13 ms·
Cryptography experts trash NFTs on first day of RSA Conference
- booleandilemma 5y agoThe books in everyone's backgrounds :D We get it! You're experts!
- djoldman 5y ago> 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 that it is a bad thing that humans are easily persuaded to acquire shiny things and things they think will rise in value. If so, the problem lies in human nature. Energy expense of NFTs is not covered in the article.
- doggosphere 5y agoEnergy will negligible upon Eth 2.0 PoS merge
- kemonocode 5y agoI'm sure people will come up with a new bullet point to demonize NFTs after that. Not that there isn't a laundry list of things that are wrong with them, but the alleged environmental impact is the least of such issues yet it's the easiest to "understand" and so it overtakes any kind of discussion.
- Y_Y 5y agoThis was a stupid comment about how I didn't like the nomenclature and now I regret making it.
- intotheabyss 5y agoIf only we had access to the internet in order to look up things we're confused about. I highlighted ETH 2.0 PoS, right clicked "search Google" and the answer to your question is the first result.
- zcw100 5y agoBecause NFT's have nothing to do with collecting digital trinkets and everything to do with money laundering. The only thing that is remarkable about NFT's is how absolutely brazen they're being about it. The only positive is that hopefully it will keep them from screwing around with the housing market that has real life consequences for people although now we're just throwing away electricity rather than empty houses.
- SyzygistSix 5y agoIf wealthy people are going to use artwork to launder money, I'm happy with the original artist getting a cut. This already supposedly happens in meatspace, just with the artist making nothing after the original sale and missing out on most of the eventual value.
- djoldman 5y agoIf NFT money laundering is: acquire Ethereum with dirty money -> buy NFT's -> sell NFTs for Ethereum -> sell Ethereum for USD -> deposit USD in bank account I fail to understand how that is materially different from: acquire Ethereum with dirty money -> sell Ethereum for USD -> deposit USD in bank account Besides there being more steps with NFTs, I don't understand how it would attract less scrutiny. In both cases, one must acquire Ethereum in the beginning with dirty money. This can be done on a foreign exchange, transfer in the Ethereum to a domestic exchange and sell it for USD. In both cases, large deposits in bank accounts will be flagged by banks for review by the authorities. It's not a very good idea. Arguably, USD stablecoin is a much more efficient method. Just buy them, and sell them off slowly and deposit the USD in ways to avoid scrutiny. This can't be done with Ethereum because of the volatility: you can't wait because your money might lose a ton of value. My 2 cents. I am not a lawyer.
- stanzheng 5y agotheres a dimension where an NFT "appreciates" in value and sold at a premium or offset than what was it was originally acquired at. theres also the uncaptured exchanging of hands between bidders overpaying to build an asset bubble. I think its better researched replacing NFT with "Fine Art" and seeing how money laundering in the art world happens [1] [1] https://www.artandobject.com/news/how-money-laundering-works-art-world https://www.artandobject.com/news/how-money-laundering-works...
- hervature 5y agoI 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 Kitties. It was clear what exactly you had. But NFTs are simply a means for people to strip the token of anything of value and yet get to market it behind a veil of complexity to prey on those who don't understand.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- djoldman 5y agoI 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).
- pkdpic_y9k 5y agoAgreed, would be easier to agree that they're harmless enough if the energy use aspect had been addressed. But also isn't it a little crazy to think about how many unestablished / small-time artists are dropping $50~$150 on minting NFTs that might never even sell. And how their participation just drives the hype engine and makes the whole thing look like even more of a thing?
- snarf21 5y agoAs said, this isn't collectibles. This is pyramid schemes, pump & dump and money laundering.
- OminousWeapons 5y agoI think a non-zero portion of the criticism is actually a criticism of collecting in general. If you think collecting things is dumb, you will think NFTs are dumb by default.
- sadfasf122 5y agolol, who cares what they think.
- dpflan 5y agoHas anyone watched the discussion? This article is, well, not sure what value I'm getting out of this: cryptographers discuss the merits of NFT...OK..."Shamir then announced plans to, at some point in the future, theoretically mint his own NFT." The concept of NFT is fine, the problem is the implementation plus resources/energy costs, right?
- hannasanarion 5y agoThe concept of NFT is basically nothing. Even if they somehow stopped wasting outrageous quantities of energy wouldn't change the fact that they're nothing but collectable receipts.
- intotheabyss 5y agoUniswap V3 liquidity positions are NFTs. Are those useless receipts?
- williesleg 5y agoJust an easy way to launder money.
- MR4D 5y agoThe ultimate snark from the article - “If the RSA Conference finally decides on an answer, maybe it can mint that as an NFT.” Awesome!
- Trias11 5y agoI totally agree. Tulips was the first thing that came to my mind as well. However as a technology NFT has it place, especially when crypto ecosystem evolves beyond ETH limitations
- lottin 5y agoI disagree, I don't think it has a place. It's useless.
- intotheabyss 5y agoI said this elsewhere, but Uniswap V3 liquidity positions are NFTs. Are those NFTs useless?
- th0ma5 5y agoYou mean for money laundering? No I guess not?
