5 ms·

Would you like to participate in an alternative cultural norm of ownership of a bridge in Brooklyn?

by evan_ 5y ago

gfodor 5y ago
Depends on the context. For example if it meant I was the only one able to spawn the bridge in Meta’s Horizon, maybe? You just don’t know what’s happening.
- zepto 5y ago
  > You just don’t know what’s happening. You mean NFTs as an in-game currency for Facebook’s VR? Yes, that’s a reasonable account of what they are good for.
- verdverm 5y ago
  What would stop someone from spawning a slightly modified (imperceptible to human eye) Brooklyn Bridge? The idea of artificial scarcity seems central to NFT, but it is unclear if this is really a moat or desirable. Does it really convey exclusivity over a "unique" set of bits?
  - gfodor 5y ago
    No, an NFT is not a pair but a tuple. The third part of the tuple is the third party who issued the NFT. In the case of the Brooklyn Bridge, the NFTs I expect that would confer social status in the metaverse regarding the bridge would be ones issued by the City of New York or perhaps the descendants of the original architects. This will probably actually happen in some form but it will be a while. If you’re talking about a specific work of art depicting the bridge, the only NFT of value is the one sanctioned by the original artist. That NFT is scarce. Too many people do not understand what an NFT represents and what it’s short and longer term expected conferred benefits are, and are hung up on trying to create analogies to existing forms of ownership like physical property rights or copyright.
    - zepto 5y ago
      It’s reasonable to assert that NFT’s are about conferring social status in the metaverse. I.e. they are in-game currency. People are ‘hung up’ on analogies to physical ownership, because proponents of NFT’s keep claiming they are like deeds of ownership, which is what the linked article strongly asserted before it was amended. If NFT advocates stopped calling it ownership, I don’t think anyone would be hung up about it.
      - gfodor 5y ago
        I agree a lot is lost in the noise due to presumption about what the other side means when they’re using “ownership.”
        zepto 5y ago
        This isn’t correct. People outside the ‘community’ are using a long established meaning. People within the community are using a meaning that has essentially none of the attributes of the conventional definition while claiming that the meaning is the same. This isn’t a question of two sides disagreeing over meanings. It’s a question of a deceptive use of a very well established pre-existing term.
        gfodor 5y ago
        No, there are already a variety of uses of the term ownership. For example, copyright ownership, license ownership, or physical ownership. There isn’t a single definition, and the definitions of ownership have always been contextual and evolve based on things like norms and technological changes. The ownership of NFTs is the ability to assert you control the keys of a wallet pointing to a tuple that pairs, for example, a URL to a smart contract. Both of these elements in the tuple then confer certain things by proxy: the URL a proxy to the work, and the smart contract a proxy to an authority. Once that linkage is accepted by a third party, then it serves as a form of semantic ownership with contextual benefits (there are several contemporary realized and theoretical future ones.)
- evan_ 5y ago
  For $6,500 USD I will create a GitHub repo called “A Bridge in Brooklyn” containing your name in the readme. You may consider the commit ID your non-fungible token. If you wish to sell it I will add another commit with the new owner’s name after I receive a $500 “gas fee”. I will have my kid draw a picture of a bridge and send you a JPG of it; you can put that on Meta Horizon as many times as you want. Naturally like all NFT wallets I fully reserve the right to delete the repo at any time for any reason with no warning. Lmk what you think and I’ll get you my Venmo.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    No, that doesn’t meet my requirement above. Nothing does, because Meta doesn’t impose the constraint I am talking about: it was a hypothetical example to try to convey to you the dynamics going on regarding NFTs that you seem to think you fully understand.
    - Volundr 5y ago
      Isn't that the point though? Every time I try to figure out the value of this thing called an "NFT" I can find plenty of hypotheticals, but I've yet to encounter anything concrete. Using your example you want to be the only one who can use this "thing" in Meta Horizon. Cool, but that's something Meta Horizon has to implement, and they don't need some weird blockchain thingy to do it. If someone buys an NFT what good is it today, or what problem can it solve in future that can't more simply be solved by something that already exists?
      - gfodor 5y ago
        I used meta because I assumed you’d be aware of what I was referring to instead of cryptovoxels, sommium space, or webaverse. If you grant that the meta example would be useful if it exists, then we’d just be haggling over if eg cryptovoxels has enough analogous utility to pull it into the set of things you consider worthy.
        Volundr 5y ago

Would you like to participate in an alternative cultural norm of ownership of a bridge in Brooklyn?

by evan_ 5y ago

Would you like to participate in an alternative cultural norm of ownership of a bridge in Brooklyn?

