31 ms·

NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

• stickfigure 5y ago
  > The venn diagram of NFT haters are almost exact matches of Crypto haters Nonsense. I'm pro-crypto but think NFTs are absolutely idiotic. Scarcity is fundamental to any store of value. There are an infinite number of potential NFTs.
  • omarfarooq 5y ago
    > There are an infinite number of potential NFTs. That doesn't mean there is an infinite number of any given collection.
    • stickfigure 5y ago
      Any given collection will have all the staying power of a beanie baby. Everyone moves on to the next non-fungible thing.
      • omarfarooq 5y ago
        > will have all the staying power of a beanie baby. You're making a future prediction about an entire category invoking a specific instance from physical collectibles. Have all physical collectibles been subject to the fate of beanie babies?
        • mrosett 5y ago
          Not all, but perhaps all those that appreciated in value so dramatically?
          • deleted 5y ago
            [deleted]
    • smt88 5y ago
      > That doesn't mean there is an infinite number of any given collection. For digital collections, there are an infinite number. The only finite thing, in this case, is the NFT. NFTs are not digital representations of art. They don't create scarcity. They're digital trading cards: their scarcity is only relevant and verifiable in and of themselves.
    • fortuna86 5y ago
      "Limited edition" Limited to how many we can sell.
  • spoonjim 5y ago
    Interesting. I actually think that scarcity is the only thing that NFTs have. I almost think of them as the purest distillation of scarcity. Everyone knows you can get a perfect copy of a Vermeer done for $10k. Why is the real Vermeer worth more? Because the guy with the real Vermeer knows that while you can have the lighting and you can have the shadows, you can’t have the scarcity. And the concept of an NFT is just the end game of that line of thinking.
    • Godel_unicode 5y ago
      Right, because the creator of the NFT totally can't just mint another token right after you buy the first one. Oh wait, just kidding they can. And there's absolutely nothing you can do, because you don't _actually_ own the thing, you just own a trivially replicated pointer to the thing. It's ok though, because at least the original will definitely be the one to be valuable, and not the 42nd, 69th, or 420th. Right? Right??
      • spoonjim 5y ago
        But that’s exactly what the scarcity value of a Vermeer is (which is 99% of the value). People can make infinite numbers of copies. NFTs just kind of lay that bare. It’s almost like the concept itself a performance art. “Can we cleave off the scarcity from the art/history/je ne sais quoi that fuels the hoarding of other scarce artifacts, and just sell that disembodied scarcity in a marketplace?”
        • Godel_unicode 5y ago
          You seem to have missed the fundamental truth that NFTs are not scarce. With the example of a Vermeer, you create one original thing, and then imitations of that thing. Minting multiple NFTs of the same thing is creating more originals, but of the same thing. One is not somehow "more original" than the others. This is a difficult concept for people to get their heads around because of the obvious but incorrect parallel between original art and reproductions. It would be slightly closer to say that an NFT is a photo of a Vermeer. Anyone can make more originals at any time and there's nothing you or anyone can do about it.
  • taylorfinley 5y ago
    The venn diagram of crypto people who think NFTs are absolutely idiotic almost exactly matches the venn diagram of crypto people who haven't really dug in and tried to understand NFTS.
    • ryan93 5y ago
      You don’t have to dig in to understand there is a distributed ledger saying you “own” a jpeg
      • taylorfinley 5y ago
        This is exactly the sort of shallow understanding I mean to point at. NFTs are so much more than "owning jpegs." This is the same mistake as saying "owning bitcoin is just owning a cell in a spreadsheet." Can I have the title to your car? After all, it's just a piece of paper. NFTs are access tokens to social communities, where owning a particular token grants you access to a community that shares ownership. Collab.Land is a tool communities use for NFT ownership based roles, revoked upon sale. NFTs are a distributed system of title. I'd be shocked if every concert ticket isn't a form of NFT in ten years--you can transfer them verifiably on the secondary market while giving a royalty to the issuer, use them to access a concert, and keep them as a souvenir like a traditional ticket stub. And yes, some people make profile pics, and generative art projects. You don't have to like or participate in those. But dismissing all NFTs as idiotic is not a position that is going to age well.
        • toomanydoubts 5y ago
          Why would you put a concert ticket on a distributed ledger if there's only a single party who can honor this ticket? There's a company who issued the ticket, and it's the same one that will either let you in or not at the date and time the concert is supposed to happen. Why would they put it in a distributed ledger instead of a database managed by themselves?
          • pinoli 5y ago
  • shp0ngle 5y ago
    > Scarcity is fundamental to any store of value. There are an infinite number of potential altcoins.
    • agravier 5y ago
      Same with paintings, etc. So yeah it's a wonky argument because it ignores subjective judgement
      • stickfigure 5y ago
        You can hang a painting on your wall and flaunt it. Nobody looks at the bits on your hard disk.
        • doublerebel 5y ago
          Many NFTs either come with or are designed for a physical representation. 100s or 1000s are already installed and viewable IRL. Being an NFT does not preclude the art from being traditionally enjoyed.
          • stickfigure 5y ago
            Being an NFT does not preclude anyone else from hanging the exact same physical representation on their wall. Exclusivity matters if you want to impress your rich friends.
            • doublerebel 5y ago
              That is a circular argument. That is the same argument as print vs original -- NFT owners are paying for the original to support the art regardless of how accurate a print may be. It's much more impressive to those people to have paid to support the original rather than having a knockoff... This has been true as long as goods have been produced.
              • 5y ago
  • hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    > Scarcity is fundamental to any store of value. There are an infinite number of potential NFTs. I'm a pretty big crypto-skeptic, and I'm especially an NFT skeptic, but this is a weird argument. It's kind of like saying there could be an infinite number of paintings, so why should Picassos be worth very much? Even more, it's possible to create extremely high quality reproductions of famous Picasso paintings, but they would have just a teeny amount of value of the original. Reason being, with very expensive art, and other things like a signed book or baseball card, what you're really paying for is the provenance of the item, not so much the thing itself. While I'm skeptical that the NFT form of "digitally assigned provenance" will be valued similarly, I can understand the argument for why a piece of digital artwork with an associated NFT isn't that different from a piece of physical art with the artist's signature.
    • stickfigure 5y ago
      Scarcity is necessary but not sufficient. What sets BTC apart from NTFs is its fungibility. In theory, there are an infinite number of potential cryptocurrencies, sure. But everyone has already embraced bitcoin (and a small handful of others), and replacing that userbase is an incredibly tall hurdle. On the other hand, minting a new beanie-baby-NFT takes less effort than making an actual beanie baby.
      • hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
        I think you're missing the purpose of NFTs. Again, I think the best analogy is really the art market. Most art in the art market is pretty worthless (at least monetarily) - just go to one of a bajillion garage sales to see why. But a few pieces of art will be worth a lot because something about them is desirable. It's the same with NFTs. There will be a bajillion "beanie-baby-NFTs" that will be close to worthless. And then there will be a few of the "Charlie Bit My Finger" variety that people actually have desire to uniquely "own".
        • stickfigure 5y ago
          The difference is that you can hang art on your wall and say "that's an original" when your other rich friends come to visit. "I control some arbitrary bits on an arbitrary blockchain" will never have the same cachet.
  • nootropicat 5y ago
    Store of value requires being backed by something, scarcity alone is irrelevant. Nfts satisfy the same ponzi urge as memecoins (bitcoin, doge, etc) but also work as visible status symbols - expensive nft can be used as a profile picture, which is why they're taking over.
  • arthurcolle 5y ago
    Yeah, agreed. Seems like someone is interested in painting a picture, despite any threats to their potentially incomplete image of reality
  • rattlesnakedave 5y ago
    I’m also pro crypto, and this is a silly argument. Consider this statement: Scarcity is fundamental to any store of value. There are an infinite number of potential cryptocurrencies.
