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NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

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Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#41

Post by detaro »

dimgl wrote: post #24
Osmose wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What property of NFTs has suddenly made them make money where previously they weren't? Like how did adding NFTs to the mix suddenly make their art start selling?

This is exactly what I don't understand. If it's the same art, why does it matter if the art is in an NFT or in a physical representation? Like, why are people buying pieces of art using NFTs?

Digital art doesn't have a natural physical representation, and people find it interesting to get rid of the requirement for creating and maintaining one just to make it a thing to exist as art. I.e. fundamentally digital art pieces are today often sold as part of installations which are a pain to maintain long-term. Or as physical media, which also are difficult to maintain long-term, or if you don't require the specific media to be preserved you get into the chaos of which later copy is an "original". That really only works at an expensive high end.

Or you don't create exclusivity and sell it cheaply, but while people do buy e.g. music that apparently doesn't work as well for other art forms (artists certainly have tried).

Limited/unique prints apparently do work (as in people are willing to spend money on those), but limits you to static 2D media.

In principle nothing stops you from selling digital art with licenses like we do sell software with licenses, but that hasn't caught on, for whatever reason. (I'm actually expecting that to be added to NFTs soon-ish)

Enough people do seem to be currently willing to accept the concept of an NFT representing ownership of a digital thing to put a price on it, and that price is noticeably higher than what they pay for non-exclusive digital art. For many artists, that's reason enough to use this new avenue to sell their art.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#42

Post by TheDong »

alexmingoia wrote: post #13

NFTs aren’t much different than merchandise artists and musicians sell. Tshirts, buttons, plastic figurines, stickers, etc. The environmental critique rings hollow. Our economy revolves around this unnecessary consumerism. Why single out NFTs? Seems like sour grapes to me.

> The environmental critique rings hollow. Our economy revolves around this unnecessary consumerism

It is only proof of work which needs to be more wasteful the more efficient things become.

If it turns out t-shirts are polluting massively, and someone finds out that by replacing one chemical with another they pollute much less, then people will do that.

If a more efficient machine comes out for making a t-shirt, t-shirts will become cheaper to make.

Proof of work chains can't take advantage of any improvements. They waste X amount of money in electricity intentionally. If computers get faster, they need more computers. If electricity gets cheaper, they need to burn more electricity to have similar security (make the cost of a 51% attack the same again).

Any time computers get significantly better, old hardware has to be thrown out in favor of the new fancier hardware, or else other miners outcompete you.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#43

Post by benrbray »

jes5199 wrote: post #21
chickenfries wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The possibilities of NFTs fascinate me, especially for portable, digital identities and assets that transcend any specific virtual realm and can't be arbitrarily erased by any central authority. I'm struggling to understand the possibilities. Can you enlighten me? It seems like people buying these things are just speculating. Can you paint a picture of what kind of possibilities you're excited about?

“digital identities and assets that transcend any specific virtual realm” I think they mean, you could have the same stuff in different video games

The hard part about this isn't the crypto, it's the coordination between game companies on how to store and render assets.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#44

Post by anonporridge »

chickenfries wrote: post #15
anonporridge wrote: post #8

The possibilities of NFTs fascinate me, especially for portable, digital identities and assets that transcend any specific virtual realm and can't be arbitrarily erased by any central authority. But I also won't put a single sat in any of them right now.

> The possibilities of NFTs fascinate me, especially for portable, digital identities and assets that transcend any specific virtual realm and can't be arbitrarily erased by any central authority. I'm struggling to understand the possibilities. Can you enlighten me? It seems like people buying these things are just speculating. Can you paint a picture of what kind of possibilities you're excited about?

This thread touches on it, https://twitter.com/FEhrsam/status/1366248629661552642

A very simple example is that it could partially solve the problem of verifying digital identities. If I follow/friend your NFT based identity, and various virtual realms (games, social media, virtual spaces) integrate with that 'identity' NFT for user accounts, then any new virtual realm I enter, I can immediately find and connect with people I already know, or identify imposters. There will obviously still be some other hoops I need to jump through to know a digital identity maps to a particular physical person.

