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I don't even know where to begin. We are at this stage in the crypto bull market that all the smart people who refuse to believe in it are getting upset and ar

I don't even know where to begin. We are at this stage in the crypto bull market that all the smart people who refuse to believe in it are getting upset and are writing angry articles. You cannot realistically write an article dumping on NFTs and digital assets unless you also go after 95% of game developers which are making exponentially more money on microtransactions than the entire NFT marketspace. Underground gambling rings formed around CS:GO skins. People are spending thousands of dollars on ships in Start Citizen. Most of League of Legends business model is in-game skins. These are all digital assets that the users don't even really own if they read the terms of service. They are nothing more than flex pieces in game that can be taken away at any time. Don't even get me started on mobile games targeting kids. But for some reason the bridge too far is adults putting jpegs in their twitter profile pictures.

elil17 5y ago
The difference is that video games have a way to enforce ownership. CS:GO skins are valuable because Valve doesn’t let you just upload your own skins. I can download any NFT and use it as my own profile picture.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > I can download any NFT and use it as my own profile picture. You cannot, unless you have a vastly different understanding of what an NFT is than what it actually is. A NFT is not a picture, it's a cryptocurrency that only has one item. You could download the data representing a NFT (it's just ascii data), but not sure what you'd get out of that.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  If I understand NFTs correctly, anyone can verify who owns the NFT. No one is claiming the NFT is literally just the bytes of the profile picture. The NFT is the control of the token on the blockchain. Likewise, anyone could download the bytes of a 3D model of a weapon or hat in a video game. The only difference is that Valve’s software will check the canonical source of ownership, which isn’t much different than if Twitter or any other social network writes code to verify the ownership of an NFT representing some profile picture.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    The latter only works if Twitter stops you uploading any old image. Hence trying to find some way to differentiate regular profile pictures from NFT profiles. But the latter still only works if the general population of Twitter thinks it’s cool. Otherwise you’re marking yourself out as a rube. Whereas skins and other DLC are broadly accepted in games if only from the perspective that most people don’t care what skin you use. That and most games with DLC charge a fixed rate and offer it to everyone rather than making individual items scare.
    - tshaddox 5y ago
      > The latter only works if Twitter stops you uploading any old image. Sure, or if they check the images you upload (YouTube does this on a massive scale). Or if they show a checkmark on verified images. Or if they prevent uploading unverified profile images at all (presumably this is how Valve games work, so that everyone can't just download a copy of the expensive item and use it online). > But the latter still only works if the general population of Twitter thinks it’s cool. Yes, of course, but as you explain, that's no different than with video games, especially if the items are purely cosmetic.
      - meheleventyone 5y ago
        I don’t think you can just snip all the context out of what I said and pretend I agree. I explain in the post you quote what the meaningful differences are.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    I believe I can take a BAYC, mint my own NFT of it, upload it and still get the check mark haha.
    - tshaddox 5y ago
      Indeed, unless Twitter were to check each profile picture against some database of known images. That would be silly, of course, but precisely as silly as YouTube checking 100s of hours of video footage every minute against known copyrighted footage.
- listenallyall 5y ago
  Sure, and that benefits the NFT owner, by increasing attention and exposure to the NFT he/she owns. If you'd like to use an NFT I own as your profile pic, you have my express permission. I'll help you do it!
- maccolgan 5y ago
  That's the use for it though. If Valve hypothetically minted NFTs for each unique individual CSGO skin variation, it'd be valued and would create a secondary market free of Valve's constant rent seeking. I see that as a very legitimate use of the technology.
tomc1985 5y ago
> But for some reason the bridge too far is adults putting jpegs in their twitter profile pictures. That's not the bridge too far. It's not about the JPEG, it's about the bullshit shoehorning of 'ownership' around infinitely-copyable bits put in place by a culture that seems to care more about ownership than equality. Digital economies are a land of plenty, where nobody can own anything and bits copy themselves freely. NFTs shoehorn a scarcity economy on top of that, which suits those with no concept of the reality of the digital world. NFTs and DRM have no place in cyberspace, yet here they are. The world is a much better place without enforcement of "ownership". NFTs and DRM go against the grain of our digital reality. I can't find the link right now but I literally just read an article on here (not this one) explaining this far more eloquently than I can; it laments the death of open-source culture (openness, equality, egalitarianism) that underpins nearly everything digital.
