30 ms·

NFTs and a Thousand True Fans

110 points by parsecs 6y ago

sschueller 6y ago
I think I am experiencing FOMO with this NFT thing but no matter how much I look at it I have no interest what so ever in any of these. Very odd feeling...
- user-the-name 6y ago
  It's a scam. It's always a scam when it comes to crypto.
  - bluescrn 6y ago
    And if it's not a scam, it's gambling
    - ketamine__ 6y ago
      And if it's not gambling, it's investing.
    - user-the-name 6y ago
      Well. The gambling is usually fraudulent as well.
dgellow 6y ago
It's only speculative, right? I'm happy artists get paid but I still don't get why you would pay to be the "owner" of a digital art piece. Anyone can see and download the art. Who cares who is registered as the owner it if it's free to have an exact copy?
- redm 6y ago
  "A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the “best-of” DVD version of your free YouTube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month." I think the point is, people are fans so they want to collect and have a pride of ownership.
- koonsolo 6y ago
  I think baseball cards is the best comparison. People pay this much because it's official, it's a collectors item. You could make a nice color copy, but it will not be the same, even if the copy is hard to distinguish. The world is moving to digital. Kids play with digital things more than with physical. So how can you own a digital collectors item? Best solution seems NFT.
  - bastawhiz 6y ago
    If the actual collector's item is freely available and all you get is your name listed as having paid for it, you're not really "collecting" so much as showing that you paid money for each item. If I collect stamps, it's fun to show off your stamp collection because you have those stamps. It's different if everyone can also have all of those stamps, and the hobby is reduced down to "I have these stamps and also my name is on the blockchain next to each of them". There's no physical scarcity for the stamps, there's scarcity for your name being listed as a buyer in a ledger. Call me old fashioned, but that seems to suck the fun out of it.
    - seibelj 6y ago
      The physical world collectibles will have NFTs associated, allowing the best of both worlds.
      - bastawhiz 6y ago
        Why would they? It seems to defeat the purpose. You can sell the item in the real world without the NFT. The uniqueness of the item is implicit in its physical form. If you did sell the item again with an NFT, there's nothing really mandating that you actually turn the item over to the new owner. The NFT has no material connection to the item, so it doesn't even provide verifiable provenance.
        CodeShmode 6y ago
        You could also sell a certificate of authenticity without an artwork, but why would you?
- jsemrau 6y ago
  Nothing says decentralizing finance like artificially restricting the existence of digital object. Of course, this statement is a bit smug, but while I caved in to the FOMO and bought some Ada could before the Mary Hard Fork, I have yet a real world use case for any of the coins. If there would be a wallet filled with credits where I can gift / tip creators for their work independent of their bank | location | currency, this would be an amazing use case.
- jcfrei 6y ago
  Then why do people buy paintings? They could just own a photograph. Don't tell me it's because they appreciate the subtle brush strokes or the smell of the oil paint. It's because they want their name to be associated with a great artist. Because in the halls of MoMA in New York it will say painting by Jackson Pollock on permanent loan by <insert name of your foundation>.
  - paul_f 6y ago
    Comparing an original painting to a photograph of the painting is the exact issue the OP is making. They are asking why people would pay for a photo, when anyone could have the same photo. There is no original, scarce painting to own. Just all identical copies.
    - pxue 6y ago
      "Original" doesn't really exist in the digital native world. Data is literally copied when it gets distributed. Maybe think of NFT as a pointer to the head of a link list, the start of the data distribution chain. And we assign some arbitrary monetary value to that pointer, because, well, there's only 1 head of a link list.
  - Qworg 6y ago
    Yes! Currently, NFTs lack a stage - I can't imagine deriving the same level of MoMA association with "Owned by jcfrei (0x859128479178571823784)" when I got to a webpage.
    - vmception 6y ago
      I can. And that already happens. When prestigious institutions are involved you'll be able to check their addresses and signatures too. It is more about the transfer and hypothecation of value, which this scarcity and transparency allows. If it doesn't catch on it doesn't catch on. Right now people are clamoring for this future.
    - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      The stage is the community which the NFT is related to.
- vmception 6y ago
  it is the same as any collectible, there is a market of people that like originals, except now there is a greater assurance of it being the original, primarily because of the earlier block/timestamp compared to a duplicate NFT which would therefore not hold its value, and the non-NFT versions of the art has no transaction so they do not store value. This assurance is accessible to any creator or collector. a whole industry of appraisers and committees now gone. yay. automatic ability to pay royalties to the artist upon resale just built in, no contracts or enforcement of contracts necessary. no trust involved for lower value works where everyone is unfamiliar with contracts and lawyers. more efficient market available to all.
  - africanboy 6y ago
    > there is a market of people that like originals, except now there is a greater assurance of it being the original for it to have some value there must be consensus around it. if I have the same exact copy of the digital art and I am selling it in a market that does not recognize NFT as proof (think about China that doesn't even recognize patents) what value does this hold? or if two competing entities are both claiming to have emitted the one true token, which one do I trust? we are thinking today: the artist can tell which one is the good one, but what if is the future and the artist is dead? do we need a token that identifies the artist statement? and who verifies that the content of the email was not forged? isn't a piece of paper with a signature in a closet inside a notary office a simple mechanism? What makes NFT special, except that probably collector are actually paying to collect NFTs and not the item attached to them? I know many collectors, I don't see them collecting digital fingerprints
- dorkwood 6y ago
  I think the real answer is "because it boosts the economy and gets more artists involved".
- GauntletWizard 6y ago
  I pay real money to have artists endorse my association with digital artworks they have created on my behalf. For all intents and purposes, these are not works for hire - The artist retains the rights, I have just sponsored their creation. Doing so post-facto isn't insane, either. The artist gets paid, I get warm fuzzies. The blockchain is nice in that it takes control of that endorsement out of the artist's hands, so they can't "take it back" and stop supporting that endorsement. I'm certain that has happened to people. I'm also certain that this cure is worse than the disease.
- debbiedowner 6y ago
  Maybe if you buy an NFT of an image you own 1/2000th of the rights and then can sue people for 1/2000th of the royalties when they tweet or blog it? I could get behind that. One interesting dilemma for prestigious artists is as their work resells at auction at higher prices they don't get any of the money, except when they go create a new artwork for their higher priced market. A way to fix this could be by the artist always being able to make genesis blocks for past artwork NFTs. NFTs with image rights would be great for news photographers and paparazzi for starters. Or rather it would be good for lawyers representing them?
  - throwaway_kufu 6y ago
    The ongoing commission to artists for future sales already exists in many NFTs
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    From an IP perspective aren’t NFTs the perfect sale? Basically you can let people squabble over ownership of the NFT without having to give up any IP rights over the work itself. At least when you buy a physical painting you can do what you want with it.
hi5eyes 6y ago
cryptokitties 2.0 right?
- sroussey 6y ago
  Same team.
- Animats 6y ago