I could also see game studios start to issue varying tiers of rare in-game items as NFTs that can then trade on a free market, like collectible cards. Not only would I suspect people will be much more likely to pay more for digital items they can actually take uncensorable possession of (and still sell after they get banned from a game), but different studios could even make deals to make their NFT items cross compatible. (Mario NFT skins and items in Minecraft?)

Maybe I'm starry eyed and delusional, and I'm sure it's a LONG, messy road to get wherever we're going with this.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#45

Post by TheDong »

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.

Bikes have unique serial numbers. https://bikeindex.org runs a free website to let you lookup serial numbers and mark them as stolen, and there's also various other regional websites that do a similar sort of thing.

If you want to buy a bike, make sure it has a serial number (and if the number was filed off, then yes it was probably stolen), and look it up on the index.

How would an NFT be better than the above database in any way?

I do think the bikeindex could be run better (fewer regional websites, a database we can download for archival purposes, sharing of information between multiple registries), but all of those things seem like they're easier and cheaper to do without a blockchain or NFTs.

Rather than do something like NFTs, they could do what the certificate transparency project does, and just dictate "here's the data format, here's how you share data", and get all the benefits I can think of with none of the downsides or ecological waste.

For what it's worth, there is evidence that such a database can be made and work in a similar case, since car registrations, transfers, etc are all quite well handled with no NFTs.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#46

Post by anonporridge »

benrbray wrote: post #43
jes5199 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“digital identities and assets that transcend any specific virtual realm” I think they mean, you could have the same stuff in different video games

The hard part about this isn't the crypto, it's the coordination between game companies on how to store and render assets.

This is exactly why I would be wary of committing to the current stuff.

Without integration into large networks, NFTs are worthless.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#47

Post by resters »

Youtube has been successful even though most videos are watched a dozen times or so.

NFTs are a parallel copyright system. The market price of an NFT that violates meatspace copyright law would be a function of the relevance and enforceability of the law/jurisdiction in question.

The shortcomings cited by the author are critiques of the distriution of market prices, but there is no alternative proposed. Of course most Youtube videos get a handful of views, and of course most NFTs will be nearly worthless. That concern is orthogonal to the question of whether NFTs offer some benefits over traditional copyright mechanisms.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#48

Post by lmm »

TheDong wrote: post #45
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.

Bikes have unique serial numbers. https://bikeindex.org runs a free website to let you lookup serial numbers and mark them as stolen, and there's also various other regional websites that do a similar sort of thing. If you want to buy a bike, make sure it has a serial number (and if the number was filed off, then yes it was probably stolen), and look it up on the index. How would an NFT be better than the above datab…

An NFT is inherently decentralized, maintained by multiple independent parties, and more or less tamper-proof. That database is only as resilient as the organisation running it (or maybe less, plenty of organisations have lost their databases before), and presumably there are corruptible humans with write access to it.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#49

Post by jbluepolarbear »

It would be really awesome if there was a digital exchange that dealt in multi use media. I would love to be able to buy an album, image, movie, 3D model, etc directly from the creators and then own the rights to use for whatever their content license allows. And then I could then resell that content and the original content creator would get an originator fee from the transactions. Some new data formats may need to exist because I would like to share my media with my license and the content creators license/copywrite intact.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#50

Post by drdeca »

ajiang wrote: post #29
bagels wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The externality of the electricity use is the pollution, and increased prices due to demand.

That's an argument for a different question, which is "should we allow people to waste electricity if they pay for it?". If your answer is that we should regulate what people are allowed to use electricity for, then we'll need to change the laws in this country. It is very difficult to start being the moral judge for every single use of electricity. Instead, we let the free market decide in most situations. And when…

right, we should just tax carbon emissions by just enough to pay for removing those emissions, and then use said taxes to remove said emissions.
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