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The article is a symptom of arrogance of a certain technical crowd which has fully invested themselves into the "nothing new logic", simply refuses to consider

The article is a symptom of arrogance of a certain technical crowd which has fully invested themselves into the "nothing new logic", simply refuses to consider that they might be missing something, and as a result ends up totally off-field. The proposed scheme does not track ownership. The trick is to proof that I /no longer/ own a token. It's about having a ledger of ownership. The only thing the blockchain does is provide shared state, a ledger. To rip out the one thing that matters in this, then claim you have the same thing, takes se kind of hubris.

shagie 5y ago
The reoccurring question is "how do you map the real world and its laws back into this?" If I've got a photograph that I took, how do I sell the right to print a copy of it? How do I make sure that only one copy of it gets printed? Alternatively, if I sell a NFT, what does that mean in the world of copyrights and intellectual property that can be enforced by the courts? Until that linkage from the real world to the blockchain is made, much of this "mining and selling NFTs" reminds me of my days of playing on MUDs and creating objects to populate a game with that have since lost every iota of value since that MUD does not exist anymore. Even then, people did tricks and exploits to get it so that they'd have more people in the room that the other clan did so that they gained control of the artifact (yes, we had 51% attacks back then too). And there's my skepticism on this all. Until I can see the block chain data moving back into the real world, it's no more interesting than another news story on a game site about how many titans were made or destroyed in EvE. Sure, people spent real money to create in game assets - but it doesn't mean anything more outside of the game except as a headline to a journalist. Let's see that venue that sells seats at concerts as NFTs that can be transfered as a competitor to Ticketmaster (I'm honestly interested in the permeant public ledger of everyone attends political rallies). Lets see the season tickets get managed by a NFT ( https://zonecoverage.com/2021/packers/the-insanity-of-the-packers-season-ticket-waitlist/ https://zonecoverage.com/2021/packers/the-insanity-of-the-pa... ). Until then, all I see are tulips, beanie babies, and EvE titans. But at least the tulips grow in my garden, and my niece and nephew played with some old beanie babies and people trading EvE titans know exactly what they're trading.
- miracle2k 5y ago
  You can use a Blockchain ledger to track real world assets but then the critics do make the very valid point that enforcement will depend on a centralized third party. The blockchain is then not the authoritative record of ownership - the real world is. Maybe an issuer might still find it useful to hook into an existing standardized open financial ledger like Ethereum, but in the end, the issuer will decide who can attend the venue, not the blockchain. The reason NFTs work is because they do not attempt to track ownership of real world assets. They are about creating a new asset that o my exists on the chain. The artworld has a long history of doing so: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/t-magazine/tino-sehgal-hirshhorn-museum-art.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/t-ma... This surely isn't for everyone, but for art enthusiasts who are into NFTs, it's super exciting.
  - shagie 5y ago
    Just as a note, I find it ironic that an artist from 2018 is considered to be a "long history" and that the artist that is used as an example of is Sehgal who is doing part of his art in that medium and refusing to go abroad to minimize his carbon footprint is used as an example of art on one of the most energy hungry distributed applications in the world. That said, you're trading json strings that have no real world application as part of an "experience" of art with others who want to have the same "experience" but has no real world application or ability to enforce anything relating to the intellectual property of that art. If Twitter deletes a tweet that has a NFT attached to it there's squat that anyone else can do about it; or if an artist loses control over their hosting site, or if a URL changes with a host upgrade... that's all too bad as it was the experience of the art that matters?
    - miracle2k 5y ago
      I just gave you what I thought was an interesting article I came across recently, about an artist I wasn't aware of before. You can certainly go further back, i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_de_Sensibilit%C3%A9_Picturale_Immat%C3%A9rielle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_de_Sensibilit%C3%A9_Pictu... I appreciate the energy footprint concerns, but will say that I find this the least interesting part of the thing, and that certainly NFTs are being done an blockchains such as Tezos which have no energy impact of note. When you say "trading JSON strings", it strikes me that you get hung up on technical details that are irrelevant. The URL is similarly unimportant. Think of it as sugar to help software display images in a standardized way. NFT platforms generally try to use IPFS to provide stable resource locators that anyone can seed, but even if that is not the case, and the URL goes down, as long as two (or more) parties can agree on what piece of art the token represents, they can recognise the ownership over it (not the copyright! - ownership over the digital edition.) Early experiments from 5 to 10 years ago generally just encoded a hash of the file, and that's all that is required to create a link between token and file. Yes, someone has to keep the file around, but there is no magic way to ensure that. The Sehgal article is actually an interesting connection here in that they explicitly discuss the challenge of keeping alive these experiences.