Depends on the context. For example if it meant I was the only one able to spawn the bridge in Meta’s Horizon, maybe? You just don’t know what’s happening.

zepto 5y ago
> You just don’t know what’s happening. You mean NFTs as an in-game currency for Facebook’s VR? Yes, that’s a reasonable account of what they are good for.
verdverm 5y ago
What would stop someone from spawning a slightly modified (imperceptible to human eye) Brooklyn Bridge? The idea of artificial scarcity seems central to NFT, but it is unclear if this is really a moat or desirable. Does it really convey exclusivity over a "unique" set of bits?
- gfodor 5y ago
  No, an NFT is not a pair but a tuple. The third part of the tuple is the third party who issued the NFT. In the case of the Brooklyn Bridge, the NFTs I expect that would confer social status in the metaverse regarding the bridge would be ones issued by the City of New York or perhaps the descendants of the original architects. This will probably actually happen in some form but it will be a while. If you’re talking about a specific work of art depicting the bridge, the only NFT of value is the one sanctioned by the original artist. That NFT is scarce. Too many people do not understand what an NFT represents and what it’s short and longer term expected conferred benefits are, and are hung up on trying to create analogies to existing forms of ownership like physical property rights or copyright.
  - zepto 5y ago
    It’s reasonable to assert that NFT’s are about conferring social status in the metaverse. I.e. they are in-game currency. People are ‘hung up’ on analogies to physical ownership, because proponents of NFT’s keep claiming they are like deeds of ownership, which is what the linked article strongly asserted before it was amended. If NFT advocates stopped calling it ownership, I don’t think anyone would be hung up about it.
    - gfodor 5y ago
      I agree a lot is lost in the noise due to presumption about what the other side means when they’re using “ownership.”
      - zepto 5y ago
        This isn’t correct. People outside the ‘community’ are using a long established meaning. People within the community are using a meaning that has essentially none of the attributes of the conventional definition while claiming that the meaning is the same. This isn’t a question of two sides disagreeing over meanings. It’s a question of a deceptive use of a very well established pre-existing term.
        gfodor 5y ago
        No, there are already a variety of uses of the term ownership. For example, copyright ownership, license ownership, or physical ownership. There isn’t a single definition, and the definitions of ownership have always been contextual and evolve based on things like norms and technological changes. The ownership of NFTs is the ability to assert you control the keys of a wallet pointing to a tuple that pairs, for example, a URL to a smart contract. Both of these elements in the tuple then confer certain things by proxy: the URL a proxy to the work, and the smart contract a proxy to an authority. Once that linkage is accepted by a third party, then it serves as a form of semantic ownership with contextual benefits (there are several contemporary realized and theoretical future ones.)
evan_ 5y ago
For $6,500 USD I will create a GitHub repo called “A Bridge in Brooklyn” containing your name in the readme. You may consider the commit ID your non-fungible token. If you wish to sell it I will add another commit with the new owner’s name after I receive a $500 “gas fee”. I will have my kid draw a picture of a bridge and send you a JPG of it; you can put that on Meta Horizon as many times as you want. Naturally like all NFT wallets I fully reserve the right to delete the repo at any time for any reason with no warning. Lmk what you think and I’ll get you my Venmo.
- gfodor 5y ago
  No, that doesn’t meet my requirement above. Nothing does, because Meta doesn’t impose the constraint I am talking about: it was a hypothetical example to try to convey to you the dynamics going on regarding NFTs that you seem to think you fully understand.
  - Volundr 5y ago
    Isn't that the point though? Every time I try to figure out the value of this thing called an "NFT" I can find plenty of hypotheticals, but I've yet to encounter anything concrete. Using your example you want to be the only one who can use this "thing" in Meta Horizon. Cool, but that's something Meta Horizon has to implement, and they don't need some weird blockchain thingy to do it. If someone buys an NFT what good is it today, or what problem can it solve in future that can't more simply be solved by something that already exists?
    - gfodor 5y ago
      I used meta because I assumed you’d be aware of what I was referring to instead of cryptovoxels, sommium space, or webaverse. If you grant that the meta example would be useful if it exists, then we’d just be haggling over if eg cryptovoxels has enough analogous utility to pull it into the set of things you consider worthy.
      - Volundr 5y ago