  Right. But with more mainstream PR. See "NBA Top Shot". The people selling NFTs talk a lot about buyers "owning" something. From the article: The logic of blockchains is once you purchase an NFT it is yours to fully control, just like when you buy books or sneakers in the real world. There are and will continue to be NFT platforms and marketplaces, but they will be constrained in what they can charge because blockchain-based ownership shifts the power back to creators and users — you can shop around and force the marketplace to earn its fees. Some don't mean it. From the TOS for Genies: Digital Goods are not purchased by you, but rather are licensed to you on a limited, personal, nontransferable, non-sublicensable, revocable basis, solely for your non-commercial use in connection with your use of the Services. You may not transfer Digital Goods to any other user of the Services or any other third party, except where the Services expressly authorize you do to so. For example, you may transfer your Digital Goods to other users of the Services through Genies’ Digital Goods re-sale marketplace on the Services. You acknowledge and agree that Genies may manage, control, change, or eliminate Digital Goods at any time. ... Digital Goods and Virtual Currency do not constitute personal property, nor do they have any value outside of the Services. Virtual Currency cannot be sold, traded, transferred, or exchanged for cash. "Revocable". Genie giveth, and Genie taketh away. Plus, you can only transfer ownership through them, not via some blockchain they don't control. Art Blocks is very funny. This is an Art Block.[1] Current price, US$223. It's not unique; there are 2000 copies for sale. There's a lot of sucker bait for sale in this space. [1] https://www.artblocks.io/token/16000118 https://www.artblocks.io/token/16000118
  - TigeriusKirk 6y ago
    There are 2000 iterations of that particular Art Block project, each of which is unique. There are not 2000 copies of that iteration.
bondarchuk 6y ago
>NFTs are blockchain-based records that uniquely represent pieces of media. There is a jpg of an artwork on the internet that anyone can view and copy. There's also a non-fungible token that's linked to this jpg. I just don't see how NFT proponents want to make the actual connection between the one and the other in a way that's both decentralized and unique. - You can have some authority that says "THIS artwork belongs to THIS token". Then, you don't need blockchain, because you have a central authority. - You can encode the relation on-chain by e.g. taking an md5 of the jpg. How do you know which token claiming to be "the unique token for that jpg" is the real unique one? Even if there is a class of token that preserves uniqueness, it can only do that internally within the class, we're back to the previous point of needing some centralized allocation to say which class of tokens is the real one. Edit: for the last point, you can take the one with the earliest timestamp of course, as per another comment. Anything I missed? Has anyone even thought about this in-depth? Are a16z's crypto dabblings just empty hype chasing?
- sombremesa 6y ago
  As far as I can tell, this is indeed all 'empty hype chasing' on the part of the founders, but the people who actually believe in it probably end up trusting in a central authority - which means a database would have sufficed. Still, it's amazing how many people are willing to shell out money for this - many of them are likely trying to sell their acquisitions to the next sucker, though.
- pilingual 6y ago
  “You can have some authority that says "THIS artwork belongs to THIS token". Then, you don't need blockchain, because you have a central authority.” You need blockchain because central authorities can shut it down; however, most smart contracts in this space are centrally controlled. I think the reason people struggle to understand how NFTs make sense is because it is new and there is no mental model for it. It’s easy to dismiss, but if you think about it and in particular if you program an ERC721 contract and/or use it, you begin to get it. Younger generations won’t need to do this because it’ll just be the way things are. You won’t trade MtG cards but NFTs. You may be in a VR game and see a work on art on the wall and buy it right there for your collection. It is absolutely legit regardless of the mania or the fact that contracts aren’t decentralized (yet).
openfuture 6y ago
This has nothing to do with art. NFTs are the best money laundering method in the cryptocurrency world. Just like how druglords use fine art auctions to pay for cocaine shipments. Think about it, anyone could be the customer or the creator of the NFT 'art', the platform can charge a percentage. Meanwhile if the platform offers financial services the need for KYC/AML locks them from doing business with themselves and anything else doesn't have enough volume. I think AML/KYC is an extremely draconian regulation so I sympathise to some extent but NFTs have no value as art. They have various interesting use cases though but those things require more effort (you know, cause they are actual products) but no one has done anything like that yet because blockchains have not had a big enough market or fast enough transaction speed to attract talent to build on them (yet!). Hopefully we can leave this era behind soon and abandon nation states and taxes for insured crowdfunding and internet-as-means-to-solving-climate-change, i.e. fair allocation of the earths resources.
- capableweb 6y ago
  You could be right with all of this, I don't know. But worth considering that people have been saying "X have no value as art" since the invention of art. So it might be useful to see if there is other problems than just if it's actually "valuable as art" or whatever.
ksm1717 6y ago
Pretending there’s real value in NFTs is 100% delusion, rationalization, and/or bandwagoning. Normally I would have no problem with a good old delusion, but this one just costs carbon emissions with play pretend upside.
dillondoyle 6y ago
I have mixed feelings from my perspective of being into art. One of my favorite artists just came out with an NFT. They also do limited edition 'drops' which I would much prefer an actual print, but I've missed them on Instagram or haven't hit refresh fast enough. Check out the app NTWK i think a more interesting way to bring art online. They have live stream videos of launches, more like actually visiting a show. And they also have more fair raffles instead of whoever hits refresh first. For now these releases are more accessible (but still not totally), and the artist doesn't have to give 50% to a gallery (yet?). But it's still a reseller scalper market. <br> Long context / my thoughts if interested: Art is incredibly exclusive. For small collectors it's almost impossible to get in on rising stars; sucks if you have supported them from before they started getting big and now it's way out of your price range and even if not you don't have the connections to buy. Check out @jerrygogosian they always have a good take lol. Galleries will say there is a waitlist. The waitlist is a lie. Can't see art in person at fairs anymore. But you can still get a PDF to zoom in on though! no prices. And all pieces are pre-sold lol. Nina Chanel Abney - who recently made it 'big' - posted on her stories the other day the typical large gallery email response to a buy inquiry: 'i can put your name on the waitlist. But what is your collection like, what artists do you own.' She replied she has the largest collection of Nina Chanel lol. I guess the intern didn't recognize her name. Unless you buy other artists that the gallery is trying to prop up you can't get the actual artist you want. Also the book 'Dark Side of the Boom' does a really good job laying out the start of contemporary art and how a few gallerists ended up controlling - often colluding - to corner the market, increase prices, and make art inaccessible. At the high end contemporary art is a levered asset (you can get loans against it) so there is incentive to artificially prop up the price at auction to get bigger loans and higher returns. BUT there is still a huge amount of accessible art, only 1% or less of artists make a sizable living. So if you are in it for the art there's a ton out there and it feels good to support a struggling artist (almost all are) even if a gallery gets 50%. Maybe you even get lucky and pick an artist that others connect to and then you can't afford it anymore haha. Has happened to me 2 coming up on 3 times so far. Check out Yale graduates and a few other non-profits or galleries that do like sponsored residencies. But bet your ass senior directors at Gagosian look there too - you know while they aren't busy sexually harassing & abusing their wealthy white pretty staff. https://www.instagram.com/p/CLsua3Klz0LIJMR_t0RiRsii_2AclS4gsLOP0g0/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CLsua3Klz0LIJMR_t0RiRsii_2AclS4g... https://instagram.fapa1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t50.2886-16/88710050_947517819324877_4850393155004681007_n.mp4 https://instagram.fapa1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t50.2886-16/887100...?
