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NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

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Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#461

Post by lottin »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #430
calciphus wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that makes ticketing difficult is not minting and selling unique items of inventory - that's a well understood problem with many viable solutions. Nor is verifying at any given moment if a single piece of inventory is valid and who owns it - again, that's a solved problem. The secondary markets in ticketing exist because there's an excess of demand and entities who can exploit access, speed, or technical kn…

> The secondary markets in ticketing exist because there's an excess of demand I don't buy "excess of demand" as being fundamental, though, except in the most technical sense. Imagine a super niche event, where the organizers know there are exactly 200 fans on the entire planet, and they offer that many tickets on sale. It still makes sense for a random scalper to take a loan, buy all 200 tickets, and resell them wit…

Excess demand refers to a situation where a good is underpriced, resulting in a quantity demanded that exceeds the supply. [0]

[0] http://www.personal.psu.edu/dxl31/econ2/pizza_market.png

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#462

Post by smt88 »

soulofmischief wrote: post #192
smt88 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither the content nor the ownership is protected by the NFT. The NFT has literally no connection to the content at all, except that someone said, "Hey, buy this and you own the 'original'!" Except in all things digital, "original" means absolutely nothing. There's a guy who has been selling property on the moon[1]. This is exactly the same thing. 1. https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/03/25/meet-the-man...

People are attempting to create a new world so scary and different to what you know, that it seems insane and completely off base. But we know what we're doing. We know this is leading to the future of a world where artists and fans can take back and redefine ownership. It doesn't matter what you think ownership is. We're redefining it. :) See you on the other side.

There is no substance to your reply, so I can't even refute it. It sounds like something copy/pasted from a crypto startup's landing page.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#463

Post by smt88 »

throwaway_kufu wrote: post #200
smt88 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thieves can do whatever they want with the certificate -- use it to pay illicit debts and so forth. They can visit their painting at the museum, and brag to their friends about it. But the rest of the public still gets to enjoy the painting too. I love this answer because it's a perfect analogy to explain why NFTs are total nonsense. Owning a one-of-a-kind, literally irreplaceable painting cannot be substituted…

> The core concept of ownership (control over a scarce resource) is violated as soon as you start trading a certificate instead of the original item. That’s entirely how our markets are run. Nearly all stock is owned by a few trusts and what everyone is trading everyday are “certificates” of the original stock certificates. Even big ticket items like cars or homes, they really aren’t worth anything without a clean ti…

Stock ownership is backed by the legal system. It also has a ledger that must be settled and sent to the government.

Stock ownership gives you dividends and votes, too. You can sue for these things if they aren't given to you.

Cars and homes are things I can physically interacg with.

Digital certificates of digital goods have none of those qualities. If you do get any legal rights when you own them, it's not any different than copyright, which we've already seen is essentially impossible to enforce for digital works.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#464

Post by aabhay »

dools wrote: post #312
tshaddox wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But with something like CryptoPunks you're essentially paying for digital beanie babies, which are worse than real ones since anyone can display and enjoy the image you paid for. It seems like the obvious counterpoint is that perhaps all of these “collectible” scarce physical things which are bought and sold for huge amounts of money (art, coins, relics, etc.) are in fact being used simply as a way to identify a un…

Also if anything is a digital beanie baby then so is Bitcoin, what’s the difference?

There’s a limited supply of Bitcoin

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#465

Post by CyberDildonics »

tal8d wrote: post #417
CryptoPunk wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin's transaction throughput is independent of its energy consumption. If its block size limit was raised to allow Visa-scale transaction throughput, its per transaction energy cost would be 1/1000ths what it is now. Bitcoin Cash forks Bitcoin to provide a block size limit that allows these kinds of throughput levels, while Ethereum enables both sophisticated transaction compression methods and layer 2 models, th…

When you blow up the transaction limit you physically centralize the verification process. This is why you'd see miners gamble with sitting on a solved block and secretly beginning the next search, with a few seconds of head start, before announcing to the network, or skipping the inclusion of any transactions: because fractions of a second make a big difference. Bigger blocks propagate more slowly, and magnify the a…

> When you blow up the transaction limit you physically centralize the verification process.

