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Are there NFT plans that make sense? I'm sorry if I'm being too cynical for the general quality of this forum, but all I see regarding NFTs look like get rich q

Are there NFT plans that make sense? I'm sorry if I'm being too cynical for the general quality of this forum, but all I see regarding NFTs look like get rich quick schemes, so I'm not putting a cent in that. Am I losing the opportunity of a lifetime?

speedgoose 5y ago
> Am I losing the opportunity of a lifetime? If you feel like participating in a large scam, perhaps. Personally I would feel bad and I rather not touch this.
- throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
  If you don't want to participate in the scam aspect, just don't resell. Or make sure someone you're selling to is comfortable with the value going to 0 (and wants artist to make any smart contract royalties). You can still use it as a way to invest in artists.
  - speedgoose 5y ago
    When you say "invest in artists", do you mean you want to support artists or you want to exploit artists in the hope of making profits ?
    - kobasa 5y ago
      Why is absolute braindead comments like this still tolerated on here. I mean you'd hope that at some point the people who missed out on one of the biggest investment and technological opportunities of our time would just suck it up and either admit they were wrong or quietly move on with their lives but this place is just filled with angry cope comments like this that seek to vilify participants in a new space without even having a moderate understanding of what they're talking about. Maybe just maybe past all the evil scams and get rich quick schemes out there (which is present in any nascent industry), there are some things and people who are interested in this space and aspects of it that don't amount to eXpLoItaTioN. And just to actually touch on this specific aspect of artists and being exploited, it's a laughable suggestion to mention this in this context when NFTs are one of the first times in recent history when artists can actually take back control from being exploited and unable to provide for themselves without succumbing to essentially giving up their soul - to unlocking their creative freedom and earning potential like we've never seen before.
      - speedgoose 5y ago
        I don't know, insulting others with rhetorical questions shouldn't be tolerated. I didn't read the rest of your comment.
        cwkoss 5y ago
        You seem proud of not reading it... That's the attitude I don't like seeing on HN. Smug and lacking intellectual curiosity
        speedgoose 5y ago
        Not listening to insulting people is not lack of intellectual curiosity.
300bps 5y ago
Are there NFT plans that make sense? The tax fraud schemes make sense for now. Party A makes 10 NFTs and sells 1 to Party B for $10,000. Party B makes 10 NFTs and sells 1 to Party A for $10,000. They both then donate their remaining NFTs to a charity and take a $90,000 tax write-off each. Will work until the IRS is able to hire the additional 80,000 enforcement agents they’ve asked for.
- lmkg 5y ago
  It has been pointed out that NFTs have actually been around for a few years, but their rise in popularity coincides with the IRS tightening some rules about using artwork for tax write-offs.
  - 300bps 5y ago
    Tightening rules does nothing if they aren’t enforced. Otherwise why did the IRS pay out $30MM in refunds for “Slavery Credits” that had no basis in law? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-pays-30m-in-slavery-credits/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-pays-30m-in-slavery-credits... There are literally thousands of examples of things like this.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- mminer237 5y ago
  Are charities really going to provide receipts that their donated NF-what?s are worth $180,000? Is the market liquid enough for them to resell them? If it is, then it's no different than if A & B resold them and donated the money. If not, why would charities go along with it? It's easy to find a small museum to donate small amounts of artwork to at an inflated value. But what charity wants NFTs?
  - turkishmonky 5y ago
    With the money at stake, it would be pretty easy for both parties to tangentially set up a 501c3 whose purpose is to display gifted NFTs to the public
SpaceManNabs 5y ago
The axie infinity model looks alright. There is verifiable work in breeding the axies. Too bad the game is boring; the future roadmap is stale compared to upcoming competitors; and the dev team has become deluded from their success derived from first to market. I can see the next Pokemon-like NFT game do well.
- smt88 5y ago
  > The axie infinity model looks alright. There is verifiable work in breeding the axies. Still doesn't seem to require a blockchain. Axie Infinity decides whether assets (on-chain or not) are compatible with their game. That means the control over (and value of) the assets are centralized with the game devs anyway.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Does it really make any sense though? Why is a decentralized ledger of any value to them?
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    The secondary market and they don’t have to touch any of the regulations around handling real money if they were to run this themselves. F2P games with their own virtual currencies don’t usually let players cash out for the latter reason.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      What value is the secondary market to them? Or allowing their players to "cash out"?
