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NFTs unbundle ownership from enjoyment
- brighton36 6y agoThe Internet has become a gigantic repository of post-hoc rationalizations. Its pieces like this, that make me wonder if maybe the library of alexandria would have actually been far less interesting that we thought....
- QuercusMax 6y agoIt seems likely that there probably were some small number of unreplaceable works, but there may have also been a gigantic number of tax records and such. This is just based on the history of what writing was largely used for in the ancient world.
- tfang17 6y agoNFTs are all about status. Same reason people will pay $100 for a Supreme T-shirt, when the same plain white tee sells for $10.
- mc32 6y agoStatus on the surface, potential bonanza of money laundering under the belly.
- tfang17 6y agoSame thing can be said about any high-end good :)
- mc32 6y agoI believe high end goods require more participants in the conspiracy to give cover of validity. A 70MM Picasso needs verification, appraisers, art gatekeepers, insurers, etc., to agree on the preposterous valuations. Here it’s two entities; you and your confederate.
- cblconfederate 6y agoBut status is usually allocated by people or organizations with higher status. The blockchain has no personality, its hard to legitimize gaining status that way. It s like saying "i paid god $69M and now i have status". I just can't see it Catching up with the general population (although crypto maniacs are delighted)
- endisneigh 6y agoNFTs only make sense to me if there was "A World", a massive ubiquitous online game that was even more popular than FB. If such "A World" existed, then yes, NFTs would make sense because in the world you would need a way to present "luxury." Another note is - I'm not sure if NFTs are used for money laundering (they probably are) - but I'd love to watch something like Breaking Bad in the modern time. Money laundering I imagine would be so easy now. Literally just use your drug money, buy a bunch of computers, mine crypto, buy useless NFTs, trade that around a few times, sell your NFT. Boom. Clean money. There's absolutely no need to do convoluted things like bribe a politician to open a casino or open a laundry mat anymore.
- benmller313 6y agoNot just "A World" but A decentralized world without a central authority that could just sell scarce goods. Think in game skins or second life property.
- jaywalk 6y agoImagine Facebook or Instagram adding an NFT display section to your profile, where you can show off the NFTs that you own.
- jayd16 6y agoYou mean like the Steam Trading Cards?
- sparsely 6y agoWhy would they do this, and not have their own collectables database which they could more easily make money off?
- deckard1 6y agoYeah this is always the idea the pro-NFT crowd throws around. As if Disney is going to let Mickey Mouse be in some random video game. Imagine Mickey mowing down people in Call of Duty. Or Mario smoking crack and taking an axe to prostitutes in Postal. In the hypothetical case that Pokemon start showing up in Facebook, then that's only because Nintendo has a licensing agreement with Facebook with established guidelines and limits for usage of intellectual property.
- pjc50 6y agoNFTs unbundle everything but the experience of handing money over to someone. You're not even guaranteed to keep anything: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkdj79/peoples-expensive-nfts-keep-vanishing-this-is-why https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkdj79/peoples-expensive-nft... Conversely, you can turn anything into an NFT whether you own it or not and then sell it: https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vxe7/people-are-stealing-art-and-turning-it-into-nfts https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vxe7/people-are-stealing-a...
- iamwil 6y agoI address the tenuous connection between NFTs and the underlying asset in the post. If after reading it, you have a different take, lemme know.
- acjohnson55 6y agoWe're absolutely dying to make the NFT concept revolutionary. But most of the uses so far are really pedestrian and don't actually require a decentralized blockchain with expensive and immensely wasteful transactions. They could just be hosted by centralized e-commerce platforms, which allow authors of digital assets to enroll. I'm not saying that Everydays or CryptoPunk #7804 NFTs aren't valuable. They probably are, as historic firsts. But I don't think they prove the existence of a long tail of long-term value of similar tokens. In my opinion, an NFT actually becomes useful when it represents a right that is decoupled from one specific asset. More like a tradable auth role. In effect, a tradable identity. That would actually merit decentralization, such that any provider that respects that role could use it to authorize access to some asset or experience. Even still, this could be centralized, but I think it's a step closer to enabling something truly novel, rather than simply trying to reproduce mutual exclusive ownership of a physical object.