What numbers are you basing that on? Bitcoin is 1.5KB/s. A $10 vps is 80,000 times faster than that.

> because fractions of a second make a big difference

No they don't. The examples you are talking about are rare and have very little impact. If the entire network makes blocks once every 10 minutes on average, each miner finds blocks much less frequently.

> Bigger blocks propagate more slowly, and magnify the advantage of employing those kinds of undesirable behaviors. This is why HFT boxes end up as physically close to Wall Street as possible.

Where are your numbers here? How long do you think it takes to send around 900KB ?

A single twitch stream will propagate more than that around the world every second to thousands of individuals. Cryptocurrency only has to send the same tiny amount of data every few minutes to miners.

High frequency traders trying to be physically closer to a connection are operating on the scale of single micro seconds. You are comparing that to something 600 MILLION times slower.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#466

Post by jules-jules »

karpour wrote: post #387
sygma wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it sounds catchy to say that NFTs are an ecological disaster, but that statement is sensational and not accurate. NFTs do not cause carbon emissions themselves, just like you don't add carbon emissions by occupying a seat on a public transportation bus. The bus is doing its daily route and has a fixed amount of emissions per day whether it has any occupants or not. This analogy breaks quickly, so I wouldn't lo…

More accurate would be to say that NFTs are additional fuel for the ecological disaster that is ETH. Your analogy makes little sense in this context. Mining hardware will always run at 100% capacity, regardless of the amount of transactions, unless mining becomes unprofitable. The issue is, while the energy used by mining is not directly dependent on the amount of transactions, it is dependent on the amount of people…

The energy used to secure PoW networks is indeed wasteful. But just a heads-up, Ethereum is currently transitioning to Proof of Stake consensus mechanism which will reduce electricity costs by an order of magnitude.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#467

Post by meowface »

notahacker wrote: post #347
Traster wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The example you give - reselling tickets, is actually something that is directly something ticket sellers want to discourage, crypto doesn’t solve that.

And there's always a necessary third party to a p2p ticket exchange anyway: the entity that actually puts on the event the ticket gives entry to. Where they want ticket exchange (or at least refunds) to be possible they can do so in a centralised manner and when they don't, they're not a middleman that can be cut out.

One could imagine it being a kind of emergent community-organized event, somewhat modeling a decentralized peer-to-peer network itself. There will still technically be at least one intermediary of a sort, but hypothetically the only real intermediary could be restricted to the single person or group who initially proposes the event and issues the batch of ticket NFTs.

There are plenty of major concerns here, like how security and access are physically enforced if there are no official organizers or designated volunteers, but in theory you could maybe distribute a phone app so everyone is automatically scanning for unauthorized people, and just rely on physically capable attendees and police to deal with potential security incidents. Still probably a recipe for utter Fyre Festival-esque disaster and lawsuits in many cases, but feasible in theory.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#468

Post by aabhay »

fluffything wrote: post #269
runeks wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can brag about owning such-and-such an image [...] How? You don’t own a (digital) image. You own a token that references an image. Everyone else can view the image and send it to their friends. But you have some token allegedly signed by the author of the image — who cares?

The author cares. They got real cash for signing a meaningless token.

So why not ask for donations or sell prints?

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#469

Post by dash2 »

Really? The latest random string of numbers for a gazillion dollars isn't a wise long-run investment?... Look, I know this isn't very HN-ish, but the Pope is a dangerous Catholic, and the woods are full of dangerous shitting bears.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#470

Post by ThomPete »

jamesgreenleaf wrote: post #37

NFTs make perfect sense for representing a claim on things that can be used, like event tickets or in-game virtual goods. But as certificates layered on top of collectibles... I'm not so sure. With something like CryptoKitties, you can do something with the tokens (play a virtual pet game). But with something like CryptoPunks you're essentially paying for digital beanie babies, which are worse than real ones since an…

This always comes down to how you understand value.

How valuable is Jimmy Hendrix guitar pick? How valuable is a lok of Justin Biebers hair? How valuable is a book owned by Charles Darwin?

Of course NFT is a bubble just like about every other thing humans create, but humans will always attach value and meaning to dead things even digital ones.

And so NFTs can be used for many things including allowing people to buy something overhyped that will depreciate in value.

That's all good, the more of this the better.

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