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NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

every.to

271–280 of 687 posts

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with paintings, etc. So yeah it's a wonky argument because it ignores subjective judgement

Yes and No. Most paintings don't have (much) value. Behold my latest work, the brown ring of quality... do I hear... 5 cents? A few paintings have value, primarily due to the fame of the artist or the history of the piece (It hung ). Supply is frequently capped by the fact the artist is dead...

Yes, the historical and social context, etc, which are subjectively valued. I expect that those who purchase NTF with the hope that they appreciate also count on the value of the token being part of a "limited collection", or being one of the first (an NFT from 2021 becoming a "historically significant" thing due to being one of the first ever produced), or such speculative considerations.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#272

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Youtube suggested a video to me about what's going on in the collectable video game market. The claim was that there's some collusion between a major auction site and a grader, and some of those players were running a pump and dump. Unless you know who the buyers and sellers are or transaction fees are high (like an auction at Christie's), you have no idea if the sales are real, so it's pretty easy to make it look li…

Yup, Karl Jobst's expose I bet. It was a really good piece of journalism, maybe not something you'd expect from a YouTuber who mostly vlogs about speedrunners.

I was trying to find it, but couldn't until you said his name. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvLFEh7V18A

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#273
What many people seem to do is associate NFTs with art. Art is a subset of what NFTs are used for. We're in that phase where the first apps on the iPhone were the beer pouring ones, as that was the only way they could figure out how to use the gyroscopes. More use-cases will come, as the tech matures, the tulip manias fade.

I'm incredibly bearish about art via NFTs, but I see potential in non fungible tokens / smart contracts more broadly. Look at how successful NBA top shot has been...collecting digital moments that can be seamlessly traded on a market place. That's like baseball cards, but more convenient. In a future that will increasingly be more digital and VR is slowly gaining stronger foothold, it will be easier to show your friends your digital collectibles collection than it will be to show your baseball card collection. You can also guarantee its authenticity instead of hoping the shady seller on ebay is honest.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#274

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If the community cares they'll try and find out people that do that and blacklist them. hicetnunc does that, it's the only one I could speak to. That's generally referred to as copy-minting. EDIT: here's the hicetnunc community write up for basic steps to minimize the change you buy a copy-mint: https://github.com/hicetnunc2000/hicetnunc/wiki/Beware-copym... !

This is a lot of words to say "there is by design no way to do that". DeFi systems are all designed around the unspoken (although sometimes spoken, honestly) assumption that rules are bad and that the system should make enforcing them difficult-to-impossible. A fun exercise is to consider, if all businesses went to using *coin overnight and one accidentally overcharged your wallet, how would you get your coins back?

Like anything in life, the value and integrity of something is maintained by the community who uses it, a platform is just a tool for people to use.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#275

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> there is an entirely new world of opportunity ... any distributed form of ownership That is what people say, but what I don't understand is what ownership is actually conferred with NFTs. The only "ownership" is the ability to transfer the NFT to another person, which simply gives them the ability to transfer it to another person (which sounds a bit MLMy). For ownership to be worth more than that, you need a legal…

> For ownership to be worth more than that, you need a legal system and a legal contract ... so back to square one. That's the part about NFTs that I keep getting hung up on, yes. I get the abstract notion of creating artificial scarcity for digital goods, and how that could have market value. But we've seen absurd things like "use this service to create an NFT for any individual tweet," with no verification that the…

A lot of people on here are aggressively expressing skepticism of NFTs while only giving simple easily refutable reasons. It seems like they're trying hard not to understand. That's what happens when people have cognitive dissonance. Perhaps they've spent their whole life building a slightly incorrect mental model of how society works and NFTs don't fit that model. It's easier to deny the value of NFTs than to change their mental model. The denial has to be aggressive because it's so emotionally dangerous to let yourself lose your grip on your existing beliefs. That kind of hysteresis or stickiness of beliefs is a good thing because it allows us to build elaborate consistent useful models of the world without upending it at every random new idea. But it also means old set-in-their-ways people aren't good at adopting cutting edge ideas.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#276

> The venn diagram of NFT haters are almost exact matches of Crypto haters Nonsense. I'm pro-crypto but think NFTs are absolutely idiotic. Scarcity is fundamental to any store of value. There are an infinite number of potential NFTs.

I like to think about NFT as an easy method of buying art from artists. There are many platforms for this with classical purchase mechanics, but as an artist myself, I love the idea of an auction-based platform for this era of digital art. Right now, there are no mechanism for extraordinary digital artists to make their art expensive like IRL art. The best thing is you can do commissions for people, but it's hard for…

But you don't own the art. You own the receipt for the purchase of a hash of the specific digital format the art is stored in.

Note that there are definitely currently ways for digital artists to make expensive art, and that's in the form of commissions. If you really want to support an artist, find one you really like, and pay for a commission from them. You may also be able to pay more for forms of copyright (like reproduction).

NFTs are the worst possible way for artists to make money from digital art.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#277
post #264

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Not that I support NFTs much, but conceptually, how is that different than you buying a Marilyn Monroe from Andy Warhol and him printing the exact same Marilyn Monroe and selling it to someone else ? Hopefully in 2021 everyone would agree that the two are distinct artworks, even if the physical object is exactly the same to the human eye ; that's not what matters when buying art.

The Marilyn Monroes are still limited by the number that Warhol prints, and you have ownership of the print that you bought. Maybe it’s not as valuable as it would be if there was only 1 Monroe print, but you are paying for a physical object made by Warhol. If I understand correctly, an NFT is like if someone, not necessarily Warhol himself, sold you a note posted on a wall somewhere that said “You own Andy Warhol’s…

Yeah, but what else can you do with digital art? Buy the PC it's sitting on and only share it via webcam of the screen?

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes? Even if you're exclusively referring to cryptocurrency when you say "purely digital money", it was already possible before the popularity of NFTs to accept cryptocurrency as payment for anything.

I'm saying you still needed https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721 to appear on the scene to facilitate NFTs, that implementation isn't as omnipresent as the possibility of buying anything with crypto.

But you don’t need NFTs to sell a digitally signed copy of a picture for say Bitcoin.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a lot of words to say "there is by design no way to do that". DeFi systems are all designed around the unspoken (although sometimes spoken, honestly) assumption that rules are bad and that the system should make enforcing them difficult-to-impossible. A fun exercise is to consider, if all businesses went to using *coin overnight and one accidentally overcharged your wallet, how would you get your coins back?

You do realize that replicas are a problem in the real world art world as well right? In real world art this is resolved by proving providence, in crypto providence from minting is trivial, but you still need to prove providence that the minting was honest.

In the real art world replicas are... well replicas. Regardless of how good they are, they're not exactly the same, a trained eye can tell them apart.

That's not the case when making a copy of the file. You get a perfect one-to-one replica that nobody can tell apart in any way.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#280
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you buy a Babe Ruth baseball card you aren't buying the rights to Babe Ruth. It's the card itself which is valuable, as a product of the context it was issued in. I don't know why that part, as it translates to NFTs, is so difficult for people to understand.

You have the right to copy of that Babe Ruth baseball card and place it on a t-shirt. If someone uses that exact card's image to do this, you can sue them for copyright infringement. With NFT this cannot be done.

What? Surely not. Someone else still owns the copyright of baseball cards, don't they? Or are baseball cards special in that they come with a kind of copyright ownership when they're sold? I doubt that.
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