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NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

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Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#621

Post by kmtrowbr »

wokwokwok wrote: post #429
TheColorYellow wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rephrasing your questions and critiques more broadly: What is the point of all this digital infrastructure if no one uses it? Why would anyone use it? This is a more difficult question for NFTs as the market is even smaller than the financial use cases which has been driving blockchain applications. It'll take some time for seemingly legitimate and long-lasting value in areas for NFT to emerge as they are still being…

> the NFT will be taken as the source of truth for representing the ownership of the claimed asset... I simply can’t see how that is possible for digital assets you can copy and paste and have two copies of the original asset; it only works for physical assets where there can only be one copy of the asset, ever. You’ve hit it on the head: what does it mean to own an image when ten other people also “own” a copy of it…

Possession of the private key also allows you to create signatures which prove your ownership, while not revealing your private key. Artworks could be encrypted and only decryptable by such signatures. Client applications could be built to incorporate this.

We have a big problem today in that our information technology's ability to infinitely create copies of digital artifacts seemingly breaks the incentive mechanism to create. I.e. art, news, authorship worked better when you could sell physically sell copies of your album, book, painting. This has resulted in a glut of low quality stuff.

Think of the long term. It would be very good for society to solve this problem. With the distribution abilities of the internet, plus the ability to monetize adding incentives to create, we should see much more, and higher quality art. It would enable more of our economy to move online, which would be good for the environment. I.e. humans are mostly interested in social status. Today we show that status by creating and showing off possessions. But also we need jobs. What will people do for work in 2050? Perhaps we'll still be busily working to climb the pile of monkeys, but now with virtual goods. That's more sustainable than the current situation.

For a hacker & technology forum, Hacker News is remarkably negative on crypto topics. Part is a justifiable reaction against the hype. Another part I think is FOMO. But also, the crypto space is only partially about technology. It is very inefficient technology from a functionality point of view. But from an economic point of view, where the problem is coordinating human activity in the way that money does, I think there's a lot of potential there.

At a certain point there is more risk in being a "permabear" than there is in taking a measured interest. The crypto space has been growing for 12 years ... is it really just a giant fraud at this point? No value, nothing of interest at all?

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#622

Post by bal4591 »

Taek wrote: post #613
roywiggins wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is, that states have monopolized property transfers and there's all sorts of weird and arcane laws and practice around how you transfer property- especially real estate- and convincing the state to recognize an NFT as evidence of anything is going to be a real challenge. ex, if the law requires an actual notarized handwritten signature to transfer ownership, what you and I do on the blockchain will simply no…

Blockchains are a shortcut to social consensus, not the final word. There is substantial value in the state giving credibility to a blockchain, allowing an NFT title for a house to be transferred digitally. That value does not disappear if the state + courts also build in processes for over-ruling the on-chain owner of an object and forcibly transferring it to someone else. The core value here comes from how much eas…

Are you insane, what happens when my grandma forgets her password?

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#623

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

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…

> “You can brag about owning such-and-such an image, but only as long as enough other people desire images from that particular set.”

I think that’s the whole point. An enduring aspect of human culture is that we praise and confer social status on owners or stewards of rare curiosities. You aren’t buying NFTs for tangible value, you’re buying a speculative investment in social status. And people feel very confident that the market cap and liquidity for buying and trading this type of social status will go way up, and that unique, verifiable digital ownership allows the pay-for-status desires to take place untethered to physical goods.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#624

Post by h4kor »

jules-jules wrote: post #466
karpour wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How long and how often have the announce the transition yet?

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#625

Post by okareaman »

Taek wrote: post #607
reaperducer wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while you or I personally don’t need the 100M to enjoy the impressionist art, you can’t ignore the fact that someone out there is in fact willing to pay that for the original. There are people who happily pay $10,000+ for an Italian purse. There are people who are happy with a $10 Chinese knock-off. There are people who happily pay $2,000 for an Apple laptop. There are people who are happy with Linux on a $100 machin…

You should also account for how early NFTs are. If you've been following blockchains for a while, you may recall that in 2012 and 2013 there were an ocean of Bitcoin knock offs that distinguished themselves by changing things like the difficulty adjustment algorithm, or the hashing function, or the total coin supply. All of these "altcoins" to experts seemed to be completely useless and many chalked the entire catego…

I feel your take is the correct one. I'm old enough to remember when home video recorders were criticized because porn, but porn was just the kick off to the wider world of video uses and purposes.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#626

Post by roywiggins »

