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> I don't think anyone who buys an NFT wants that NFT > I could be wrong of course, but I seriously doubt it. You're wrong. I hold many NFTs that I want just f

> I don't think anyone who buys an NFT wants that NFT > I could be wrong of course, but I seriously doubt it. You're wrong. I hold many NFTs that I want just for the sake of the art. Sorry to disprove your theory. One of my favorites is the Bonsai collection by ZenFT: https://www.zenft.xyz/ https://www.zenft.xyz/ Some people use NFTs as simple mementos (free to claim, and collect): https://poap.gallery/ https://poap.gallery/ People enjoy collecting and displaying NFTs: https://oncyber.io/nawkzst https://oncyber.io/nawkzst People enjoy using their NFTs as avatars in Web3 games: https://www.webb.game/ https://www.webb.game/ People use NFTs to access exclusive areas on Decentraland (https://decentraland.org/ https://decentraland.org/) and Sandbox (https://medium.com/sandbox-game/cyberkongz-vx-partner-with-the-sandbox-d1025257b8e9O https://medium.com/sandbox-game/cyberkongz-vx-partner-with-t... People use NFTs for token-based access to websites or online services. People use them for real world events. People spend countless hours hanging out on Discord in various communities and servers and they build together. > People want a central authority and not bother themselves with running their own server/infrastructure. People don't want a central authority. Most people don't really understand the implications of the technology they use. Awareness is higher than it's ever been, however, in the age of censorship and deplatforming. It's not sustainable or desirable for all of humanity's communication and value exchange to be routed through a handful of trillion dollar tech monopolies. It's not desirable that so much of the web be dominated by these entities. It's not good for democracy, it's not good for humanity. > So the only way for OpenSea to "die" is if it's replaced by a different, but similar, central authority. Only those who lack imagination or skill would assert such a thing.