      - meheleventyone 5y ago
        They can take a cut of every secondary market transaction and players need to be able to cash out for a secondary market to make sense. The main reason for not doing that centrally is it becomes an attractive means of money laundering which Valve found out with their skins. Second Life also had this problem and IIRC a third party company handles all their game related banking business as a result. Note I’m not saying this is a good thing and I think all the entities involved should have the same regulatory responsibility but you can see the greasy cogs whirring in some executives brain.
gpm 5y ago
> Are there NFT plans that make sense? I mean, it seems like an way for artists to collect donations, and to distribute the donations so that less popular artists get a larger share, because even the most popular artists only have 1 "you own the NFT representing the 'original' version of this piece" to sell per piece of artwork. Unsurprisingly, all the scammers and get-rich-quick people are making a lot more noise.
neom 5y ago
This is the closest I've seen to a product that is intellectually honest in the space: https://islands.xyz/ https://islands.xyz/ & https://blockblock.io/ https://blockblock.io/
ineptech 5y ago
The only non-speculation and non-dumb use case for NFTs I know of is identities for distributed or federated apps. An NFT registry is just a list of people who own numbers, and they get made fun of because a) owning a number isn't very useful, and b) anyone who wants to own the same number can just make a new list. But identities are exceptions: a) a username for a specific app is one of the few cases where it is useful to own a number, and b) because a specific app will only look at a specific list, i.e. it's reasonable and expected that I might own the 'ineptech' username on HN and someone else might own it on some other platform. So, if you were going to make some sort of distributed social app, e.g. a twitter clone, it would make sense to use an NFT-like registry to track ownership of the handles. I believe this is basically how urbit identity ownership works, although it was implemented before the NFT craze.
- floatboth 5y ago
  Namecoin was released in 2011 — way before the NFT craze. This is indeed the most attractive reason for a globally distributed database of "valuable things", but proof-of-whatever powered "trustless" systems (cryptocurrencies) are still terrible. There was a really good experimental system with articulated trust: https://github.com/andres-erbsen/dename https://github.com/andres-erbsen/dename
- pornel 5y ago
  I guess that is close to making sense, but as usual there are simpler alternatives. For example, the DNS. It already is a distributed global registry of reserved names that can be traded. The difference is more in political outlook than technical capability. There could be simpler solutions even without a big bad central authority. Nodes participating in the federated network could build consensus among themselves (after all, each node has to voluntarily honor the database, whether that database is on the blockchain or not). The identity ownership can be controlled via knowledge of the private key. Just like you can currently sell your Twitter or Insta username by selling the password.
jedberg 5y ago
I own some NFTs. They represent a partial interest in an LLC that owns real property (single family homes) in the United States. The properties earn rental income, which flows to a management company, which takes their cut and sends the rest to the LLC, which then puts the rent into crypto which flows to me via smart contract daily. I can take my rent money out any time I want or I can sell my NFT any time I want based on the current value of the house (which I think is just pulled from Zillow or Redfin?). It's an experiment for sure, but the nice thing is that the tokens are only $50 each initially (they base the total number of tokens on the purchase price of the house so that they come out to $50 each) so it's low risk. You can get the tokens too at https://lofty.ai https://lofty.ai (I have no relation to them other than being a customer, but they are a YC company).
- marban 5y ago
  Any Gas fees whatsoever that would eat up profits?
  - jedberg 5y ago
    The company that manages the NFTs reimburses them for right now.
    - shock-value 5y ago
      Thus negating > but you lose a lot of money on management fees that way. (It's just not you paying the fees at this point in time.)
      - jedberg 5y ago
        I'm not sure how that follows? Lofty.ai is using their investor money to pay the fees. I think they are counting on the fees being negligible at scale.
        shock-value 5y ago
        Maybe I'm misunderstanding but don't the fees scale (basically linearly) with the number of transactions? It seems like you are suggesting that this NFT based approach is superior at least in part because money can be invested/withdrawn more frequently/flexibly.
serverholic 5y ago
I just bought an ENS domain name. As a result I got an NFT sent to my account that represents the ownership of my domain. I can now keep it, trade it, exchange it, give it away, etc. That's what NFTs are for.
- rideontime 5y ago
  How does ENS plan on getting anybody but crypto enthusiasts to install the browser plugins that legitimize their alternative DNS?
  - serverholic 5y ago
    Well Cloudflare has a proxy service called eth.link. Basically take any ens domain and add ".link" to the end of it and it'll proxy to the ens domain. But other than that, you don't have to use it if you don't want to.