Taek wrote: post #613
roywiggins wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is, that states have monopolized property transfers and there's all sorts of weird and arcane laws and practice around how you transfer property- especially real estate- and convincing the state to recognize an NFT as evidence of anything is going to be a real challenge. ex, if the law requires an actual notarized handwritten signature to transfer ownership, what you and I do on the blockchain will simply no…

Blockchains are a shortcut to social consensus, not the final word. There is substantial value in the state giving credibility to a blockchain, allowing an NFT title for a house to be transferred digitally. That value does not disappear if the state + courts also build in processes for over-ruling the on-chain owner of an object and forcibly transferring it to someone else. The core value here comes from how much eas…

So now you have two ledgers: one on a blockchain and another one that's just "the court said X". They will diverge over time, and eventually everyone will just use the latter one, because that's the one that counts.

Before I buy an NFT, I'll have to check the GovLedger anyway to make sure that NFT is actually that person's to sell, and hasn't got a lien on it or something else that means they can't actually sell it.

If the idea is the blockchain is permissioned and the state can choose which transfers to allow and can forcibly recover NFTs, why not just use a database?

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#627

Post by a1369209993 »

Igelau wrote: post #528
snarf21 wrote: post #489

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…

> 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.

> Creators who wanted to make an honest dollar but ignorantly perpetuated the scam

To be fair, if they're doing it honestly the value proposition is "Support the artist and get bragging rights for having done so!", which doesn't become a scam (or at least any more of scam, depending on your view of bragging rights) just because there's a scammy secondary market that the patron doesn't necessarily have to participate in.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#628

Post by acdha »

kmtrowbr wrote: post #621
wokwokwok wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the NFT will be taken as the source of truth for representing the ownership of the claimed asset... I simply can’t see how that is possible for digital assets you can copy and paste and have two copies of the original asset; it only works for physical assets where there can only be one copy of the asset, ever. You’ve hit it on the head: what does it mean to own an image when ten other people also “own” a copy of it…

Possession of the private key also allows you to create signatures which prove your ownership, while not revealing your private key. Artworks could be encrypted and only decryptable by such signatures. Client applications could be built to incorporate this. We have a big problem today in that our information technology's ability to infinitely create copies of digital artifacts seemingly breaks the incentive mechanism…

> For a hacker & technology forum, Hacker News is remarkably negative on crypto topics. … The crypto space has been growing for 12 years ... is it really just a giant fraud at this point? No value, nothing of interest at all?

The negative reaction is _due_ to HN being a technology-heavy forum: the blockchain field is a marketing invention and divides into two camps: Merkle trees, which are useful but not new, and everything else, which is uncompetitively reinventing commonplace concepts with language designed to attract speculators’ money. For a decade, salespeople have been showing, repeating marketing points which don’t hold up to much thought, and hammering the “use your money to make me rich” message, so it’s not surprising that it’s hard to get attention with the same spiel now.

Put another way: after 12 years, huge amounts of money and attention, where’s anything clearly better than its predecessor? (For the user, not the seller) That’s considerably longer than it took for the web to have a huge impact on advertising, sales, dating, travel, banking, research, job hunting, etc. despite much lower barriers to adoption. Someone trying to invent a new DRM system to make signed prints isn’t remotely close.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#629

Post by keymone »

dmitriid wrote: post #573
keymone wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ah yes, another bitcoin obituary, there's hundreds of them on the internet posted quite regularly, ever since bitcoin's inception.

It's not an obituary, and you'd know it if you'd bothered to read it. It very aptly describes the perpetual state of bitcoin in particular, and of blockchains in general.

I read it, it’s an article from 2017 proclaiming bitcoin is worthless for a payment system while it is now 2021 and amount of value exchanged on bitcoin is more than ever. Author is clueless and the article is worth nothing.

Re: NFTs Are a Dangerous Trap

#630

Post by chillacy »

m12k wrote: post #181
cloudking wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this system https://v.cent.co/ anyone can bid for a tweet, and it's up to the actual Twitter user who created the tweet to verify ownership and mint/sell the NFT via their system. All you own by buying it is the token, the real owner of the tweet could delete it any time :) see what I mean about mania?

An NFT really is just a commemorative plaque that says "I own [URL HERE]". It doesn't come with some crypto-backed security that only you can do anything with whatever is at the URL. It doesn't give you any legal rights unless backed by a separate contract (which could just as well have been made without the NFT). All it guarantees is that no other plaque with exactly the same words can exist on that blockchain.

It reminds me of those companies that will sell you a plot of land on the moon or a star.
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