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What I don't understand is the focus on media NFTs. On both sides. To me, it's obvious that owning an image or a song doesn't give you any advantage over just

by k__ 5y ago

What I don't understand is the focus on media NFTs. On both sides. To me, it's obvious that owning an image or a song doesn't give you any advantage over just "right clicking" it. I can look at it, the owner can look at it, that's basically what you can do with most media. But there is so much more that can be done with NFTs. For some thing, ownership actually gives you an advantage. I own my drivers licence and my bachelor degree. Other people can look at them too, like I can, but looking at them is not the actual value of them.

fwip 5y ago
You can't sell the advantages that your degree or license confer to anyone else. There's no reason for those to be an NFT.
- k__ 5y ago
  While I understand, that this is what the majority of NFT proponents find most valuable, I don't think being able to sell them is a requirement.
  - fwip 5y ago
    Then you gain approximately nothing over the DMV maintaining a database of licenses, like they do now.
nhooyr 5y ago
What advantage do you get from NFTs?
treeman79 5y ago
My opinion, NFT is mostly a scam for the next round of investors. How long it will last, I have no idea. But it’s not sustainable. Just my opinion, feel feel to roast me.
- k__ 5y ago
  No roast, I think most of that stuff is crap. But, I also think, the rest that is left when the bubble pops could be an improvement over the status quo.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Most people peddling it, including all the influencers and celebrities, are only in it as a get-rich-quick scheme with the small possibility of it gaining in value over time and paying dividends to the original artist every time the art is traded. But it's not bad technology, it works well for what it says - tracking a specific bitstream's history of sale so other technology can leverage said history to verify ownership.
labster 5y ago
In Russia, you own bachelors degree. In Soviet America, bachelors degree loans own you.
- noah_buddy 5y ago
  A bachelor degree loaning me out seems like some sort of hyper capitalist dystopia.
  - treeman79 5y ago
    Nothing capitalistic about student loans. Remove government loan guarantees and cost of college will drop drastically.
  - shagie 5y ago
    There's a bit of that in The Unincorporated Man (which at times reads more like an economics paper with a plot than sci-fi). At birth, you're incorporated. Instead of getting taxed, the state gets some portion of your shares as do your parents and you. The majority shareholders can make some important decisions. Additionally, if you want to go to college, you sell some shares of you that you own to the college. That the book won the 2010 Prometheus Award from the Libertarian Futurist Society and a review of it is titled Anti-Corporate Libertarian Futurism in "The Unincorporated Man" ( https://gizmodo.com/anti-corporate-libertarian-futurism-in-the-unincorpora-5179986 https://gizmodo.com/anti-corporate-libertarian-futurism-in-t... )
indigochill 5y ago
> But there is so much more that can be done with NFTs. For some thing, ownership actually gives you an advantage. I have an unwritten blog post about what "ownership" means in the digital realm, but the gist is that ownership is control. This is complicated by laws imposing meatspace-minded artificial scarcity, mainly by forbidding the duplication and/or reverse-engineering of certain bytes on your own hard drive (programs which have restrictive licenses). So NFTs have nothing at all to do with ownership because they don't touch those dynamics (at least not in a way meaningful to the end user). Even an NFT that granted you certain privileges would have those privileges enforced by some external system, so you're again only borrowing the authority from someone else so it's really they who own it and you're only buying a license to use it. Open source software, on the other hand, is about ownership because the license is granted to users to assume full control of what they possess with no third-party arbitration.
- k__ 5y ago
  Sometimes the entity you "own" is just digitally signed content. You can certainly make a perfect copy from it, because it's a digital good, but the copy gives you nothing.
celdon25 5y ago
> But there is so much more that can be done with NFTs. For some thing, ownership actually gives you an advantage. You mean like this? https://stampery.com/ https://stampery.com/

by k__ 5y ago

fwip 5y ago

You can't sell the advantages that your degree or license confer to anyone else. There's no reason for those to be an NFT.

k__ 5y ago
While I understand, that this is what the majority of NFT proponents find most valuable, I don't think being able to sell them is a requirement.
- fwip 5y ago
  Then you gain approximately nothing over the DMV maintaining a database of licenses, like they do now.

nhooyr 5y ago

What advantage do you get from NFTs?

treeman79 5y ago

My opinion, NFT is mostly a scam for the next round of investors. How long it will last, I have no idea. But it’s not sustainable. Just my opinion, feel feel to roast me.

k__ 5y ago
No roast, I think most of that stuff is crap. But, I also think, the rest that is left when the bubble pops could be an improvement over the status quo.
judge2020 5y ago
Most people peddling it, including all the influencers and celebrities, are only in it as a get-rich-quick scheme with the small possibility of it gaining in value over time and paying dividends to the original artist every time the art is traded. But it's not bad technology, it works well for what it says - tracking a specific bitstream's history of sale so other technology can leverage said history to verify ownership.

labster 5y ago

In Russia, you own bachelors degree. In Soviet America, bachelors degree loans own you.

noah_buddy 5y ago
A bachelor degree loaning me out seems like some sort of hyper capitalist dystopia.
- treeman79 5y ago
  Nothing capitalistic about student loans. Remove government loan guarantees and cost of college will drop drastically.
- shagie 5y ago
  There's a bit of that in The Unincorporated Man (which at times reads more like an economics paper with a plot than sci-fi). At birth, you're incorporated. Instead of getting taxed, the state gets some portion of your shares as do your parents and you. The majority shareholders can make some important decisions. Additionally, if you want to go to college, you sell some shares of you that you own to the college. That the book won the 2010 Prometheus Award from the Libertarian Futurist Society and a review of it is titled Anti-Corporate Libertarian Futurism in "The Unincorporated Man" ( https://gizmodo.com/anti-corporate-libertarian-futurism-in-the-unincorpora-5179986 https://gizmodo.com/anti-corporate-libertarian-futurism-in-t... )

indigochill 5y ago

> But there is so much more that can be done with NFTs. For some thing, ownership actually gives you an advantage. I have an unwritten blog post about what "ownership" means in the digital realm, but the gist is that ownership is control. This is complicated by laws imposing meatspace-minded artificial scarcity, mainly by forbidding the duplication and/or reverse-engineering of certain bytes on your own hard drive (programs which have restrictive licenses). So NFTs have nothing at all to do with ownership because they don't touch those dynamics (at least not in a way meaningful to the end user). Even an NFT that granted you certain privileges would have those privileges enforced by some external system, so you're again only borrowing the authority from someone else so it's really they who own it and you're only buying a license to use it. Open source software, on the other hand, is about ownership because the license is granted to users to assume full control of what they possess with no third-party arbitration.

k__ 5y ago
Sometimes the entity you "own" is just digitally signed content. You can certainly make a perfect copy from it, because it's a digital good, but the copy gives you nothing.

celdon25 5y ago

> But there is so much more that can be done with NFTs. For some thing, ownership actually gives you an advantage. You mean like this? https://stampery.com/ https://stampery.com/