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NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

seths.blog

521–530 of 786 posts

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because not everyone is the "economically rational agent" that just wants to maximize profits as much as they can. May be you disagree, and think most people are and it's strong enough to be a normal distribution. (I am not sure it is, but i sure hope it is not a normal distribution and there are enough people outside).

It doesn't matter that not everyone is a "economically rational agent". What matters is that there are some of them. People who will reinvest their profit into more mining, to profit more and reinvest it further. The people who are currently fabbing their own ASICs and setting up mining farms in places where electricity is cheap. These people left unchecked will, over time, suck up all spare electricity generation ca…

Once again I disagree.. these "some people" need to be the majority(of anyone participating in these currencies) for this mining to stay profitable.. Of course i may be mistaken about that part of the reasoning, but I'm fairly confident about it. Please let me know if you think it is an unfair assumption.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#522

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…

NFTs are nonsense and just as much a pyramid scheme as everything else crypto. People will get left holding the bag at the top just like with CryptoKitties. I have several hand painted reproductions of famous paintings (impressionist). I get just as much enjoyment looking at them on my wall as I have at the museums looking at the real ones. I don't need to have $100M. I'm glad that content creators are getting paid n…

>I get just as much enjoyment looking at them on my wall as I have at the museums looking at the real ones.

I'm sorry, but I simply don't. Not trying to be contrarian, but reproductions bring me a very different joy and appreciation than provable originals. I agree some things in crypto are scams, but NFTs, in my opinion, have a really important function in some domains.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NFTs make perfect sense for representing a claim on things that can be used, like event tickets or in-game virtual goods. There’s absolutely no reason for that to be decentralized, only one party can honor the tokens anyways. Like most things crypto they don’t actually make sense for anything.

When it's owned by an external party, you might not be able to (easily) trade it. When it's decentralized, nobody can stop you from trading it.

It is funny: there are essays in this thread, authors clearly breathless to explain the utility or lack thereof of NFTs.

Yet your two sentence explanation is the most comprehensive.

NFTs enable the possibility of a market that is orthogonal to the channel that distributed the token.

The viability or existence of such a market is not guaranteed, but the likelihood that one could emerge at all has gone up thanks to the novel properties of NFTs.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Failure to expand / define the acronym.

That isn't mentioned anywhere in the posting guidelines. I don't think posts should be flagged for breaking rules that don't exist.

A broad interpretation of clickbait as any low-quality or gratuitously obscure writing style might be seen as a factor.

In practice, people will vote down or flag what they will. Asking for permission really won't change that.

The practice of using a recently-coined acronym without definition as the principle focus of a story is pretty egregious.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NFTs are nonsense and just as much a pyramid scheme as everything else crypto. People will get left holding the bag at the top just like with CryptoKitties. I have several hand painted reproductions of famous paintings (impressionist). I get just as much enjoyment looking at them on my wall as I have at the museums looking at the real ones. I don't need to have $100M. I'm glad that content creators are getting paid n…

>I get just as much enjoyment looking at them on my wall as I have at the museums looking at the real ones. I'm sorry, but I simply don't. Not trying to be contrarian, but reproductions bring me a very different joy and appreciation than provable originals. I agree some things in crypto are scams, but NFTs, in my opinion, have a really important function in some domains.

NFTs aren't the original and digital reproductions are perfect.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#527

Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy: Earth - a small planet in the outer reaches of spiral galaxy M7529, so far the only planet on record that the semi-intelligent biped inhabitants managed to overheat so badly that they became extinct. Overheating has happened before, of course, however the method of overheating is unique - the inhabitants invented a method of identifying uniqueness by making large calculations and atta…

DON'T PANIC

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#528

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…

NFTs are nonsense and just as much a pyramid scheme as everything else crypto. People will get left holding the bag at the top just like with CryptoKitties. I have several hand painted reproductions of famous paintings (impressionist). I get just as much enjoyment looking at them on my wall as I have at the museums looking at the real ones. I don't need to have $100M. I'm glad that content creators are getting paid n…

> NFTs are nonsense and just as much a pyramid scheme

What scares me is that there are artists who I don't think understand how scammy this is. They've drunk the kool-aid and accepted the handwaving "you don't need to know how it works, just that it exists" explanations. Creators who wanted to make an honest dollar but ignorantly perpetuated the scam could find them themselves in hot water.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#529
post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Only in this case the value is stored in “digital gold”. Unlike gold, which is chemically stable, I’m far from convinced the digital format itself will end up sticking around long term.

Not sure about your definition for long term.

TCP/IP looks pretty solid to me. NFT is basically TCP/IP with memory, why shouldn't that be useful for all sorts of things?

Bitcoin is more like gold, NFTs are more like network based consensus validation of ownership.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#530

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…

what is the use-case for an NFT for an in-game virtual good? A sword from World of Warcraft (WoW) can already be traded between players within WoW, since the environment in which it appears is already centralized and that's already provided by the environment. Trading a WoW sword outside of WoW has ambiguous logic. Let's say you sold your WoW sword to a Destiny player. Ok, does the sword still exist in WoW or not? What if the WoW servers just say that it does? Do all players verify that other players have the items the server says they have? If the player uses the sword and the server says "they did 9000 damage because that's how big the sword is", what difference does it make if your client say "NO! Nooo! They don't -HAVE- that sword"? You can't just wave your hand and say "but we'll just make the games peer to peer and that fixes it". P2P lockstep protocols were extremely widespread but fell out of favor due to performance and anticheat issues inherent in lockstep protocols. Most gamedevs would prefer the luxury of not having to run any servers. How do you make a purely P2P multiplayer game protocol that is cheat-resistant and allows more than a very small number of players to witness one another simultaneously? If everyone needs to establish a network connection to everyone near them inside the virtual world, how do you handle crowded spaces?

When the sword is sold -outside of WoW-, how does it have value in another context? Can a Destiny character equip a WoW sword? (No.) Ok but what if the Destiny devs made an in-game Destiny item that was pegged to that WoW sword, and then the games all checked your inventory at login? You'd have to check the ledger -every time the item is used- or the player can just login, trade it away, and then stay logged in and continue to use it (use after sell, essentially).

If players can -already- trade items within the simulation where they were created, but we're not defining what it actually means to move an asset -between simulations-, what is the actual use-case here? That you can trade non-functional skins outside of the game? That's it? Why is that good?

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