Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

every.to

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 687 posts

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#591

Post by sireat »

jboy55 wrote: post #558
jrochkind1 wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the early days of the internet have as much scams and money-laundering in the mix? Not in my neck of the early days of the internet woods.

The early days of online payments (paypal) maybe. Unless they're talking about usenet selling, in which case I don't remember it being 'thrilling' to get a money order in the mail.

I sold/bought music CDs as well as anime model kits on the usenet (on the .marketplace ones) around the time of "Eternal September".

It was pretty thrilling to get money order in the mail.

There was little to no scamming goin on.

If someone wanted to be a bad actor, they'd be run out of town pretty quickly.

I miss those days.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#592

Post by panabee »

ashtonkem wrote: post #490
chrisco255 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you know that the person creating a NFT has the right to do that? The NFT tracks the chain of ownership for the NFT itself, if the initial person creating the NFT did not own the copyright for the art in question, then the NFT itself is useless. That's very simple. Taylor Swift registers an on-chain address via ENS. TaylorSwift.eth, let's say. Then she publicly posts that public key to the world on social me…

Your scheme of public keys on websites only works for the Taylor Swifts of the world once they’ve become Taylor Swift. It depends heavily on the social capital of websites verifying identity, a system that is pretty useless for new artists. This is roughly as practical as pgp key parties were: not practical at all. What are you going to do, go manually check the signing key on every artists website before doing some…

thanks for the comments.

you thought a lot about this, and it’s helpful to hear skeptical arguments.

why couldn’t opensea or NFT marketplaces perform verification for you and display twitter-like checkmarks for art sold by owner?

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#593

Post by Sargos »

denton-scratch wrote: post #410
SrslyJosh wrote: post #3

This would have been more interesting if the author had traced where all the money being plowed into NFTs is coming from. I suspect that most of it does not come from outside of the current ETH (or whatever) ecosystem. I'd bet that most of the volume comes from people who are either treating it as play money, or trying to pump the NFT scam for their own benefit (real or imagined).

> ETH (or whatever) ecosystem "Ecosystem" is a word that I believe sprung to life in the 70s, referring to the entire collection of organisms inhabiting a 'place', along with the weather conditions etc. in that place. The term was coined because without it, you need (or rather, I needed) 16 words to express it. So it bothers me when people use the term to refer to collections of stuff that's never been alive: the Jav…

"system" denotes something which was designed to work as a whole. Pieces are connected together by a manufacturer to build a system. The operating system is a kernel, UI, tools, etc taken by a creator and put together into a packaged tool that people can use on their computers.

"ecosystem" denotes an environment created by some kind of vessel e.g. Earth, the ocean, Ethereum, etc where independent entities can be created, develop, and compete for resources, attention, space, etc provided by that environment. The entities have no real connection to their environment besides just living within it and interacting with the other entities.

Ethereum is just as much of an environment as the Earth is. It provides the foundation which the entities live on top of (security), the resources the entity needs to exist (data availability), and the gathering point where complex interactions can happen (smart contracts and end users). Ethereum doesn't build any of the ecosystem, it simply provides the marketplace where life happens.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#594

Post by [deleted] »

Traster wrote: post #521
int_19h wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you can split NFT tokens and e.g. resell them separately?

Oh do I have a scam for you! So, no, obviously you can't divide an NFT, but what you can do is create a new fungible token (or smart contract not sure about the exact details) that represents partial ownership of the NFT. So you can issue 1000 of these fungible tokens that represent partial ownership of the NFT.

[deleted]

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#595

Post by Sargos »

stanleydrew wrote: post #548
javier123454321 wrote: post #531

The way I see NFTs is this: It is an open API to deal with ownership rights. Every behavior that you can program into ownership, is now available. The profile pictures are stupid, yes, but the idea that property is moved to an open database which anyone can program a behavior is exciting. Aston martin can now have a lounge in France where only Aston Martin owners can join, even if your car is in New York. Even if the…

What's the point of the database being open? That doesn't seem all that exciting and there are plenty of examples of other open databases. > property is moved to an open database But it's not really in most cases. Only the claim of ownership is in the database. And the claim part is important. > Aston martin can now have a lounge in France where only Aston Martin owners can join What if I sell my car and don't transf…

>What if I sell my car and don't transfer my NFT showing ownership of the car? Who will enforce the requirement that I must transfer the NFT when I sell my car

