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NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

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Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#641

Post by miracle2k »

danShumway wrote: post #90
doublerebel wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is no different than any current artist with a limited print run. The earliest prints are typically still the most valuable and the artist has incentive not to create additional runs of the same artwork.

> This is no different than any current artist with a limited print run Right. But also nobody acts like limited print runs are mathematically non-fungible. If the best argument for NFTs is that they're scarce in the exact same way that existing systems produce scarcity, and that this scarcity is enforced using the same systems we already have, that's not a good argument for the existence of NFTs. You might as well j…

> Right. But also nobody acts like limited print runs are mathematically non-fungible.

You misunderstand the word non-fungible here. They are non-fungible because 2 copies are recorded like this:

- token 1, owned by Alice - token 2, owned by Bob

Bob and Alice may are may not be willing to make this trade, that is up to them. The two tokens are distinct. After they trade, it is still clear who the owner of each token is.

A fungible token is recorded like this:

- Alice owns 1 unit of token CHARLIE - Bob owns 1.3 units token CHARLIE

If Alice sends their one unit to Bob, he now owns 2.3 units. No one knows which one these 2.3 units was Alices. It's just a counter

Note that no one acts like this is any different than I explained it just now. NFT people do not claim that non-fungible means "you cannot mint two tokens representing the same thing".

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#642

Post by miracle2k »

danShumway wrote: post #620
baby wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most NFTs are just links to a publicly hosted asset That's metadata, to display or use it in dapps, this is not how you uniquely identify an NFT. The metadata is optional.

> The metadata is optional For the vast majority of people hyping NFTs, the metadata is the only part they care about. The metadata is the part that links the NFT to an actual piece of artwork -- the issuer and the work that it's linked to are the only reasons why some tokens are worth more to collectors than others. Without the context of the person who issued it and the work that the token is being paired with, you…

Yes, a lot of NFTs will represent some kind of visual media, and you want to know what that visual media is that they represent. But whether the link is a URL in the contract, a hash, or simply collective memory/agreement amongst collectors doesn't matter.

Note that the argument that NFTs are useless if you need to rely on social consensus to link token and asset is not valid - the use case is in having a common ledger to track ownership of the token.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#643

Post by Graoik »

WorldMaker wrote: post #629
jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I agree, and that's why I'm generally skeptical of any smart contract ideas that have to interface with real life (supply chains, land registry, and so on). I think they make more sense when they are concerned with things entirely contained within the blockchain, like swapping tokens or mapping names to addresses. Frustratingly enough, it's the former type ("let's put cows on the blockchain") that seem to get th…

I've passed beyond skeptical of smart contracts that try to apply to real life to a concern that much more real contract law needs to apply to smart contracts. Ethereum is already full of fun stories where "smart" contracts did extremely dumb things because they took a programmer's word extremely literally rather than a programmer's intent. In a world where programmers are assumed to be ordinary, fallible humans that…

Using a court of appeals assumes a shared widespread understanding of the topic of disagreement, often the only people with the expertise on the topic are going to be the parties involved and teaching a 3rd party can be impractical and prone to steering.

I can see smart contracts working with very low volume specialized scenarios for this reason.

Also traditional dispute resolution is expensive plenty of times where both parties would be willing to accept the risk of a bug over paying lawyer fees

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#644

Post by danShumway »

miracle2k wrote: post #641
danShumway wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is no different than any current artist with a limited print run Right. But also nobody acts like limited print runs are mathematically non-fungible. If the best argument for NFTs is that they're scarce in the exact same way that existing systems produce scarcity, and that this scarcity is enforced using the same systems we already have, that's not a good argument for the existence of NFTs. You might as well j…

> Right. But also nobody acts like limited print runs are mathematically non-fungible. You misunderstand the word non-fungible here. They are non-fungible because 2 copies are recorded like this: - token 1, owned by Alice - token 2, owned by Bob Bob and Alice may are may not be willing to make this trade, that is up to them. The two tokens are distinct. After they trade, it is still clear who the owner of each token…

> NFT people do not claim that non-fungible means "you cannot mint two tokens representing the same thing".