    • fortuna86 5y ago
      > There are an infinite number of potential cryptocurrencies Which is why alt coins are our generation's version of penny stocks. But specific coins have scarcity built in.
      • cortesoft 5y ago
        And certain NFTs also have scarcity built in. Both NFTs and crypto coins can choose the level of scarcity they want, and all of the value for that scarcity is determined by whatever people believe it to be. NFTs are the exact same thing as crypto coins.
        • fortuna86 5y ago
          > And certain NFTs also have scarcity built in. Right, the "limited edition" sales ploy (limited to how many they can sell). Because they can also mint a "new collection".
    • stickfigure 5y ago
      There are only a few cryptocurrencies that have any significant adoption, and fungibility is fundamental to that value. If I exchange a bitcoin for $N, that validates the value of all the other bitcoins. And folks exchange large numbers of bitcoins for $N every day. By definition, every non-fungible token is its own unique snowflake. There are new snowflakes made every day. Few ever trade, and the ones that do are probably wash trades.
    • imtringued 5y ago
      Yeah come on it should be pretty simple to explain why Bitcoin has value. It's because there is demand for it, for whatever reason. A "scarcity theory of value" feels like someone hamfisted the labor theory of value into the cryptocurrency space. No, even if labor is scarce and precious then making beanie babies for which there is basically zero demand (I assume) is still producing no value. I'd say most of the value of Bitcoin comes from the ability to do payments that are not possible in the current legal system. Some of them may be illegal. Some of them might be genuinely useful like in El Salvador.
  • danShumway 5y ago
    I think there's a big overlap -- if you're a crypto skeptic, you are almost certainly going to be an NFT skeptic as well. But the reverse is not necessarily true. NFTs are just fundamentally a lot worse than cryptocurrencies. They have every problem that cryptocurrencies have, except they're also not scarce, require centralized verification mechanisms, have bad incentive structures around hoarding, are prone to link rot, etc, etc, etc... NFTs are much harder to justify than cryptocurrencies are. They're all of the drawbacks with virtually none of the upsides. I don't know anyone who likes NFTs but dislikes cryptocurrency.
    • baby 5y ago
      It doesn’t make sense to say that an NFT is not scarce. Every NFT is unique by design.
      • danShumway 5y ago
        Most NFTs are just links to a publicly hosted asset. They're not meaningfully unique in any of the ways that matter. Sure, technically you're making a new NFT when the same creator mints an NFT that points to the same work as before. But also technically you're making a new dollar with a new serial label when the government prints money, and we don't call paper money "non-fungible". It's not a kind of uniqueness that matters to anyone.
        • baby 5y ago
          > Most NFTs are just links to a publicly hosted asset That's metadata, to display or use it in dapps, this is not how you uniquely identify an NFT. The metadata is optional.
          • danShumway 5y ago
            > The metadata is optional For the vast majority of people hyping NFTs, the metadata is the only part they care about. The metadata is the part that links the NFT to an actual piece of artwork -- the issuer and the work that it's linked to are the only reasons why some tokens are worth more to collectors than others. Without the context of the person who issued it and the work that the token is being paired with, you're just trading numbers around and assigning completely arbitrary values to them. Which to be fair is a common criticism of NFTs. It's just weird to hear an advocate lean into that argument themselves, normally advocates are trying to convince me that NFTs mean something.
  • paxys 5y ago
    As with any other kind of collectable, scarcity is created artificially. There is a potentially unlimited number of baseball cards. I can print one for myself today. Yet it is the authenticated 1933 Goudey #53 which is worth $4.2 million. NFTs provide this authenticity.
    • tsimionescu 5y ago
      Except that they don't, and still rely on experts to give any kind of authenticity. NFTs are like the serial numbers on dollar bills - if the dollar is genuine, then that serial number is unique, but the serial number itself doesn't prove that the dollar is genuine.
  • neonbones 5y ago
    I like to think about NFT as an easy method of buying art from artists. There are many platforms for this with classical purchase mechanics, but as an artist myself, I love the idea of an auction-based platform for this era of digital art. Right now, there are no mechanism for extraordinary digital artists to make their art expensive like IRL art. The best thing is you can do commissions for people, but it's hard for them to maintain their rights (both for artist and customer). Maybe NFT will be more prominent with some "data registry" between platforms to make it global to check your rights on items, and great artists can sell their art for a more reasonable price. For now, IRL art is like a "club for friends," and digital artists are not taken as seriously as they, even when digital one draw some almost masterpieces and spent 3-6 months on every item.
    • kevingadd 5y ago
      It doesn't seem very easy right now, it's complex and expensive for the seller and/or buyer compared to existing services for commissioning art
    • ryan_lane 5y ago
      But you don't own the art. You own the receipt for the purchase of a hash of the specific digital format the art is stored in. Note that there are definitely currently ways for digital artists to make expensive art, and that's in the form of commissions. If you really want to support an artist, find one you really like, and pay for a commission from them. You may also be able to pay more for forms of copyright (like reproduction). NFTs are the worst possible way for artists to make money from digital art.
      • miracle2k 5y ago
        Many artists do not want to do commissions. In fact, you could argue that people who want commissions are very selfish. Not only do they want to force artists to work on their thing, often driven by vanity, they even want to own the copyrights to the work! NFT buyers are clearly more respectful of an artists craft: They buy the work the artist really wanted to create, and they respect the fact that they cannot be the owner of the work in a moral sense.
  • jollybean 5y ago
    "There are an infinite number of potential NFTs. " There are an infinite number of made up currencies as well. Because neither of them function as a currency then they are the same thing, the difference being, with NFT's you own some 'art' or something like that, with Crypto you own a 'number'. The 'potential usefulness' of Crypto makes it feel like it has more material merit, but in practice, they're not useful (not yet), so they might as well be NFTs. There are no Crypto models today that make sense in any real systematic way, other than some governments reasonable attempts to be more digital, which comes wit a bunch of scary caveats as well. Currency is a form of social credit that is fundamentally tied to the economy in which it is used as a means of transaction, there is no escaping that reality. We can't just magically make up some thing that is independent of that underlying reality. If we could merely overcome the kludigness of banks, and the transnational cost of VISA - and make something a little more easily internationalized ... those things would help, but those probably are going to have to be a function of 'good governance'. Maybe the experiments in New Zealand and Sweden etc. will pay off if they can find something that works, that can be expanded upon.
  • imgabe 5y ago
    There’s an infinite number of potential paintings too. I don’t see what that has to do with the value of any one particular painting. There’s not an infinite number of the one original Mona Lisa.
    • larsiusprime 5y ago
      If the original Mona Lisa had been done in photoshop there could be infinitely many indistinguishable copies of the “original” MonaLisa.psd
      • imgabe 5y ago
        The NFT solves exactly this. There cannot be infinitely many copies of an NFT. The fact that there can be infinitely many other, different NFTs is irrelevant.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • nsonha 5y ago
    there are also people who think the "art" is full of shit. So art + bs tech is doubly so.
  • GVRV 5y ago
    I'm pro-crypto, pro-NFTs, just not pro the current popular use trend of NFTs. I'm sure we'll see much more interesting use cases for NFTs emerge over time, and I'm excited about that.
    • dmarcos 5y ago
      There are some aspects of the pfp trend that I also don’t like. On the other hand, it’s helping to onboard (wallet, security, metamask…) more people into crypto than any other use case before. Many ready to go beyond collectables.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • tapas73 5y ago
    wow. only after reading 10s of comments did I understood that crypto-hater and pro crypto refer not to cryptography but to blockchain and friends.
• SrslyJosh 5y ago
  This would have been more interesting if the author had traced where all the money being plowed into NFTs is coming from. I suspect that most of it does not come from outside of the current ETH (or whatever) ecosystem. I'd bet that most of the volume comes from people who are either treating it as play money, or trying to pump the NFT scam for their own benefit (real or imagined).
  • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > This would have been more interesting if the author had traced where all the money being plowed into NFTs is coming from. Not possible to trace where the money is coming from. In fact, someone can "sell" an NFT to themself in a wash trade between two wallets they control. The last trade price of the NFT is now recorded as the transaction price, but it's possible that money never actually changed hands. Want to have an expensive NFT? Just trade it to yourself for as much money as you have in your crypto wallet. You keep the money, you keep the NFT, but now everyone can see that someone "paid" a certain amount for it.
    • teej 5y ago
      > In fact, someone can "sell" an NFT to themself in a wash trade between two wallets they control. The last trade price of the NFT is now recorded as the transaction price, but it's possible that money never actually changed hands. I heard rumors this is what happened with the Beeple nft
      • square_usual 5y ago
        Beeple actually got paid, though, and (smartly) cashed it all out into fiat.
        • sneak 5y ago
          ...and then returned it quietly to the person who had loaned it to him temporarily to elevate his brand?
• shiftpgdn 5y ago
  eyeroll I won’t deny that there are tons of NFT projects that are nothing more than modern day tulip mania. On the other hand there is an entirely new world of opportunity that has never existed before for both common people, artists and corporations in the form of DeFi projects. Basically any distributed form of ownership you can imagine is now possible through NFT and DAOs. There has never been a better time to learn about it either.
  • teruakohatu 5y ago
    > there is an entirely new world of opportunity ... any distributed form of ownership That is what people say, but what I don't understand is what ownership is actually conferred with NFTs. The only "ownership" is the ability to transfer the NFT to another person, which simply gives them the ability to transfer it to another person (which sounds a bit MLMy). For ownership to be worth more than that, you need a legal system and a legal contract ... so back to square one.
    • seibelj 5y ago
      If an application (videogame, social network, website, etc.) gives the holder of the NFT special rights, then that is the utility of the NFT. It does not matter about legal ownership of a graphic.
      • polemic 5y ago
        But this is the wrong abstraction. The application becomes the central authority for some arbitrary token. Yes, in theory they could use "an NFT" to represent a key to some in-application capability but at best the owner of the NFT has an exclusive right to that capability at the whim of the application owner. The NFT owner can't really claim to own any real "thing" in and of it's own right. The application owner gains very little – they could just implement a Plan Old Database within their system. The owner of the "NFT" gains very little – except the theoretical value of a token they could trade, and might have value, as long as it's backed with some capability provided by the application. None of this applies to things like "a gif on the internet", for which the NFT means exactly nothing if you have no enforceable rights.
• roweow 5y ago
  Here’s an amazing email from Hal Finney on proto-NFTs 1993- https://imgur.com/a/UJpFjzx https://imgur.com/a/UJpFjzx I think people who have been in bitcoin for 10 years are more skeptical of NFTs because suddenly they’re framed as the ultimate crypto use case. And Eth is ultra sound money. And while there’s some interesting generative art (eg deafbeef) most of the industry is hyping NFTs for videogames. There are better and more transformative use cases than just the “metaverse”.
  • RNCTX 5y ago
    Everything is framed as the ultimate crypto use case, because crypto doesn't have a use case. No one needs money capped at 8 transactions per second world-wide, which costs ever-increasing amounts of electricity to trade. All of these things end up being an exercise in cryptocurrency people in a round-about way proclaiming to the world that they don't know what a thing is. For example: NFTs are a great idea to people who have never read an undergrad definition of what art is.
    • LudwigNagasena 5y ago
      Why would anyone care about an undergrad definition of what art is?
    • devetec 5y ago
      You do realize there are blockchains that don't suffer from just... not working? like PoS fixes the electricity issue, and there are many solutions to making transactions much cheaper, quicker, and having more bandwidth.
      • p1necone 5y ago
        Sure but a large portion of the current crypto market cap is in currencies that do have these issues, and I'm not sure how to explain that other than by assuming that that value is probably mostly speculation and not actual usefulness.
  • SantalBlush 5y ago
• cratermoon 5y ago
  The same could be said for cryptocurrency as a whole. https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1399058952336277505 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1399058952336277505
• seibelj 5y ago
  Why do people want Picassos? Show them off, appear sophisticated, an investment, etc. Crypto Punks are something a wealthy segment of society likes and because they are graphical and fit neatly into an avatar, they become like an expensive watch except for the digital set. This phenomenon is not hard to understand.
  • 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
    A Picasso actually has cultural and historical significance. And we probably had to think about it hard after the work was done. And collections even of the super rich are not necessarily random pieces. They may have hired a curator. An NFT can be some shitty gif hardly worth mentioning let alone displaying.
    • darcys22 5y ago
      Its pretty arguable that cryptopunks have cultural and historical significance already. Even if you dont share that sentiment
      • neuralzen 5y ago
        I agree, they are profoundly historically significant, they are the prototype for the ERC-721 token standard, and are event cited in the whitepaper proposal.
      • 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
        Because I don’t know any unpopular art periods, I’ll swap to music. NFTs could be boy bands. It was fun and a few things came out of it, but largely most people don’t know or care who was in Take That and we moved on. Unlike Mozart or the Beatles which manage to have relevance beyond their times and lives. NFTs will always be a thing, but current popularity or references in white papers doesn’t mean much in a broader context.
        • chrisco255 5y ago
          NFTs are a platform. I don't think this analogy applies. NFTs are standards for digital ownership. If you think digital ownership will not stand the test of time, I don't know what to say. It's a critical technology for the future of the web and metaverse. I'm sure that within the NFT ecosystem, some trends will fade with time. Maybe it's animal profile pics, or AI generated art collections or maybe it's autobattler gaming that falls out of favor, but as long as humans like gaming, music, art, and entertainment, I suspect NFTs will thrive.
• shimonabi 5y ago
  As soon as I see or hear the words "bitcoin", "blockchain" or any DeFi project for that matter, my brain automatically assigns the label "moron" to the person. It's like when I see a girl I like smoking. 10 to 0 in a milisecond. It's high-stakes gambling at least, total fraud at most. It's not surprising that a lot of known MLM scammers in my country moved into DeFi.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• hzambo 5y ago
  Most of the comments assume that with NFTs you are buying just a piece of digital image with no utility whatsoever. And yes, it is the case with most of the things we see on https://opensea.io/ https://opensea.io/. But on the other hand, there are a bunch of interesting projects out there where you can do some cool things with your NFTs, like the "card game" Axie Infinity and other ripoff projects - with a very few original ones - inspired by it. NFTs for collectible card games is promising and maybe this can lead to some other interesting use cases in the future. Anyway, I recommend searching for "utility nft projects". Most of them seem just like something to steal money from other people, but again... there are some interesting things coming out from it.
  • loudandskittish 5y ago
    But online collectible card games have existed for well over a decade without any need for NFTs, including the ability to trade and sell your rare cards. What does having an NFT add?
    • vokep 5y ago
      It's a new implementation of the same thing, but now with no team, no servers, no company, just some code that runs on the blockchain (which is a ton of servers lol)
• ck2 5y ago
  NFTs are money laundering.
  • muhammedbash 5y ago
    I wouldn't say NFTs are money laundering - there are some interesting use cases. But the setup of NFT makes it easy for say a drug dealer to conduct business on the blockchain and launder earnings by selling "digital art" to his customers.
• gruez 5y ago
  sorry to be pedantic, but it's literally not multi-level-marketing? Specifically, it's missing the multi-level part. Your upline isn't getting $$$ when you sell a NFT. I suppose you can make the argument that if you then take the money and buy more stuff, then your upline gets paid, but that describes most distributor arrangements. Come to think of it, there isn't really even an upline. It's just a network of artists and traders with no set hierarchy.
