23 ms·

Instagram Is Disabling Its NFT Features

270 points by 0xedb 4y ago

craigmcnamara 4y ago
And nothing of value was lost.
kstrauser 4y ago
It’s rare I’d say this, but good for Facebook.
1attice 4y ago
I'm no NFT cheerleader, but I do bemoan the failure of yet another attempt to provide artists with revenue. NFTs were always daft, but the fiction, as fiction often does, spoke to a real need.
- jtode 4y ago
  I think the Bored Ape thing was a perfect illustration of who is provided with revenue by NFTs.
  - 1attice 4y ago
    You aren't wrong, and again, I am at pains to indicate that I don't support NFTs, was disappointed with NFTs, and I genuinely believe they're a standout sign of cultural decay. Again, my concern is for the artists who were briefly given hope, however false. For context, this book is helpful: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Artist-Creators-Struggling-Billionaires/dp/B083QMCJ5H/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=death+of+the+artist&qid=1678749374&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Death-Artist-Creators-Struggling-Bill...
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      Artists can easily make money, they just have to produce what the market demands, like any other business. Draw furry porn comics and paywall them behind patreon and watch the cash roll in. Of course no one was going to pay $1000 for landscape_digital_painting.png which you can get a dime a million on dall-e.
      - 1attice 4y ago
        [flagged]
        libraryatnight 4y ago
        There's lots of ways for artists to make money professionally (probably not paid enough in the corporate creative world, but nft's were never an answer to that issue, an issue plaguing a lot of industries and professions lately) and independently. I appreciate that it would be nice if everyone who painted or sang or wrote could support themselves with that passion, but if nobody is buying what you're selling NFTs weren't going to help. There's so much more than the art that goes into supporting oneself with art, and at that point it very much intersects with business. NFTs are just one more thing to sell if you have the thing a starving artist doesn't - an audience.
        1attice 4y ago
        [flagged]
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        JohnFen 4y ago
        I didn't downvote you, but I respectfully submit that it's possible that the people who did do so, and gigachad, understand the underlying issues and simply disagree with you.
        lgeorget 4y ago
        I think the reason that comment was downvoated is because "you need to read more about the issue" is not a rational argument. In the wrong context, it may even sound like an ad hominem.
        piqi 4y ago
        [flagged]
      - jandrese 4y ago
    - pornel 4y ago
      In the original post you've called it an "attempt to provide artists with revenue" and let's be clear it was never that. The only attempt was to provide revenue for Facebook, and both NFT scammers and Facebook only used artists as a fig leaf for the get-rich-quick scheme of wash trades and piracy.
      - 1attice 4y ago
        At pain of downvoting, I respectfully need to ask if you read the article? It literally describes an effort by Meta to put NFTs to use for artists. Again, decay.
- Semioj 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - jsemrau 4y ago
    One can argue that the way we implemented this on finclout it even simpler. Its as simple as receiving a share of the Stakepool revenues based on relative performance on the platform. Passive content income through real yield treasuries.
    - Semioj 4y ago
      I have spent 10 minutes on your site an still don't get it. Bravo for that. Already a good sign of a well running crypto thing. And I'm still not sure how value is created if no one has to pay?! Right now for me it feels like a soon imploding weird microbubble of investment Tipps
      - sleepybrett 4y ago
        Shhh, if he actually explains what he does in plain english people might figure out that it's huge fucking grift.
      - jsemrau 4y ago
        One could view Proof of Stake (PoS) Systems as being similar to the Federal Reserve System. In the latter, the central bank provides liquidity to the banking system. The banking system then provides financial services (working capital, managing deposits, etc) to companies within an economy. These companies can then use this capital / service to provide goods and services to the economy. The banking system is, in simplified terms, a margin business that borrows funds from the central banks and lends out further. Through this margin all costs have to be covered. In the former this role is taken on by the Treasuries of the PoS (Eth, Cardano, etc). Stakepool operators take on the role of the banking system and Apps like finclout take on the role of a business in this ecosystem. Stakepool operators validate the chains, at a low energy overhead one might add, and thus provides services to the Central Treasury. For this service they receive a fee. This fee can be seen as being similar to the margin of the traditional banking system. Moreover, stakepool operator then can take on the role of distributing the liquidity they received from the treasury further into the economy of the block chain. Thereby providing liquidity to App Operators. In theory this could provide an efficient means to monetize content. And this is what the finclout app is aimed to solve. Absolutely, it doesn't do that well yet. Yet if you look into the consequences of Mandated Payments for content in Canada (https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2023/03/the-consequence-of-mandated-payments-for-links-facebook-confirms-it-will-drop-news-sharing-in-canada-under-bill-c-18/ https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2023/03/the-consequence-of-manda...) this solution could provide a better monetization mechanism. A tertiary benefit is that there is no need for a ponzi-like investing scheme through such a method.