miguelmota 6y ago
Majority of NFT's are garbage (Sturgeon's Law) and not worth any price. However the nature of an NFT is that it allows an asset to be wrapped in a smart contract and have ownership and terms of use encoded. There's something to be said about having digitized assets that can be trustlessly verified and have capability of issuing dividends. The Veblen effect also comes to mind. The more something costs, the more [rich] people want it, no matter how ridiculous, typically used as status symbols. - [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law - [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
jgalt212 6y ago
It continues to blow my mind how much cognitive energy VC's expend trying to figure out a way (no matter how implausible) for something to have the value they hope it has. e.g. Marc Andressen on what we all were missing about the Yo app. https://slate.com/business/2014/06/marc-andreessen-explains-why-mobile-app-yo-is-a-big-deal-one-bit-signaling-takes-up-70-percent-of-bangladesh-cell-phone-traffic-at-any-moment.html https://slate.com/business/2014/06/marc-andreessen-explains-...
zepto 6y ago
Seems like someone figured out how to scale the Million dollar homepage.
pxue 6y ago
Most ppl in this thread is still trapped by concept of ownership of something tangible. Why not break out of that and think digitally. Digital ownership is like putting your name on a building, like a museum. Completely meaningless to most but a few. And that is worth it enough for some folks to send millions to do it. NFT ownership is exactly the same thing. The article says that creators just need a few thousand of devote followers to make a living. A NFT doesn't have to mean or worth anything to millions of people, just to a few thousand will do. It's enough to create a vibrant marketplace centered around some creator.
- noahatwi 6y ago
  I agree with you that intellectual/digital property has value, but I think that it is impossible to establish authenticity in an entirely decentralized way. If you are a notable artist wanting to sell NFT art, what makes your tokens valuable is that you have verified your identity with the service which deals the NFTs, and that the service is reputable. Otherwise, anyone may set up an account claiming to be you (on another service for instance) and sell the same JPGs attached to a new token. In the absence of a centralized authority, the only sign of authenticity is chronology (who minted this jpg into a token first), which is very susceptible to chronological "squatting" e.g. an opportunist discovers an artist's works and mints them before the artist does. The difficulty of replicating physical works of art has the happy side-effect of massively strengthening their authenticity.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  I disagree with your analogy that "Digital ownership is like putting your name on a building, like a museum." The main value of putting your name on a building or museum is the branding value, and that's not the driving force behind the value of an NFT. The analogy that DID make me understand NFTs is the traditional art market. When a painting sells for millions of dollars, basically all of that value comes from the provenance of the artwork, not the artwork itself. That is, with present technology it is possible to make an extremely detailed replica of, say, "The Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I", one that was indistinguishable to the human eye from a distance of a meter or so, that would sell for a few grand max, not the $135 million of the original. Thus, if humans are capable of assigning a huge amount of value to provenance, why can't this be applied to digital artwork as well? IMO, though, since digital copies are exactly identical to the original (unlike physical objects), it remains to be seen whether humans will value this concept of provenance the same as they do in the physical world.
debbiedowner 6y ago
NFTs are kind of an oxymoron in my opinion. For a digital object to be scarce it needs a central authority. If a digital object is decentralized, it has no scarcity and is worthless. E.g. a limited edition skin in a game needs the central authority to make it usable in the game. So why do they need blockchain? E.g. a blockchain piece of data is accessible to all, so why pay for it?
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  The "central authority" is the blockchain, which is decentralized because no one controls it. > a limited edition skin in a game needs the central authority to make it usable in the game. So why do they need blockchain? Why do you need a central authority to make it usable? I believe anyone can check the ownership of an NFT on the blockchain. You would just need to cross-check a player's game account against their blockchain address. > a blockchain piece of data is accessible to all, so why pay for it? It is accessible to everyone, but only owned by one person.
  - addajones 6y ago
    If it's only owned by one person, can that one person make it not accessible to everyone once they own it? Or is it just the public knowledge that there is one owner and listing who that is?
    - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      No, because everything on the blockchain is public. I'm not exactly sure how NFTs work, but they will have some data associated with them that will be publicly accessible on the blockchain.
  - tkiolp4 6y ago
    Not everyone knows how blockchain works, and so NFT marketplaces are acting as pseudo central authorities (the average Joe buys, sells and checks the ownership of NFTs via marketplaces).
  - debbiedowner 6y ago
debbiedowner 6y ago
That guy who tried selling me the Brooklyn bridge was the first true NFT salesperson.
hrishi 6y ago
I think the value of NFTs purely based on "ownership" will not last very long. Yes it's cool, but most of these are already on the way to becoming almost purely speculative instruments. Some - like punks and hashmasks among others - seem to be taking advantage of the medium, to do things with art that only NFTs can do. Art that embraces the medium and does something unique that only it can IMO will eventually win[1]. In the case of NFTS, having each piece be self-contained bits of code sitting inside an execution engine open up a lot of possibilities, from self-mutation to generation. 1 - longer summary of my thoughts: https://hrishioa.github.io/the-two-innovations-of-hashmasks/ https://hrishioa.github.io/the-two-innovations-of-hashmasks/
- biztos 6y ago
  As an artist considering doing some stuff in this area, I really hope you’re right. At the moment the money seems to be chasing Instagram stars and for that purpose I find it a little boring, even if I like some of the art.
anonymouse008 6y ago
YOUR DMCA ARE BELONG TO US
biztos 6y ago
I’ve been trying to figure out NFTs and I can’t understand why they’re better than just using smart contracts. I threw together a contract in Solidity that would do all this and cut out the middleman / middlewinkelvii. It wasn’t hard. What am I missing? Why is the contract not the token?
- wmf 6y ago
  Throwing together a contract in Solidity is infinitely hard for most artists and it also makes the cloning problem (that several people in this thread have mentioned) even worse.
  - biztos 6y ago
    I’m not suggesting every artist make their own, rather that a generic all purpose art sale/resale/royalty contract on the Ethereum blockchain seems easy-ish to do (I might try it) and then... just instantiate it with yourself as the artist and whatever signature you want? Sorry if that’s not the right word, but however one deploys a contract object. I don’t understand how this is any more susceptible to cloning or any other problem. Maybe also not less susceptible but I still don’t get the value add of the NFT versus basically just a good transparent contract with a few things stored. I do get the value add of the gallery/dealer but what’s their advantage in using the NFT instead of a contract? Is it just so Beeple can set numerology prices in USD? Still feel like I’m missing something fundamental here, I’m usually not more right than everyone else.
