Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Tinkerbell Griftopia

stephendiehl.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 251 posts

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#221

Post by bonestamp2 »

b3morales wrote: post #138
danielvf wrote: post #21

I work in the crypto industry right now - my job is to keep bad guys from stealing XXX millions of dollars. I've also worked on a team that has done the tech side of several record breaking NFT's sales. And I've sold my own NFTS for fun, and strangers have bought them (wat!). I'm not a "believer". Crypto is indeed full of idiots - and scammers - and crazy people who will say anything to see the token they hold go up…

> And amidst the flurry of insanity in NFT world, there is some genuinely good art being created. ... The whole game around who gets to pay a stupid amount of money to say they own it of them doesn't diminish the fact that art has been created, and the art can be enjoyed anyone. It is good art, and thanks for the link, I hadn't heard of them before. But I don't see what the NFT aspect adds. They've been creating art…

> But I don't see what the NFT aspect adds.

It's a very good question, and the answer was conveniently left out of the blog post at hand. The reason art NFTs were created to begin with was because in the traditional art world, the people who make nearly all of the money are not the people who actually make the art. It is the art dealers and the art collectors who take the lion's share of the money.

The purpose of putting art in an NFT is to better balance the economics of art so that when the dealers and collectors continue to sell the art for increasingly higher prices, the original artist also gets some of the financial reward. This is especially important for young artists who are talented but are not yet able to sell their originals for a liveable wage or get any interest in a distributor to make prints.

A lot of people think NFTs are a waste of time and money, and I completely understand that paradigm, but NFTs are very important to the Artists who are trying to make a living wage from their passion. Ideally, this will contribute to even more imaginative art in the future.

I'd argue that Art NFTs actually share the values of open source software that were listed in the article, at least when it comes to improving "abundance, post-scarcity, universal access, and equality" for artists.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#222

Post by JeremyNT »

iskander wrote: post #211
vkou wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of the NFT protocol verifies provenance? And why did this not work for Davidson Carvalho, who hasn't seen a cent of the money made by someone selling NFTs of his work? If there was no provenance, why did anyone pay $170,000 for them? [1] Could it be the case that the NFT market doesn't give two figs about provenance? [1] https://twitter.com/colorblindmess/status/145059819884259328...

Social interpretation of the contract that the token is attached to. e.g. if your Art Blocks NFT is on the Art Blocks contract, it's authentic. If it's the same image on a different contract, it's inauthentic. Just saw your edit: now that it's known that the art is stolen from a different artist, I would expect the original NFTs to lose most if not all of their value. The convention of authenticity is a social one. I…

> Social interpretation of the contract that the token is attached to.

So if the value of NFTs only exists because of a "social contract," what good are they? I could just pay the artist $1M for a normal JPEG they will send me via email (and for my money, an actual JPEG seems like it would be way more useful than a cryptographic hash of a URL to the JPEG).

In neither case do you "own" anything in a real sense, you have an artist communicating that you have exclusive rights to a bucket of bits.

The only value I can comprehend in all this is that of the ledger's utility in facilitating trading on the secondary market (since the artist doesn't need to go and vouch for everybody who eventually buys/sells the ownership stake in the bag of bits in the future).

It all feels gross to me. I can certainly appreciate that artists have to make a living, but the idea that the best way to do this is to crank out digital certificates to confirm somebody "owns" their work (but only in the sense that the "owner" can trade and speculate on that ownership stake) strikes me as bizarre and dystopian.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#223

Post by [deleted] »

trevyn wrote: post #116
pphysch wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it lulz, or is it a desperate attempt to find a financial/economic foothold when traditional footholds (bearable careers, houses, etc.) are increasingly out of reach for Millennials and onward?

The traditional footholds are no longer relevant. Millennials and onward live on their phones, not in a house or at a workplace. From the traditional perspective, this seems like a loss. From another perspective, it's not.

[deleted]

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#224

Post by nathias »

kibwen wrote: post #175
nathias wrote: post #151

Yes, the bankster grandpa Dahl is right. Crypto is not for you, it is not for the very wealthy old americans that have build the 'open' web of platforms and sucked the value out of all the corners of the Earth. It's for the rest of us.