  • avs733 5y ago
    I think you could argue that the 'upline' acrues value even if they aren't paid directly. Greater interest in an NFT drives the value up. As with everything NFT crypto, the value is all probabilistic anyways /s
    • gruez 5y ago
      > I think you could argue that the 'upline' acrues value even if they aren't paid directly. Greater interest in an NFT drives the value up. right, but uplines getting paid in a necessary but not sufficient condition for MLM. In a MLM it's usually derived through their downlines. The mechanism described is a general benefit to all participants in the system which isn't very MLM-like. platforms (eg. youtube) tend to have the same "general interest drives the value of the ecosystem up" (ie. creators convincing other creators to join your youtube clone increases your site's catalog, which boosts the quality of recommended content you can show to your user to get them to stay on longer, making it easier for creators to get views), but you wouldn't call that a MLM.
      • avs733 5y ago
        I think it has many of the characteristics of an MLM * value is accrued by getting new people involved who buy something * that they are buying in part because they believe they can make more value by selling it to someone new they recruit * non-salaried workforce * built on relationships and word of mouth In the end, its an analogy not a proof of work...
• iAm25626 5y ago
  Car/bag/cloth/jewelry/art - these type of things are sometime considered status symbol. It help people convey certain “message” to other. NFT might could be the same in the ever more virtual world. I might not be be the target audience; but it does not meant that it hold no value to other. People spent lots of money on game skins, rare weapon. So there is a market. When one goes to a physical conference: flair/badges serves similar purpose. NFT could be that in zoom/team/slack. My naive way of looking at NFT: Maybe it can be used to help fund open source free software. Instead piece of art; a flair/pin/badge for showing your support for your favor projects. do not underestimate people's vanity.
  • teej 5y ago
    When it comes to luxury cars and clothes, you force others to see that you’ve spent for status. That doesn’t exist for NFTs. There’s no public forum I can go to where others are forced to observe my status signals. High end art is more about investing, money laundering, and tax havens then status.
    • cryptoboid 5y ago
      Well, it doesn't exist...yet. NFTs could serve as badges, why not?
    • darcys22 5y ago
      Except twitter profile pictures now right? Verified NFTs are in the pipeline. https://twitter.com/af_mada/status/1443243702156206089?s=20 https://twitter.com/af_mada/status/1443243702156206089?s=20
      • ALittleLight 5y ago
        How? Your Twitter profile picture is an image. What stops me from saving your profile and setting mine to the same thing? Are you suggesting Twitter validates that a Twitter account owns an NFT and shows a check/badge/whatever? I also don't think that works. Whatever rare NFT you have I can go make a visually identical NFT for <minimum cost of an NFT> and confirm that I own that NFT. I often think that I must be missing something about NFTs because they seem breathtakingly stupid. But, I've yet to find out what I don't understand about them.
• beckman466 5y ago
  Thank fuck someone said it. Similar angle: ”Are NFTs DRM by Another Name? [...] What do NFTs do that DRM doesn’t do? Not much. To me, the only interesting thing is that NFT schemes make public the identities of people who paid money for the NFTs that point to digital objects, so that those people have help from the NFT platform in exercising bragging rights. DRM technologies generally don’t do this, though they certainly could.” https://copyrightandtechnology.com/2021/03/15/are-nfts-drm-by-another-name/ https://copyrightandtechnology.com/2021/03/15/are-nfts-drm-b...
• jrochkind1 5y ago
  > This Ape sold for $2.3M (769 ETH) last night. NFTs make me think our society has gone completely insane. People sometimes ask me to explain them because I, like, "understand technology", and I have no explanation for what they want explained.
  • m_ke 5y ago
    It's simple, people who got rich on imaginary coins are turning their imaginary coins into imaginary art tokens.
• kaonashi 5y ago
  basically all of crypto is
• doopy1 5y ago
  This whole rant assumes that people just buy NFTs to sell them to the next guy, but that's not the case. Some people buy NFTs to support artists (like Patreon) - others are gamified to represent something in a dapp, for example metaverse parcels are like domain names. And of course some just collect them for the flex. It's not really an MLM anyway you slice it.
  • Igelau 5y ago
    Why wouldn't you just support an artist on Patreon? Or by actually buying something from them? What's the point of buying NFT instead? It's to sell to the next sucker before the bubble bursts. That's the only thing it does that other platforms don't already do better without having a blockchain involved.
    • doopy1 5y ago
      NFTs have perpetual royalties baked in which are much better for the artists. Buying an NFT from an artist IS buying something from them.
• m_ke 5y ago
  I'd argue that startups are also MLMs for tech elites. EDIT: Good video that summarizes it well that I just found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU5JsP6pUpc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU5JsP6pUpc
• rices 5y ago
  For me nfts provide an easier way for me to support digital artists I love that I've been following for a while. I don't really like the collectable scarcity kind of thing, but I like building a collection and having an easy way to explore and find art and artists. Also a lot of these websites are providing this art at higher resolutions and quality than social media would allow for (IPFS) and without direct hosting. I think it's here to stay in some form but it'll definitely undergo some change. Not everything exists for function, let's enjoy our time.
  • LegitShady 5y ago
    Massive speculation scam to take advantage of the uninformed. Let them enjoy their time without making digital beanie babies and pretending they have value.
  • analog31 5y ago
    Indeed, and I'm much less skeptical, if it's seen as akin to buying tickets to a concert. The value is in enjoying the music in the present moment, and knowing that the musicians are receiving some income. A concert ticket is an NFT of sorts. Nobody will ever be able to attend that concert again. I own plenty of concert tickets.
    • stickfigure 5y ago
      Did you buy the ticket and skip the concert? How did you feel about paying 30% to ticketmaster?
      • analog31 5y ago
        I've missed concerts that I had tickets for. Fortunately I'm mostly into classical, jazz, fiddling, etc., where Ticketmaster doesn't have much of a presence.
  • kevingadd 5y ago
    What makes NFTs easier than sending them cash on paypal for a commission, backing their patreon, or using a service like Skeb?
• larsiusprime 5y ago
  I summed up all my complaints about NFT's in this (short) article: https://www.fortressofdoors.com/the-degraded-blockchain-problem/ https://www.fortressofdoors.com/the-degraded-blockchain-prob... > In short, the minute you connect your blockchain to an app frontend you now have a degraded blockchain, one that cannot even in principle guarantee immutability, trustlessness, and decentralization – at least not for assets that the app's customers actually care about. Scratch the surface on almost any NFT ecosystem or blockchain application and I find I'm still relying on trust, or a centralized service, or a service that's more mutable than it advertises. So if I don't get the purported benefits of blockchain anyways, what was the point of getting a blockchain involved? EDIT: Getting a lot of responses that I don’t have time to reply to. My more involved thoughts on the entire space are here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fZBIYjsXT_s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fZBIYjsXT_s
  • danShumway 5y ago
    Complete sidenote, but I loved your "So You Want to Compete With Roblox" article a while back, it was a pleasant surprise to click on this link and end up back at your blog.
    • larsiusprime 5y ago
      Ah thanks! I live to serve.
  • neuralzen 5y ago
    This isn't true - sure there are projects that use IPFS to host token assets too big to store on-chain (3d assets, photos, etc.), but those assets can be assured to be perfectly correlated with their hashes. Not to mention many projects are fully on-chain, like CryptoPunks and AutoGlyphs.
    • X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
      Yeah this is one of the reasons I love hicetnunc and am suspicious of most of the NFTs hyped on Ethereum, so many that I checked are hosted on some random host, I even saw a very $$$ one hosted on heroku...