- bookmarkable 6y ago
  Is your contract on the blockchain? At what address can it be verified? If I buy it and trade it, can you verify or receive a royalty? That’s the token part.
  - biztos 6y ago
    Yes, the contract would be on the Ethereum blockchain. If the contract stores the owner, how is it not the “token” at the same time? Royalties are pretty easy: contract knows the artist, artist gets say 10% of every resale, owner gets the rest, purchaser becomes new owner. Anyway this and NFT both have a big vulnerability around royalties: I can make some of the payment in cash if I want to cut out the artist.
goshx 6y ago
I have a hard time processing why people would spend their money this way. Here’s an insane auction going on right now: https://nft.3lau.com/#/auction https://nft.3lau.com/#/auction It has reached over $8MM... why
AndrewKemendo 6y ago
Lets say I buy an NFT. Now what do I do with it? I can't hang it up, or print it (if its a gif for example). The only thing I've heard is that people store them on IPFS [1] but I don't really know what that is or how it works. Every art collector I know displays it somewhere, or has it in storage such that it will be displayed somewhere eventually. This feels like a way for people to support digital artists directly, which is great. Not sure there's much more here than that though. [1]https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/
- miketery 6y ago
  You’ll be able to hang it in your virtual home in the meta verse. And visitors will be able to see its “authentic” (authority x certifies it).
- langitbiru 6y ago
  You can flex your wealth with it. :) Or you can make it as collateral to borrow some (cryptocurrency) assets.
ramijames 6y ago
I work in this space as a Product Owner for a blockchain team at Ultra.io. I think that I can speak to some of the questions and concerns in this thread with some authority. NFTs as they are being used today, as proof of ownership over a copy able, digital asset, is frankly the lowest hanging fruit. It isn't a very robust or interesting use of the technology. What we are building is a game distribution platform, like Steam, that makes games and their items NFTs. This opens up many interesting business opportunities that are defined by the built in scarcity that NFTs are built for. Because it is all on chain, it also means that ownership rights move back to end users, meaning that once you are done playing a game, it is then possible to sell or trade it on the open market. A prime example of NFT use as a business case is the ability for a game developer or publisher to create limited edition games with unique content. Basically, I see NFT art as just a proof of concept and not really where the future of this tech is going.
- dmw_ng 6y ago
  Your use case is definitely more interesting, but it still seems relatively pointless. I love the idea of NFTs acting as a kind of capability to unlock functionality in a piece of software (like a game), but in the particular case of just one game, the value of the token is linked to a single, central authority (the company producing the game) and implementing transactions on an open blockchain seems somewhat superfluous. The key detail of Bitcoin's use of blockchain is to enable mutually distrusting groups to agree on some state in the absence of any centralized authority. In the above case, as in so many buzzy uses, the use of some blockchain to transact seems redundant since the value of tokens being exchanged are entirely dependent on a central authority, and could much more easily be facilitated by that authority (this is just the common "99% of blockchain uses could just be a database" argument I guess). Another aspect is that when the central authority is also the sole issuer of tokens, no counteracting forces exist to drive a meaningful market dynamic. No matter how much price pressure exists from users, the authority can always act to restrict issuance or increase issuance to force a particular price, and over the long term in the absence of that authority (due to bankruptcy, obsolescence, ..) the value of all issued tokens drifts towards zero. On saying that though, there seems to be some promise one step removed -- tokens that activate functionality in software produced across a wide range of vendors. In the case of a game, that could perhaps be realized as something like a common set of power ups tied to NFTs that could be reused in multiple games. The question is how you'd incentivize multiple vendors to buy into the same set of tokens, given doing so is likely to have some real world cost attached to it, and obviously introduces a creative limitation to game design. Meanwhile, can't help but agree, the current NFT applications (million dollar web site clones, weird eBay for JPEGs clones, ..) seem entirely pointless and more a symptom of something than a solution to anything.
baby 6y ago
> But the internet took a detour. Centralized social platforms became the dominant way for creators and fans to connect. The platforms used this power to become the new intermediaries — inserting ads and algorithmic recommendations between creators and users while keeping most of the revenue for themselves. I don't think that's an issue, plenty of people now making a living thanks to the internet, even though discovery is a hard problem (and thus ads are a flourishing business). Cryptocurrencies (not NFTs) remove intermediaries, but they don't fix or improve the discovery problem, which is the real problem. There's still a million related problem, and cryptocurrency solves one of them.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
>NFTs are blockchain-based records that uniquely represent pieces of media Or pieces of land, see Fabrica [0] (disclosure: I am still affiliated with the company, and I used to be a co-founder there) [0]: https://www.fabrica.land/ https://www.fabrica.land/
tkiolp4 6y ago
I think we are missing the main point: NFTs are all about speculation. You buy an NFT not because you want to own it (and hang it in your virtual residence in the meta verse), you buy it because you hope you can sell it later at a higher price. Marketplaces are taking a fee for every sell and saying who owns what (ridiculous because you can check that yourself... but not everyone knows how blockchain works). It’s like art in the real world. The ones who own a Picasso, sure enjoy it by showing it to guests... but the real pleasure comes when they are able to sell it for double the price they have paid for it.
snack_man 6y ago
hi I collect pirate cryptopunks AMA http://piratepunks.com http://piratepunks.com
Reimi 6y ago
Cryptocurrency, art, technology.... there is nothing surprising, time passes, we develop.Remember the times 20 years ago, not everyone had a TV, and if there was, there was almost nothing to watch. And today... everyone has a smartphone and the ability to watch thousands of movies or TV shows... One Showbox app is worth it https://pipsli.net/en/android-apps/multimedia/125-showbox.html https://pipsli.net/en/android-apps/multimedia/125-showbox.ht.... I can't even imagine what will happen in ten years...
rstuart4133 6y ago
How can someone calling themselves "The University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance" not have any understanding of how the thing they are commenting on actually works? I hope they aren't actually associated with the University. This is just plain wrong: > The vast effort it requires also makes Bitcoin inherently difficult to scale, he argues. "If Bitcoin were to be adopted as a global reserve currency," he speculates, "the Bitcoin price will probably be in the millions, and those miners will have more money than the entire [US] Federal budget to spend on electricity." Bitcoin's energy usage and transaction rate are unconnected. Even the long time casual observer would know when Bitcoin hit is maximum transaction rate for the first time, it's energy usage was literally orders of magnitude less than it is now. Whatever is driving it's energy usage isn't transaction rate. What's more, it's looking unlikely the max transaction rate will ever increase. And as for miners having to mine more coins ... Christ how confused is it possible to be about one topic? Apparently he doesn't know mining of new coins is halving every 4 years, and will end completely on May 7th, 2140. It's like reading an Emu claiming the desert doesn't bloom because the fish in the rivers drink all the water. The Emu isn't wrong about the fish drinking the water of course, but with that level of ineptitude on display taking anything else the Emu has to say about the climate seriously ain't going to happen.

