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The whole NFT craze lost me when tech founders I once highly respected started pushing and showing off their ugly gifs and trading cards on Twitter. Bad taste

• xwdv 5y ago
  You mean at some point NFT had you?
  • marban 5y ago
    Well, I found it to be a decent solution to support actual artists (esp. Photographers or folks like eBoy fame) who were already selling their digital art in genuine and honest capacity. But when some random guy without a story renders a thousand animated dogs from a script and the actual art is how to push it via Reddit bots, my support for artistic value creation has reached its limit.
    • tiborsaas 5y ago
      I don't get this. The concept hasn't changed since and those genuine artists are still there you supported. Or things are only cool until they are not mainstream?
      • wpietri 5y ago
        I think the NFT thing is kinda ridiculous. But then so are plenty of other marketing shenanigans. Maybe it could have worked? But once it was picked up by the grift/hype/fincrime machine that has eaten cryptocurrencies, it lost all semblance of plausibility to me. It has gone from something like "I bought a small piece of a creator whose work I treasure" to "ZOMG MAKE MONEY FAST". As an example, take the guy who was big on what he calls investing and I call gambling, who proposed to his girlfriend with an NFT: https://twitter.com/redditships/status/1432396694608662536?lang=en https://twitter.com/redditships/status/1432396694608662536?l... For me it's the same deal with cryptocurrencies in general. Interesting idea, and I want to visit the alternate reality where it was developed gradually and sanely by the sort of curious, well-meaning person that got into it early on. But the sort of value-based innovation I care about got stomped long ago.
      • II2II 5y ago
        My interpretation of what they were saying: NFTs are a worthy means of supporting artists but have been tainted by the other breed of artist (the scam artist). I would extend that by suggesting that NFTs should be a valid means of supporting new artists. The problem arises when people dump garbage into the market to make a quick buck. This will ultimately diminish the long term value of NFTs, meaning there is less value for those who are trying to make a living from their art (and even for those who are trying to make a living investing in art).
    • saalweachter 5y ago
      Honestly I don't think NFTs - as it exists - was ever a good model. I know there's a hypothetical resale mechanism, but it's fundamentally operating on a lottery system - artists are buying a ticket hoping to hit it big, and that favors a self-destructive mentality. A Patreon-like system still has an element of luck, but the steady monthly income makes it much easier for an artist to say "this is working, I should keep going" or "I guess I should start looking for a/keep my day job".
      • nerdponx 5y ago
        It wasn't ever meant to be a lottery. It was and remains just a way to sell ownership rights to stuff without physically transferring any stuff. The fact that a speculation market bloomed around it was just a weird circumstance.
        • im_down_w_otp 5y ago
          Weird circumstance? It seems like an entirely predictable outcome, and as such it seems like it may very well have been the actual point. Especially since NFTs confer no actual assets or rights in anyway that matters EXCEPT for in an adjacent speculative market.
    • pibechorro 5y ago
      I am an artist. Have shown in galleries, museums and rubbed shoulders with all sorts of dealers etc in Manhattan art world. What you see in the nft space is pretty normal.. for every genuine, talented artist there are 1000 copy cats just gaming the market trends. For every genuine, professional art seller/buyer there are 1000 used car salesmen looking to flip hype and bad taste for quick profit, screw over naive and poor artist and the big elephant in the room, money laundering. The recent Met gala.. socialites and wealth parading the halls hanging Caravaggio and Van Gogh, who died destetute.
      • analog31 5y ago
        What's lacking is an agreed upon mechanism for distinguishing the real artists from the hacks, and the real buyers from the flippers.
        • ipaddr 5y ago
          Real art is what you agree in your mind is real art. If you are trying to find something to filter out art that will not skyrocket in prices that's different. You need to find out what people are buying and only buy those. Each subgroup will be buying different types of art so research is required. Anything is real art. A rock you brought in or a painting made by a computer. As long as you see it as art, special and perhaps get an emotion from it.
          • marban 5y ago
            "Art is what you can get away with", to quote Andy Warhol.
  • fullshark 5y ago
    I was pretty torn about crypto, I saw most of what this essay describes but I also did find it as a potential global currency / computer system outside gov't control that could enable more as a result. BTC v. $ has been discussed to death but the BTC case isn't COMPLETE nonsense imo, in a world where trillions are generated out of thin air to prevent debt defaults and everyone supports it. However once NFTs became a thing and the crypto whales started pimping it I saw the truth. These people have no vision beyond finding some story to get someone else to pay more for their crypto tokens down the line, full stop.
• oefrha 5y ago
  I'm on board if charities* could somehow get in on the action and convince the bored rich to part with their money. * Real charities, not those billionaire tax avoidance schemes.
  • Tenoke 5y ago
    I'd wager billionaires donate a lot more to charities than they spend on nfts. Look at the Gates Foundation.
    • oefrha 5y ago
      You don't need to be a billionaire to count as "bored rich", which I take to mean anyone who has too much money lying around and can't find better uses than shitty computer-generated "art" (note that this doesn't include people who buy these with the sole purpose of flipping them to a greater fool). There are a surprising number of bored rich people, especially when you consider all the new-found crypto wealth. Most of them probably haven't contributed any of their excess wealth to help the hundreds of millions of people who are still starving, so if NFT is one way to extract some of that, so be it.
      • zrobotics 5y ago
        >> (note that this doesn't include people who buy these with the sole purpose of flipping them to a greater fool). Hate to burst your bubble, but that is 99.99% of the NFT market. There is maybe 5 people total who bought a NFT for art appreciation reasons, but aside from that rounding error the only reason anyone owns one is as a speculative investment.
        • oefrha 5y ago
          Sure, even in that scenario, if a slice of the MLM money can be used for societal good, it’s still something.