You realize that there's literally nothing stopping Old Money from buying their way into cryptocurrency ecosystems and concentrating their wealth there too, yes? In fact it's even easier for wealthy people to speculate like this, because unlike poor people, wealthy people have disposable income. Cryptocurrency is a playground for the wealthy and the model for our futuristic serfdom dominated by a digital aristocracy…

There is, its risk. They are rich and risk averse, we are poor and have nothing to lose except our tiny paychecks. Wealthy people have assets, poor people have time. There is very little freedom and social mobility left in our decaying system and crypto is all there is left.

There is of course the possibility that the current aristocracy will apropriate our tools for themselves (they sure are trying), but I see the potential for a much better world, one where democracy is restored and enhanced by technology.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#225

Post by cwkoss »

RyanCavanaugh wrote: post #203
cwkoss wrote: post #184

There are several major issues with NFTs but I don't think this article identifies any of them: - NFTs are not durable. All of the implementations I've seen are trading "ownership" of URLs that rely on DNS and WHOIS. URL is nice for convenience feature, but they should at least include file hashes, ideally multiple perceptual hashes as well. If there is a central point of failure in a web service, the benefits of dec…

If you have a "unified 'IP Registry'", as you (I think correctly) posit would be useful, why does it have to be done with a blockchain? Blockchains are useful for decentralized decisions, but decentralization is antithetical to the kind of thing you would need in order to take an IP claim to court. If you and another person with alleged IP claims to the same work but different registries show up to court, the court h…

In terms of "unified IP registry' I'm not talking about a single centralized organisation, but a super-ecosystem of multiple sub- NFT ecosystems:

- Each do due diligence of creator ownership before an NFT can be sold on their platform.

- In addition, they test the candidate-NFT against the file and perceptual hashes on other trusted peer ecosystems

- Due diligence signatures are portable and transferrable, so ex. Sotheby's validation could be used as evidence when token is resold within OpenSea ecosystem - even if Sotheby's was to hypothetically disappear (assuming old signatures are still trustworthy).

(caveat: Perceptual hashes are starting to push past my technical expertise, not sure to what extent perceptual hashes would be economically feasible: can they be specific enough to not cause excessive false positives while still identifying true positive subtle image manipulations without drastically increasing on-chain storage costs?)

I think the benefits of decentralization would be nice, but it's certainly arguable that an ICANN-like international centralized consortium could be a better solution - it certainly can be more energy and cost efficient but at the expense of that entity being a single point of failure.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#226

Post by iskander »

JeremyNT wrote: post #222
iskander wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social interpretation of the contract that the token is attached to. e.g. if your Art Blocks NFT is on the Art Blocks contract, it's authentic. If it's the same image on a different contract, it's inauthentic. Just saw your edit: now that it's known that the art is stolen from a different artist, I would expect the original NFTs to lose most if not all of their value. The convention of authenticity is a social one. I…

> Social interpretation of the contract that the token is attached to. So if the value of NFTs only exists because of a "social contract," what good are they? I could just pay the artist $1M for a normal JPEG they will send me via email (and for my money, an actual JPEG seems like it would be way more useful than a cryptographic hash of a URL to the JPEG). In neither case do you "own" anything in a real sense, you ha…

>The only value I can comprehend in all this is that of the ledger's utility in facilitating trading on the secondary market (since the artist doesn't need to go and vouch for everybody who eventually buys/sells the ownership stake in the bag of bits in the future).

The contract also automates royalties.

>It all feels gross to me. I can certainly appreciate that artists have to make a living, but the idea that the best way to do this is to crank out digital certificates to confirm somebody "owns" their work (but only in the sense that the "owner" can trade and speculate on that ownership stake) strikes me as bizarre and dystopian.

It's definitely weird and it's definitely a novel form of ownership -- I think the debate over whether NFTs are good/bad is really one over whether this new social convention will stick around. I can see why some people don't want it to.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#227

Post by [deleted] »

demygale wrote: post #75

From the article: "But truly that is the message of the Andersen folktale, that power begets the capacity to inspire delusion in the masses." Does the "Andersen folktale" refer to Tinkerbell? Has nothing to do with the merit of the article or his argument, but Tinkerbell was a character invented by J.M. Barrie for Peter Pan and not a folktale at all.