- mjr00 4y ago
  Artists have been poor forever. There's a reason the expression is "starving artist" and not "well-fed artist." It's also easier than ever now for an independent artist to make money. Patreon, Fanbox, Skeb have vastly simplified the logistics of getting money for your work. Promotion through social media is free, though time-consuming. The problem is the same as it always was: artists want to focus on creating art, and not running a business. If I told you I was going to make a software company, with the expectation of a livable salary, but spend $0 on sales, marketing, or customer support, you'd call me an idiot, because there's a lot more to a software business than churning out code. Similarly, there's a lot more to making a living as an artist than drawing pictures or creating music. Ironically, NFTs were most successful with people who already understood all this. Unscrupulous people like Steve Aoki aggressively marketed their own NFTs using their existing brand power and made a hefty sum, while your dime-a-dozen 10k Twitter follower artist got nothing.
  - grugagag 4y ago
    In an ideal world you’d do what you are best at. If that was churning useful code then be it. If that was selling that code without needing to churn code yourself then be it. It’s unfortunate we can’t collaborate with eachother without stealing eachother’s livelyhood.
    - mjr00 4y ago
      Aren't you just describing a business? Maybe even a startup specifically, with a CTO who's great at building things and a CEO who's great at selling them? I don't really see how that's stealing each other's livelihood; neither of those people can be successful without the other.
  - flockonus 4y ago
    > while your dime-a-dozen 10k Twitter follower artist got nothing Very condescending and, at the same time, not true at all. Many existing artists did much better in revenue than ever in the way of getting paid for their craft during the rise of NFTs, there were many spaces where artists would brag about their success and help onboard others into the space, often paying their transaction fees. For many of the small audience artists it's very sad the momentum faded, and the spring of generative AI doesn't help them either.
- delecti 4y ago
  On the contrary, I'm glad to see the death of yet another scam targeting artists. People might have been trying to convince artists it could provide revenue, but I don't believe many of those people were themselves artists. It felt very much like "here you go, use this technology, we know best", because from the very start of the scam I saw artists unambiguously asserting they wanted no part in it, but lots of art being wrapped up in NFTs without permission.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 4y ago
  As someone who still knows a number of professional Illustrators I highly suggest talking to artists about this topic then for once, both hobby and professional. Actually talk to a few artists and you will quickly find a number of them who were already hurt by NFTs via art theft or spam and scam. NFTs and the guys pushing them were only out to hurt artists and exploit them, and nothing else. If they weren't out to scam them, they were out there just stealing the art. It was not "a nice idea" and the fact that people still try to tie them to "but what about the artists" narrative is a disgrace. I'm sorry, but there is no "but" here. Yes something for artists would be nice, everyone agrees. NFTs were never that, not even a little bit. It was not "an attempt to provide artists with revenue", it was an attempt to use artists for revenue. You make a difference between what you say, and the people cheering for NFTs, but the whole "yeah but what if it works" or "yeah but wouldn't it be nice if..." angle is exactly the type of crowbar all the cryptocurrency/NFT scammers used and still use to stay relevant.
  - LegitShady 4y ago
    The artists don't matter. The art on the bored ape whatever was never the value. Artists pushing crypto are just looking to grift off their fanbase and are either stupid or malicious - in both cases reason for normal people to stay away.
