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NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

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Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#211

Post by paulmd »

anonporridge wrote: post #66
TheDong wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> portable, digital identities and assets that transcend any specific virtual realm Why not just have a government or trusted company sign things rather than an NFT? If the UN says "we will digitally sign digital passports", that seems strictly better than an NFT for identity. Without a central authority to verify identity, how do you solve the problem of a thousand people creating NFTs saying they're john doe living…

Here I'm talking more about pseudonymous virtual identities that aren't necessarily publicly tied to meat world people. Digital passport for verification of physical world identity probably will be some government agency. Boy would it suck if they 'accidentally' delete your digital identity and suddenly you can't participate in any social media. As more and more of our lives go virtual, this could legitimately become…

You mean like getting your facebook profile banned?

As always, this always exists and the question is why Facebook would want to give up their centralized control of it, just like national central banks won't willingly accept loss of control over their own currencies.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#212

Post by rhn_mk1 »

smt88 wrote: post #131
friedman23 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It doesn't have connection to the content, unless it's declared that it does.

All intellectual property law works this way already. The copy you have does not have any bearing on the copy someone else has, but we created laws that link it back: you don't "own" the copy you have, and using it in certain ways is made illegal.

NFTs as they are now, without any legal protection, are still innocent, but they are bought because people want to "own" something. Since NFTs don't actually provide technological means to implement that "ownership", the next logical step is to declare it by law: "owning" an NFT gives "ownership" of the content. I hope it never comes to this.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#213

Post by throwaway_kufu »

Lazare wrote: post #182
detaro wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have the impression people buying NFT art consider there to be much difference between the art and what you call a "trading card" referencing art. (sure, many probably buy for speculation, but that happens with meatspace art too) Thought experiment: if they sold a digital art piece in traditional terms, would you consider the printed licensing contract (which is our usual legal tool represent selling a file)…

> if they sold a digital art piece in traditional terms People do sell licenses to digital art, yes. I've both bought and sold such licenses, primarily on TurboSquid ( https://www.turbosquid.com/ ), a digital market place which has been doing that for over 20 years. That's neither a trading card nor the art itself, but it's certainly closer to "art" than "trading card", because I get specific legal rights to do speci…

The turbosquid comparison is fair...basically NFTs are recreating that, but without the need of turbosquid.

To your other point many NFTs already include these additional legal rights, it’s articles and forums like this where people are talking about NFTs as if they are all just digital baseball cards.

Just look at decentralized domain names as the obvious counter examples (Unstoppable Domains and/or Ethereum Name Service). You aren’t just buying an NFT for a domain name, the NFT includes the rights to the actual name. I use both companies as examples, because even if this new space they are not offering the same rights over the underlying domain and it’s incumbent on the user to understand what rights they actually get with the NFT.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#214

Post by j4yav »

analog31 wrote: post #55
thinkingkong wrote: post #38

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…

Couldn’t the thieves just make a new NFT blockchain that says they own whatever they like and skip the messy steps in the middle? You’d end up at the same end state where the museum has a painting and the thieves have a certificate that says they own it.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#215

Post by dannyw »

The electricity argument is flawed. The electricity used is to power the ethereum proof of work blockchain. All its doing is checksumming hashes.

It doesn't matter if you buy 0, 1, or 100 NFTs: your marginal impact on the electricity usage is zero.

The argument of marginal gas fees is also going away in July, with the network upgrade no longer paying gas fees to miners but burning them instead.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#216

Post by roywiggins »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #81

Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy: Earth - a small planet in the outer reaches of spiral galaxy M7529, so far the only planet on record that the semi-intelligent biped inhabitants managed to overheat so badly that they became extinct. Overheating has happened before, of course, however the method of overheating is unique - the inhabitants invented a method of identifying uniqueness by making large calculations and atta…

I am reminded of the Shoe Event Horizon.

https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Shoe_Event_Horizon

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#217

Post by paulmd »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #146
detaro wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Even without proof of stake, it's possible to make transactions low-cost. 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.

> Even without proof of stake, it's possible to make transactions low-cost.

only at the cost of reversibility.

the central thesis of proof of work is that an attacker must expend more energy than the "main" chain, across the duration of time they want to be able to reverse a transaction (older transactions require more time).

The amount of energy expended is determined by mining rewards - over time, mining profit will converge to zero, miners will expend however much energy the mining rewards buy.

as such - any reduction in energy expenditure (i.e. a reduction in mining rewards) will lead to a reduction in security, making it easier to reverse transactions.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#218

Post by kolinko »

anonymoushn wrote: post #115
andreskytt wrote: post #112

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.

Yeah, you could plausibly just transfer these things by having each owner sign an attestation of the new owner's public key. But since it looks like this junk will happen on a publicly accessible slow computer/database, I'm just hoping it happens on e.g. Solana instead of Ethereum.

Signing attestation by itself wouldn’t work because of double spending. You would need either a centralised database of who owns what or a blockchain.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#219

Post by [deleted] »

tablespoon wrote: post #110
jamesgreenleaf wrote: post #37

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…

> You can brag about owning such-and-such an image, but only as long as enough other people desire images from that particular set. When a set's popularity wanes, so does your token's value, and your ability to show it off. And only as long as people recognize your NFT claim to ownership as even being valid. Other people may view that brag as being as sad as someone bragging about their land holdings on the moon: htt…

[deleted]

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#220

Post by TimTheTinker »

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.

ECC (curve 25519) would be preferable.
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