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NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

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Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#341

Post by Aunche »

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #148
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This would have been more interesting if the author had traced where all the money being plowed into NFTs is coming from. Not possible to trace where the money is coming from. In fact, someone can "sell" an NFT to themself in a wash trade between two wallets they control. The last trade price of the NFT is now recorded as the transaction price, but it's possible that money never actually changed hands. Want to have…

> Not possible to trace where the money is coming from. Chain analysis is certainly something you can do.

Can't you just wash your transactions with Monero?

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#342

Post by eoo »

WA wrote: post #340
highfrequency wrote: post #311

There’s a lot of confusion here about why NFTs are valuable if the buyer doesn’t get to own the image copyright. This should not feel mysterious - NFTs are just like baseball cards. If you buy a Barry Bonds baseball card for $1,000, you don’t own the artistic rights to the image on the card. All you own is the card itself, which has negligible manufacturing cost. It would be trivial for any card company to produce a…

NFTs are not like baseball cards. NFTs are a JSON string on a proprietary entity that point to the image of a baseball card. The image can be viewed by everyone. The bragging rights of owning a JSON string depend heavily on whether or not the proprietary entity will become the dominant player in the I own a JSON string -world. This also has zero to do with blockchains. The proprietary entity could've used any databas…

An NFT is a virtual title of ownership on a blockchain, that's it. You don't own neither a string or an image or a JSON.

https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#343

Post by MontagFTB »

highfrequency wrote: post #311

There’s a lot of confusion here about why NFTs are valuable if the buyer doesn’t get to own the image copyright. This should not feel mysterious - NFTs are just like baseball cards. If you buy a Barry Bonds baseball card for $1,000, you don’t own the artistic rights to the image on the card. All you own is the card itself, which has negligible manufacturing cost. It would be trivial for any card company to produce a…

This is a great explanation. I’ve understood NFTs slightly differently, where they are akin to an _autographed_ baseball card. In that case, regardless of how many copies of that card exist in the world, you have a rendition of that card authorized by a special party (the autographer) that causes it to be unique.

Where any number of digital copies of an asset may exist, the NFT is the “autograph” atop that asset that is unique and therefore adds the value.

(It’s worth noting that anyone can autograph any baseball card. So it’s not the autograph that makes it valuable, but _who_ autographed it. It’s the same with who minted the NFT.)

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#344

Post by tauntz »

jcelerier wrote: post #255
Doxin wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're both correct and underestimating how broken NFTs are. If you buy an NFT that gives you nothing except bragging rights that you "own" this NFT. What ownership actually means when devoid of the associated rights is anyones guess. Buying an NFT of a GIF doesn't stop anyone from using that GIF on reddit. No one is going around checking if posted GIFs have a matching NFT out there and enforcing property rights base…

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.

If you buy the Marilyn Monroe print then you can legally put it up on your wall at home and other people can see it.

If you buy an NFT (which is just an URL to somewhere that might have a picture today but might be a 404 tomorrow or an ipfs hash if you're lucky) then you can not (in most cases I've seen) legally put that picture that's behind the link in the NFT up on your website and show it to others. Heck, in some countries this doesn't even grant you the right to store that picture itself on your own computer.

(Most) NFT's don't give the owner of the NFT any rights for the linked art itself - you can't copy it, distribute it, present it etc. You can do all of that with the NFT but _not_ the actual art piece.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#345

Post by highfrequency »

WA wrote: post #340
highfrequency wrote: post #311

There’s a lot of confusion here about why NFTs are valuable if the buyer doesn’t get to own the image copyright. This should not feel mysterious - NFTs are just like baseball cards. If you buy a Barry Bonds baseball card for $1,000, you don’t own the artistic rights to the image on the card. All you own is the card itself, which has negligible manufacturing cost. It would be trivial for any card company to produce a…

NFTs are not like baseball cards. NFTs are a JSON string on a proprietary entity that point to the image of a baseball card. The image can be viewed by everyone. The bragging rights of owning a JSON string depend heavily on whether or not the proprietary entity will become the dominant player in the I own a JSON string -world. This also has zero to do with blockchains. The proprietary entity could've used any databas…

Surely the baseball card’s value does not come from the fact that you can hold a piece of cardboard in your hand.