- pennaMan 5y ago
  NFTs provide proof of ownership of something unique, not enforcment. You are still free to put any jpeg you want on any profile pic you want. Like you can reproduce and hang a multi million dollar painting on your wall without enforcement but that provides no proof you own the original thing. I do not get the argument that an algorithm for decentralized proof of ownership of an unique token has any moral attribution to it. If anything it enables a future where content creators can get income for their content without the ad industry (youtube, major labels, facebook etc) getting any cut. And that could lead to the erosion of IP laws all together. We are already seeing experiments with distribution of royalties implemented with NFT smart contracts of today and the tech is still in it's infancy both in implementation and applications. The reality is that good content, be it art or media, needs revenue for the content creators to produce content. Currently their options are limited to censoring themselves in the name of profit because profits are gatekeeped by the ad industry via the monopolies of google facebook and amazon. A future where digital economies are decentralized and self sufficient, where anyone can publish and make royalties via the uniqueness of holding the "original" work of content and all future developments in this space is a future I look forward to.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
vernie 5y ago
Microtransactions, but they use a million times more energy. Now we're cookin'
- FeepingCreature 5y ago
  Hi, commenting here because there's no private messages: I saw your comment about having a browser that still supports TabMixPlus/multirow tabs. If you check the readme on https://github.com/onemen/TabMixPlus https://github.com/onemen/TabMixPlus, you'll find steps to patch TMP into current Firefox versions. Note that this may impact your security.
gitfan86 5y ago
Yes, it is also kind of silly to spend a lot of money on a skin in a game. But the difference is that video game companies are not claiming that their skins are revolutionizing the world.
- nemothekid 5y ago
  >But the difference is that video game companies are not claiming that their skins are revolutionizing the world. I think Epic is claiming exactly this, and to be honest, I don't think they are wrong.
SrslyJosh 5y ago
"How dare people be angry about my favorite scam when other scams exist!"
- boh 5y ago
  Seriously
- arcticbull 5y ago
  It’s literally impossible for us to try and stop a scam that’s smaller than any other scam.
aqme28 5y ago
I don't think this makes sense. Microtransaction cosmetics have value beyond just the concept of ownership. You get to show your friends in game the new skin or whatever. You can't do that with NFTs other than just showing people the image you paid for.
boh 5y ago
Gaming skins aren't assets, they're licensing/service agreements. Even if you have the option to resell, you're trading your rights not your "assets". From a purely pragmatic ownership perspective, NFTs would only matter if ownership gives the owner exclusive rights to the property. Owning a physical Picasso is always going to be more valuable than owning a unique digital copy of anything (bcs it can only be unique based on a version in a specific network).
NicoJuicy 5y ago
You're mentioning a lot of unrelated problems. Not a single one solved by NFT. I think your sentiment is phrased in the first sentence. "We are entering a crypto bull market", which is just greed. As usual.
- fivea 5y ago
  > You're mentioning a lot of unrelated problems. I agree, but I would say that the OP is not even point out multiple problems, or any problem at all. The OP just points to in-game microtransactions, and hopes that if it's possible to make them sound extremely absurd and irrational, the absurdity and irrationality of NFTs can sound less bad.
packetlost 5y ago
It's possible to think both are bad, but if we're comparing them, NFTs are exponentially worse than game items because: 1. game items don't generally imply worth will appreciate/speculation, while NFTs do 2. crypto consumes the electricity of a mid-sized country
s17n 5y ago
The differences are: 1. Most of society already agrees that paying for in game assets is stupid, so there's no need to make the argument. 2. People who buy in game assets do it because they actually want the thing they are buying, a large portion of spending on NFTs is people who are just hoping the prices will go up
hartator 5y ago
> Underground gambling rings formed around CS:GO skins. People are spending thousands of dollars on ships in Start Citizen. Most of League of Legends business model is in-game skins. In 100 years, these will bo to 0. Same for NFTs and most probably most current cryptocurrencies. The stock market will be still there.