110 points by parsecs 6y ago

I think I am experiencing FOMO with this NFT thing but no matter how much I look at it I have no interest what so ever in any of these. Very odd feeling...

user-the-name 6y ago
It's a scam. It's always a scam when it comes to crypto.
- bluescrn 6y ago
  And if it's not a scam, it's gambling
  - ketamine__ 6y ago
    And if it's not gambling, it's investing.
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    Well. The gambling is usually fraudulent as well.

dgellow 6y ago

It's only speculative, right? I'm happy artists get paid but I still don't get why you would pay to be the "owner" of a digital art piece. Anyone can see and download the art. Who cares who is registered as the owner it if it's free to have an exact copy?

redm 6y ago
"A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the “best-of” DVD version of your free YouTube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month." I think the point is, people are fans so they want to collect and have a pride of ownership.
koonsolo 6y ago
I think baseball cards is the best comparison. People pay this much because it's official, it's a collectors item. You could make a nice color copy, but it will not be the same, even if the copy is hard to distinguish. The world is moving to digital. Kids play with digital things more than with physical. So how can you own a digital collectors item? Best solution seems NFT.
- bastawhiz 6y ago
  If the actual collector's item is freely available and all you get is your name listed as having paid for it, you're not really "collecting" so much as showing that you paid money for each item. If I collect stamps, it's fun to show off your stamp collection because you have those stamps. It's different if everyone can also have all of those stamps, and the hobby is reduced down to "I have these stamps and also my name is on the blockchain next to each of them". There's no physical scarcity for the stamps, there's scarcity for your name being listed as a buyer in a ledger. Call me old fashioned, but that seems to suck the fun out of it.
  - seibelj 6y ago
    The physical world collectibles will have NFTs associated, allowing the best of both worlds.
    - bastawhiz 6y ago
      Why would they? It seems to defeat the purpose. You can sell the item in the real world without the NFT. The uniqueness of the item is implicit in its physical form. If you did sell the item again with an NFT, there's nothing really mandating that you actually turn the item over to the new owner. The NFT has no material connection to the item, so it doesn't even provide verifiable provenance.
      - CodeShmode 6y ago
        You could also sell a certificate of authenticity without an artwork, but why would you?
jsemrau 6y ago
Nothing says decentralizing finance like artificially restricting the existence of digital object. Of course, this statement is a bit smug, but while I caved in to the FOMO and bought some Ada could before the Mary Hard Fork, I have yet a real world use case for any of the coins. If there would be a wallet filled with credits where I can gift / tip creators for their work independent of their bank | location | currency, this would be an amazing use case.
jcfrei 6y ago
Then why do people buy paintings? They could just own a photograph. Don't tell me it's because they appreciate the subtle brush strokes or the smell of the oil paint. It's because they want their name to be associated with a great artist. Because in the halls of MoMA in New York it will say painting by Jackson Pollock on permanent loan by <insert name of your foundation>.
- paul_f 6y ago
  Comparing an original painting to a photograph of the painting is the exact issue the OP is making. They are asking why people would pay for a photo, when anyone could have the same photo. There is no original, scarce painting to own. Just all identical copies.
  - pxue 6y ago
    "Original" doesn't really exist in the digital native world. Data is literally copied when it gets distributed. Maybe think of NFT as a pointer to the head of a link list, the start of the data distribution chain. And we assign some arbitrary monetary value to that pointer, because, well, there's only 1 head of a link list.
- Qworg 6y ago
  Yes! Currently, NFTs lack a stage - I can't imagine deriving the same level of MoMA association with "Owned by jcfrei (0x859128479178571823784)" when I got to a webpage.
  - vmception 6y ago
    I can. And that already happens. When prestigious institutions are involved you'll be able to check their addresses and signatures too. It is more about the transfer and hypothecation of value, which this scarcity and transparency allows. If it doesn't catch on it doesn't catch on. Right now people are clamoring for this future.
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    The stage is the community which the NFT is related to.
vmception 6y ago
it is the same as any collectible, there is a market of people that like originals, except now there is a greater assurance of it being the original, primarily because of the earlier block/timestamp compared to a duplicate NFT which would therefore not hold its value, and the non-NFT versions of the art has no transaction so they do not store value. This assurance is accessible to any creator or collector. a whole industry of appraisers and committees now gone. yay. automatic ability to pay royalties to the artist upon resale just built in, no contracts or enforcement of contracts necessary. no trust involved for lower value works where everyone is unfamiliar with contracts and lawyers. more efficient market available to all.
- africanboy 6y ago
  > there is a market of people that like originals, except now there is a greater assurance of it being the original for it to have some value there must be consensus around it. if I have the same exact copy of the digital art and I am selling it in a market that does not recognize NFT as proof (think about China that doesn't even recognize patents) what value does this hold? or if two competing entities are both claiming to have emitted the one true token, which one do I trust? we are thinking today: the artist can tell which one is the good one, but what if is the future and the artist is dead? do we need a token that identifies the artist statement? and who verifies that the content of the email was not forged? isn't a piece of paper with a signature in a closet inside a notary office a simple mechanism? What makes NFT special, except that probably collector are actually paying to collect NFTs and not the item attached to them? I know many collectors, I don't see them collecting digital fingerprints
dorkwood 6y ago
I think the real answer is "because it boosts the economy and gets more artists involved".
GauntletWizard 6y ago
I pay real money to have artists endorse my association with digital artworks they have created on my behalf. For all intents and purposes, these are not works for hire - The artist retains the rights, I have just sponsored their creation. Doing so post-facto isn't insane, either. The artist gets paid, I get warm fuzzies. The blockchain is nice in that it takes control of that endorsement out of the artist's hands, so they can't "take it back" and stop supporting that endorsement. I'm certain that has happened to people. I'm also certain that this cure is worse than the disease.
debbiedowner 6y ago
Maybe if you buy an NFT of an image you own 1/2000th of the rights and then can sue people for 1/2000th of the royalties when they tweet or blog it? I could get behind that. One interesting dilemma for prestigious artists is as their work resells at auction at higher prices they don't get any of the money, except when they go create a new artwork for their higher priced market. A way to fix this could be by the artist always being able to make genesis blocks for past artwork NFTs. NFTs with image rights would be great for news photographers and paparazzi for starters. Or rather it would be good for lawyers representing them?
- throwaway_kufu 6y ago
  The ongoing commission to artists for future sales already exists in many NFTs
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  From an IP perspective aren’t NFTs the perfect sale? Basically you can let people squabble over ownership of the NFT without having to give up any IP rights over the work itself. At least when you buy a physical painting you can do what you want with it.

hi5eyes 6y ago

cryptokitties 2.0 right?