- mattdesl 4y ago
  Most artists using NFTs for revenue are not using IG, so are unaffected by this news. This is dead in the water in any app, anyways. Apple charges 30% fee on all in-app NFT sales, and on top of that Apple ToS prohibits any “functional” use of NFT tech in their apps. [1] [1] https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1584609845570768897?s=20 https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1584609845570768897?s=2...
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    Thanks, Apple! No, seriously.
    - mattdesl 4y ago
      Hooray for tech monopolies prohibiting the use of open source payment protocols and continuing to force a ridiculous rent on users and developers? Typical HN view, at least.
      - DonHopkins 4y ago
        Thanks for nipping scams in the bud, and thanks for crushing Flash, Apple!
Calvin02 4y ago
I'll preface this by saying that I'm not a crypto fan, but I felt that NFTs were at least a promising use case for blockchain (* in addition to money, to avoid derailing this discussion). They solve a real world problem of ownership of digital assets in an interesting way. We need a solution here and NFTs proposed an "open" one. I wish we keep exploring this space.
- buildbot 4y ago
  How? They literally just point to a URL right? It's like buying the name of the a star but high tech....
  - kipchak 4y ago
    Ones that had larger image sizes did, but some such as Cryptopunks for example are "on-chain", hence the small image size. Definitely a limitation for larger file sizes though.
  - burnished 4y ago
    No, that is just one example of a payload - the token itself is non-fungible, so presumably some one could write code to associate the ownership of that token to some game feature. Lets say a mount in WoW, then you could trade said token as part of a secondary market. I dont think its a great idea, largely because making the ledger operate in a zero trust environment isnt a great value add for video game tokens, but it's important to judge things on their merits and in this case you could build a system as described.
    - drusepth 4y ago
      > Lets say a mount in WoW, then you could trade said token as part of a secondary market. This use-case always broke down for me when I realized you inherently can't have a secondary market when you still rely on the first market (the owners/operators of WoW) to maintain the integration(s) with token<->game. If I sell an owned mount token to a friend but the ownership of that mount doesn't actually transfer in-game, the entire system breaks down. Ergo, the livelihood of any secondary market relies entirely on Blizzard maintaining whatever in-game functionality uses the tokens, rather than solidifying a promise of any real decentralized ownership.
poopsmithe 4y ago
Instagram had NFT features?
- grugagag 4y ago
  Nobody was using it turns out.
  - hypothesis 4y ago
    Sound like no one even knew it was a thing, which also might explain that nobody used it.
    - dbbk 4y ago
      Barely anyone even owns an NFT so I don't think product education was the primary problem
      - DANmode 4y ago
        It's both surprising that they had the feature this early in the adoption of token-based ownership, and that they wound it down so quickly.
        trophycase 4y ago
        Common problem for many corporations, especially in times like these. They basically put it on life support the moment it is released so it never has a shot
        namaria 4y ago
        > token-based ownership It's just token ownership. What ties tokens to actual physical assets is the institutional framework of laws, contracts, courts and law enforcement. Not a glorified pointer in a glorified ledger.
        DANmode 4y ago
colesantiago 4y ago
[flagged]
- avnsadlfnlsaei 4y ago
  Interestingly enough, bitcoin is up 10+% today and I think few other crypto currencies as well. Seems like when people see banks failing, bank runs and risk of losing their deposits, they see value in crypto.
  - berkle4455 4y ago
    That's why bitcoin is rallying today after the US government swore to protect the banks and the integrity of the US dollar, and bitcoin crashed when the actual bank run happened and the outcome was up to speculation? Your commentary is quite literally the opposite of what happened.
  - worksonmine 4y ago
    Yes, the same people seeing their fiat at risk finally understand the point of crypto is control and not NFTs. Hope they're smart enough to keep it safe and not on an exchange though, defeats the purpose.
  - ourmandave 4y ago
    Bitcoin always rallies when crypto has bad news. It's propped up by wash trading by the tether cartel so people think everything is fine.