- intotheabyss 5y agoOh ok. So NFTs aren't useless then?
- th0ma5 5y agoIf you can already launder the cryptocurrency you probably don't need the NFTs, so yeah you're probably right they're not worth much.
- amackera 5y agoTulips bulbs are more-or-less fungible; but I guess you're thinking of tulips because of the speculative nature of these assets?
- robert_foss 5y agoI'm not sure if RSA is a trustworthy authority on anything, considering the intentionally backdoored crypto they've produced.
- bo1024 5y agoAre you thinking of the NSA?
- robert_foss 5y agoNo, but the RSA did put backdoors into ciphers on behalf of the NSA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- smhenderson 5y agoBoth really, I think they are referring to this: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/01/after-nsa-backdoors-security-experts-leave-rsa-conference-they-can-trust https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/01/after-nsa-backdoors-se...
- midev 5y agoAre you confusing RSA the company with independent speakers at a conference sponsored by RSA? They're not the same thing....
- robert_foss 5y agoAnything the RSA touches is tainted by their depleted credibility.
- Animats 5y agoThe NFT thing seems to be settling out. It's for collectables, like Magic, the Gathering cards. I've been following this because I'm interested in virtual worlds. There are at least four virtual worlds that use some kind of NFT thing to register land ownership. Nobody does much in those worlds, and the graphics aren't all that good. It's all about trading land and speculating in some minor cryptocurrency. The newest entrant - Zero Space.[1] The actual 3D world is promised for 2024. They already have five cryptocurrencies of their own, plus an NFT system. Their "3D world" is a simple un-shared Unreal Engine demo. They claim they will have a high-resolution metaverse, but show no indication that they have any idea how to build one. [1] https://www.zero.space/ https://www.zero.space/
- jandrese 5y agoEven for collectables it doesn't really make any sense. It's not like you have to own a Black Lotus to sell a NFT of it. Nor is there any benefit to collectors in buying the NFT except for the possibility of finding a bigger sucker somewhere down the line to buy it off of them.
- 2bitencryption 5y ago> They already have five cryptocurrencies of their own The first four didn't create the speculative frenzy they were hoping for, huh? Just kidding(?)
- colechristensen 5y agoI see NFTs as more like a gimmick which reminds me of the million dollar homepage, but pretending to be more than what they are by associating themselves with "ownership". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage
- driverdan 5y ago> They already have five cryptocurrencies of their own, plus an NFT system. Pretty clear what their priority is. It's not building a good game, it's making money off of suckers.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ThomPete 5y agoNFTs are here to stay, it's a classic short-term over-appreciation and long-term under-appreciation. Art is only a small subset of what it's going to be used as. NFT's is a protocol for distributed exchange of digital assets whether it's a sword you spent 10 hours in a game to acquire or a skin you designed and want to sell or a piece of generative art that you are the only person in the world who can show on your digital frame via a wallet. You can't be an expert in this as little as you can be an expert in a startup. You either have conviction in this or you don't.
- supernova87a 5y agoI 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 doing that?
- ketamine__ 5y agoI thought this comment was a joke at first. What's wrong with creators getting royalties? Is there proof that artists are too wealthy (in general)?
- geofft 5y agoTwo things. First, in the real world, creators stop getting royalties after the item expires and goes into the public domain, and there's a pretty strong view that the time for that is already too long and the beneficiaries of that long period tend to be companies instead of creators. I would say that there is in fact a widespread belief that the heirs of Walt Disney are too wealthy, despite the fact that Walt himself was a creator. Second, there's no reason to believe this won't lead to the exact sort of mechanisms that plague existing royalties - e.g., a young singer makes a (smart) contract with a recording studio to have the studio count as the "creator" of the work as far as the contract cares, and the singer is just performing work for hire, in exchange for marketing, promotion, initial funding, and connections. A singer who has absolutely no resources but their talent is probably going to say yes to that, because it's better for them in the short term than going it alone, and the odds are against them (not every talented young singer can become famous). But the profits continue to flow to the recording studio for all time.
- jcranmer 5y agoThere's another thing you're missing: First Sale Doctrine. In the world of physical goods, once you've sold a copy of something, you have no rights whatsoever to constrain what people can do with that copy. Authors don't see a dime for used book sales, for example.
- RobertDeNiro 5y agoPart of the appeal of collectibles is that they hold their value through time (if they are preserved properly). It's not clear to me if an NFT of today will still exist in 50 years? I assume that it will, but it also implies that people will still be mining the same legacy blockchain then.
- peterkelly 5y agoI love that the embedded video immediately below the article is titled "WATCH: A beginner's guide to NFTs, the crypto potentially worth millions"
- mumblemumble 5y agoThe tulip comparison strikes me as being rather specious. For starters, tulip bulbs of the same variety were absolutely fungible. It's more like trading cards. If you own some rare rookie card, you don't actually own that baseball player, just a sort of paper token that references the baseball player. But, since people see value in the reference itself, the value of the token ends up deriving from both the player's celebrity and the rarity of the baseball card. NFTs riff on this concept by being digital, and having it be common for there to be limited runs of only 1.