Whether the data representation is a piece of cardboard or a JSON string replicated on 10,000 Ethereum nodes or a tulip or a Venmo balance is arbitrary; it just matters whether a lot of humans are looking at the same thing. And for the time being, a lot of humans are looking at crypto ledgers!

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#346

Post by meheleventyone »

ilaksh wrote: post #306
root_axis wrote: post #170

All of this gushing hype for the future of artistry is transparently performative. Nobody in this tech cares about art or artists, any of the useful functions of NFTs have long been possible and many orders of magnitude less expensive using public key cryptography or digital signatures.

The guy who came up with the idea and has been paying me for the last few months to build our NFT auction site is a musician trained at the New England Conservatory, working doing performances in a band and as a music teacher, paying out of his savings, and he definitely cares about artists since he is one. Also these systems do use public/private keypairs and signatures (Algorand). https://gifeconomy.com

Being an artist doesn't mean you care about other artists. There are a looooot of selfish people out there and they'll often use the trappings of helping people to claw their way skyward.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#348

Post by tauntz »

renewiltord wrote: post #250
t_akosuke wrote: post #242

Ok, let's see if I'm following the discussion right. let's say you buy an NFT for using a GIF of the Techno Viking, from the Viking himself, and Reddit verifies it. Now you are the only person on Reddit that can have a Techno Viking GIF signature, yippee! Except I can make a new NFT of the same GIF and nothing in the NFT itself betrays that it wasn't issued by the real Techno Viking, so it's up to him, Reddit and you…

Your NFT’s trade provenance will reveal it was never owned by Technoviking’s key. He won’t need to use copyright law, you simply can’t impersonate him so no one will value your duplicate NFT.

I might be mistaken but I don't think >99% of people who have bought an NFT have verified that the key used to generate the token does in fact belong to the artist that created the piece that's (currently) behind the link that's in the token.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#349

Post by rewma »

highfrequency wrote: post #345
WA wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NFTs are not like baseball cards. NFTs are a JSON string on a proprietary entity that point to the image of a baseball card. The image can be viewed by everyone. The bragging rights of owning a JSON string depend heavily on whether or not the proprietary entity will become the dominant player in the I own a JSON string -world. This also has zero to do with blockchains. The proprietary entity could've used any databas…

Surely the baseball card’s value does not come from the fact that you can hold a piece of cardboard in your hand. Whether the data representation is a piece of cardboard or a JSON string replicated on 10,000 Ethereum nodes or a tulip or a Venmo balance is arbitrary; it just matters whether a lot of humans are looking at the same thing. And for the time being, a lot of humans are looking at crypto ledgers!

> Whether the data representation is a piece of cardboard or a JSON string replicated on 10,000 Ethereum nodes or a tulip or a Venmo balance is arbitrary; it just matters whether a lot of humans are looking at the same thing. And for the time being, a lot of humans are looking at crypto ledgers!

But are they really? I mean, are there that many humans waiting in line to have a JSON pointing to a tweet?

There were a few reports of NFTs going on the market for thousands of dollars, but at least the ones I'm aware of sounded an awful lot like people buying their own NFTs and leaving that out from the report.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#350

Post by [deleted] »

t_akosuke wrote: post #242

Ok, let's see if I'm following the discussion right. let's say you buy an NFT for using a GIF of the Techno Viking, from the Viking himself, and Reddit verifies it. Now you are the only person on Reddit that can have a Techno Viking GIF signature, yippee! Except I can make a new NFT of the same GIF and nothing in the NFT itself betrays that it wasn't issued by the real Techno Viking, so it's up to him, Reddit and you…

[deleted]
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