    - Lapsa 4y ago
      sensible but more likely folks are just desperately trying to hedge even if that means using crypto
luckydata 4y ago
the crypto tech cycle was one of the stupidest things a bunch of supposedly smart people bought hook line and sinker in a REALLY long time. The sweaty FOMO was incredibly real for something that never withstood an even cursory amount of scrutiny.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  NFTs didn't hold up to even the smallest amount of scrutiny. You'd have people say we will all be trading land as NFTs but can't answer what happens when hackers steal your land NFT. Obviously it makes no sense for the police and government to respect the stolen NFT but there is also no mechanism for correcting this mistake so the blockchain is now out of sync with reality. And in the end, people care about reality a lot more than they do about blockchain data.
  - simonw 4y ago
    So you're telling me that this thing is going to have value because of artificial scarcity... but anyone can create their own new NFT (including one that links to the exact same image) at any time? Oh, and many of the people involved are going to stay anonymous, and attempting to prove the authenticity of one of these things by deferring to off-chain authorities goes against the intended spirit of the entire thing. Utterly baffling.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      There was a joke "It's obvious now in hindsight that NFTs are a scam, but to be fair, it was also obvious before, and in the middle too" I'm not sure anyone at any point thought they were legit, it was crypto chuds hyping their next scam, and the media willing to join in for extra clicks. The real losers were the the ones who bought in thinking they would find a greater fool to off load their magic beans to later.
      - bawolff 4y ago
        The baffaling part is it even sounds like someone making up an over the top scam. If you believe that ownership of a hash of the brooklyn bridge in a ledger is the same as the real thing. Well i have the brooklyn bridge to sell you.
pram 4y ago
My favorite recent NFT story was the exchange that opened an NFT market, and then closed it 30 days later because they only had $100 in trades: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=wazirx-closes-nft-marketplace-after-processing-112-in-trades-over-a-month https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=wazirx-closes-nft-marketpla...
- jandrese 4y ago
  Imagine starting an NFT market and not even doing the standard wash trades to set the ridiculous prices for all of the FOMO spam. Oh my god, these guys were true believers. That’s even more hilarious.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - oliwarner 4y ago
    Washing is pretty abrasive when there's a 5% sales commission.
    - adastra22 4y ago
      Not for the people running the market.
    - uncletammy 4y ago
      I think they are suggesting that the exchange would use bot accounts, exempt from trading fees.
    - jandrese 4y ago
      You gotta spend money to grift money.
    - kuhewa 4y ago
      Even if they did pay it they would be collecting their own vig
    - shapefrog 4y ago
0xB31B1B 4y ago
If there is a future for crypto it is in the cyberpunk/pirate zone. The idea the institutional investors thought they could make a buck off all these folks is hilarious. Even in their delusional unrealized apotheosis the crypto/web3 crowd was building the anti Facebook. I think all the web3 investment was horrible BS and crypto is not a place for venture investing. If it has a future at all it should embrace the drug dealing ponzi scheming tax evading ransomwaring heart of itself. It’s not chase bank, it’s the Medellin cartel.
- bawolff 4y ago
  On the contrary, true believers are usually the easiest people to make a buck off. Their bias makes them easy to trick/manipulate.
  - beepbooptheory 4y ago
    I feel like those are second order "true believers". The real guys never left Cypherpunks mailing list, or you wont find them on Twitter at least.
  - kuhewa 4y ago
    There were Gamestop true believers for Christ's sake, who knew they bought in high and would probably not get out before it crashes, but still let themselves convinced their disposable income that month was worth the price of sticking it to the man.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      It was a fun time though, and watching hedge funds lose billions of dollars in value definitely was worth the 100$. The way I see it, the fun went on for months, way better entertainment value than movie tickets in that time. And I still have some GME and AMC to remember that glorious time. Ape together strong.
      - kuhewa 4y ago
        If the value was real to you there is no arguing, likewise i spend more on inputs to grow tomatoes every year than the market value of what I get out, for similar reason. but I'm sure you are aware someone that repeated the line about sticking it to the man is still laughing about you believing it and getting left holding the bag.
xnx 4y ago
Even Salesforce has some NFT feature: https://www.salesforce.com/products/web3/nft/ https://www.salesforce.com/products/web3/nft/
- oblio 4y ago
  Salesforce probably has SOAP and RPC and XML DB features, so that's not such a high bar to clear.
nailer 4y ago
Most of the comments made in this thread about NFTs could also be made about digital signatures, HTTPS, Signal, PGP and traditional forms of crypto. “I can open up devtools and change the words on this page. HTTPS has no value.“ “I can photoshop you digitally signing a different document. Digital signatures have no value.” I fairly obviously disagree with those statements but if you do too - you may wish to put your pitchfork down for a moment and think deeper about the value of digitally signed artwork.