• crorella 5y ago
  #wut MLM
• osigurdson 5y ago
  I watched the link below to try to understand what is going on with NFTs. This helped a bit but I don't quite understand how to apply the token to a physical or digital thing. Does it make sense that for a digital item (like a jpg) it would be a hash of the file, the entire file or something else? Also, how would one use an NFT with a physical item (if that is in fact possible)? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i86Nh-Srfsk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i86Nh-Srfsk
  • chrisco255 5y ago
    Trying to parse your question, for the digital answer first. An NFT is verifiable metadata that can link to any other arbitrary data, such as a PNG, JPG, MP4, or whatever. Following the standards set forth by ERC721, you can add an image, external URLs, names, and various attributes that define the item's traits in relation to a broader collection that it belongs to. It is very common to use IPFS for hashing the contents of both the metadata and the image (or other linked media), since it's an easy standard to adopt to back up in multiple places. You can even back up IPFS files permanently using a storage solution like Arweave. NFTs have been linked to physical items. Typically the way it's handled is the NFTs are sold, but are redeemable for the physical item by the creator. So you can either hold the NFT or redeem it for the physical item. At which point the creator will need your shipping info to get it to you. NFTs could also be used to represent things like real estate titles and mortgages, but at some point there would need to be a centralized connection or oracle connected with a centralized entity for that use case. They're also used to represent liquidity positions in decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap v3.
    • osigurdson 5y ago
      Thanks, this is helpful. I had a look at this link (https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721#simple-summary https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721#simple-summary) based on your response (specifically the json schema). Is it correct that the actual NFT is three strings: name, description and image? It seems that "image" contains URL that you mention. Is there any limit to the size of the NFT (i.e. could you save the entire jpg base64 encoded in the image field for example)? At first I was a little confused by the fact that it seems that the purchaser essentially owns a URL and they would have no control over the information that the URL is pointing to. However, the concept of permanent/decentralized storage (Arweave as you mention) starts to clarify things a bit. If you have a digital asset located at a URL that can never be altered and is permanently accessible then it does start to make some sense - though I will have do some reading to understand how this is actually possible. Thanks again!
• etc-hosts 5y ago
  so are SSL certs
• darthvoldemort 5y ago
  If you buy an NFT for a piece of art, you can't even sell prints of the piece of art. You can't take a pic of it and sell a t-shirt of the art. You own nothing associated with that piece of art, except for the NFT itself. It's such a strange, strange concept to want to invest in. What if they create a new NFT blockchain standard. Does the previous NFT become invalid? Is there anything contractual saying you can't have multiple types of NFTs on a single piece of art? I kind of doubt it.
  • larsiusprime 5y ago
    It gets worse: if someone hard-forks the blockchain the NFT is on, it's possible for there to be two entirely different claimants to the NFT. And then there's all the times people's artwork has been straight up ripped off and minted into NFT's without their permission. The only provenance record a blockchain can authoritatively track is its own internal transactions -- it can't even prove that the original artist was involved at all; you're still relying on trust for that.
  • jjoonathan 5y ago
    Lots of traditional art is used for flexing or money laundering. NFTs work just fine for those applications.
  • coz131 5y ago
    NFT license are dependent on the project. That's up to you to research. NFT license from crypto kitties allow you up to 100k. BAYC has full commercial rights. You wrap the token into the new standard if there is a new one when there is a new standard. Look at cryptopunks, they are wrapped into ERC-721.
  • chaostheory 5y ago
    It makes total sense to me if you think about money laundering for illegal transactions.
  • paxys 5y ago
    If you buy a Babe Ruth baseball card you aren't buying the rights to Babe Ruth. It's the card itself which is valuable, as a product of the context it was issued in. I don't know why that part, as it translates to NFTs, is so difficult for people to understand.
• ezconnect 5y ago
  NFT is like the pet rock idea.
  • Animats 5y ago
    EtherRocks[1] are exactly like the pet rock idea. The real reason NFTs exist is simple. ICOs were shut down by the SEC. The SEC prosecuted a few of the total scam ICOs (the one supposedly backed by diamonds and real estate was the first). Then they sent letters to every ICO issuer in sight: "Please explain why your product is not a security offering which requires SEC registration". Most of the ICOs shut down immediately. Operating from outside the US doesn't help. If you sell into the US (or the EU, or China, or most of the developed world) some regulatory authority wants to have a word with you. Now, part of the idea behind NFTs was to escape SEC and CFTC regulation. Because each one is different, it's not a commodity, by definition. Is it a security? The Howey test applies, as usual. An NFT which represents something that already exists is probably not a security. That's a collectable. However, there are people selling NFTs that represent land in virtual worlds that haven't been built yet. That's a security; you're funding a startup. Also, "fractional NFTs" are almost certainly a security. So the legit use of NFTs is to monetize fame. Which is why basketball team owners and musicians are into this. If you're famous enough to sell merch, you may be able to add an NFT to your product line. People will buy, hold, and cherish your thing. Initial offers of unknown NFTs intended to be resold at a profit are doomed to failure, for the usual pyramid-scheme reasons. As I point out occasionally, go look at Beanie Babies on eBay. Offering prices around $5000, no bids. Then search for completed sales. Prices around $10-$50. NFT prices are like that. Mostly, you're looking at asking prices and wash sales. NFT markets, like Beanie Babies, don't crash. They stall. There's no liquidity. No market. You may have to advertise to find a buyer. Just like the leggings suckers. [1] https://cryptopotato.com/what-are-ether-rocks/ https://cryptopotato.com/what-are-ether-rocks/
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• twirlock 5y ago
  Yeah well so is the economy.
• neuralzen 5y ago
  As someone who was early in both crypto and NFTs, I really don't get the hate from the crypto community especially. They are a powerful tool for artists and creators to manage their works, especially digital artists who could never control their art before. They can and do manage commercial and IP rights, artist royalties, help self-organize DAOs and other efforts, and assure the authenticity and provenance with a categorical shift in confidence which could never be done before. They will and are changing and improving our digital world such that it will never be the same, just as crypto has.
  • 0xB31B1B 5y ago
    The hate is because the realized instantiation of the supposed value creates a bunch of collections of four thousand images of a rabbit or something stupid. The NFT community is largely a bunch of people hyping up crappy animal picture collections on twitter as the next big thing. The attraction to the medium is not through aesthetics or craft, but through FOMO.
    • neuralzen 5y ago
      I agree there are issues, but the same was (and still is) true in crypto - shitcoins and shitNFTs. That doesn't mean there aren't valuable use cases, or real artistic value and utility in some NFTs, and it doesn't mean there aren't real visionaries building things with authenticity and heart behind them.
      • 0xB31B1B 5y ago
        That there are real visionaries in NFTs does not change the fact that the zeitgeist of the community is centered in the shitNFTs, not in the visionaries, nor does it change the fact that for the huge majority of participants the phrase “I love the art and the community” is largely a lie and a basis for a pump and dump.
      • grey-area 5y ago
        Yes it’s very like cryptocurrencies, full of grifters, gamblers, fraud and snake oil salesmen and of course marks who think this ‘revolutionary’ technology is going to change the world and believe the made up prices and wash trades are real. Most of the visionaries have left cryptocurrencies because they realised just how riddled with fraud and grift the ecosystem is so what’s left is people attracted by the money. I expect NFTs will have the same trajectory.
• ngc248 5y ago
  As of now ... cryptocurrencies and the blockchain are just solutions searching for problems.
  • Ekaros 5y ago
    And that is likely long search. Traditional and more modern databases are pretty good. And features that blockchain brings, don't really change that too much or they might even be undesirable...
• panabee 5y ago
  it's easy to get blinded by the scams and abuses enabled by new technology, but what matters in the long term are the new benefits and use cases. will NFTs last? unclear. however, one benefit is clear and compelling: decentralized royalty capture and IP management. the NBA and other large enterprises could build and manage IP APIs that mimic NFT functionality. but what if you're an individual artist? or what if you're taylor swift? today these creators resort to record labels or the equivalent to manage royalties. NFTs empower individuals to capture royalties and manage IP without a middleman and without needing to build custom APIs; think of them as outsourced APIs. royalty capture and IP management are the last functions to get disrupted in record label stack. now musicians can choose different "vendors" for the major activities in the value chain, from marketing to funding to creation to distribution -- and now IP/royalty management. is this enough to sustain NFTs? unclear.
