8 ms·

> A lot of the reason why I detest NFTs in particular is because I detest the concept of artificial scarcity, something that has been plauging the digital world

> A lot of the reason why I detest NFTs in particular is because I detest the concept of artificial scarcity, something that has been plauging the digital world long before the invention of NFTs I agree with this, artificial scarcity is a lousy way to get anything done. The end-game of economics ought to be to eliminate scarcity, artificial or otherwise. But if the alternative to NFT's is the status quo, then you're choosing between a system where only the privileged get to set up artificial scarcity games (usually there are lawyers...) versus one where anyone can do so. It still sucks, but it sucks less. > Naturally, the exploitation of natural resources and absurd energy demands solely to enforce the value of made up internet items would be the endgame [of NFTs]. I think that the endgame is to exchange NFTs as proofs of contribution to the public good. I minted this NFT by sequestering a kilogram of carbon, by filling this pothole, by serving in a jury, that sort of thing. As it stands it's not really clear why I should accept a dollar from a stranger--for all I know, they made that dollar by making the world worse. Why should I participate in a scheme that enables them to continue doing so? But with NFT's I can look at the circumstances of its minting and decide for myself whether that's the kind of thing I want to see more of.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> But if the alternative to NFT's is the status quo, then you're choosing between a system where only the privileged get to set up artificial scarcity games (usually there are lawyers...) versus one where anyone can do so. It still sucks, but it sucks less. This doesn’t really follow. Why would NFTs be the only way to generate artificial scarcity when people have been doing it forever with one-off art, private experiences and concerts, and limited edition runs? NFTs seem like a step in the wrong direction: You still don’t have the original art or thing that the NFT supposedly represents. You just have a new blockchain entry that says “This NFT represents <thing>“ > As it stands it's not really clear why I should accept a dollar from a stranger--for all I know, they made that dollar by making the world worse. Why should I participate in a scheme that enables them to continue doing so? But with NFT's I can look at the circumstances of its minting and decide for myself whether that's the kind of thing I want to see more of. This doesn’t make any sense either. Why do you implicitly trust what people tell you about an NFT but not a dollar? There’s nothing magical about NFTs that solves the social problems you’re describing. An NFT is just a blockchain entry with associated cryptographic procedures for changing said blockchain entry. It doesn’t give you insight into the circumstances around it. You still have to take whatever people say at face value, just as you would with the dollar example. But with the NFT you have to pay a lot of money just to accept it. Money which goes to miners who are burning energy at a furious pace just to keep the NFT existing, in a system that becomes ever less efficient as more miners join. That’s probably not what people had in mind when it comes to making the world a better place.
- __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
  Without the ability to sue people who break the rules that create the artificial scarcity, how do you keep it scarce? And yeah, when it comes to NFT's for some random jpeg... That's pretty useless. But that's all that can be done with them right now because there's infrastructure available to connect the NFT with whatever supposedly valuable side-effect it's supposed to go with. That'll take time. But when it's ready, the side effects won't be some random jpeg, they'll be things that you can touch. It'll be obvious that continuing to support the people who do whatever-the-thing-is is a good idea, and that's why we'll value the associated token. > It doesn’t give you insight into the circumstances around it. You still have to take whatever people say at face value, That's the missing supporting infrastructure I'm talking about. If a bridge washes out because of a storm, and somebody repairs it and mints an NFT of the before/after photos, that's just an image. But with a supporting web of trust, complete with verifiers who inspect the bridge afterward and put "yeah that's a good job, and this is the only NFT for it" on the blockchain... now you've got something more.
  - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
    s/because there's infrastructure/because there's NO infrastructure/ # oops
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    The problem for the blockchain and by extension NFTs is that the transactions are only trustless for the things that can be known about by the chain. Which is a vanishingly small amount of information, basically the exchange of tokens. There is no way to link a token to something in the real world without bringing in trust of a third party. At which point you’re just replicating what we already have with more complexity and less protection. You can already donate to people doing good things across a whole spectrum of options and see tangible side effects. You don’t have to wait for NFTs to maybe grow infrastructure to allow this! You can literally build bridges, schools and all sorts of infrastructure for people around the globe right now!
    - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
preseinger 5y ago
> I agree with this, artificial scarcity is a lousy way to get anything done. The end-game of economics ought to be to eliminate scarcity How do you have an economy without scarcity? What are the substantial differences between artificial and natural scarcity?
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  > How do you have an economy without scarcity? It's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.
- __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
  Once you've done away with scarcity, you don't need an economy. After that it's gay luxury space communism for all. And I'd say scarcity is artificial if making more of it requires you to break somebody's rules.
  - preseinger 5y ago
    I don't understand the point you're making. I'm all for Gene Roddenbery post-scarcity space communism, but the entire crypto space is based on scarcity...
    - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