speedgoose 5y ago

> Am I losing the opportunity of a lifetime? If you feel like participating in a large scam, perhaps. Personally I would feel bad and I rather not touch this.

throw_nbvc1234 5y ago
If you don't want to participate in the scam aspect, just don't resell. Or make sure someone you're selling to is comfortable with the value going to 0 (and wants artist to make any smart contract royalties). You can still use it as a way to invest in artists.
- speedgoose 5y ago
  When you say "invest in artists", do you mean you want to support artists or you want to exploit artists in the hope of making profits ?
  - kobasa 5y ago
    Why is absolute braindead comments like this still tolerated on here. I mean you'd hope that at some point the people who missed out on one of the biggest investment and technological opportunities of our time would just suck it up and either admit they were wrong or quietly move on with their lives but this place is just filled with angry cope comments like this that seek to vilify participants in a new space without even having a moderate understanding of what they're talking about. Maybe just maybe past all the evil scams and get rich quick schemes out there (which is present in any nascent industry), there are some things and people who are interested in this space and aspects of it that don't amount to eXpLoItaTioN. And just to actually touch on this specific aspect of artists and being exploited, it's a laughable suggestion to mention this in this context when NFTs are one of the first times in recent history when artists can actually take back control from being exploited and unable to provide for themselves without succumbing to essentially giving up their soul - to unlocking their creative freedom and earning potential like we've never seen before.
    - speedgoose 5y ago
      I don't know, insulting others with rhetorical questions shouldn't be tolerated. I didn't read the rest of your comment.
      - cwkoss 5y ago
        You seem proud of not reading it... That's the attitude I don't like seeing on HN. Smug and lacking intellectual curiosity
        speedgoose 5y ago
        Not listening to insulting people is not lack of intellectual curiosity.

300bps 5y ago

Are there NFT plans that make sense? The tax fraud schemes make sense for now. Party A makes 10 NFTs and sells 1 to Party B for $10,000. Party B makes 10 NFTs and sells 1 to Party A for $10,000. They both then donate their remaining NFTs to a charity and take a $90,000 tax write-off each. Will work until the IRS is able to hire the additional 80,000 enforcement agents they’ve asked for.

lmkg 5y ago
It has been pointed out that NFTs have actually been around for a few years, but their rise in popularity coincides with the IRS tightening some rules about using artwork for tax write-offs.
- 300bps 5y ago
  Tightening rules does nothing if they aren’t enforced. Otherwise why did the IRS pay out $30MM in refunds for “Slavery Credits” that had no basis in law? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-pays-30m-in-slavery-credits/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-pays-30m-in-slavery-credits... There are literally thousands of examples of things like this.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
mminer237 5y ago
Are charities really going to provide receipts that their donated NF-what?s are worth $180,000? Is the market liquid enough for them to resell them? If it is, then it's no different than if A & B resold them and donated the money. If not, why would charities go along with it? It's easy to find a small museum to donate small amounts of artwork to at an inflated value. But what charity wants NFTs?
- turkishmonky 5y ago
  With the money at stake, it would be pretty easy for both parties to tangentially set up a 501c3 whose purpose is to display gifted NFTs to the public

SpaceManNabs 5y ago

The axie infinity model looks alright. There is verifiable work in breeding the axies. Too bad the game is boring; the future roadmap is stale compared to upcoming competitors; and the dev team has become deluded from their success derived from first to market. I can see the next Pokemon-like NFT game do well.

smt88 5y ago
> The axie infinity model looks alright. There is verifiable work in breeding the axies. Still doesn't seem to require a blockchain. Axie Infinity decides whether assets (on-chain or not) are compatible with their game. That means the control over (and value of) the assets are centralized with the game devs anyway.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Does it really make any sense though? Why is a decentralized ledger of any value to them?
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  The secondary market and they don’t have to touch any of the regulations around handling real money if they were to run this themselves. F2P games with their own virtual currencies don’t usually let players cash out for the latter reason.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    What value is the secondary market to them? Or allowing their players to "cash out"?
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      They can take a cut of every secondary market transaction and players need to be able to cash out for a secondary market to make sense. The main reason for not doing that centrally is it becomes an attractive means of money laundering which Valve found out with their skins. Second Life also had this problem and IIRC a third party company handles all their game related banking business as a result. Note I’m not saying this is a good thing and I think all the entities involved should have the same regulatory responsibility but you can see the greasy cogs whirring in some executives brain.