sroussey 6y ago
Same team.
Animats 6y ago
Right. But with more mainstream PR. See "NBA Top Shot". The people selling NFTs talk a lot about buyers "owning" something. From the article: The logic of blockchains is once you purchase an NFT it is yours to fully control, just like when you buy books or sneakers in the real world. There are and will continue to be NFT platforms and marketplaces, but they will be constrained in what they can charge because blockchain-based ownership shifts the power back to creators and users — you can shop around and force the marketplace to earn its fees. Some don't mean it. From the TOS for Genies: Digital Goods are not purchased by you, but rather are licensed to you on a limited, personal, nontransferable, non-sublicensable, revocable basis, solely for your non-commercial use in connection with your use of the Services. You may not transfer Digital Goods to any other user of the Services or any other third party, except where the Services expressly authorize you do to so. For example, you may transfer your Digital Goods to other users of the Services through Genies’ Digital Goods re-sale marketplace on the Services. You acknowledge and agree that Genies may manage, control, change, or eliminate Digital Goods at any time. ... Digital Goods and Virtual Currency do not constitute personal property, nor do they have any value outside of the Services. Virtual Currency cannot be sold, traded, transferred, or exchanged for cash. "Revocable". Genie giveth, and Genie taketh away. Plus, you can only transfer ownership through them, not via some blockchain they don't control. Art Blocks is very funny. This is an Art Block.[1] Current price, US$223. It's not unique; there are 2000 copies for sale. There's a lot of sucker bait for sale in this space. [1] https://www.artblocks.io/token/16000118 https://www.artblocks.io/token/16000118
- TigeriusKirk 6y ago
  There are 2000 iterations of that particular Art Block project, each of which is unique. There are not 2000 copies of that iteration.

bondarchuk 6y ago

>NFTs are blockchain-based records that uniquely represent pieces of media. There is a jpg of an artwork on the internet that anyone can view and copy. There's also a non-fungible token that's linked to this jpg. I just don't see how NFT proponents want to make the actual connection between the one and the other in a way that's both decentralized and unique. - You can have some authority that says "THIS artwork belongs to THIS token". Then, you don't need blockchain, because you have a central authority. - You can encode the relation on-chain by e.g. taking an md5 of the jpg. How do you know which token claiming to be "the unique token for that jpg" is the real unique one? Even if there is a class of token that preserves uniqueness, it can only do that internally within the class, we're back to the previous point of needing some centralized allocation to say which class of tokens is the real one. Edit: for the last point, you can take the one with the earliest timestamp of course, as per another comment. Anything I missed? Has anyone even thought about this in-depth? Are a16z's crypto dabblings just empty hype chasing?

sombremesa 6y ago
As far as I can tell, this is indeed all 'empty hype chasing' on the part of the founders, but the people who actually believe in it probably end up trusting in a central authority - which means a database would have sufficed. Still, it's amazing how many people are willing to shell out money for this - many of them are likely trying to sell their acquisitions to the next sucker, though.
pilingual 6y ago
“You can have some authority that says "THIS artwork belongs to THIS token". Then, you don't need blockchain, because you have a central authority.” You need blockchain because central authorities can shut it down; however, most smart contracts in this space are centrally controlled. I think the reason people struggle to understand how NFTs make sense is because it is new and there is no mental model for it. It’s easy to dismiss, but if you think about it and in particular if you program an ERC721 contract and/or use it, you begin to get it. Younger generations won’t need to do this because it’ll just be the way things are. You won’t trade MtG cards but NFTs. You may be in a VR game and see a work on art on the wall and buy it right there for your collection. It is absolutely legit regardless of the mania or the fact that contracts aren’t decentralized (yet).

openfuture 6y ago

This has nothing to do with art. NFTs are the best money laundering method in the cryptocurrency world. Just like how druglords use fine art auctions to pay for cocaine shipments. Think about it, anyone could be the customer or the creator of the NFT 'art', the platform can charge a percentage. Meanwhile if the platform offers financial services the need for KYC/AML locks them from doing business with themselves and anything else doesn't have enough volume. I think AML/KYC is an extremely draconian regulation so I sympathise to some extent but NFTs have no value as art. They have various interesting use cases though but those things require more effort (you know, cause they are actual products) but no one has done anything like that yet because blockchains have not had a big enough market or fast enough transaction speed to attract talent to build on them (yet!). Hopefully we can leave this era behind soon and abandon nation states and taxes for insured crowdfunding and internet-as-means-to-solving-climate-change, i.e. fair allocation of the earths resources.

capableweb 6y ago
You could be right with all of this, I don't know. But worth considering that people have been saying "X have no value as art" since the invention of art. So it might be useful to see if there is other problems than just if it's actually "valuable as art" or whatever.

ksm1717 6y ago

Pretending there’s real value in NFTs is 100% delusion, rationalization, and/or bandwagoning. Normally I would have no problem with a good old delusion, but this one just costs carbon emissions with play pretend upside.

dillondoyle 6y ago

I have mixed feelings from my perspective of being into art. One of my favorite artists just came out with an NFT. They also do limited edition 'drops' which I would much prefer an actual print, but I've missed them on Instagram or haven't hit refresh fast enough. Check out the app NTWK i think a more interesting way to bring art online. They have live stream videos of launches, more like actually visiting a show. And they also have more fair raffles instead of whoever hits refresh first. For now these releases are more accessible (but still not totally), and the artist doesn't have to give 50% to a gallery (yet?). But it's still a reseller scalper market. <br> Long context / my thoughts if interested: Art is incredibly exclusive. For small collectors it's almost impossible to get in on rising stars; sucks if you have supported them from before they started getting big and now it's way out of your price range and even if not you don't have the connections to buy. Check out @jerrygogosian they always have a good take lol. Galleries will say there is a waitlist. The waitlist is a lie. Can't see art in person at fairs anymore. But you can still get a PDF to zoom in on though! no prices. And all pieces are pre-sold lol. Nina Chanel Abney - who recently made it 'big' - posted on her stories the other day the typical large gallery email response to a buy inquiry: 'i can put your name on the waitlist. But what is your collection like, what artists do you own.' She replied she has the largest collection of Nina Chanel lol. I guess the intern didn't recognize her name. Unless you buy other artists that the gallery is trying to prop up you can't get the actual artist you want. Also the book 'Dark Side of the Boom' does a really good job laying out the start of contemporary art and how a few gallerists ended up controlling - often colluding - to corner the market, increase prices, and make art inaccessible. At the high end contemporary art is a levered asset (you can get loans against it) so there is incentive to artificially prop up the price at auction to get bigger loans and higher returns. BUT there is still a huge amount of accessible art, only 1% or less of artists make a sizable living. So if you are in it for the art there's a ton out there and it feels good to support a struggling artist (almost all are) even if a gallery gets 50%. Maybe you even get lucky and pick an artist that others connect to and then you can't afford it anymore haha. Has happened to me 2 coming up on 3 times so far. Check out Yale graduates and a few other non-profits or galleries that do like sponsored residencies. But bet your ass senior directors at Gagosian look there too - you know while they aren't busy sexually harassing & abusing their wealthy white pretty staff. https://www.instagram.com/p/CLsua3Klz0LIJMR_t0RiRsii_2AclS4gsLOP0g0/ https://www.instagram.com/p/CLsua3Klz0LIJMR_t0RiRsii_2AclS4g... https://instagram.fapa1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t50.2886-16/88710050_947517819324877_4850393155004681007_n.mp4 https://instagram.fapa1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t50.2886-16/887100...?