bambax 5y ago
> You're wrong. I hold many NFTs that I want just for the sake of the art. This is an old debate and not really the subject at hand, but I'll still bite (against my better judgement). You don't need to own an NFT to enjoy the art. That's the fundamental difference between art in the real world and digital art (NFT or not). When you own a piece of art you get to look at the original; this is a unique experience in the case of a painting, and sometimes a rare experience in the case of limited editions of photos. But the digital art is the same whether you "own it" or not. From an esthetic experience (not a financial one, obviously), it's pointless to "own" digital art. The only thing that would influence the esthetic experience of digital art is the medium. Buy a better screen. Better speakers. Etc. > People spend countless hours hanging out on Discord Sure. That I don't doubt.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  You don't need an original art work to enjoy the art either. You can print out photorealistic copies. You can buy a fake Rembrandt. You can buy a fake Gucci purse. It's perfectly okay to do that...however... What you lose is a direct connection to the original artist. Art is as much about the story of that artwork as it is the art itself. If an artist mints an NFT and that NFT has has provenance that's generally accepted by the community at large, then it has all the properties of an original physical artwork. Except that you can be more sure of its origin, because the blockchain history is immutable and you can trace the transactions back to the original creator. Music NFTs have been created, although they are certainly still nascent, it's possible to create an MP3-based NFT that has the same or better quality as a CD album. One could imagine NFT albums being minted just like CD and record albums of yore. One could imagine people collecting the NFTs just for the sake of actually owning the rights to backup and play that music without having to stream through Spotify or YouTube. One could imagine the user retaining the right to resell that album just like they had the right to resell a used CD back in the day. I already gave many examples above about how NFTs can be used beyond the basic use-case of attaching a JPEG (access to services, access to software, use in cross-game or cross-app experiences, etc). Some people are collecting them as Proofs of Attendance (POAPS), which are free NFTs used as badges. They're quite popular and fun to collect. I do so for the pure enjoyment of them. Sometimes the badges above are used for things like giveaways. If I want to reward loyal community members, I can issue a POAP for attending a particular video chat, and then give out random rewards to anyone holding one of my community's POAPs. That's cool, and fun. I've been in communities where we create our own POAPs as funny shared inside jokes.
  - kylebyproxy 5y ago
    To my ear, this all sounds like you're saying participation in NFT is performance art, which I hadn't really considered before, but I can kinda make sense of the appeal in that light. It just seems in bad taste to me that a person would claim ownership of someone else's work. But to each their own.
    - chrisco255 5y ago
BlueTemplar 5y ago
Discord, being closed and centralized, is a very "web2" software to use ?
- chrisco255 5y ago
  Discord is centralized. Yes, and? We are not in the end state of Web3 yet. Web3 is nascent and new. And we have to use some of the existing infrastructure to bootstrap it. Just as the internet was bootstrapped by the Department of Defense (via ARPAnet). Ideally we transition to a decentralized chat service at some point (some communities do use Matrix or Status), but in the meantime, we can't let perfect be the enemy of good.
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    Now go back to what the previous article was saying about decentralized (/federated) systems being slower, and consider how Discord got more popular than Matrix despite coming out a bit later (so it's not a question of "transitioning" - why not picking Matrix (or XMPP/Jabber) right off the bat ?), and despite Matrix being clearly more aligned with the decentralization values supposedly espoused by the "web3" people ? And let me guess, do these people also "build together" using the centralized and proprietary Github built on top (and now bought by Microsoft, who knows what they'll do of it now...) of the decentralized git ?
tasha0663 5y ago
The idea of NFTs as access keys makes me wretch. How can we make DRM worse? I know, let's make it speculative and even worse for the environment. (Re: proof of stake, I'll believe it when it happens without Ethereum forking again)
- chrisco255 5y ago
  It's not DRM. It's token-based authentication. Are you against token-based authentication? Are you against Software-as-a-Service? Are you against membership-based organizations as a concept? Are you against board voting by stockholders? If you're not against these analogous concepts, why would you be against NFT-based versions of this? One difference with NFTs is you retain the right to resale and transfer at all times. Which is totally different than DRM. As for Proof of Stake, it's already live: https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/beacon-chain/ https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/beacon-chain/ It was shipped in December of 2020. The remaining component is the Merge, which merges the Proof-of-Work chain with the Proof-of-Stake chain: https://ethmerge.com/ https://ethmerge.com/ . That is coming this summer. The Ethereum community is almost 100% behind the merge, so it's highly unlikely that ETH forks over it, and even if one occurred, the forked chain would not succeed.
  - gizmo385 5y ago
    > That is coming this summer. Hasn't that date been continuously pushed back? Like the parent you replied to, I'll believe when I see it. And regardless, the mining infrastructure spun up because of the gold rush on Ethereum isn't going away at thia point. Those miners will just move to different chains. And while proof of stake does partially minimize some of the environmental concerns, it introduces other problems that aren't great (like all of the power being systematically consolidated into the hands of early adopters and the wealthy).
    - chrisco255 5y ago
      > Hasn't that date been continuously pushed back? Like the parent you replied to, I'll believe when I see it. And regardless, the mining infrastructure spun up because of the gold rush on Ethereum isn't going away at thia point. Those miners will just move to different chains. It's been pushed a few times. Like any complex technical upgrade with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of assets on the line, it has to be taken very carefully and has to be tested very thoroughly against numerous vectors. But there are live testnets of the Merge already, if you feel like testing it out: https://kintsugi.themerge.dev/ https://kintsugi.themerge.dev/ Please submit any bugs you find. > And while proof of stake does partially minimize some of the environmental concerns, it introduces other problems that aren't great (like all of the power being systematically consolidated into the hands of early adopters and the wealthy) Not here to get into PoW vs PoS debate. But its worth noting that Ethereum has hundreds of billions of dollars worth of non-native assets sitting on-chain. Many of these are protocols that didn't even exist 2 years ago. Anyone can create a whole new token on Ethereum that backs a new application and be their own early adopter. For a more philosophical deep dive on PoW vs PoS, see Vitalik's writing on this: https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

bambax 5y ago

> You're wrong. I hold many NFTs that I want just for the sake of the art. This is an old debate and not really the subject at hand, but I'll still bite (against my better judgement). You don't need to own an NFT to enjoy the art. That's the fundamental difference between art in the real world and digital art (NFT or not). When you own a piece of art you get to look at the original; this is a unique experience in the case of a painting, and sometimes a rare experience in the case of limited editions of photos. But the digital art is the same whether you "own it" or not. From an esthetic experience (not a financial one, obviously), it's pointless to "own" digital art. The only thing that would influence the esthetic experience of digital art is the medium. Buy a better screen. Better speakers. Etc. > People spend countless hours hanging out on Discord Sure. That I don't doubt.