[deleted]

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#228

Post by cwkoss »

iskander wrote: post #219
cwkoss wrote: post #184

There are several major issues with NFTs but I don't think this article identifies any of them: - NFTs are not durable. All of the implementations I've seen are trading "ownership" of URLs that rely on DNS and WHOIS. URL is nice for convenience feature, but they should at least include file hashes, ideally multiple perceptual hashes as well. If there is a central point of failure in a web service, the benefits of dec…

>NFTs are not durable Some of the more prized NFTs are entirely on-chain; I agree that ones which just encode a URL of an image feel very superficial and brittle. >Scarcity is entirely illusory across ecosystems Every successful ETH NFT has been copied (probably multiple times) on other chains; this isn't really any different from just even copying on the same chain. In all cases it's treated as a copy. >There is no…

> Some of the more prized NFTs are entirely on-chain

Oh neat - that's definitely better, I'm sure it increases costs significantly though.

> "treated as a copy."

Are consumers able to easily make informed decisions about which versions of NFT are primal and which are derivative? Seems like a hard problem that would require a lot of expensive moderation by the ecosystems.

> Best NFTs are CC0 licensed and don't confer any legal rights

I love me some CC0, but I'd also love a system where I can self service:

- Identify the owner of a song I'd like to use as background music in a video

- Buy an NFT that represents a license to use that song in a single streaming video

- "Point" that NFT at a file hash of the completed video

- Upload video to youtube and other streaming platforms including a reference to the NFT, making it immune to arbitrary takedown requests.

There are stories of creators who own the rights to a song getting takedown requests on a video that includes it and getting stuck in kafkaesque bureaucracy despite having a valid license. There is no public registry of who is licensed to use a piece of content, so Youtube would have to manually inspect contracts to resolve this - it seems they are grossly understaffed in support to be able to do this. Sure, this is partially due to Youtube's extreme subservience to the IP lobby, but a public system to validate licensing would be extremely valuable IMO.

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#229

Post by kwertyoowiyop »

danielvf wrote: post #21

I work in the crypto industry right now - my job is to keep bad guys from stealing XXX millions of dollars. I've also worked on a team that has done the tech side of several record breaking NFT's sales. And I've sold my own NFTS for fun, and strangers have bought them (wat!). I'm not a "believer". Crypto is indeed full of idiots - and scammers - and crazy people who will say anything to see the token they hold go up…

“There are a lot of smart people working on this stuff” is something I’ve heard several times recently. It gives me reason to hope, but it’s not sufficient. At some point, concrete results are needed. Fingers crossed…

Re: The Tinkerbell Griftopia

#230

Post by wpietri »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #221
b3morales wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And amidst the flurry of insanity in NFT world, there is some genuinely good art being created. ... The whole game around who gets to pay a stupid amount of money to say they own it of them doesn't diminish the fact that art has been created, and the art can be enjoyed anyone. It is good art, and thanks for the link, I hadn't heard of them before. But I don't see what the NFT aspect adds. They've been creating art…

> But I don't see what the NFT aspect adds. It's a very good question, and the answer was conveniently left out of the blog post at hand. The reason art NFTs were created to begin with was because in the traditional art world, the people who make nearly all of the money are not the people who actually make the art. It is the art dealers and the art collectors who take the lion's share of the money. The purpose of put…

There's no particular evidence that NFTs will change the economics of art. Indeed, given the rich history of scams, money laundering, grift, and fraud in the fungible token space, I'd say there's good reason to think artist will end up at least as screwed over. Indeed, given that the traditional art world will be eager to get in on it, it could be worse.

> Art NFTs actually share the values of open source [...] improving "abundance, post-scarcity, universal access, and equality"

This is flatly wrong. The whole point of an NFT is to create artificial scarcity in a post-scarcity medium. And it is the sort of "up is really down" crypto promotion that has turned me into a reflexive skeptic.

Post reply on HN