elil17 5y ago

The difference is that video games have a way to enforce ownership. CS:GO skins are valuable because Valve doesn’t let you just upload your own skins. I can download any NFT and use it as my own profile picture.

capableweb 5y ago
> I can download any NFT and use it as my own profile picture. You cannot, unless you have a vastly different understanding of what an NFT is than what it actually is. A NFT is not a picture, it's a cryptocurrency that only has one item. You could download the data representing a NFT (it's just ascii data), but not sure what you'd get out of that.
tshaddox 5y ago
If I understand NFTs correctly, anyone can verify who owns the NFT. No one is claiming the NFT is literally just the bytes of the profile picture. The NFT is the control of the token on the blockchain. Likewise, anyone could download the bytes of a 3D model of a weapon or hat in a video game. The only difference is that Valve’s software will check the canonical source of ownership, which isn’t much different than if Twitter or any other social network writes code to verify the ownership of an NFT representing some profile picture.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  The latter only works if Twitter stops you uploading any old image. Hence trying to find some way to differentiate regular profile pictures from NFT profiles. But the latter still only works if the general population of Twitter thinks it’s cool. Otherwise you’re marking yourself out as a rube. Whereas skins and other DLC are broadly accepted in games if only from the perspective that most people don’t care what skin you use. That and most games with DLC charge a fixed rate and offer it to everyone rather than making individual items scare.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    > The latter only works if Twitter stops you uploading any old image. Sure, or if they check the images you upload (YouTube does this on a massive scale). Or if they show a checkmark on verified images. Or if they prevent uploading unverified profile images at all (presumably this is how Valve games work, so that everyone can't just download a copy of the expensive item and use it online). > But the latter still only works if the general population of Twitter thinks it’s cool. Yes, of course, but as you explain, that's no different than with video games, especially if the items are purely cosmetic.
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      I don’t think you can just snip all the context out of what I said and pretend I agree. I explain in the post you quote what the meaningful differences are.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  I believe I can take a BAYC, mint my own NFT of it, upload it and still get the check mark haha.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    Indeed, unless Twitter were to check each profile picture against some database of known images. That would be silly, of course, but precisely as silly as YouTube checking 100s of hours of video footage every minute against known copyrighted footage.
listenallyall 5y ago
Sure, and that benefits the NFT owner, by increasing attention and exposure to the NFT he/she owns. If you'd like to use an NFT I own as your profile pic, you have my express permission. I'll help you do it!
maccolgan 5y ago
That's the use for it though. If Valve hypothetically minted NFTs for each unique individual CSGO skin variation, it'd be valued and would create a secondary market free of Valve's constant rent seeking. I see that as a very legitimate use of the technology.

tomc1985 5y ago

> But for some reason the bridge too far is adults putting jpegs in their twitter profile pictures. That's not the bridge too far. It's not about the JPEG, it's about the bullshit shoehorning of 'ownership' around infinitely-copyable bits put in place by a culture that seems to care more about ownership than equality. Digital economies are a land of plenty, where nobody can own anything and bits copy themselves freely. NFTs shoehorn a scarcity economy on top of that, which suits those with no concept of the reality of the digital world. NFTs and DRM have no place in cyberspace, yet here they are. The world is a much better place without enforcement of "ownership". NFTs and DRM go against the grain of our digital reality. I can't find the link right now but I literally just read an article on here (not this one) explaining this far more eloquently than I can; it laments the death of open-source culture (openness, equality, egalitarianism) that underpins nearly everything digital.