- svachalek 6y agoI think the most interesting use of NFTs is for ticketing. It allows someone to transfer a ticket to another person in a way that the buyer can verify it's valid, the seller can't also sell it to someone else, and neither needs permission from the original ticketing authority. Particularly as a token of online membership or authority itself. I think the whole NFT for art thing is probably here to stay but not likely to ever be important to the vast majority of the public that never went shopping in real world art galleries.
- acjohnson55 6y agoBut if ticket vendors wanted their tickets to be easily tradable, they could make that happen. They clearly aren't that interested, though. I think they see it as a threat to their control of the primary market
- Traster 6y agoYeah the idea that this was previously a technical limitation and not a commercial one is absurd. Ticketmaster could’ve put a “transfer ticket” button in their system a long time ago - but venues don’t want a 3rd party reselling tickets.
- devmunchies 6y ago> As with anything, it's because someone paid $69 million for an NFT, and everyone else is scratching their heads wondering if these people have gone insane, or if it's something they should pay attention to. The group that bought it has LOTS of money invested in crypto (and Flow, an NFT focused blockchain) so they benefited by increasing demand for the ecosystem as a whole. Whales can move markets.
- cblconfederate 6y agoOk let's cut through the crap. The nft craze is BTC oldtimers who are finding new and faster ways to launder them, no?
- wwalexander 6y agoJust like the absurdly wealthy buy and sell fine art to launder money and avoid taxes! [1] Blockchain technologies are exceedingly efficient at replicating real-world inequality, privilege, waste, and inconsistency; no wonder they’ve gotten so much traction among the already absurdly wealthy. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/a5beb8e2-5334-11ea-90ad-25e377c0ee1f https://www.ft.com/content/a5beb8e2-5334-11ea-90ad-25e377c0e...
- cblconfederate 6y agoI think they became wealthy and privileged after it got traction
- Traster 6y agoI think this obsession with money laundering is kind of absurd. Firstly the entire point of these technologies is it’s a permanent record so authorities could track you down any time. Secondly they’re grabbing tonnes of headlines which is the opposite of what money launderers want. Thirdly there are already plenty of ways to launder money. The truth is it’s much more likely the frothy Bitcoin market is overflowing into other similar products - almost all the most recent news making headlines have been about transactions amongst people who gained all their wealth through Bitcoin in the first place. It’ll go to 0 next time Bitcoin does, and whilst Bitcoin will probably bounce back, lots of these new shitcoin alternatives won’t.
- annoyingnoob 6y agoHonestly, NFTs make me feel old. NFT seem like just another form of collectable.
- joosters 6y agoI think the author has got it all wrong. The blockchain (and the NFT contract) don't make digital art scarce, nor do they confirm 'ownership'. It's been pointed out many times that anyone can create an NFT on a blockchain, and just because you own an NFT with a URL of http://example.com/example.jpg http://example.com/example.jpg doesn't stop anyone else from creating another NFT with the same URL. An NFT is 'genuine' solely because the artist says it is. Anyone can make another NFT of Beeple's $69m picture, and it will be identifiable on the blockchain, but it won't be the 'original' because Beeple says it isn't. In other words, none of this is decentralised, it's all based upon real world authority. Despite all the crypto verbiage, blockchains don't add or enable anything with NFTs. The artist, or a company, could easily just maintain a database showing who 'owns' which artwork NFT, and could update it when works are re-sold. The fact that this runs right now on the blockchain is just because it provides an existing database (and a polluting, expensive and cumbersome one at that!)
- seibelj 6y agoBeeple said which one was valid originally, which is how we know which smart contract and which token ID is valid. But after Beeple dies, we will still know the correct one. The authority happened at minting, but from now on is programmed into the ledger. > Despite all the crypto verbiage, blockchains don't add or enable anything with NFTs. Wrong - blockchains add the digital scarcity component that you don't get with a centralized company running a relational database.
- joosters 6y agoThe 'NFT company' maintaining the database would still show who 'owned' it long after Beeple is gone. Running such a company could be profitable because you could charge a small fee for the admin: right now it costs around $100 in ethereum fees to buy an NFT, so it could even work out cheaper! As a side benefit, such a company could also host the artwork, ensuring that the inevitable link rot that will otherwise afflict most tokens won't take place. Win win!
- dwb 6y agoWhere do we go to find out which NFT is valid according to Beeple? How is this information stored, authenticated, distributed?