- sleepybrett 4y ago
  In most nft marketplaces the actual artwork was not signed. They signed a url, not even a fucking hash of the jpg.
  - cypress66 4y ago
    That's not how it works. The url was ipfs, which is immutable and is a hash by itself.
    - illiarian 4y ago
      >The url was ipfs, which is immutable and is a hash by itself. 1. For the majority (perhaps even vast majority) it was never pointing to ipfs, but to some server running somewhere. 2. On ipfs files will disappear eventually if there's no one to pay for their storage
      - nailer 4y ago
        1. Sites like https://nft.storage/ https://nft.storage/ (which I dislike as they have a silly bug with content types) or Pinata also go to IPFS. Just because the https URL doesn't look like a well known IPFS HTTP gateway doesn't mean it's not on IPFS. 2. Good point. I haven't investigated this but I should.
        illiarian 4y ago
sebastien_b 4y ago
>“You’re not thinking in the long run. What if you would have said goodbye to the internet when the bubble exploded back in the 2000s? There would be no Google. Or Meta whatsoever,” she said. She says that like it would’ve been a bad thing.
- sebastien_b 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - sebastien_b 4y ago
    LOL!
  - dang 4y ago
    We've banned this account for repeatedly posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments and ignoring our requests to stop. Not cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
jiqiren 4y ago
nature is healing
- ht85 4y ago
  non fungus token
web3-is-a-scam 4y ago
Passed few days have been really really juicy for the crypto space. Purchase popcorn futures while you can.
- philihp 4y ago
  Must be driving really fast.
- Lapsa 4y ago
  +50% capital gains on a single day. unlikely I will beat that record anytime soon
sleepybrett 4y ago
This is good for bitcoin.
paxys 4y ago
But think about the money laundering industry...
PretzelPirate 4y ago
Just a reminder: NFTs that link to an image is a simple use case for the NFT token standard, and most of the time it didn't make any sense. NFTs make more sense when representing ownership of digital assets that grant some utility. I am a believer in the idea that in-game assets will become NFTs. Playing video games professsionally is like being a tradesperson, and just like a carpenter doesn't need to use a different hammer for each job, a gamer shouldn't need to get new stats or weapons for each game they play. Just like a famous musician might, a gamer should be able to sell the gun they used professionally to a fan and that fan can have that represented in any game (using that game's native assets). I see a lot of value in an open registry of digital items I own, each with a cryptographic proof of provenance, and which doesnt require a centralized entity to control and decide which games can and can't participate. This can be done without a blockchain, but then there's no central proof of who owns what (I can own the item, sell it, but still submit old proofs to a game to keep using the item). I may think this way because I own a lot of digital goods that are stored in private databases which will someday shutdown. At that point, I'll loose all of those items.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  Why would any game developer ever implement that? - If they want money, NFTs are directly competing with microtransactions/loot boxes. Any NFT imported is money the developer isn't making off their own content. - If they want a good game, allowing users to import random items from other games is going to be impossible to balance. - If they want a free for all, they can already implement mods and steam workshop without the crypto aspects. As an aside, if the goal is simply trading items between players, that's better done with a traditional market. Allowing real money to enter the game tends to incentivise all the worst player behaviors and ruin the experience, as Blizzard discovered with the Diablo auction house.
- throw_m239339 4y ago
  NFT, like 99% of blockchain tech, are a solution looking for a problem. They have absolutely zero practical use in the real world. The only people getting rich with NFT are the people selling ETH.
janalsncm 4y ago
Sounds like they didn’t roll out any actual meaningful features until long after the crypto hype died down. Peak crypto/NFT frenzy was early/mid 2021. So not only were they bandwagoning, they were slow too.