  • ashtonkem 5y ago
    > however, one benefit is clear and compelling: decentralized royalty capture and IP management. Bzzt. No. This is what NFTs claim they do, not what they actually do. How do you know that the person creating a NFT has the right to do that? The NFT tracks the chain of ownership for the NFT itself, if the initial person creating the NFT did not own the copyright for the art in question, then the NFT itself is useless. Second, there is no way for the NFT chain to enforce off-chain actions. If you have the NFT for a copyrightable piece of work and you believe someone is infringing your rights, you must still go to the regular legal courts and sue over it. The NFT itself cannot enforce your IP or collect royalties on your behalf.
    • chrisco255 5y ago
      > How do you know that the person creating a NFT has the right to do that? The NFT tracks the chain of ownership for the NFT itself, if the initial person creating the NFT did not own the copyright for the art in question, then the NFT itself is useless. That's very simple. Taylor Swift registers an on-chain address via ENS. TaylorSwift.eth, let's say. Then she publicly posts that public key to the world on social media and her personal website. Then any mints that come from that address have a chain-of-title back to a publicly announced address. As the address builds an on-chain reputation, that on-chain history is proof enough of provenance. The royalties are enforced in on-chain marketplaces. A lot of NFTs forego the physical court enforcement over IP. In the same way that fake Luis Vuitton purses don't devalue the original, it's largely ignored. It's still quite possible to find free MP3s on torrents, but the vast majority of people nowadays just use streaming services because it's official and they want to support their favorite artists with revenue. Same will go with NFTs.
• kwhitefoot 5y ago
  I wish that HN would implement an automatic acronym and abbreviation expander! What is an MLM? Ah, multi-level marketing. A euphemism for a pyramid scheme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing.
  • system2 5y ago
    I think MLM is as known as CEO or HDD. Or to anyone over 25 years old age with moderate news exposure.
    • kwhitefoot 5y ago
      In the US perhaps. And if you are a native US English speaker. I'm well over 25, almost 66, and it meant nothing to me. I read a reasonable amount of news but not very much from the US (mostly UK and Norway). In fact I think I would like to go further than my original comment and simply forbid abbreviations in titles.
• corona-research 5y ago
  Wow, genius insight
• root_axis 5y ago
  All of this gushing hype for the future of artistry is transparently performative. Nobody in this tech cares about art or artists, any of the useful functions of NFTs have long been possible and many orders of magnitude less expensive using public key cryptography or digital signatures.
  • eh9 5y ago
    Hasn’t Banksy setup a whole pipeline to do just that?
    • VonGuard 5y ago
      He also created a painting that, upon being sold immediately shredded itself. They pulled the plug halfway through, though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXKE0nAMmg4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXKE0nAMmg4
      • jimbob45 5y ago
        Did they pull the plug? I was under the impression that it was done halfway on purpose.
        • ChrisKnott 5y ago
          It apparently malfunctioned. He posted a video on Instagram of it a few days later of practice run that fully shredded it with a caption saying something like "worked in rehearsal"
          • rbanffy 5y ago
            It’s interesting how the malfunction itself created a very unique work of art depicting a moment suspended in time.
            • cge 5y ago
              The work is actually back at auction now, with a significantly higher estimate than its original sale price. https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2021/contemporary-art-evening-auction-2/love-is-in-the-bin https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2021/contemporary-ar...
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• xtat 5y ago
  Never before have I found the technically competent so divided. I sit in both HN and crypto camps I find this article catches all of the negative and none of the positive. I think everyone needs to zoom out.
• t_akosuke 5y ago
  Ok, let's see if I'm following the discussion right. let's say you buy an NFT for using a GIF of the Techno Viking, from the Viking himself, and Reddit verifies it. Now you are the only person on Reddit that can have a Techno Viking GIF signature, yippee! Except I can make a new NFT of the same GIF and nothing in the NFT itself betrays that it wasn't issued by the real Techno Viking, so it's up to him, Reddit and you to call me out and reach for old school copyright laws to stop me from using it. Which is no different than me uploading a Techno Viking video to YouTube and getting sued by him or flagged by YouTube, is it?
  • Doxin 5y ago
    You're both correct and underestimating how broken NFTs are. If you buy an NFT that gives you nothing except bragging rights that you "own" this NFT. What ownership actually means when devoid of the associated rights is anyones guess. Buying an NFT of a GIF doesn't stop anyone from using that GIF on reddit. No one is going around checking if posted GIFs have a matching NFT out there and enforcing property rights based on that. When you buy an NFT you're not even buying the GIF, you're buying the receipt proving you bought the GIF. What good that is without owning the GIF isn't exactly obvious to me.
    • jcelerier 5y ago
      Not that I support NFTs much, but conceptually, how is that different than you buying a Marilyn Monroe from Andy Warhol and him printing the exact same Marilyn Monroe and selling it to someone else ? Hopefully in 2021 everyone would agree that the two are distinct artworks, even if the physical object is exactly the same to the human eye ; that's not what matters when buying art.
      • jljljl 5y ago
        The Marilyn Monroes are still limited by the number that Warhol prints, and you have ownership of the print that you bought. Maybe it’s not as valuable as it would be if there was only 1 Monroe print, but you are paying for a physical object made by Warhol. If I understand correctly, an NFT is like if someone, not necessarily Warhol himself, sold you a note posted on a wall somewhere that said “You own Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe”, without any rights to the underlying work, or any promise that another person might sell another note on another wall that says “Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe”.
• melomal 5y ago
  This is NFTs 1.0. The current issue is that there's a gap between your NFT and a suitable metaverse. People love to customize their avatars, it's just what we like to do. NFTs 2.0 will be able to take your purchases and add them into whatever metaverse dominates at that current time. As much as people like to say why buy things digital I remember reading a HN thread where many, many, many people preferred to live in a digital world VERSUS the real world. Therefore if you live in a metaverse you probably will want to customize and make yourself digital twin unique to your likes, desires etc. What we are seeing right now is a standard progressive of a new digital product that some take advantage of, others don't see it and some will see the potential. QR Codes have been around for years, dropped off the map and then came storming back even though they are unsecure, some people hate them, others love them and so on.
• gnrlst 5y ago
  What many people seem to do is associate NFTs with art. Art is a subset of what NFTs are used for. We're in that phase where the first apps on the iPhone were the beer pouring ones, as that was the only way they could figure out how to use the gyroscopes. More use-cases will come, as the tech matures, the tulip manias fade. I'm incredibly bearish about art via NFTs, but I see potential in non fungible tokens / smart contracts more broadly. Look at how successful NBA top shot has been...collecting digital moments that can be seamlessly traded on a market place. That's like baseball cards, but more convenient. In a future that will increasingly be more digital and VR is slowly gaining stronger foothold, it will be easier to show your friends your digital collectibles collection than it will be to show your baseball card collection. You can also guarantee its authenticity instead of hoping the shady seller on ebay is honest.
• test30230 5y ago
  imagine there was no dollar, no central bank. all we have is this public ledger with lots of tokens. some are stable and some are variable, some have cool art, some are ugly. That's what crypto is. The deeper you dig, the more you will understand. You can start with questioning yourself, what's money? how much is a gucci bag worth?
• mrtrombone 5y ago
  Maybe someone should release a smart context which is a literal MLM/pyramid NFT where everybody in the upline gets a portion of the sale (rather than just the seller and the creator)
• bob229 5y ago
  Every blockchain application is useless and only used by idiots, criminals or cranks
• Grimm1 5y ago
  NFTs are just another attack on the concept of ownership and wealth and a step in making a class of people who own tangible things and then everyone else who either just rents them or scrambles to hold ephemeral things like this that grant no true value. True ownership, of a physical good or legal asset is what you actually want to shoot for. Going back to the PG essay talking about wealth. NFTs are strictly not in that class.