gpm 5y ago

> Are there NFT plans that make sense? I mean, it seems like an way for artists to collect donations, and to distribute the donations so that less popular artists get a larger share, because even the most popular artists only have 1 "you own the NFT representing the 'original' version of this piece" to sell per piece of artwork. Unsurprisingly, all the scammers and get-rich-quick people are making a lot more noise.

neom 5y ago

This is the closest I've seen to a product that is intellectually honest in the space: https://islands.xyz/ https://islands.xyz/ & https://blockblock.io/ https://blockblock.io/

ineptech 5y ago

The only non-speculation and non-dumb use case for NFTs I know of is identities for distributed or federated apps. An NFT registry is just a list of people who own numbers, and they get made fun of because a) owning a number isn't very useful, and b) anyone who wants to own the same number can just make a new list. But identities are exceptions: a) a username for a specific app is one of the few cases where it is useful to own a number, and b) because a specific app will only look at a specific list, i.e. it's reasonable and expected that I might own the 'ineptech' username on HN and someone else might own it on some other platform. So, if you were going to make some sort of distributed social app, e.g. a twitter clone, it would make sense to use an NFT-like registry to track ownership of the handles. I believe this is basically how urbit identity ownership works, although it was implemented before the NFT craze.

floatboth 5y ago
Namecoin was released in 2011 — way before the NFT craze. This is indeed the most attractive reason for a globally distributed database of "valuable things", but proof-of-whatever powered "trustless" systems (cryptocurrencies) are still terrible. There was a really good experimental system with articulated trust: https://github.com/andres-erbsen/dename https://github.com/andres-erbsen/dename
pornel 5y ago
I guess that is close to making sense, but as usual there are simpler alternatives. For example, the DNS. It already is a distributed global registry of reserved names that can be traded. The difference is more in political outlook than technical capability. There could be simpler solutions even without a big bad central authority. Nodes participating in the federated network could build consensus among themselves (after all, each node has to voluntarily honor the database, whether that database is on the blockchain or not). The identity ownership can be controlled via knowledge of the private key. Just like you can currently sell your Twitter or Insta username by selling the password.

jedberg 5y ago

I own some NFTs. They represent a partial interest in an LLC that owns real property (single family homes) in the United States. The properties earn rental income, which flows to a management company, which takes their cut and sends the rest to the LLC, which then puts the rent into crypto which flows to me via smart contract daily. I can take my rent money out any time I want or I can sell my NFT any time I want based on the current value of the house (which I think is just pulled from Zillow or Redfin?). It's an experiment for sure, but the nice thing is that the tokens are only $50 each initially (they base the total number of tokens on the purchase price of the house so that they come out to $50 each) so it's low risk. You can get the tokens too at https://lofty.ai https://lofty.ai (I have no relation to them other than being a customer, but they are a YC company).

marban 5y ago
Any Gas fees whatsoever that would eat up profits?
- jedberg 5y ago
  The company that manages the NFTs reimburses them for right now.
  - shock-value 5y ago
    Thus negating > but you lose a lot of money on management fees that way. (It's just not you paying the fees at this point in time.)
    - jedberg 5y ago
      I'm not sure how that follows? Lofty.ai is using their investor money to pay the fees. I think they are counting on the fees being negligible at scale.
      - shock-value 5y ago
        Maybe I'm misunderstanding but don't the fees scale (basically linearly) with the number of transactions? It seems like you are suggesting that this NFT based approach is superior at least in part because money can be invested/withdrawn more frequently/flexibly.

serverholic 5y ago

I just bought an ENS domain name. As a result I got an NFT sent to my account that represents the ownership of my domain. I can now keep it, trade it, exchange it, give it away, etc. That's what NFTs are for.

rideontime 5y ago
How does ENS plan on getting anybody but crypto enthusiasts to install the browser plugins that legitimize their alternative DNS?
- serverholic 5y ago
  Well Cloudflare has a proxy service called eth.link. Basically take any ens domain and add ".link" to the end of it and it'll proxy to the ens domain. But other than that, you don't have to use it if you don't want to.