7 ms·

NFTs are not the answer to many questions. Maybe you should start asking the correct questions. The one problem NFTs solve perfectly: How to do decentralized a

• LogonType10 5y ago
  Didn't some artist get his NFTs stolen through Discord screensharing and he begged his Twitter followers not to acknowledge the possessor of the NFT as the real owner of art?
  • pengwing 5y ago
    I do not know this particular story and do not see the relevance to the points I am making. That being said, you cannot steal an NFT via Discord screensharing unless you manage to display your private key on screen. In which case: Children gotta learn that the stove is hot.
    • lupire 5y ago
      And then children grow up into adults who don't use stoves as currency.
  • Joeboy 5y ago
    I think maybe you're talking about this: https://futurism.com/person-furious-right-click-saved-precious-nft https://futurism.com/person-furious-right-click-saved-precio... Which strictly speaking is about the art being "stolen", not the NFT.
  • mherdeg 5y ago
    I saw something like this described here: https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1455325800291397633 https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1455325800291397633 My personal view here is that your continued ability to own an NFT depends on your ability to tell an interesting story. If 51% of the professional clout of the art world decides you don't own something any more, you ... might not? If the metadata that denote ownership of beeple's first 5000 everydays are accidentally overwritten due to a small bug, probably everyone will agree to ignore that. But if someone puts on a super cool art-thief costume and does a livestream where they write and execute software that resets the ownership so it's their art now, while they play "The Thomas Crown Affair" soundtrack in the background, probably everyone will go along with this, yeah? (Certainly the theft of the Mona Lisa increased its value!)
    • Uehreka 5y ago
      If it’s really down to social consensus and not the state of the blockchain, then does the blockchain mean anything at all?
      • TigeriusKirk 5y ago
        The most important thing to understand about the blockchain is that it's a tool to facilitate social consensus. Once you get that, everything makes sense, from why bitcoin has value to the point of NFTs. It's worth taking time to think about it until it at least makes sense what's happening, even if you don't choose to participate yourself.
        • lupire 5y ago
          It's equally important to understand that the biggest names in the system are mostly fraudsters. It's a natural consequence of a system whose primary purpose is to replace government with "law of the jungle". That's only useful to people who want to live outside the law, because they are either persecuted or predators. The law exists because it works for most people. If you disagree with that, and believe it's imposed by some cartel by force, the you need an answer for why your alternative system won't also be dominated by people who would assert their power by force.
      • roywiggins 5y ago
        Not technically, but the story of "being on the blockchain" does seem to matter.
      • cslarson 5y ago
        It's more convenient to query a database than to ask everyone.
        • danpalmer 5y ago
          Which database to you query? They're on the blockchain, but you have to know which format you're accepting, how to verify, etc. Do you accept OpenSea as the source of truth for NFT ownership? How about Foundation? What about MyFirstMarketplace, the one that I've decided to create? This requires some social contract to know who the authority is, and that's probably based on how much they have spent on marketing to become The Authority. It always comes back to social contracts.
  • dktbs 5y ago
    I'm assuming you're talking about this person: https://twitter.com/calvinbecerra/status/1454328591202721796 https://twitter.com/calvinbecerra/status/1454328591202721796 It was funny to see how they responded to losing their NFTs by being tricked on discord: they contacted the centralized storefronts (rarible, opensea) to have them marked as stolen.
• breadbreadbread 5y ago
  "designer clothes, luxury watches, and fancy cars" all have understandable limits to production and have genuine scarcity (even if that scarcity is strictly controlled). NFTs have artificial scarcity... for little to no purpose other than monetary gain. Generally I am against the concept of artificial scarcity in any industry.
  • tantalor 5y ago
    > genuine scarcity (even if that scarcity is strictly controlled) Scarcity can't be both genuine and artificially imposed. Luxury sunglasses costing $3 to make are sold for $300.
    • lottin 5y ago
      Pricing a good above its production cost is not artificial scarcity.
      • nybble41 5y ago
        Artificial scarcity is, however, a prerequisite for it, at least with that kind of margin. Otherwise you'll get competition bringing the price back down toward production cost + overhead.
        • lottin 5y ago
          Technically, I think that would be monopoly power, not artificial scarcity. The government grants a legal monopoly to producers to stamp their products with their brand name, which also prevents producers from using someone else's brand name on their products.
          • nybble41 5y ago
            A legal monopoly is artificial scarcity. However, if the provenance of an item is important to the buyer then scarcity of items from that source would be natural, not artificial—even if goods which are otherwise physically identical down to the atomic scale (including branding) are available from other sellers. That has nothing to do with any monopoly granted by a government. The trademark rules which prohibit using someone else's brand are there to protect buyers from fraud, not to create scarcity. As long as the buyer is fully informed as to the actual origins of the item there shouldn't be any concerns over fraud regardless of how it's been marked. Using someone else's mark in a misleading way to sell your own product would be fraud, though, even in the absence of trademark laws.
• aj3 5y ago
  So in other words NFTs are scams just like designer clothes, luxury watches and fancy cars.
  • paulcole 5y ago
    The definition of a scam is not something that other people like that you dislike.
  • dboreham 5y ago
    In that context most human activity is a scam.
    • postalrat 5y ago
      It's hard to accept this.