• DantesKite 5y ago
  I think NFT's are wonderful for reducing inflation. I just don't like hearing about them so much.
• ilaksh 5y ago
  Strange that no one mentions Algorand in this context. There are several NFT marketplaces on Algorand and the fees for transactions are less than a penny. It costs around 20-40 cents (depending on ALGO price) to fund the escrow for a sale or auction on our site. Transactions complete within about 5 seconds, with confirmation within around 15-20 seconds. https://gifeconomy.com https://gifeconomy.com if you are interested. You can also exchange ALGO easily on places like Coinbase. And if you search you will find multiple other NFT sites using ALGOs.
• highfrequency 5y ago
  There’s a lot of confusion here about why NFTs are valuable if the buyer doesn’t get to own the image copyright. This should not feel mysterious - NFTs are just like baseball cards. If you buy a Barry Bonds baseball card for $1,000, you don’t own the artistic rights to the image on the card. All you own is the card itself, which has negligible manufacturing cost. It would be trivial for any card company to produce a million functionally equivalent Barry Bonds cards. When you buy a Barry Bonds baseball card, you hope that the card company won’t dump a million more on the market. You also hope that if another baseball card company springs up and prints their own Barry Bonds cards, people won’t be as interested in that brand of cards. Attention and scarcity drive value; the nuance is that other speculators must care about scarcity along the same dimension that you possess it (in this case: the brand of the baseball card company and the year the card was made). There are a hundred tokens functionally equivalent to Bitcoin, but none approach Bitcoin’s value - purely because Bitcoin sustains more consumer and media attention. This position is fairly stable because attention has strong positive feedback loops. There has always been interest in speculative collectibles. A purely digital collectible solves a lot of practical problems related to exchange: you don’t have to wait a week to receive the item in the mail, you don’t have to worry about its condition because it does not degrade with time or use, there is minimal counterparty risk due to online escrow contracts, and counterfeits are harder to fake (along the relevant dimension of scarcity, which is the origin address). People have been speculating on collectibles for thousands of years. Crypto just makes it easier to trade them back and forth.
  • tdeck 5y ago
    When you have a baseball card, the first sale doctrine means that you at least have the legal right to display and transfer that card. With NFTs, even that is not necessarily the case because displaying the content of the NFT is making a copy, and you may not have a license to do that.
    • highfrequency 5y ago
      If you own an NFT, you have the ability to write someone else’s address on a socially recognized ledger of ownership. That is all that matters. If the NFT and the ledger have wide interest, this ability to transfer ownership has value regardless of any legal subtleties.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• m00dy 5y ago
  There is another great post about nft availability. https://blockrotate.medium.com/nft-availability-is-a-problem-2794f1d1e95e https://blockrotate.medium.com/nft-availability-is-a-problem...
• sub7 5y ago
  NFTs are a scam as old as markets themselves. Buy your own supply at any price, then sell to a sucker at a "discount". Sprinkle around marketing bullshit about how all real world things will be NFTs one day, be really good at capturing imaginations and creating fantasy. More suckers get in. They'll end the same way as similar scams too - founding teams had no skin in the game since they just paid themselves, pros will ride the wave and cash out in time, and suckers will be left without bids.
  • risyachka 5y ago
    No. Regular market rules apply exactly like with fidget spinners. Marketing and hype? Demand increases, sales go through the roof. Hype passed? No one is buying. With NFT situation is 1:1. Just like people that collect stamps pay x100-x1000 for many. Do they have value? No. Scam? No.
• qwerty456127 5y ago
  Not all MLMs are just bubbles or Ponzi schemes like this. Some MLMs actually sell useful products and distribute actual revenue. E.g. I buy some Amway products from time to time and the quality seems fantastic. But NFTs seem selling pure bullshit.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• faraggi 5y ago
  Anything crypto related being discussed in HN is worthless. Nothing to see here people.
• dvh 5y ago
  Do nft actually resell? Did anybody (not a celebrity) resell a nft?
• zby 5y ago
  This whole discussion here shows that NFT are really confusing. And this is the point. NFT is art - it makes you think.
• quickthrower2 5y ago
  Not really MLM per se, more like a greater fool scheme.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• shawticus 5y ago
  NFTs are not baseball cards, they're not JPEGs, they're none of this. They are emblems of buy-in to a community or idea. Think of it like the next generation of crowdfunding. Most of what people are saying here is really ignorant of the reality on the ground to be honest, so it's hard to say anything other than-- ya'll really don't see it, because you haven't bothered to look.
• shawticus 5y ago
  This post might as well have just been titled "Launch House is really out of touch"
• Grustaf 5y ago
  Can't we just be honest about it and say that NFTs are highly priced for exactly the same reason "tokens" were a few years ago? Or indeed dot com before that. Mundane things become valuable when you link them to something new and hyped like crypto or the internet. It's as simple as that. Hopefully there will emerge some meaningful use cases on the other side, in the meantime a lot of people will end up holding the bag.
• BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  NFT always felt ridiculous to me, but I though I understood the mechanism: "it's like baseball cards but in the blockchain". This week I learned it's not. NFT are Non Fungible Tokens, which means tokens that can't be divided, unlike crypto currencies like Bitcoin that can be divided in Satoshis. So you exchange the totality of it, or not. Basically it's a unique number in the blockchain you change ownership by applying cryptographic signatures during a transaction. Most of the time it's an ethereum smart contract address + a token id. But wait, where are the pics ? The gifs ? The videos ? I mean, opensea.io does allow you to mint (the term for magically turning a media into an official NFT backed by the blockchain) up to 100MB of content. So where is it? Not in the blockchain, obviously, it's already fat enough with tiny transaction data. Well, it's just stored in the centralized platforms like opensea, rarible, etc. Basically, the NFT is not even that piece of art, baseball card or whatever, it's just the number linked to the proprietary, centralized, privately own trading platform that hosts the content. The platform disappears, or bans you, or changes policy, or is blocked, or whatever, and your NFT is back to being a bare-bone blockchain contract number and a token id. It's even more bullshit that I though! You don't even have control on whatever you make believe to virtually own. It's madness. But you know what, the week I spent in this weird universe was also so much fun. There is an atmosphere of creative WTF, a mix of scams, community bonding, money laundering and genuine experimentation all bathed in some frenetic craziness that reminds me of the early days of the internet. Despite all that crap, I kinda like it.
  • hanklazard 5y ago
    > I mean, opensea.io does allow you to mint (the term for magically turning a media into an official NFT backed by the blockchain) up to 100MB of content. So where is it? Not in the blockchain, obviously, it's already fat enough with tiny transaction data. Well, it's just stored in the centralized platforms like opensea, rarible, etc. You’re right that this is the way many have been created so far, but that will not be the case for long. Already people have pointed NFTs to IPFS/Filecoin which will give them much more staying power. And this can be done without using a centralized platform like opensea, check out nft.storage and metaplex (1) as starting points. 1. https://github.com/metaplex-foundation/metaplex https://github.com/metaplex-foundation/metaplex
• slmnsmk 5y ago
  As financial holdings or blockchain assets they also seem speculative at best to me. I participate, however, because some digital artists are truly truly good; and they are finally seeing success/sales. Without getting too far into it, the Mona Lisa is of undeniably high quality. But its (is saying “her” gauche?) value is certainly not just a function of quality. Cultural relevance, scarcity, etc. I like that digital artists found a way to participate in the culture and make money. This is why I buy NFTs. It’s also the most transparent “shill” pump and dump scheme ever. :) The article is not wrong, but there ARE other motivations. Especially on PoS low-electricity blockchain technologies.