      The original comment was about the "end game" of NFT's. My point is that money has value because we choose to value it, and fungible tokens often don't give you enough information to adequately make that choice, which means that nonfungible tokens have a bigger part to play than their current form would indicate. Currently, most people don't consider whether using a given type of money is in line with their personal values because we all value food and shelter and clean water, so there's enough common ground that it's not worth splitting hairs over. But if you chart a course to a post-scarcity world, then it will take you through a time when food and shelter and clean water are no longer scarce. There will still probably be people causing problems in the world (and using money to do it), and the nonviolent way to take the wind out of those people's sails is to stop valuing their money because it's encouraging behavior that's not in line with your values. This might happen several times before the greedy learn to behave, so in such a world it might be difficult to decide which type of fungible token to use. If you end up using tokens minted by people that ultimately end up pissing off the masses, those masses might reject your money. One way to hedge against this kind of risk is to just go around doing things that you're pretty sure everybody will agree are good things. For each public good provided, mint an NFT and use it as money. Initially we'll need some way to burn stale NFT's to keep the scarcity-logic in check, but this is the road to post-scarcity. Once we're well practiced in valuing a token for its effects, rather than for its scarcity, we'll be prepared to let go of the scarcity logic entirely. Or at least that's the plan.
gfodor 5y ago
Creative effort is scarce, so the argument is about how to securitize it. It’s not artificial scarcity, it may just be a poor proxy method around the actual scarce resource.
- kody 5y ago
  Therein lies the insanity; a person can create {art, music, game asset} and nothing stops others from consuming that thing. Web3/crypto does not solve that -- it only 'proves' that one person 'owns' the created thing. Abstractly, that's cool. Concretely, who the hell cares? I got to see the jpeg and listen to the album exactly as the 'owner' of the digital asset was able to.
  - xeffingd 5y ago
    You don't think it's different to experience the art and to own the art?
    - brandonmenc 5y ago
      NFTs just force the idea of “ownership” onto things for which ownership makes zero sense. You are never going to convince more than a small number of suckers that any of this is true or worth it.
      - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
        Ownership is one way to interpret the meaning of an NFT, but that's not the only way to do it. For instance, you could use them to keep track of responsibility/permissions: "The holder of this token is the project maintainer, only they can approve pull requests". That sort of thing. Interpretation is up to the users, I'm really just talking about nonfungibility in general here.
      - gfodor 5y ago
        > You are never going to convince more than a small number of suckers that any of this is true or worth it. This is exactly the kind of thing that is said before complete implosions or complete disruptions. Time will tell! Reminder: same was said about BTC.
udbhavs 5y ago
There are some use cases like concert or event tickets where the scarcity is not artificial
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  Right but those cases are already solved in a cheaper and less complex way and have been for an extraordinarily long time.
  - serverholic 5y ago
    Wow. Imagine actually thinking this.
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      This is a pretty empty comment. Access to scarce events has been a solved problem for thousands of years the Ancient Greeks used tickets for example. NFTs don’t really add anything to this system even in the secondary market aspect. So yeah, imagine thinking this when billions of events over thousands of years have successfully negotiated the problem.
- pornel 5y ago
  Concert tickets are an absolutely pointless application of a blockchain. The concert venue is an unavoidable central authority. You don't need to melt the arctic for a fully decentralized trust-nobody system that merely manages a database of a single ultimate authority that can't be removed from the equation. This problem can be solved with a REST API and it will have the exact same amount of (de)centralization and trust.
pjc50 5y ago
> I minted this NFT by sequestering a kilogram of carbon .. while emitting another ten. > for all I know, they made that dollar by making the world worse ... with NFT's I can look at the circumstances of its minting Ah, so the opposite of financial privacy, you get to inspect how someone made their money before you accept it?
- __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
  Well no, I'd only value NFT's for sequestered carbon that were a net negative. The energy overhead need not be Bitcoin-sized. And also, I'm not proposing that we make the entire pathway auditable. You don't get to know what each user spent it on before it reached your hands, you just get to know that somewhere, at the end of the line, is the guy who minted it. And whether you value it should come down to whether you want to live in a world with more of whatever he's doing.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> But if the alternative to NFT's is the status quo, then you're choosing between a system where only the privileged get to set up artificial scarcity games (usually there are lawyers...) versus one where anyone can do so. It still sucks, but it sucks less. This doesn’t really follow. Why would NFTs be the only way to generate artificial scarcity when people have been doing it forever with one-off art, private experiences and concerts, and limited edition runs? NFTs seem like a step in the wrong direction: You still don’t have the original art or thing that the NFT supposedly represents. You just have a new blockchain entry that says “This NFT represents <thing>“ > As it stands it's not really clear why I should accept a dollar from a stranger--for all I know, they made that dollar by making the world worse. Why should I participate in a scheme that enables them to continue doing so? But with NFT's I can look at the circumstances of its minting and decide for myself whether that's the kind of thing I want to see more of. This doesn’t make any sense either. Why do you implicitly trust what people tell you about an NFT but not a dollar? There’s nothing magical about NFTs that solves the social problems you’re describing. An NFT is just a blockchain entry with associated cryptographic procedures for changing said blockchain entry. It doesn’t give you insight into the circumstances around it. You still have to take whatever people say at face value, just as you would with the dollar example. But with the NFT you have to pay a lot of money just to accept it. Money which goes to miners who are burning energy at a furious pace just to keep the NFT existing, in a system that becomes ever less efficient as more miners join. That’s probably not what people had in mind when it comes to making the world a better place.