BigCryo 4y ago
Nft is no longer fashionable among the intelligentsia of the internet
faefox 4y ago
NFTs: the thing nobody needed, let alone wanted, but which proved to be a sufficiently effective money laundering (sorry, "speculative") instrument that we all had to have it shoved down our throats for the better part of a year anyway. Goodbye and good riddance.
- eric-hu 4y ago
  What makes NFTs any more effective at money laundering than cryptocurrency?
  - DebtDeflation 4y ago
    You can sell them to yourself (at arm's length, using separate entities) to establish a price, and then sell them to yourself again (using a different entity) to take the profit and launder the money. Crypto may be manipulated, but you can't just set an arbitrary price equal to the amount of money you need to launder.
  - michaelt 4y ago
    Hypothetically? If I made $1M of bitcoin proceeds-of-crime and I put it through a coin tumbler then cash out, it can't be directly linked to the crime - but I also can't explain where the money came from. On the other hand, if my legitimate account creates some shitty digital art and auctions it, then my proceeds-of-crime account buys it, I get slightly less money (auction fees etc) but a good explanation of where I got the money from: I'm an artist, you don't understand my work because you're a dumbass. Of course, there are plenty of other ways to launder money - feed the proceeds of crime through a fixed-odds betting terminal and I'm just a lucky gambler. Anonymously buy fine art with a suitcase full of cash, then resell it as something I found in grandpa's attic. Sue my own anonymous tax-haven company, and report a big payment as an out-of-court settlement. And so on.
    - mikhael28 4y ago
      This was a great explanation.
  - 4y ago
Kye 4y ago
And Sesame Street just announced its NFT, long after the hype has passed. I knew they were desperate for funding when they let HBO get first shot at new episodes, but I figured that solved things.
mattdesl 4y ago
Most artists using NFTs for revenue are not using IG, so are unaffected by this news. NFT is in many ways anti-Meta, just buy/sell/mint directly with your wallet. It is now dead in the water in any app, unfortunately. Apple charges 30% fee on all in-app NFT sales, and on top of that Apple ToS strictly prohibits any “functional” use of NFT tech in their apps.[1] As you’d expect, NFT markets have moved to web in general, outside of app space. [1] https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1584609845570768897?s=20 https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1584609845570768897?s=2...
- 1337biz 4y ago
  I think they always were out of conventional fiat markets. Its just that big corps try to get a slice of the market (and so far mostly fail at it).
RancheroBeans 4y ago
I'll be honest, it hurts me to see people shit on something, likely because of the sentiment towards NFTs at the moment. It's definitely not the first time I've seen a lot of smart people on HN look at things in an off-way. There are bad actors, there are bad actors everywhere with any physical goods as well. I'm just trying to build something I enjoy and others will too. That something happens to use NFTs.
- ofchnofc 4y ago
  [dead]
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  What is that thing you're building, and why does it use NFTs?
- atoav 4y ago
  Sorry, as someone who is fascinated with cryptographgy I have to say that NFTs are a technology nobody could explain me the benefits of. Most of them who tried were either naive (and lost money on NFTs) or bad actors trying to sell me something. The fact that I have not met a single knowledgable person who managed to convince me that NFTs are a good technology that solves problems that need solving in elegant ways doesn't speak about me, it speaks about the topic at hand. To me NFTs look like this: Somebody was like "how can we make money off the internet if people just can copy everything? We need to limit the supply somehow!" and then they tried to market it to artists "you will earn money this way". I don't even agree that copyability of data is a problem, and the argument of "we can make money by owning and not putting in a lot of work" attracts exactly the kind of bad actor you talked about. Any technology doesn't live in isolation from society, especially not something like NFTs that makes the extraordinary claim to introduce something as fundamental as ownership within a system that has been built on free copying of data. That means bad actors need to be factored in, especially if you're marketing the thing in the style of a get rich quick scheme. Maybe you can explain why this is something we want and why this is the technology that solves it?
  - ahnick 4y ago
atoav 4y ago
NFTs to me felt from the start like stereoscopic film: Sure technologically it has some interesting aspects, but I couldn't really see how the results are worth the extra effort. And anybody kept telling me it is the future. That being said, with NFTs I have never met any truly technologically knowledgeable person who could explain me in detail why it solves the problems it (wrongfully) claimed to solve.