- reedjosh 5y agoNFTs for MTG would make a lot of sense. Right now it's kinda like that, but there's a market on MTG servers.
- wrkronmiller 5y agoAre we about to come full circle to Mt Gox?
- reedjosh 5y agoMagic the Gathering...
- abhorrence 5y agoFor others’ benefit, Mt Gox (of Bitcoin fraud fame) was originally “Magic The Gathering Online eXchange”.
- gjsman-1000 5y agoThese experts are also upset that the term "crypto" now refers to "cryptocurrency" than "cryptography" and want to change that but don't seem to have a plan to do so.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pmulard 5y agoI was really hoping they were going to dunk on the technology itself, like how the media of the NFT is lost if the platform hosting it is ever compromised - only the meta data is stored on the blockchain. Instead, they just attacked the contents of the NFTs, akin to my mom telling me my pokemon cards are a waste of money all those years ago. Value is only whatever someone is willing to pay.
- chrisco255 5y agoThe metadata is an IPFS hash in most cases that you can use to validate against the file regardless of where the file is stored. At any rate NFT market places are working on surfacing quality data to users to show them this information. Some NFTs are small enough to be embedded on-chain. Some use IPFS + Filecoin or other decentralized archive service like Arweave. Some don't. Surfacing that to users will become more important as the space evolves.
- soco 5y agoThe metadata only contains an URI to where the actual information lies (says ERC-721). So as long the URI stays, the hash stays. And then you go and modify the contents of the pointed file and lo, instead of a Picasso you own now a lolcat. Or the file gets simply removed because the hoster went bankrupt or lost the backups after a crash and you're left owning... yeah.
- twox2 5y agoArt Blocks has everything on chain. A few other projects do as well.
- soco 5y agoThe ArtBlocks webpage says they use the (same usual) ERC721 standard - which only stores the URI on chain. Can you please point to your information source?
- sneak 5y agoIt's important to remember that these people are also the kind of industry personalities that would speak at and participate in a conference run by an organization in 2004 that backdoored their crypto products for government bribes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG I'm of the belief now that those associated with the RSA conference are more interested in the publicity/reach of the conference than anything technical. They've pretty firmly positioned themselves outside of technology and far up the orifice of "industry" now. Maybe it's worth watching for policy wonks, but I skip the whole thing.
- singold 5y agoWhat 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)
- upbeat_general 5y agoYeah 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?
- intotheabyss 5y agoBecause the NFT is only as good as the blockchain it was minted on. The vast majority of (valuable) NFTs are minted on Ethereum. If someone mints the same NFT on Flow for example, it won't be as valuable because it's a copy (verifiably so) and it's secured by a centralized chain. NFTs are supposed to live on as if they were physical objects, so minting an NFT on a centralized chain has a significant risk of not existing in the future.
- th0ma5 5y agoRight, and Ethereum is effectively centralized https://web.archive.org/web/20201214170136if_/https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereumfraud/comments/6bgvqv/faq_what_exactly_is_the_fraud_in_ethereum/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201214170136if_/https://www.re...
- intotheabyss 5y agoYou can't be serious with that link? That entire subreddit was run by one person who clearly had a mental health disorder. I remember that person very well. edit: I'm not arguing every single point here because a lot of them aren't even relevant anymore, and frankly I just don't care enough to go through them with you. I'm not trying to win an argument. The information is freely available for all to see and people can do their own due diligence
- herodotus 5y agoI still don't get it. Sure art work is artificially priced. But if I buy a Picasso original, I can hang it on the wall, show it to my friends, look at it closely, burn it, even. Yes, "bragging rights" might be part of it, but I own something physical and (probably) scarce or unique. What do I actually get when I buy an NFT?
- deckard1 5y agoyou go to Picasso with a piece of blank ordinary paper. The paper says "Guernica" on it. You get his signature. There is a notary with you and it is notarized. That's an NFT. You now have a signed piece of paper that refers to a piece of art that you don't actually own. You're free to go to the museum (in NFT this is IPFS, or the regular web) and see it. But so is everyone else. Now imagine instead of Picasso signing your piece of paper, an autopen is signing it. Pumping out however many copies of that signature it wants to in a day. And instead of a notary it's the blockchain recording the transaction. That's an NFT.
- ck2 5y agoNFTs are money laundering for the wealthy, right out in the open. At least the current crop.
- mirekrusin 5y agoPairing nfts with reality makes sense if ownership can be enforced by sole fact of having an ownership, ie: 1. for things that live in digital world (easy), or 2. weaker but probably acceptable in some cases - if physical good would be painted/printed on/made out of material containing ie. fingerprinted nanoparticles that match nft or has some unique chip that cannot be detached/duplicated – is as difficult to forge and as easy to verify as paper money 3. all ownership transfers would be verified by centralised (or whatever) system ie. government official confirming that digital and physical transfer happened correctly or ie. amazon/ebay would hold temporary custody of both digital/physical as intermediary in ownership transfer …otherwise pairing with reality looks like “lets have this cryptographically secure thing and pretend that it means X” – if this “pretend” part can be removed or minimised to be close to zero, then it starts making more sense, without it it’s just nothing more than cargo cult like “let’s pretend” arrangement.