chrisco255 5y ago
You don't need an original art work to enjoy the art either. You can print out photorealistic copies. You can buy a fake Rembrandt. You can buy a fake Gucci purse. It's perfectly okay to do that...however... What you lose is a direct connection to the original artist. Art is as much about the story of that artwork as it is the art itself. If an artist mints an NFT and that NFT has has provenance that's generally accepted by the community at large, then it has all the properties of an original physical artwork. Except that you can be more sure of its origin, because the blockchain history is immutable and you can trace the transactions back to the original creator. Music NFTs have been created, although they are certainly still nascent, it's possible to create an MP3-based NFT that has the same or better quality as a CD album. One could imagine NFT albums being minted just like CD and record albums of yore. One could imagine people collecting the NFTs just for the sake of actually owning the rights to backup and play that music without having to stream through Spotify or YouTube. One could imagine the user retaining the right to resell that album just like they had the right to resell a used CD back in the day. I already gave many examples above about how NFTs can be used beyond the basic use-case of attaching a JPEG (access to services, access to software, use in cross-game or cross-app experiences, etc). Some people are collecting them as Proofs of Attendance (POAPS), which are free NFTs used as badges. They're quite popular and fun to collect. I do so for the pure enjoyment of them. Sometimes the badges above are used for things like giveaways. If I want to reward loyal community members, I can issue a POAP for attending a particular video chat, and then give out random rewards to anyone holding one of my community's POAPs. That's cool, and fun. I've been in communities where we create our own POAPs as funny shared inside jokes.
- kylebyproxy 5y ago
  To my ear, this all sounds like you're saying participation in NFT is performance art, which I hadn't really considered before, but I can kinda make sense of the appeal in that light. It just seems in bad taste to me that a person would claim ownership of someone else's work. But to each their own.
  - chrisco255 5y ago

BlueTemplar 5y ago

Discord, being closed and centralized, is a very "web2" software to use ?

chrisco255 5y ago
Discord is centralized. Yes, and? We are not in the end state of Web3 yet. Web3 is nascent and new. And we have to use some of the existing infrastructure to bootstrap it. Just as the internet was bootstrapped by the Department of Defense (via ARPAnet). Ideally we transition to a decentralized chat service at some point (some communities do use Matrix or Status), but in the meantime, we can't let perfect be the enemy of good.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  Now go back to what the previous article was saying about decentralized (/federated) systems being slower, and consider how Discord got more popular than Matrix despite coming out a bit later (so it's not a question of "transitioning" - why not picking Matrix (or XMPP/Jabber) right off the bat ?), and despite Matrix being clearly more aligned with the decentralization values supposedly espoused by the "web3" people ? And let me guess, do these people also "build together" using the centralized and proprietary Github built on top (and now bought by Microsoft, who knows what they'll do of it now...) of the decentralized git ?

tasha0663 5y ago

The idea of NFTs as access keys makes me wretch. How can we make DRM worse? I know, let's make it speculative and even worse for the environment. (Re: proof of stake, I'll believe it when it happens without Ethereum forking again)

chrisco255 5y ago
It's not DRM. It's token-based authentication. Are you against token-based authentication? Are you against Software-as-a-Service? Are you against membership-based organizations as a concept? Are you against board voting by stockholders? If you're not against these analogous concepts, why would you be against NFT-based versions of this? One difference with NFTs is you retain the right to resale and transfer at all times. Which is totally different than DRM. As for Proof of Stake, it's already live: https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/beacon-chain/ https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/beacon-chain/ It was shipped in December of 2020. The remaining component is the Merge, which merges the Proof-of-Work chain with the Proof-of-Stake chain: https://ethmerge.com/ https://ethmerge.com/ . That is coming this summer. The Ethereum community is almost 100% behind the merge, so it's highly unlikely that ETH forks over it, and even if one occurred, the forked chain would not succeed.
- gizmo385 5y ago
  > That is coming this summer. Hasn't that date been continuously pushed back? Like the parent you replied to, I'll believe when I see it. And regardless, the mining infrastructure spun up because of the gold rush on Ethereum isn't going away at thia point. Those miners will just move to different chains. And while proof of stake does partially minimize some of the environmental concerns, it introduces other problems that aren't great (like all of the power being systematically consolidated into the hands of early adopters and the wealthy).
  - chrisco255 5y ago
    > Hasn't that date been continuously pushed back? Like the parent you replied to, I'll believe when I see it. And regardless, the mining infrastructure spun up because of the gold rush on Ethereum isn't going away at thia point. Those miners will just move to different chains. It's been pushed a few times. Like any complex technical upgrade with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of assets on the line, it has to be taken very carefully and has to be tested very thoroughly against numerous vectors. But there are live testnets of the Merge already, if you feel like testing it out: https://kintsugi.themerge.dev/ https://kintsugi.themerge.dev/ Please submit any bugs you find. > And while proof of stake does partially minimize some of the environmental concerns, it introduces other problems that aren't great (like all of the power being systematically consolidated into the hands of early adopters and the wealthy) Not here to get into PoW vs PoS debate. But its worth noting that Ethereum has hundreds of billions of dollars worth of non-native assets sitting on-chain. Many of these are protocols that didn't even exist 2 years ago. Anyone can create a whole new token on Ethereum that backs a new application and be their own early adopter. For a more philosophical deep dive on PoW vs PoS, see Vitalik's writing on this: https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]