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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

#381

Post by techdragon »

eoo wrote: post #342
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…

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

It’s a very expensive, publicly broadcasted and “socially agreed upon” (by everyone who thinks they are worth money) version of calling “dibs”.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#382

Post by Grustaf »

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 partly true, but you are missing one important aspect:

While ownership can be enforced equally well with NFTs and baseball cards, the crucial difference is that with physical cards, owners have a unique way of experiencing the card. Anyone can look at an online reproduction of it, but only if you have a physical copy can you hold it in your hand.

This is not the case for NFTs, anyone can experience the image in exactly the same way.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#383

Post by ClumsyPilot »

meheleventyone wrote: post #278
omarfarooq wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A cryptographically signed picture may tell you its from a certain artists, but it cannot enforce uniqueness.

There are only two options - tokens, and ledgers. Despite the name, there is no such thing as a digital token, because digital objects cannot move, they only copy.

So you need a ledger, so basically something like a blockchain, to keep track of copies.

https://dergigi.com/2021/01/14/bitcoin-is-time/

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#384

Post by saurik »

rewma wrote: post #349
highfrequency wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fe…

FWIW, I am personally shocked that anyone wants to buy small pieces of cardboard with photos of baseball players on them at all, much less for any appreciable amount of money just because one happens to be "rare" (whatever the hell that means, as clearly anyone with a printer and some cardboard can make their own)... that doesn't mean that someone else is valuing them for some reason, and they clearly do; that most small pieces of cardboard with pictures on them aren't valuable is kind of irrelevant to the idea that some are.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#385

Post by lugorrr »

rewma wrote: post #349
highfrequency wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fe…

"art blocks" had a trading volume of $100M last week [1].

And that's only one of the more notable nft projects.

[1] https://nonfungible.com/market/history

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#386

Post by gnopgnip »

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…

It is more like buying a signed baseball card. And with NFTs being digital tokens they can't be forged or duplicated, and the original creator can't stop you from transferring to someone else, and they can be transferred to someone else relatively securely if you have the private key and pay the gas.

Anyone else could print and sign a baseball card, mint an almost identical NFT. But if they come from someone besides the techno viking they won't be worth anything, because anyone could do the same thing. But the techno viking can certainly sell more to others just like a baseball player can sign a lot of cards.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#387

Post by spupy »

darcys22 wrote: post #87
teej wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to luxury cars and clothes, you force others to see that you’ve spent for status. That doesn’t exist for NFTs. There’s no public forum I can go to where others are forced to observe my status signals. High end art is more about investing, money laundering, and tax havens then status.

Except twitter profile pictures now right? Verified NFTs are in the pipeline. https://twitter.com/af_mada/status/1443243702156206089?s=20

I just don't see a single positive side of this. Cool, now more people can flaunt their wealth in a brand new way. It's like Fortnite skins, but more extreme and for adults. Just one more way to rope people into wasting money on mostly useless shit.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#388

Post by teruakohatu »

miracle2k wrote: post #376
teruakohatu wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> giving simple easily refutable reasons I didn't vote you down, but I do think it would have been a better use of time to explain why NFTs are the future, rather than ad-hominem attacks on people who disagree with you. Please tell me why NFT are valuable and useful, with very concrete examples of utility. If you use the word "ownership" please explain in context what this means.

You know, there are people in the space who talk a lot about adding utility to NFTs. This may well work for tickets or whatever, but the kind of NFTs we talk about here don't benefit from utility; art doesn't benefit from utility. I agree with the OP that a lot of people here seem unwilling to take a moment and think about this more deeply, and how NFTs might compare to existing ways of valuing things. To be fair, it…

I think you have outlined the fundamental disagreement quite well.

> It's not very strange that people instinctively feel that NFTs are nonsense; but a lot of the arguments being made are entirely unengaged with the actual issues at play, and seemingly no interest in doing so.

I think when people see utility in physical artwork, to the point they would travel to the other side of the world to see it, they find it hard to credit that almost all the value comes from provenance.

Likewise I think people who see art as nothing more than the name of the person who painted it will wholly embrace NFTs as investments.

These two groups are probably not going to come to an agreement.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#389

Post by quickthrower2 »

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 more like paper products in general. Buying a typical NFT is like owning a single sheet from a standard ream of 500 A4 laser printer sheets.
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