- trophycase 4y ago
  The killer app of Ethereum already exists, and it is the set of standards being built on it that allow you to easily interoperate with other financial applications. NFTs are basically what the name implies, whereas "tokens" represent something fungible (e.g. stocks in a company), NFTs are a new standard (ERC721 or others) for representing non-fungible digital goods (deeds for houses, collectibles, game assets, etc.). Suppose I'm a small indie game studio. I create a game, and this game has skins for characters, weapons, what have you. I want to build a real money economy around these assets, but don't have the manpower to deal with payment processors, build a marketplace, etc. My company could just represent the skins as ERC721 tokens and instantly have access to the wealth of infrastructure that already supports the ERC721 standard. People can buy and sell on a marketplace of their choosing (Opensea, Blur, etc.), they can manage their assets using a wallet of their choice (Metamask, Rainbow, Frame, Coinbase Wallet, etc.). This is just one example, but can be applied to literally any non-fungible asset that be represented digitally. And although the application I mentioned is primarily a financial one (because Ethereum is the internet of finance), there are certainly non-financial use cases for having a fully interoperable, decentralized representation of a digital good. It's important to understand that NFTs didn't invent digital scarcity. This is an idea that's existed for a long time. Downloading a song I have to pay for, League of Legends issuing a limited edition skin, even the notion of a privileged role on a website (e.g. moderator) implies some sort of digital scarcity. People value having status, people value having scarce things, NFTs didn't invent that idea, they just make it much easier to represent these things in a very standard way and plug into mechanisms that allow for price discovery of these things (which I repeat, already are deemed to have value, but have extremely high friction to trade). Maybe you don't understand because you aren't a digital native. I grew up playing World of Warcraft, and even from a young age I understood the power of having something other people didn't have. When I saw other players with their Naxxramas gear and I'm sitting there in normal Uncommons, it implied a difference of status. There was value in getting this gear because it made you feel special and important, or part of a certain community. The entire premise of the game revolves around the idea of scarcity (people have to work to get the best gear). If people had the best gear from the start, they wouldn't show up to raid every week, they wouldn't spend hours and hours farming materials or gold. That's digital scarcity, it's always existed.
domatic1 4y ago
you couldn't do anything with it, just display it, what's the point then if you can't trade it or sell it.
- brettermeier 4y ago
  If you don't want to look at it, why buy it in the first place? I mean, anybody needs to look at it, or all this stuff makes no sense...
chrisbrandow 4y ago
I have yet to hear anyone say they are embarrassed by their crypto/NFT dabbling a, but a quiet withdrawal from this space is satisfying enough.
highwaylights 4y ago
Reading the linked article is hard going. “Imagine if you gave up on the Internet in 2000”. This again. This is how distorted people’s perceptions become when they live their whole life in echo chambers. Leaving the obvious aside, It genuinely seems like a lot of those still pushing this are utterly unaware of the harms their whole mess has caused. Also, they’ve made it way harder to teach non-techies how to stay safe online in the future by co-opting the term “crypto”. They immediately think any use of the term crypto is related to this stuff. Your Digital ponzi scam != cryptography. The worst part is how the public now thinks if you’re involved in software you must be a massive believer in cc/NFTs because they keep hearing about it so all techies must think it’s awesome, right!? It’s exhausting.
- eterm 4y ago
  If you're in the cryptography business I'd just refer to it as digital security. ( Or cybersecurity if you prefer ). It's the same concept but without the baggage of "crypto".
  - klabb3 4y ago
    Yes but Why should I change? They’re the ones who suck.
    - siwatanejo 4y ago
      Come on, I'm sure that before bitcoin was invented, no one used the term "crypto" to refer to "cryptography"; doing that would be more cringy than this article itself.
      - lordfoom 4y ago
        > I'm sure And yet you are wrong :)
      - sunbum 4y ago
        Literally everyone did
pavlov 4y ago
I worked at Facebook in 2021, and NFTs were like a honeypot for the most useless managers. If I were Zuck, I might start another crypto project next year and ask for volunteers because it seems like a pretty good way to extract the worst performers into a neat org chart box that can be shut down without breaking anything else.