  • kilbuz 5y ago
    If you're talking about mass-produced watches sure. But visit, say, Rexhep Rexhepi's or the Gronefeld brothers' workshops, and you would be hard pressed to come away without an appreciation for hand-finished mechanical movements that border on art.
    • aj3 5y ago
      Yes, but if you buy the watch you can put it on your hand, use it and show it to me. NFT is more akin to a photo of an invoice from the workshop you attended - it might have some sentimental value to you, but it's not a watch, does not have intrinsic value and I don't have to respect it.
      • carlosdp 5y ago
        You're taking a digital item and complaining it doesn't exist irl. It's only an "invoice" to the physical world, it can actually be used for things in the digital world, like gaining access to private chat rooms / spaces or getting early access to product drops.
• egypturnash 5y ago
  There are a lot of people promoting NFTs as the solution to problems digital artists have, so it's worth spending some time talking about how that's not true, and how, in fact, many digital artists have been getting paid for their work ever since stuff like PayPal existed. Myself included, digital art's my job. Your point that they are status markers has something, though! Especially given how most of the successful work seems to be operating under completely different aesthetics than those non-filthy-rich people enjoy looking at and funding (seriously all these randomly-generated things are ugly); the "fine art" world has had increasing amounts of work that you have to be trained to see as "good art" ever since photography made accurate depictions of a scene something everyone could have for very little effort.
  • sanderjd 5y ago
    Ignoring the NFT aspect of it, I disagree that all of the randomly generated art pieces are ugly. I think the vast majority are, but that some turn out great, and that this is the main reason it's an interesting medium. The artists who are the best at this are successful at upping the rate of outputs that look good, and that makes them good artists. It's very similar to how anyone can throw paint splatters on a canvas, but not everyone who does so is Jackson Pollack. And many of the individual pieces even from the most successful (artistically I mean) projects still aren't nearly as good as the best pieces, similar to how most Pollacks are not as good as his best. This was long-winded, but all I'm saying is that I think generated art is an interesting medium, with both good and bad artists and good and bad pieces, like every other artistic medium. (Again, completely without taking a position on whether NFTs are the right way to create / sell these!)
    • egypturnash 5y ago
      The intent of my statement "all these randomly-generated things are ugly" was not "all aleatoric art is ugly", it was that all of the randomly-generated NFTs I've seen look like the results of hitting "randomize" on a mediocre Picrew except for the part where someone's trying to convince people it's worth more than I pay for rent in three years.
• zemo 5y ago
  BAYC is a community in the sense that it has members and non-members, but what binds that community other than having purchased some asset? Sure, that's one definition of community, but it's not a definition of community that I'm inspired to participate in, or a definition of community that I would be willing to stake my own money on.
  • nikk1 5y ago
    There are a number of perks that a BAYC membership grants. https://boredapeyachtclub.com/#/ https://boredapeyachtclub.com/#/
    • zemo 5y ago
      people aren't paying huge sums of money for a collaborative virtual graffiti wall, they're paying huge sums of money to signal that they have huge sums of money. People have been doing that for centuries.
• Uehreka 5y ago
  > NFTs are the digital equivalent of designer clothes, luxury watches, and fancy cars. I feel like a lot of people (particularly on this site) see these kinds of things as shallow, uninteresting, and contributory to a lot of the worst parts of society. It feels… odd… to hear them invoked as a positive/useful thing. Like, yes, I get it, a lot of people are shallow and want status symbols to fill the voids in their souls and give their lives meaning. But the idea of taking the clout-chasing mechanics that wreak so much havoc on society and going “what if we had more of that?”… well it feels a little like trying to invent digital junk food because real world junk food sells so well.
  • sanderjd 5y ago
    I totally share your vibe on this, but I also think we do ourselves a disservice when we turn our noses up at stuff lots of people actually like. I try to separate two different questions: "Is this something that people will find valuable?" and "Is this something I want to dedicate my scarce time and energy toward working on?". I think in the case of all this shallow stuff, those answers are "yes" and "no". But I think we have a tendency to conflate the two questions and since the answer to the second one is "no", assume the answer to the first one is also "no". I personally did that with Facebook for many years and really talked down the business because I considered it superficial and actively bad and not something I wanted to have any involvement in, but the truth is that it is a very valuable business that I just don't want to work on, and that's fine. I increasingly see a lot of this cryptocurrency stuff as very much the same. I may not like it, but that doesn't at all imply that it won't be valued by a large number of people.
  • CryptoPunk 5y ago
    Status symbols became the first forms of money and may have increased the productivity of Homo sapiens many fold: https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/C... With NFTs, their functionality extends through programmability, where they can be used as collateral for self-executing financial contracts.
• nikk1 5y ago
  > NFTs are the digital equivalent of designer clothes, luxury watches, and fancy cars. I think this is a limited definition of what an NFT can be.
• pjc50 5y ago
  "Veblen Goods" I've come round to the position that NFTs are not going away precisely because of this, despite not agreeing with the value proposition myself.
• spicybright 5y ago
  If it's pseudonymous, doesn't that make it easier to pretend to be someone else with their key? If it's for exclusivity, why hide your identity? Is a list of members the club maintains not good enough?
• lupire 5y ago
  >designer clothes, that you can't wear > luxury watches, that don't tell time > and fancy cars. that you can't drive.