• qeternity 5y ago
  I've read a lot of very well meaning, starry-eyed opinions of NFTs and to be honest, most of what is claimed is true. But it belies the pragmatic reason that NFTs are popular: mass speculation. People have been collecting things for years, often at prices that make outsiders scratch their heads. The difference is that the current mainstream hype around NFTs has nothing to do with the true fandom of collectibles of yesteryear, where speculation is a side-effect of scarcity. Current NFT hype is rooted solely in the fact that some people are (seemingly) making money flipping NFTs. If there was a huge market for buying digital collectibles from artists, athletes, etc pre-NFT then we would see large markets for that. It's not as if there was anything stopping A-list celebs from dropping limited availability collectibles...there just must not have been much demand for it. Gaming has seen healthy digital asset economies because there is utility to use these items in-game. But prices have remained moderated because there is (usually) no secondary market, so people are paying roughly whatever utility they gain from using the items in-game. So whilst NFTs have potential, and I'm sure we will see some successes, the current popularity is simply down to speculation, as with pretty much everything else crypto.
  • m_ke 5y ago
    It's also market manipulation. Most of the celebrities are just hypemen who get a cut for helping someone sitting on a ton of crypto pump NFTs and then dump them on idiots who bought into the get rich quick hype.
• chmsky00 5y ago
  I mean much of the economy is an MLM for elites. The elites of Claire’s Boutique aren’t letting employees design novel items. Adam Smith wrote hundreds of years ago that division of labor, taken to extremes, would lead to dumber humans than the dumbest animal. Here we have people standing around retail shops, not working on their ideas, but minding a “booth” for a distant “owner” who does little real work to sustain themselves. We believe in them therefor they get to be rich and not work. It’s simple manipulation of brain chemistry built into years of forced belief. It’s exactly the math of an MLM; keep selling others selling my value for me.
• barrenko 5y ago
  It's not about ownership, it is about bragging. What is so hard to get, have you never been to a high school?
• ladyattis 5y ago
  NFTs as they're being used is silly, but to me the fact the article makes a brief mention about "digital ownership" makes me realize why I agree with Proudhon on the absurdity of property rights. Basically, everyone needs some kind of means of subsistence. In Proudhon's day most people lived by subsistence farming, so land was an essential element to that. And thus, the contention was what happens when all the land is owned? Do those born afterward become diminished by the need to purchase or rent land? Or is ownership contingent on the possession of it as in its direct use. Meaning that someone who inherits some title to land has no valid claim if they can only use/consume it? Today, people still need land to subsist but not in the same way that people did in the 19th century. As such, the whole idea of title ownership whether it's an Ethereum smart contract or an old fashioned title from the government it needs state enforcement as without this element it's worthless. Thus, the real problem with NFTs and just title/absentee ownership is the fact that it attempts to deprive people of subsistence rights whether in the physical world with using state violence to prevent people from finding shelter, food, medical care, and so forth. Or whether it's non-physical such as trying to make it illegal to distribute content ranging from images of art to information regarding circuit designs and chemical formulas for essential medicines. So to me, NFTs as certificates of "authentic ownership" seem like another example of the absurdity of title ownership. Your piece of paper or JSON file does not entitle you or others to absentee ownership. Use and possession are the only true means of ownership and absent that you must lean on the state to enforce it and the only means to enforce is through violence of various means (physical, structural, financial, etc).
• barrenko 5y ago
  And again, like the recent misunderstanding of Macbook and iPad, it's not for techbros, it's for creatorbros.
• javier123454321 5y ago
  The way I see NFTs is this: It is an open API to deal with ownership rights. Every behavior that you can program into ownership, is now available. The profile pictures are stupid, yes, but the idea that property is moved to an open database which anyone can program a behavior is exciting. Aston martin can now have a lounge in France where only Aston Martin owners can join, even if your car is in New York. Even if they can do that now, they haven't, and would not do it in an open api that anyone can build any application they want for owners. We are learning what is possible at this very moment, a lot of the experiments are memes, and there are twice as many scams. Open and permissionless means that scammers as well as innovators are invited. However, there's excitement there which is very palpable and I would encourage you not to dismiss it.
  • tantalor 5y ago
    > only Aston Martin owners can join How would that even work? Supposing I bought the car and received the token, what's to stop me from selling the token and keeping the car?
    • javier123454321 5y ago
      Programmable property means you can program it to do anything. Multi factor authentication, is one way to do it.
    • Sargos 5y ago
      Selling a car and not transferring the NFT is akin to selling a car and not transferring the title. Sure it's possible and you could con some really dumb people but it would be an expected part of the deal and the kind of people who buy used cars are already wary of scammers for this reason.
      • Buttons840 5y ago
        > keeping the car > Selling a car You're answering a different question. If I keep the car and the title, what stops me from selling my NFT? Or, even, transferring my NFT to a wallet and then giving the wallet away in the physical world (like selling a MMORPG account)? Or sharing my wallet containing the NFT with several people who can all use it to gain access to the exclusive benefits? "Hey bro, send me your private key so I can get into this club." There's no legal reason any of those things can't be done.
• macawfish 5y ago
  There's a missing perspective in a lot of these comments: some people like to support artists and aren't that naive when it comes to "buying NFTs". They see stuff they like and want to support the creator. That's also an aspect of this. Some fraction of the art NFT space is people literally investing directly in artists with the possibility of getting a return on investment, but not necessarily an expectation of that.
  • rednerrus 5y ago
    Wouldn't it benefit everyone if you actually purchase something, even if it's just the rights to something?
    • macawfish 5y ago
      You are quite actually purchasing time and food for the artist to make more art. That said I am interested in the possibility of NFTs being linked to a key that decrypts some openly licensed content or source files. I think that'd be really cool. NFTs that sell art into the public domain.
• int_19h 5y ago
  I can think of one genuinely useful application of NFTs for collectibles: fractal art, and (guaranteed reproducible) procedural art in general. In that case, the artwork itself can be fully on-chain, since it's defined entirely by its input parameters, which are rarely large - the real value comes from finding those parameters! And yet the visuals, once computed, can be stunning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cgp2WNNKmQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cgp2WNNKmQ For something like this, I can actually see the value of owning a token that represents "the original". And when the artwork is on-chain, this claim can be easily verified so long as the author immediately puts its on the chain: the one and only "true" NFT for it is the one that is the oldest in blockchain history.
• tantalor 5y ago
  I think of NFT as scrip; substitutes for money like gift cards, Disney Dollars, or Itchy & Scratchy Money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Dollars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Dollars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dErRj6V8_xQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dErRj6V8_xQ You can buy them with money and maybe redeem for goods/service where accepted. Or convert back to money by selling to some other sucker, probably at a loss.
• leifg 5y ago
  The best comparison for NFTs I heard was the comparison with buying a star or a piece of land on the moon. There are multiple providers that sell you various areas of space. But in the end it’s just a piece of paper that grants you nothing. Yes you can brag to your friends that you own a giant piece of land on the moon with earth view but not only is that pretty useless it also doesn’t matter ever. Because if the moon is ever colonized you won’t be able to claim the said land just because some private company said you own it. When talking about NFTs I often hear that somehow ownership rights are attached to it. Which is only true if the rightful owner of the art explicitly states that ownership is defined by “whoever has access to the private key”.
• macawfish 5y ago
  Oh so NFTs are MLMs but real estate speculation is just fine?
• malermeister 5y ago
  All of crypto is just MLM for techies.
• airoftime 5y ago
  This is a great time to checkout Air of Time: https://airoftime.com https://airoftime.com It will hopefully make NFTs feel a little sensible :)
• mikestaub 5y ago
  It's even simpler than that. Art has always just been a way to avoid taxes for the wealthy.
• errorproxy 5y ago
  Isn't this just a new way to legally launder money?
• husamia 5y ago
  there are so many applications of NFT. it starts with art and ends with something you never thought of.