pennaMan 5y ago
NFTs provide proof of ownership of something unique, not enforcment. You are still free to put any jpeg you want on any profile pic you want. Like you can reproduce and hang a multi million dollar painting on your wall without enforcement but that provides no proof you own the original thing. I do not get the argument that an algorithm for decentralized proof of ownership of an unique token has any moral attribution to it. If anything it enables a future where content creators can get income for their content without the ad industry (youtube, major labels, facebook etc) getting any cut. And that could lead to the erosion of IP laws all together. We are already seeing experiments with distribution of royalties implemented with NFT smart contracts of today and the tech is still in it's infancy both in implementation and applications. The reality is that good content, be it art or media, needs revenue for the content creators to produce content. Currently their options are limited to censoring themselves in the name of profit because profits are gatekeeped by the ad industry via the monopolies of google facebook and amazon. A future where digital economies are decentralized and self sufficient, where anyone can publish and make royalties via the uniqueness of holding the "original" work of content and all future developments in this space is a future I look forward to.
- arcticbull 5y ago

vernie 5y ago

Microtransactions, but they use a million times more energy. Now we're cookin'

FeepingCreature 5y ago
Hi, commenting here because there's no private messages: I saw your comment about having a browser that still supports TabMixPlus/multirow tabs. If you check the readme on https://github.com/onemen/TabMixPlus https://github.com/onemen/TabMixPlus, you'll find steps to patch TMP into current Firefox versions. Note that this may impact your security.

gitfan86 5y ago

Yes, it is also kind of silly to spend a lot of money on a skin in a game. But the difference is that video game companies are not claiming that their skins are revolutionizing the world.

nemothekid 5y ago
>But the difference is that video game companies are not claiming that their skins are revolutionizing the world. I think Epic is claiming exactly this, and to be honest, I don't think they are wrong.

SrslyJosh 5y ago

"How dare people be angry about my favorite scam when other scams exist!"

boh 5y ago
Seriously
arcticbull 5y ago
It’s literally impossible for us to try and stop a scam that’s smaller than any other scam.

aqme28 5y ago

I don't think this makes sense. Microtransaction cosmetics have value beyond just the concept of ownership. You get to show your friends in game the new skin or whatever. You can't do that with NFTs other than just showing people the image you paid for.

boh 5y ago

Gaming skins aren't assets, they're licensing/service agreements. Even if you have the option to resell, you're trading your rights not your "assets". From a purely pragmatic ownership perspective, NFTs would only matter if ownership gives the owner exclusive rights to the property. Owning a physical Picasso is always going to be more valuable than owning a unique digital copy of anything (bcs it can only be unique based on a version in a specific network).

NicoJuicy 5y ago

You're mentioning a lot of unrelated problems. Not a single one solved by NFT. I think your sentiment is phrased in the first sentence. "We are entering a crypto bull market", which is just greed. As usual.

fivea 5y ago
> You're mentioning a lot of unrelated problems. I agree, but I would say that the OP is not even point out multiple problems, or any problem at all. The OP just points to in-game microtransactions, and hopes that if it's possible to make them sound extremely absurd and irrational, the absurdity and irrationality of NFTs can sound less bad.

packetlost 5y ago

It's possible to think both are bad, but if we're comparing them, NFTs are exponentially worse than game items because: 1. game items don't generally imply worth will appreciate/speculation, while NFTs do 2. crypto consumes the electricity of a mid-sized country

s17n 5y ago

The differences are: 1. Most of society already agrees that paying for in game assets is stupid, so there's no need to make the argument. 2. People who buy in game assets do it because they actually want the thing they are buying, a large portion of spending on NFTs is people who are just hoping the prices will go up

hartator 5y ago

> Underground gambling rings formed around CS:GO skins. People are spending thousands of dollars on ships in Start Citizen. Most of League of Legends business model is in-game skins. In 100 years, these will bo to 0. Same for NFTs and most probably most current cryptocurrencies. The stock market will be still there.