What NFT people do is argue that the uniqueness of individual tokens matters. It doesn't. They try to have their cake and eat it too, they try to argue that the NFT's link to the individual artwork doesn't matter when evaluating the technology, but that it does matter when trying to determine whether or not NFTs have value.

There are two ideas being conflated here about fungibility. If you want to argue that NFTs actually represent an artwork in some way, and that owning an NFT is somewhat similar to owning a piece of art or that it carries some meaningful connection to that artwork, then for all practical purposes NFTs are fungible resources. The attributes of an NFT that link it to an artwork are not guaranteed to be unique.

If you want to argue that the part of an NFT that matters is the individual token itself, then sure, they're non-fungible. But if that's all we care about then they're also worthless, because nobody cares about owning serial numbers, they care about owning a token that meaningfully points towards a socially or personally valuable item. They care about the thing that the token represents.

The only reason why one NFT is worth more than another is because of who issued it and what it's linked to. So to argue that the individual token's uniqueness is the only thing that matters is to reject the entire relationship between NFTs and artwork.

I brought this up elsewhere, but if I pull a $20 bill out of my pocket, it will have a unique serial number on it that corresponds to only that bill, and no other bill. So technically, by your criteria, a $20 bill is just as non-fungible as an NFT. It's technically unique in the same way that an NFT is.

But what I'm getting at with that comparison is that it's not enough to have each NFT be technically unique. They have to be unique in a way that matters, they have to be unique in a way that somebody would care about. Otherwise you might as well just collect $20 bills. Back to my original point, if the only thing that NFTs are providing is that the token itself is unique, that's not an improvement over any of our existing systems. You can already issue unique tokens without bringing NFTs into the equation, issuing a unique token is easy.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#645

Post by danShumway »

miracle2k wrote: post #642
danShumway wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The metadata is optional For the vast majority of people hyping NFTs, the metadata is the only part they care about. The metadata is the part that links the NFT to an actual piece of artwork -- the issuer and the work that it's linked to are the only reasons why some tokens are worth more to collectors than others. Without the context of the person who issued it and the work that the token is being paired with, you…

Yes, a lot of NFTs will represent some kind of visual media, and you want to know what that visual media is that they represent. But whether the link is a URL in the contract, a hash, or simply collective memory/agreement amongst collectors doesn't matter. Note that the argument that NFTs are useless if you need to rely on social consensus to link token and asset is not valid - the use case is in having a common ledg…

> But whether the link is a URL in the contract, a hash, or simply collective memory/agreement amongst collectors doesn't matter.

You voice your objection to this point below, and I'll get to that, but I just want to be clear: the NFTs are adding nothing to the existing social systems we use to determine value. We could have a collective memory/agreement without NFTs.

We're going to get to having a shared ledger below, but I just want to be clear about where we're starting -- NFTs do not add any value to the link between a token and an asset, we use the same social contracts that could always have been enforced before.

> the use case is in having a common ledger to track ownership of the token.

Now, a common ledger is a nice thing, but it also doesn't require NFTs, you could set up the exact same system with a little bit of federation.

Of course, federation would require some degree of trust and moderation, but here's the problem: NFTs require all that too. The only way that the NFT community has figured out to deal with copycat NFTs is to introduce secondary off-chain validation of which NFTs are "real" and which ones aren't. You end up recreating the exact same ecosystem of services that validate which NFTs are safe to buy, and the end result is that the secondary market isn't safe to use unless you run it through one of those services. Those off-chain validators will log fraud NFTs and refuse to validate them. As the ecosystem grows, they'll eventually shift to only validating NFTs that come from sources they trust. It's the same systems of moderation that already exist.

It's really hard to claim that NFTs add any value in the form of a trustless distributed ledger when one of the biggest recent events inside the space is Twitter verification. How much more centralized than that can you possibly get?