miguelmota 6y ago

Majority of NFT's are garbage (Sturgeon's Law) and not worth any price. However the nature of an NFT is that it allows an asset to be wrapped in a smart contract and have ownership and terms of use encoded. There's something to be said about having digitized assets that can be trustlessly verified and have capability of issuing dividends. The Veblen effect also comes to mind. The more something costs, the more [rich] people want it, no matter how ridiculous, typically used as status symbols. - [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law - [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

jgalt212 6y ago

It continues to blow my mind how much cognitive energy VC's expend trying to figure out a way (no matter how implausible) for something to have the value they hope it has. e.g. Marc Andressen on what we all were missing about the Yo app. https://slate.com/business/2014/06/marc-andreessen-explains-why-mobile-app-yo-is-a-big-deal-one-bit-signaling-takes-up-70-percent-of-bangladesh-cell-phone-traffic-at-any-moment.html https://slate.com/business/2014/06/marc-andreessen-explains-...

zepto 6y ago

Seems like someone figured out how to scale the Million dollar homepage.

pxue 6y ago

Most ppl in this thread is still trapped by concept of ownership of something tangible. Why not break out of that and think digitally. Digital ownership is like putting your name on a building, like a museum. Completely meaningless to most but a few. And that is worth it enough for some folks to send millions to do it. NFT ownership is exactly the same thing. The article says that creators just need a few thousand of devote followers to make a living. A NFT doesn't have to mean or worth anything to millions of people, just to a few thousand will do. It's enough to create a vibrant marketplace centered around some creator.

noahatwi 6y ago
I agree with you that intellectual/digital property has value, but I think that it is impossible to establish authenticity in an entirely decentralized way. If you are a notable artist wanting to sell NFT art, what makes your tokens valuable is that you have verified your identity with the service which deals the NFTs, and that the service is reputable. Otherwise, anyone may set up an account claiming to be you (on another service for instance) and sell the same JPGs attached to a new token. In the absence of a centralized authority, the only sign of authenticity is chronology (who minted this jpg into a token first), which is very susceptible to chronological "squatting" e.g. an opportunist discovers an artist's works and mints them before the artist does. The difficulty of replicating physical works of art has the happy side-effect of massively strengthening their authenticity.
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
I disagree with your analogy that "Digital ownership is like putting your name on a building, like a museum." The main value of putting your name on a building or museum is the branding value, and that's not the driving force behind the value of an NFT. The analogy that DID make me understand NFTs is the traditional art market. When a painting sells for millions of dollars, basically all of that value comes from the provenance of the artwork, not the artwork itself. That is, with present technology it is possible to make an extremely detailed replica of, say, "The Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I", one that was indistinguishable to the human eye from a distance of a meter or so, that would sell for a few grand max, not the $135 million of the original. Thus, if humans are capable of assigning a huge amount of value to provenance, why can't this be applied to digital artwork as well? IMO, though, since digital copies are exactly identical to the original (unlike physical objects), it remains to be seen whether humans will value this concept of provenance the same as they do in the physical world.

debbiedowner 6y ago

NFTs are kind of an oxymoron in my opinion. For a digital object to be scarce it needs a central authority. If a digital object is decentralized, it has no scarcity and is worthless. E.g. a limited edition skin in a game needs the central authority to make it usable in the game. So why do they need blockchain? E.g. a blockchain piece of data is accessible to all, so why pay for it?

ZephyrBlu 6y ago
The "central authority" is the blockchain, which is decentralized because no one controls it. > a limited edition skin in a game needs the central authority to make it usable in the game. So why do they need blockchain? Why do you need a central authority to make it usable? I believe anyone can check the ownership of an NFT on the blockchain. You would just need to cross-check a player's game account against their blockchain address. > a blockchain piece of data is accessible to all, so why pay for it? It is accessible to everyone, but only owned by one person.
- addajones 6y ago
  If it's only owned by one person, can that one person make it not accessible to everyone once they own it? Or is it just the public knowledge that there is one owner and listing who that is?
  - ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    No, because everything on the blockchain is public. I'm not exactly sure how NFTs work, but they will have some data associated with them that will be publicly accessible on the blockchain.
- tkiolp4 6y ago
  Not everyone knows how blockchain works, and so NFT marketplaces are acting as pseudo central authorities (the average Joe buys, sells and checks the ownership of NFTs via marketplaces).
- debbiedowner 6y ago

debbiedowner 6y ago

That guy who tried selling me the Brooklyn bridge was the first true NFT salesperson.

hrishi 6y ago

I think the value of NFTs purely based on "ownership" will not last very long. Yes it's cool, but most of these are already on the way to becoming almost purely speculative instruments. Some - like punks and hashmasks among others - seem to be taking advantage of the medium, to do things with art that only NFTs can do. Art that embraces the medium and does something unique that only it can IMO will eventually win[1]. In the case of NFTS, having each piece be self-contained bits of code sitting inside an execution engine open up a lot of possibilities, from self-mutation to generation. 1 - longer summary of my thoughts: https://hrishioa.github.io/the-two-innovations-of-hashmasks/ https://hrishioa.github.io/the-two-innovations-of-hashmasks/

biztos 6y ago
As an artist considering doing some stuff in this area, I really hope you’re right. At the moment the money seems to be chasing Instagram stars and for that purpose I find it a little boring, even if I like some of the art.

anonymouse008 6y ago

YOUR DMCA ARE BELONG TO US

biztos 6y ago

I’ve been trying to figure out NFTs and I can’t understand why they’re better than just using smart contracts. I threw together a contract in Solidity that would do all this and cut out the middleman / middlewinkelvii. It wasn’t hard. What am I missing? Why is the contract not the token?

wmf 6y ago
Throwing together a contract in Solidity is infinitely hard for most artists and it also makes the cloning problem (that several people in this thread have mentioned) even worse.
- biztos 6y ago
  I’m not suggesting every artist make their own, rather that a generic all purpose art sale/resale/royalty contract on the Ethereum blockchain seems easy-ish to do (I might try it) and then... just instantiate it with yourself as the artist and whatever signature you want? Sorry if that’s not the right word, but however one deploys a contract object. I don’t understand how this is any more susceptible to cloning or any other problem. Maybe also not less susceptible but I still don’t get the value add of the NFT versus basically just a good transparent contract with a few things stored. I do get the value add of the gallery/dealer but what’s their advantage in using the NFT instead of a contract? Is it just so Beeple can set numerology prices in USD? Still feel like I’m missing something fundamental here, I’m usually not more right than everyone else.
bookmarkable 6y ago
Is your contract on the blockchain? At what address can it be verified? If I buy it and trade it, can you verify or receive a royalty? That’s the token part.
- biztos 6y ago
  Yes, the contract would be on the Ethereum blockchain. If the contract stores the owner, how is it not the “token” at the same time? Royalties are pretty easy: contract knows the artist, artist gets say 10% of every resale, owner gets the rest, purchaser becomes new owner. Anyway this and NFT both have a big vulnerability around royalties: I can make some of the payment in cash if I want to cut out the artist.