__MatrixMan__ 5y ago
Without the ability to sue people who break the rules that create the artificial scarcity, how do you keep it scarce? And yeah, when it comes to NFT's for some random jpeg... That's pretty useless. But that's all that can be done with them right now because there's infrastructure available to connect the NFT with whatever supposedly valuable side-effect it's supposed to go with. That'll take time. But when it's ready, the side effects won't be some random jpeg, they'll be things that you can touch. It'll be obvious that continuing to support the people who do whatever-the-thing-is is a good idea, and that's why we'll value the associated token. > It doesn’t give you insight into the circumstances around it. You still have to take whatever people say at face value, That's the missing supporting infrastructure I'm talking about. If a bridge washes out because of a storm, and somebody repairs it and mints an NFT of the before/after photos, that's just an image. But with a supporting web of trust, complete with verifiers who inspect the bridge afterward and put "yeah that's a good job, and this is the only NFT for it" on the blockchain... now you've got something more.
- __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
  s/because there's infrastructure/because there's NO infrastructure/ # oops
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  The problem for the blockchain and by extension NFTs is that the transactions are only trustless for the things that can be known about by the chain. Which is a vanishingly small amount of information, basically the exchange of tokens. There is no way to link a token to something in the real world without bringing in trust of a third party. At which point you’re just replicating what we already have with more complexity and less protection. You can already donate to people doing good things across a whole spectrum of options and see tangible side effects. You don’t have to wait for NFTs to maybe grow infrastructure to allow this! You can literally build bridges, schools and all sorts of infrastructure for people around the globe right now!
  - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago

preseinger 5y ago

> I agree with this, artificial scarcity is a lousy way to get anything done. The end-game of economics ought to be to eliminate scarcity How do you have an economy without scarcity? What are the substantial differences between artificial and natural scarcity?