- abakker 6y agoUnbundling enjoyment from ownership is what Museums, Libraries, public parks, radios, youtube, public transit, and just about any other public goods do. NFTs are amazing because they unbundle enjoyment from ownership, but still allow you to pay. What an innovation /s
- jsmith45 6y agoThe pleasure of ownership of what? Nothing. You just have a row in a distributed ledger indicating that the token currently belongs to your private key. It does not conver any legal ownership over the image. It does not confer copyright. Anybody else could come allow and create a new series of NFTs that include a token pointing to the same art, and sell it too. NFTs are basically equivalent to those pieces of paper that claim ownership over a plot on the moon that get sold. Anybody can make them and sell them, and they have zero legal ramification. The only thing that makes a particular NTF that points at a work of art special is if it is endorsed by somebody. This can have meaning though. While anybody can make baseball cards for any player for any year, only those made (endorsed) by certain companies have any value in the collector's market (and only certain players and certain years). But even then at least you really do legally own a physical piece of paperboard. NFTs are more akin to owning a unique item in a video game, except at least with those you can usually use the item.
- jacobsimon 6y agoJust dropping by to say I actually did develop a NFT version of the Moon (back in 2017!). It was obviously somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but still very much alive and real: https://lunartoken.co https://lunartoken.co I think your critique of NFTs is mostly valid. Until there is some legal validity to them recognized by governments, they are basically just, well, tokens of ownership. The same could be said about most property or IP at some point in time :)
- platz 6y ago> tokens of ownership They are not even "tokens of ownership"; they're just tokens that one owns, nothing more, but the semantic distinction here is significant, because a token cannot own anything outside of itself.
- jacobsimon 6y agoI meant token in the literal dictionary sense, as in a symbolic voucher
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- tomc1985 6y agoMore fools trying to impose physical-world scarcity economics into a digital world of plenty. Data wants to be free, so how about we let it be?
- platz 6y agoeven with art, an NFT doesn't confer copyright rights, so you don't even own the art. > But as it turns out, you can make digital things scarce, through cryptography. The art isn't stored on-chain, so it's not scarce either. All the NFT is is a pointer that has some text about who created it and what it points to. Not sure why why that pointer itself is valuable except as a status of "i am the only one that owns this unique pointer". Of course there's nothing stopping anyone from creating another pointer that points to the same thing as the one you just bought and selling that. So unless you find some value in pointers, intrinsically in themselves, NFT's are useless.
- scotchmi_st 6y agoThe following rant is probably obvious to a lot of people but I really have to get it off my chest. I really don't get NFTs. I feel like every article I read about them (even the critical ones) is describing them in a way which then turns out to be far more mundane. People (such as the author here) talk about how they are the digital equivalent of trading cards. Pokemon, M:TG etc work because the cards themselves are hard to accurately duplicate. But the images and other digital items supposedly traded via NFTs can all be duplicated easily, like any other file on a computer. The only thing you get here is a record in a database with your (virtual) name on it next to a hash of the file. That's it. It's not even like your 'ownership' according to this database would have any legal implications. A real world example might be a card system where anyone could easily scan and print out the same card as the one you own, but that in some database somewhere, there's a record of your ownership of the card. It doesn't matter. Everyone has a copy of your card anyway. The reality is that you aren't the owner of it, whatever your protestations.
- megaman821 6y agoI can see some uses for fandom. * If the tickets to concerts were NFTs, you could limit forum access to concert attendees as proven by their NFTs. * If purchase of a digital album was connected to NFTs, a band could offer a special perk to their original fans. Personally, I don't get the art thing. Good art is inherently valuable because viewer of the art (my eyes) are built directly into my body. In 1,000 years it is entirely possible no one is going to be able to view a jpeg, or the host of the image has disappeared off the internet. Even URLs that don't disappear are problematic, you want a URL the connected to the hash of the file contents so you can be assured that the file is never changed.
- scotchmi_st 6y agoThe concert ticket thing is perhaps one use I hadn't thought of. But that seems like a niche solution to a problem that doesn't really exist, and doesn't really solve it anyway? People often buy tickets often in order to resell them outside the venue. That just means the touter handing over the unique private key they used to buy the ticket along with the ticket itself, surely. They same goes for forum access, or anything else.
- kgwgk 6y agoAnd you get 100% enjoyment without any meaningful ownership...
- riskneutral 6y agoNFTs unbundle rational behavior from economic behavior.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- timoth3y 6y agoMore accurately, NFTs unbundle ownership from payment.