I bring this point up in a previous comment, but for all the criticism I have of Bitcoin (and I have a lot), Bitcoin at least doesn't suffer from this problem quite as much as NFTs do. The entire ecosystem for Bitcoin doesn't fall apart as soon as somebody stops trading on Coinbase. The NFT ecosystem has no idea how to keep the secondary market safe from copycat NFTs for normal buyers without cloning the same centralized systems for "genuine product" guarantees that we already have today.

And since NFTs aren't changing anything about our social consensus of value, and since NFTs aren't changing anything about how we verify goods on the secondary market, what on earth are they doing that's of any value? It's just an over-complicated system trying to reinvent federation. If the secondary market for NFTs was safe to use without hooking into a 3rd-party validator, or if the distributed ledger was safe to trust in its entirety without filtering out a socially determined list of bad actors, then you might have a point. But it isn't safe, NFTs have done nothing to make it safe.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#646

Post by raindropm »

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…

Your second last paragraph perfectly summed up my feeling about it. :p I don't want to touch it at first, since its scam/money laundering smell is very strong(and also environment impact) also I think overall thing is pretty stupid.

But after some time that I,um, "participate" in it, I can feel the lots of weird creative energy flowing in there, collectively. Not a thing we see often in today's world. It's quite rejuvenating, and crazy.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#647

Post by seanhunter »

int_19h wrote: post #512
seanhunter wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-fungible doesn't mean something can't be divided, it means a specific one just can't be substituted for another one. An example: If I trade oil, one barrel of oil with a certain spec[1] is fungible with another barrel of oil with the same spec. If I sell you some oil you don't care which specific barrel you get as long as it's the same kind of thing. Likewise if you borrow 10 dollars from me you can pay me back w…

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

Fungible doesn't mean divisable. That does not imply non-fungible means something is divisable. I gave an example of somithing fungible which isn't divisable (a barrel of oil) and one which is (dollars). In fact I also gave an example of something non-fungible which is non-divisable (Van Gogh's Sunflowers).

I'm struggling to think of something non-fungible which is divisable, but in any case I'm pretty sure NFTs are not divisable. It might be the case that non-fungible implies non-divisable but fungible things can be divisable or not.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#648

Post by baby »

rvba wrote: post #472
baby wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what happens whenever you see a large amount associated with an NFT. I bet that the art market started like that.

Art market started because people appreciate art. In fact rich people even commissioned art for hundreds, if not thousands of years. It can be used for various scams and as an investment, but the whole premise is ridicolous: people pay for art since they like it and want to own it. (And in this NFT scam they dont own anything useful)

I disagree. Art was never expensive, and artists are known to make little money until their death. Price of selective art really went through the roof for no reason other than creating a market to make money.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#649

Post by baby »

danShumway wrote: post #620
baby wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most NFTs are just links to a publicly hosted asset That's metadata, to display or use it in dapps, this is not how you uniquely identify an NFT. The metadata is optional.

> The metadata is optional For the vast majority of people hyping NFTs, the metadata is the only part they care about. The metadata is the part that links the NFT to an actual piece of artwork -- the issuer and the work that it's linked to are the only reasons why some tokens are worth more to collectors than others. Without the context of the person who issued it and the work that the token is being paired with, you…

Check www.project-memento.com. There is no metadata.

Re: NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

#650

Post by baby »

danShumway wrote: post #645
miracle2k wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a lot of NFTs will represent some kind of visual media, and you want to know what that visual media is that they represent. But whether the link is a URL in the contract, a hash, or simply collective memory/agreement amongst collectors doesn't matter. Note that the argument that NFTs are useless if you need to rely on social consensus to link token and asset is not valid - the use case is in having a common ledg…

> But whether the link is a URL in the contract, a hash, or simply collective memory/agreement amongst collectors doesn't matter. You voice your objection to this point below, and I'll get to that, but I just want to be clear: the NFTs are adding nothing to the existing social systems we use to determine value. We could have a collective memory/agreement without NFTs. We're going to get to having a shared ledger belo…

Value added by NFT: easier to trade and easier to verify.
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