  • whywhywhywhy 5y ago
    > Real charities, not those billionaire tax avoidance schemes. No such thing.
• trystfest 5y ago
  It lost me when an OpenSea executive tried to manipulate the prices. I'm just happy that he got caught.
• jcpham2 5y ago
  I have never used Twitter, I don’t understand NFTs. Most of the influencers are shilling something, obviously
• analog31 5y ago
  I have a rule, which is that by the time I dream up an idea, plenty of other people have already had the same idea. So, when I proposed selling NFTs of the rehearsals of my band, and told my son about it, he said: "Dad, a million people are already doing that sort of thing."
  • marban 5y ago
    If you're with Pink Floyd, you could still give it a try.
  • rchaud 5y ago
    Is your band famous in any way? Or does it have a cult following of some kind? If not, who would buy an NFT of your jam sessions? The pioneering garage rock band The Stooges released a remastered edition of 1970's Fun House some years back, and included 2 CDs of rehearsal/studio sessions and outtakes. They were widely panned for it, with some reviews saying that even the most ardent Iggy Pop fan wouldn't need 5 versions of "TV Eye".
    • jrochkind1 5y ago
      And yet people are buying NFT's of random crappy JPG avatars by nobodies. I don't know why either!
• TomGullen 5y ago
  I must be getting old because I just don't get NFT's. They look stupid and I don't get why anyone would buy them. Declining tech companies and startups seem to be trying to crowbar them into their products much like Blockchain when it was new and shiny. Perhaps younger me would of seen something I can't anymore.
  • 21eleven 5y ago
    The thing about NFTs is that many people who buy them "don't get NFTs". All an NFT is is a token that represents ownership, like if the title to your car or house deed was on a blockchain. NFTs have some sane use causes like designating the owner of a valuable asset or creating electronic tickets that can be resold or transferred without some centralized entity like ticketmaster. Prior to NFTs existing, would you purchase the ownership rights to a gif or tweet? Probably not. And that is what is dumb about the excitement around NFTs, some people with more money than sense seem to think that now that you can represent ownership on a blockchain some things, like crappy jpegs, have suddenly become valuable assets.
    • lostcolony 5y ago
      Yep. It's a completely made up problem. It's maybe useful in enforcing existing IP law (i.e., I can prove that that picture is mine), but even that is questionable (proof of ownership of digital IP has already been proven satisfactorily for courts of law to rule on it). The fact there is a new way of proving ownership doesn't make the thing owned valuable.
      • marcus_holmes 5y ago
        As far as I'm aware, the NFT doesn't itself convey any transfer of copyrights (or any other form of IP). That has to be done by a separate document (and therefore it's that document that transfers the rights, not the NFT). So I don't see how the NFT is doing anything to help enforce existing IP laws?
      • pornel 5y ago
        NFTs don't actually prove ownership of anything but themselves. Owning a hash of a URL has no connection to the real world, and can't prove that the NFT was created by the author of the artwork. It makes me doubly furious that NFT is advertised as caring for artists. In fact, NFT makes it easier than ever to sell stolen artwork. NFT itself doesn't contain any copyrighted material, and selling metadata/URLs is not illegal, so it's likely that fraud through NFT is de-facto legal if you just carefully word it as selling the NFT of the artwork, and not the artwork itself.
• skinnyasianboi 5y ago
  It's not just ugly gifs. It's digital art, your online game items, concert tickets, supermarket vouchers and so on. Quote from statista: "In 2020, global gaming audiences spent an approximate 54 billion U.S. dollars on additional in-game content". But the players don't own their purchases. You don't play the game anymore, servers go down or you get banned and all your stuff is gone. Think about that. Edit: Of course my comment got nothing but down votes again on HN. Was worth a try anyway.
  • stephen_g 5y ago
    But it’s not. It’s a token on a blockchain with some metadata. You’d actually need a separate legally binding contract to link it to actual ownership, and at that point you could have just made up the legal contract without any blockchain or token… With your example, if the game goes down, an NFT of the in-game purchase isn’t going to be very useful. What’s the difference between having a token or not of the content if there are still no servers for the game either way? Maybe the NFT still points to a screenshot? Great…
    • skinnyasianboi 5y ago
      Imagine an indie game developer creating an open-world game where you can use your Sims furniture, Warcraft sword, Stardew Valley animals and so on. I don't quite understand your first point. Edit: the NFT is verifiable in your wallet and comes from a verified source
      • kristjansson 5y ago
        Doesn't your indie developer still have to acquire both licenses and assets for all those items, since NFTs (a) don't actually convey a recognizable legal ownership or right of any kind and (b) impose costs proportional to size in bytes, and so can't effectively store the actual data over which they claim ownership?
        • skinnyasianboi 5y ago
• sercand 5y ago
  I didn't understand NFT storm as well then I made a 10K collection of NFT images with my friend (I wrote the smart contract) in three weeks and earned $3M from that. I made a lot of money and now I'm part of the creator community but I still sometimes ask "Why?"
  • m12k 5y ago
    I understand why people make NFTs (to cash in on the craze), but I still don't understand why anyone buys them (outside of money laundering).
  • SwimSwimHungry 5y ago
    Nice subtle humble brag.
• iscrewyou 5y ago
  The problem with NFTs and blockchain is that they purport that anyone can have access to it…the whole decentralized thing. Except all these NFT stores require an invite from another artist. As someone who loves taking photos but isn’t socially connected because it’s a passion and not a job, it seems very elitist. Maybe it’s that way because I don’t have access to it and my brain is just playing tricks. But it seems like one of those “you aren’t good enough for this” kind of thing. Some of the online stores like Foundation app have become gatekeepers rather than outlets.
• hammyhavoc 5y ago
  Music artists too. Can't forget them. (speaking as a music artist myself who despises the NFT gimmick)