is there something that you can only do via the token? Are there special events or access for token holders? I could see something like that being independently valuable, and interesting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Bitcoin is going to burn power whether or not you attach your token-tracker to it. If you design a system with thousands to millions of users that makes one bitcoin transaction per day to secure itself, then it's responsible for a pretty negligible amount of wasted power.
Maybe NFTs for collectibles isnt ideal but Im wondering if there are some more - lets say - utilitarian uses of this concept that we havent discussed yet. The other day I tried buying a bike. Id really like to know it wasnt stolen, and somehow being able to tie a real world representation into a virtual single item good would be somewhat useful.
I actually had a similar idea, last time the theft of a famous painting was reported in the news. The museum could offer a deal, where they get the painting back but give the thieves a certificate for it. As part of the deal, they have to hang a sign next to the painting, saying, "This painting is considered to be stolen." The thieves can do whatever they want with the certificate -- use it to pay illicit debts and s…
I love this answer because it's a perfect analogy to explain why NFTs are total nonsense.
Owning a one-of-a-kind, literally irreplaceable painting cannot be substituted for a certificate. The certificate has zero value because it does not allow the owner to restrict access to the original painting.
The core concept of ownership (control over a scarce resource) is violated as soon as you start trading a certificate instead of the original item.
It's like someone saying that owning the last remaining Michael Jordan baseball card is the same as owning Michael Jordan, and that both have the same value. It's ludicrous.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you want to sell it to someone else, you sign a message saying you give it to them and so on, forming a "chain" of signed transactions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a bad idea because the energy used is worse than wasted since all it does is contribute to an increase in the mining difficulty for the entire network, thus worsening the environmental impact. It's actually better for the environment to leave that energy completely unused rather than use it for mining bitcoins.
This isn’t necessarily true: if the subsidies spread clean power generation then the percentage of miners that have bad environmental impacts will decrease over time. Also, since this would make relatively clean power sources cheaper, it would help phase out fossil generation capacity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> NFTs make perfect sense for representing a claim on things that can be used, like event tickets or in-game virtual goods. There’s absolutely no reason for that to be decentralized, only one party can honor the tokens anyways. Like most things crypto they don’t actually make sense for anything.
You still might want to hand out tokens to third parties to trade but not copy. I agree that a decentralized structure is not necessary.