NoGravitas 5y ago
> How do you have an economy without scarcity? It's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.
__MatrixMan__ 5y ago
Once you've done away with scarcity, you don't need an economy. After that it's gay luxury space communism for all. And I'd say scarcity is artificial if making more of it requires you to break somebody's rules.
- preseinger 5y ago
  I don't understand the point you're making. I'm all for Gene Roddenbery post-scarcity space communism, but the entire crypto space is based on scarcity...
  - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
    The original comment was about the "end game" of NFT's. My point is that money has value because we choose to value it, and fungible tokens often don't give you enough information to adequately make that choice, which means that nonfungible tokens have a bigger part to play than their current form would indicate. Currently, most people don't consider whether using a given type of money is in line with their personal values because we all value food and shelter and clean water, so there's enough common ground that it's not worth splitting hairs over. But if you chart a course to a post-scarcity world, then it will take you through a time when food and shelter and clean water are no longer scarce. There will still probably be people causing problems in the world (and using money to do it), and the nonviolent way to take the wind out of those people's sails is to stop valuing their money because it's encouraging behavior that's not in line with your values. This might happen several times before the greedy learn to behave, so in such a world it might be difficult to decide which type of fungible token to use. If you end up using tokens minted by people that ultimately end up pissing off the masses, those masses might reject your money. One way to hedge against this kind of risk is to just go around doing things that you're pretty sure everybody will agree are good things. For each public good provided, mint an NFT and use it as money. Initially we'll need some way to burn stale NFT's to keep the scarcity-logic in check, but this is the road to post-scarcity. Once we're well practiced in valuing a token for its effects, rather than for its scarcity, we'll be prepared to let go of the scarcity logic entirely. Or at least that's the plan.

gfodor 5y ago

Creative effort is scarce, so the argument is about how to securitize it. It’s not artificial scarcity, it may just be a poor proxy method around the actual scarce resource.

kody 5y ago
Therein lies the insanity; a person can create {art, music, game asset} and nothing stops others from consuming that thing. Web3/crypto does not solve that -- it only 'proves' that one person 'owns' the created thing. Abstractly, that's cool. Concretely, who the hell cares? I got to see the jpeg and listen to the album exactly as the 'owner' of the digital asset was able to.
- xeffingd 5y ago
  You don't think it's different to experience the art and to own the art?
  - brandonmenc 5y ago
    NFTs just force the idea of “ownership” onto things for which ownership makes zero sense. You are never going to convince more than a small number of suckers that any of this is true or worth it.
    - __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
      Ownership is one way to interpret the meaning of an NFT, but that's not the only way to do it. For instance, you could use them to keep track of responsibility/permissions: "The holder of this token is the project maintainer, only they can approve pull requests". That sort of thing. Interpretation is up to the users, I'm really just talking about nonfungibility in general here.
    - gfodor 5y ago
      > You are never going to convince more than a small number of suckers that any of this is true or worth it. This is exactly the kind of thing that is said before complete implosions or complete disruptions. Time will tell! Reminder: same was said about BTC.

udbhavs 5y ago

There are some use cases like concert or event tickets where the scarcity is not artificial

meheleventyone 5y ago
Right but those cases are already solved in a cheaper and less complex way and have been for an extraordinarily long time.
- serverholic 5y ago
  Wow. Imagine actually thinking this.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    This is a pretty empty comment. Access to scarce events has been a solved problem for thousands of years the Ancient Greeks used tickets for example. NFTs don’t really add anything to this system even in the secondary market aspect. So yeah, imagine thinking this when billions of events over thousands of years have successfully negotiated the problem.
pornel 5y ago
Concert tickets are an absolutely pointless application of a blockchain. The concert venue is an unavoidable central authority. You don't need to melt the arctic for a fully decentralized trust-nobody system that merely manages a database of a single ultimate authority that can't be removed from the equation. This problem can be solved with a REST API and it will have the exact same amount of (de)centralization and trust.

pjc50 5y ago

> I minted this NFT by sequestering a kilogram of carbon .. while emitting another ten. > for all I know, they made that dollar by making the world worse ... with NFT's I can look at the circumstances of its minting Ah, so the opposite of financial privacy, you get to inspect how someone made their money before you accept it?

__MatrixMan__ 5y ago
Well no, I'd only value NFT's for sequestered carbon that were a net negative. The energy overhead need not be Bitcoin-sized. And also, I'm not proposing that we make the entire pathway auditable. You don't get to know what each user spent it on before it reached your hands, you just get to know that somewhere, at the end of the line, is the guy who minted it. And whether you value it should come down to whether you want to live in a world with more of whatever he's doing.