goshx 6y ago

I have a hard time processing why people would spend their money this way. Here’s an insane auction going on right now: https://nft.3lau.com/#/auction https://nft.3lau.com/#/auction It has reached over $8MM... why

AndrewKemendo 6y ago

Lets say I buy an NFT. Now what do I do with it? I can't hang it up, or print it (if its a gif for example). The only thing I've heard is that people store them on IPFS [1] but I don't really know what that is or how it works. Every art collector I know displays it somewhere, or has it in storage such that it will be displayed somewhere eventually. This feels like a way for people to support digital artists directly, which is great. Not sure there's much more here than that though. [1]https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/

miketery 6y ago
You’ll be able to hang it in your virtual home in the meta verse. And visitors will be able to see its “authentic” (authority x certifies it).
langitbiru 6y ago
You can flex your wealth with it. :) Or you can make it as collateral to borrow some (cryptocurrency) assets.

ramijames 6y ago

I work in this space as a Product Owner for a blockchain team at Ultra.io. I think that I can speak to some of the questions and concerns in this thread with some authority. NFTs as they are being used today, as proof of ownership over a copy able, digital asset, is frankly the lowest hanging fruit. It isn't a very robust or interesting use of the technology. What we are building is a game distribution platform, like Steam, that makes games and their items NFTs. This opens up many interesting business opportunities that are defined by the built in scarcity that NFTs are built for. Because it is all on chain, it also means that ownership rights move back to end users, meaning that once you are done playing a game, it is then possible to sell or trade it on the open market. A prime example of NFT use as a business case is the ability for a game developer or publisher to create limited edition games with unique content. Basically, I see NFT art as just a proof of concept and not really where the future of this tech is going.

dmw_ng 6y ago
Your use case is definitely more interesting, but it still seems relatively pointless. I love the idea of NFTs acting as a kind of capability to unlock functionality in a piece of software (like a game), but in the particular case of just one game, the value of the token is linked to a single, central authority (the company producing the game) and implementing transactions on an open blockchain seems somewhat superfluous. The key detail of Bitcoin's use of blockchain is to enable mutually distrusting groups to agree on some state in the absence of any centralized authority. In the above case, as in so many buzzy uses, the use of some blockchain to transact seems redundant since the value of tokens being exchanged are entirely dependent on a central authority, and could much more easily be facilitated by that authority (this is just the common "99% of blockchain uses could just be a database" argument I guess). Another aspect is that when the central authority is also the sole issuer of tokens, no counteracting forces exist to drive a meaningful market dynamic. No matter how much price pressure exists from users, the authority can always act to restrict issuance or increase issuance to force a particular price, and over the long term in the absence of that authority (due to bankruptcy, obsolescence, ..) the value of all issued tokens drifts towards zero. On saying that though, there seems to be some promise one step removed -- tokens that activate functionality in software produced across a wide range of vendors. In the case of a game, that could perhaps be realized as something like a common set of power ups tied to NFTs that could be reused in multiple games. The question is how you'd incentivize multiple vendors to buy into the same set of tokens, given doing so is likely to have some real world cost attached to it, and obviously introduces a creative limitation to game design. Meanwhile, can't help but agree, the current NFT applications (million dollar web site clones, weird eBay for JPEGs clones, ..) seem entirely pointless and more a symptom of something than a solution to anything.

baby 6y ago

> But the internet took a detour. Centralized social platforms became the dominant way for creators and fans to connect. The platforms used this power to become the new intermediaries — inserting ads and algorithmic recommendations between creators and users while keeping most of the revenue for themselves. I don't think that's an issue, plenty of people now making a living thanks to the internet, even though discovery is a hard problem (and thus ads are a flourishing business). Cryptocurrencies (not NFTs) remove intermediaries, but they don't fix or improve the discovery problem, which is the real problem. There's still a million related problem, and cryptocurrency solves one of them.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

>NFTs are blockchain-based records that uniquely represent pieces of media Or pieces of land, see Fabrica [0] (disclosure: I am still affiliated with the company, and I used to be a co-founder there) [0]: https://www.fabrica.land/ https://www.fabrica.land/

tkiolp4 6y ago

I think we are missing the main point: NFTs are all about speculation. You buy an NFT not because you want to own it (and hang it in your virtual residence in the meta verse), you buy it because you hope you can sell it later at a higher price. Marketplaces are taking a fee for every sell and saying who owns what (ridiculous because you can check that yourself... but not everyone knows how blockchain works). It’s like art in the real world. The ones who own a Picasso, sure enjoy it by showing it to guests... but the real pleasure comes when they are able to sell it for double the price they have paid for it.

snack_man 6y ago

hi I collect pirate cryptopunks AMA http://piratepunks.com http://piratepunks.com

Reimi 6y ago

Cryptocurrency, art, technology.... there is nothing surprising, time passes, we develop.Remember the times 20 years ago, not everyone had a TV, and if there was, there was almost nothing to watch. And today... everyone has a smartphone and the ability to watch thousands of movies or TV shows... One Showbox app is worth it https://pipsli.net/en/android-apps/multimedia/125-showbox.html https://pipsli.net/en/android-apps/multimedia/125-showbox.ht.... I can't even imagine what will happen in ten years...

rstuart4133 6y ago

How can someone calling themselves "The University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance" not have any understanding of how the thing they are commenting on actually works? I hope they aren't actually associated with the University. This is just plain wrong: > The vast effort it requires also makes Bitcoin inherently difficult to scale, he argues. "If Bitcoin were to be adopted as a global reserve currency," he speculates, "the Bitcoin price will probably be in the millions, and those miners will have more money than the entire [US] Federal budget to spend on electricity." Bitcoin's energy usage and transaction rate are unconnected. Even the long time casual observer would know when Bitcoin hit is maximum transaction rate for the first time, it's energy usage was literally orders of magnitude less than it is now. Whatever is driving it's energy usage isn't transaction rate. What's more, it's looking unlikely the max transaction rate will ever increase. And as for miners having to mine more coins ... Christ how confused is it possible to be about one topic? Apparently he doesn't know mining of new coins is halving every 4 years, and will end completely on May 7th, 2140. It's like reading an Emu claiming the desert doesn't bloom because the fish in the rivers drink all the water. The Emu isn't wrong about the fish drinking the water of course, but with that level of ineptitude on display taking anything else the Emu has to say about the climate seriously ain't going to happen.