Buying a car without getting the NFT would be as dumb as buying a car and not getting the title. Sure it's possible to do but it's a pretty basic fundamental step and if you don't trust yourself to do it then maybe just go to a dealer and let them take care of you.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#596

Post by Sargos »

tantalor wrote: post #541
javier123454321 wrote: post #531

The way I see NFTs is this: It is an open API to deal with ownership rights. Every behavior that you can program into ownership, is now available. The profile pictures are stupid, yes, but the idea that property is moved to an open database which anyone can program a behavior is exciting. Aston martin can now have a lounge in France where only Aston Martin owners can join, even if your car is in New York. Even if the…

> only Aston Martin owners can join How would that even work? Supposing I bought the car and received the token, what's to stop me from selling the token and keeping the car?

Selling a car and not transferring the NFT is akin to selling a car and not transferring the title. Sure it's possible and you could con some really dumb people but it would be an expected part of the deal and the kind of people who buy used cars are already wary of scammers for this reason.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#597

Post by WorldMaker »

the_snooze wrote: post #519
jameshart wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's definitely the case for a lot of NFTs being minted and sold. And if an NFT did represent the right to download and play a particular game from Steam (like, you had to present proof of ownership of an NFT to Steam to be allowed to play the game), such that I could sell that NFT outside of Steam to someone else... well, the value of that NFT is only as good as Steam's willingness to abide by the agreement i…

It really shows the dishonesty in crypto "innovation:" they claim "security" and "trustlessness," but it all reduces to simple human/institutional/contractual trust relationships as soon as you need to deal with anything with real-world practical value, whether that be access to games on Steam or tracking a package or whatever. With all this fancy software and energy spent on mining, what then is the point of all tha…

I think some of that directly connects to the (intentional) confusion in terms of "smart contracts" and old fashioned "contracts". "Smart contracts" are programs and there's a sense that they are "better" and easier to "trust" than old fashioned "contracts" because computer's enforce them ("fairly and equitably", or so proponents believe [1]) and not people and institutions.

But people don't run "smart contract software" in their own brains and at the end of the day if these things are to be meaningful to people they have to interact with people and institutions and good old fashioned "contracts". It's trying to solve sociological and political problems with code, but we don't have a real world substrate for those "programs", what we instead have millennia of institutional history and contract law and at the end of the day those still matter more than what the computer says even you personally don't trust those institutions for whatever reason.

ETA: [1] Don't forget that it's a common fallacy among tech idealists that computers are unbiased and objective "because math" rather than machines that will reflect the biases and subjective opinions of those that program them.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#598

Post by NicoJuicy »

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #570
NicoJuicy wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it's regulated and you can sue. Then there's a potential to stop the pump's.

Good news, you can sue. Regulation is applied in some circumstances and there's a lot of movement for further clarification at the moment. https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-sec-sues-bitconnect-fo... https://www.courthousenews.com/class-claims-securities-backe... https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/coinseed... https://www.paulweiss.com/practices/litigation/white-collar-... https://www.cbsnews.com/n…

Sue who?

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#599

Post by WorldMaker »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #542
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #446

NFT always felt ridiculous to me, but I though I understood the mechanism: "it's like baseball cards but in the blockchain". This week I learned it's not. NFT are Non Fungible Tokens, which means tokens that can't be divided, unlike crypto currencies like Bitcoin that can be divided in Satoshis. So you exchange the totality of it, or not. Basically it's a unique number in the blockchain you change ownership by applyi…

Did the early days of the internet have as much scams and money-laundering in the mix? Not in my neck of the early days of the internet woods.

Many of the early ISPs played shell games with ad companies. NetZero is one of the most famously documented of the 90s dot-com age promising "free internet" with ads/MLM schemes, but they were one of the pack. The few I can recall today to google on the Bings, including NetZero, surprisingly still exist and survived the dot-com implosion as more traditional ISPs, but NetZero is the most useful example to give as it still bears the scars of its early scam-like history its own brand name. I don't think they've offered actual "zero dollar" service in more than a decade, but that's where their name originated.

I recall so many fly-by-night ads and ads+MLM schemes in the early internet, a lot of which I watched in Slashdot takedowns and teardowns at the time.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#600

Post by user-the-name »

jcelerier wrote: post #554
user-the-name wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not. Nothing about an NFT ensures it is from the artist, and not just from someone random scammer.

I mean, yes, but if you buy a painting you have the exact same issue no ?

No?
Post reply on HN