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Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference

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Re: Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference

#91

Post by klodolph »

rcxdude wrote: post #50
klodolph wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people receiving royalties are the artists in these cases... This is just factually incorrect. I don't know why there's so much confusion here... it's the creator of the NFT that controls where the money goes, not the creator of the artwork. I don't know why people think that it's the artist that gets the money--that doesn't make any logical sense--how would a system like that even work?

In most legitimate uses of NFTs the creator is the artist.

How would you know if an NFT is legitimate? There's no "legitimate" bit on the NFT that distinguishes it.

If you wanted to support the artist, wouldn't it be faster, easier, cheaper, and more reliable to support them directly, through Patreon or something similar?

Re: Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference

#92

Post by [deleted] »

bitcurious wrote: post #54
supernova87a wrote: post #28

I don't mean to distract from the main conversation, but I want to talk about how insidiously evil it is that NFTs can be coded to send the original creator a percentage $ cut off of every subsequent transaction for all time. If that's not hard coding wealth inequality and a new class of asset owners, I don't know what is. This is disturbing, along with the whole thing itself anyway. Imagine if cryptocurrency started…

>Imagine if cryptocurrency started doing that? Isn't this essentially what proof of steak is? A tax on all transactions proportional to how much you already own, but disproportionately applied to smaller users. That last bit is key. Speaking of Ethereum for a second - the largest asset owners will be institutions which can transact off-chain, which means that fees are being payed more often by folks that don't have t…

[deleted]

Re: Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference

#94

Post by platz »

toss1 wrote: post #72
ww520 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that what copyright is about?

Not quite. Copyright prevents Bob from misappropriating Alice's work. E.g., Bob purchases a painting from Alice for $100. Bob can not legally now use that painting as a source to make and resell copies. But Bob can sell the original painting to Charlie for $200 and pocket the entire $200 from Charlie. Alice has nothing to do with that sale, and does not profit from any subsequent sale. But if Alice sold Bob and NFT i…

NFTs don't liscence or provide rights to artworks; they are useless to artists.

Re: Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference

#95

Post by Pils »

supernova87a wrote: post #28

I don't mean to distract from the main conversation, but I want to talk about how insidiously evil it is that NFTs can be coded to send the original creator a percentage $ cut off of every subsequent transaction for all time. If that's not hard coding wealth inequality and a new class of asset owners, I don't know what is. This is disturbing, along with the whole thing itself anyway. Imagine if cryptocurrency started…

I believe this is wrong. Creator percentage isn't coded into the Ethereum-based NFT's themselves, it's done at the marketplace level. Currently, if you bought an NFT on Foundation and sold it on Opensea, there isn't a way to encode directly into the NFT a guarantee Foundation's royalty agreement would be followed.

EIP-2981 is the draft protocol-level NFT royalty implementation, but you will note that it's opt-in and NFT marketplaces do not need to respect it (although theoretically they could be blacklisted/sued). It explicitly outlines why a non opt-in implementation wouldn't work:

> It is impossible to know which NFT transfers are the result of sales, and which are merely wallets moving or consolidating their NFTs. Therefore, we cannot force every transferFrom() call to involve a royalty payment, as not every transfer is a sale that would require such payment. We believe the NFT marketplace ecosystem will voluntarily implement this royalty payment standard to provide ongoing funding for artists and other creators, and NFT buyers will assess the royalty payment as a factor when making NFT purchasing decisions. [0]

The only non opt-in royalty percentage implementation I know of is Euler Beats, but that royalty percentage only applies to printing new NFTs through their bonding curve. If you bought an Euler Beat print through a third party, you could simply use the safeTransferFrom function and avoid royalties entirely.

As someone pointed out in this thread, this arrangement is very common for high end art already, since it helps keep incentives aligned between collectors and the artists.

[0] https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-2981#universal-royalty-pa...

Re: Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference

#96

Post by upbeat_general »

singold wrote: post #93

What I dont understand is what stops you from minting the same thing on multiple NFT blockchains and why is it any diferent than something centralized, and thats why I dont like all the NFT hype (I may be dumb and dont get what NFTs really are)

Yeah I’m confused about this as well. Especially since tons of NFTs are images, couldn’t you just change 1 pixel to change the hash and make a new NFT?

Re: Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference

#97

Post by lottin »

dschnurr wrote: post #38
supernova87a wrote: post #28

I don't mean to distract from the main conversation, but I want to talk about how insidiously evil it is that NFTs can be coded to send the original creator a percentage $ cut off of every subsequent transaction for all time. If that's not hard coding wealth inequality and a new class of asset owners, I don't know what is. This is disturbing, along with the whole thing itself anyway. Imagine if cryptocurrency started…

The people receiving royalties are the artists in these cases – instead of the record companies, instagrams, and etsys of the world. I fail to see how this won't be a net positive for wealth equality when we're shifting the advantage to those who have historically been taken advantage of.

These are not royalties. Royalties are paid when you buy a copy of a copyrighted work. And your not paying royalties again if the previous owner has already paid them.

Re: Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference

#98

Post by djoldman »

hervature wrote: post #15
djoldman wrote: post #3

> Certainly it's not harmful — some people collect coins, some people collect stamps, some people collect NFTs. If they want to pay money for this, it's fine with me. Exactly. If someone makes some purposeless set of objects and others buy and sell them and money is lost and gained by informed adults in the process then.. nothing? If one thinks that NFTs are inherently a BAD THING then it may be more accurate to say…

I think most people take issue with this: > informed adults I believe there are many that don't understand that NFTs don't represent ownership in anything yet they are billed as such. From NBA Top Shot: "you get to own and show off the highlights that matter". Except, the NBA owns all the footage and the rights. Do you get to sue the NBA if they bin Top Shot? If so, what would you get? Nobody was angry with Crypto Ki…

I think this is a good point. One of the main problems with new products and technologies is the inherent asymmetry of information: the producers know and the consumers sometimes don't.

However, this is a problem to be addressed by the FTC and it isn't something unique to NFTs. False advertising applies.

That being said, unfortunately it may be the case that many consumers are just ignorant of what they're buying in general (not including NFTs).

Re: Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference

#99

Post by btilly »

dschnurr wrote: post #51
klodolph wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people receiving royalties are the artists in these cases... This is just factually incorrect. I don't know why there's so much confusion here... it's the creator of the NFT that controls where the money goes, not the creator of the artwork. I don't know why people think that it's the artist that gets the money--that doesn't make any logical sense--how would a system like that even work?

The creator is almost always the artist. Provenance is what gives NFTs their value. The value of a Beeple NFT minted by a random user is $0.

Provenance is what gives NFTs their value.

The question is how you prove that provenance if a niche artist has created an NFT on a niche piece of art. (And, honestly, most of the people who would want to create NFTs are going to be in this category.)

Now imagine an agency whose job was simply to create a digital signature on a work that indicated what they had done to prove a particular piece of art really was produced by the artist who then goes on to sign the NFT. If the agency has an established reputation, then that signed NFT has much more solidly established provenance than an unsigned NFT. Of course that agency has non-zero costs to establish provenance. And adds a non-zero amount to the value of the NFT.

What then, can said agency reasonably charge the artist for this service?

Re: Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference

#100

Post by lottin »

echelon wrote: post #63
dschnurr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The creator is almost always the artist. Provenance is what gives NFTs their value. The value of a Beeple NFT minted by a random user is $0.

The value of a Beeple NFT minted by Beeple is $0. The market just hasn't discovered that yet. An NFT has no more value than a JPG. I'll longbets anyone that says otherwise.

You're god-damn right.
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