shagie 5y ago

The reoccurring question is "how do you map the real world and its laws back into this?" If I've got a photograph that I took, how do I sell the right to print a copy of it? How do I make sure that only one copy of it gets printed? Alternatively, if I sell a NFT, what does that mean in the world of copyrights and intellectual property that can be enforced by the courts? Until that linkage from the real world to the blockchain is made, much of this "mining and selling NFTs" reminds me of my days of playing on MUDs and creating objects to populate a game with that have since lost every iota of value since that MUD does not exist anymore. Even then, people did tricks and exploits to get it so that they'd have more people in the room that the other clan did so that they gained control of the artifact (yes, we had 51% attacks back then too). And there's my skepticism on this all. Until I can see the block chain data moving back into the real world, it's no more interesting than another news story on a game site about how many titans were made or destroyed in EvE. Sure, people spent real money to create in game assets - but it doesn't mean anything more outside of the game except as a headline to a journalist. Let's see that venue that sells seats at concerts as NFTs that can be transfered as a competitor to Ticketmaster (I'm honestly interested in the permeant public ledger of everyone attends political rallies). Lets see the season tickets get managed by a NFT ( https://zonecoverage.com/2021/packers/the-insanity-of-the-packers-season-ticket-waitlist/ https://zonecoverage.com/2021/packers/the-insanity-of-the-pa... ). Until then, all I see are tulips, beanie babies, and EvE titans. But at least the tulips grow in my garden, and my niece and nephew played with some old beanie babies and people trading EvE titans know exactly what they're trading.

miracle2k 5y ago
You can use a Blockchain ledger to track real world assets but then the critics do make the very valid point that enforcement will depend on a centralized third party. The blockchain is then not the authoritative record of ownership - the real world is. Maybe an issuer might still find it useful to hook into an existing standardized open financial ledger like Ethereum, but in the end, the issuer will decide who can attend the venue, not the blockchain. The reason NFTs work is because they do not attempt to track ownership of real world assets. They are about creating a new asset that o my exists on the chain. The artworld has a long history of doing so: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/t-magazine/tino-sehgal-hirshhorn-museum-art.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/t-ma... This surely isn't for everyone, but for art enthusiasts who are into NFTs, it's super exciting.
- shagie 5y ago
  Just as a note, I find it ironic that an artist from 2018 is considered to be a "long history" and that the artist that is used as an example of is Sehgal who is doing part of his art in that medium and refusing to go abroad to minimize his carbon footprint is used as an example of art on one of the most energy hungry distributed applications in the world. That said, you're trading json strings that have no real world application as part of an "experience" of art with others who want to have the same "experience" but has no real world application or ability to enforce anything relating to the intellectual property of that art. If Twitter deletes a tweet that has a NFT attached to it there's squat that anyone else can do about it; or if an artist loses control over their hosting site, or if a URL changes with a host upgrade... that's all too bad as it was the experience of the art that matters?
  - miracle2k 5y ago
    I just gave you what I thought was an interesting article I came across recently, about an artist I wasn't aware of before. You can certainly go further back, i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_de_Sensibilit%C3%A9_Picturale_Immat%C3%A9rielle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_de_Sensibilit%C3%A9_Pictu... I appreciate the energy footprint concerns, but will say that I find this the least interesting part of the thing, and that certainly NFTs are being done an blockchains such as Tezos which have no energy impact of note. When you say "trading JSON strings", it strikes me that you get hung up on technical details that are irrelevant. The URL is similarly unimportant. Think of it as sugar to help software display images in a standardized way. NFT platforms generally try to use IPFS to provide stable resource locators that anyone can seed, but even if that is not the case, and the URL goes down, as long as two (or more) parties can agree on what piece of art the token represents, they can recognise the ownership over it (not the copyright! - ownership over the digital edition.) Early experiments from 5 to 10 years ago generally just encoded a hash of the file, and that's all that is required to create a link between token and file. Yes, someone has to keep the file around, but there is no magic way to ensure that. The Sehgal article is actually an interesting connection here in that they explicitly discuss the challenge of keeping alive these experiences.