- dsco 4y ago
  This could be a symptom of Facebook and not software as a whole. I mean, you could say the same thing about what’s happening in AI and large corporations. Same for IoT etc.
  - pornel 4y ago
    No, you couldn't, because the other things have useful applications, and can possibly work.
    - dsco 4y ago
      You could use blockchain based transactions to reduce overhead and complexity. Here’s JPM doing it https://cointelegraph.com/news/jp-morgan-executes-first-defi-trade-on-public-blockchain/amp https://cointelegraph.com/news/jp-morgan-executes-first-defi... Have you ever tried steelmanning your arguments?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- patatino 4y ago
  Or with metaverse, only idiots would work on that.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    John Carmack is hardly an idiot.
    - 4y ago
kristiandupont 4y ago
>This is a breaking story and was updated. Really? Will nftnow.com be sending their helicopter to the Meta headquarters?
siquick 4y ago
I am still regularly contacted by recruiters trying to peddle Web3/NFT startup jobs - how are these companies still existing and how are they making money?
- yoavm 4y ago
  IMO, some investors are just slower in recognizing a scam. I know a few Web3 people that are still raising funds - it might be harder, but still happening. Some investors know very little about technology and are buying into the big promises of this new (now old) religion. To make it clear, this doesn't mean that these companies are actually _making_ money.
- dsco 4y ago
  Have you tried https://cryptofees.info https://cryptofees.info ? Some of them are making bank.
pie_flavor 4y ago
I've got no illusions about NFTs, but I also think they're perpendicular to the real takeaway from this article: Instagram yet again tried to ape a competitor's (in this case Twitter's) feature, yet again did not check whether any of their users wanted it, and yet again shuttered it after wasting a lot of time, money, and goodwill. I am starting to wonder if it is Facebook's dumping ground for features that they don't want to test-in-prod on Facebook actual.
- status200 4y ago
  Totally agree, single projects on Blur have $3 million in 1D volume and a floor price above $100k (at time of writing, 66 eth), the copycat markets were a little silly to think they would catch the spillover of the popularity of the platforms that started it just because they made the same thing on their side of the fence. It's a shame that it was a feeding frenzy for scammers, it's just another protocol when you look under the hood [0] [0] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc-721/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc...
  - xwolfi 4y ago
    Especially if they dont market to fraudsters and money launderers but to normal people who already pirate movies and wont start paying for monkey jpeg.
- spacebanana7 4y ago
  Yet they still haven't made an iPad native app. An obviously profitable project that users want.
INTPenis 4y ago
Genuine question but does this feel like yet another nail in the coffin of cryptocoins in general? I feel like the general sentiment is that cryptocoins have mostly been used to scam people out of money. The field seems full of manipulative tactics all for the purpose of feeding the early investors. Blockchains are not a magic technology, they will probably have a niche use somewhere, but cryptocoins seem like a dead end.
- ciropantera 4y ago
  After the 1000th "last nail in the coffin" I gave up believing that this will end someday. I see it becoming one of those ever-lasting scams that go up and down in popularity, like piramid schemes, tourist scams, 419 scams etc.
  - INTPenis 4y ago
    Oh it will absolutely be drawn out. I see that first hand because I know some people who write blockchains. There are still new "products" being launched that seem to be only for promoting the use of various cryptocoins. So it might be like e-mail spam, it'll stick around as long as there are suckers born every minute. But I'm hoping it will fade away from the mainstream at least.
baerrie 4y ago
Oh, integrating a form of gambling/pyramid scheme into your app was a bad idea? What a surprise!
trojanalert 4y ago
Something is off. Given Meta's ambitions with the metaverse, shutting this down seems contrary to how Meta is thinking of NFT art? Does this mean there's no place for NFT art in the metaverse? Or did something real shady happen in the plaftorm; data that shows people are susceptible to buying NFTs are exorbitant prices, and Instagram wants to stop this behaviours before market education kicks in?
- onion2k 4y ago
  Given Meta's ambitions with the metaverse.. Zuck announced that they're pivoting to AI, shuttering Reality Labs, and moving Oculus to a pure gaming platform. They have no ambitions for the metaverse any more.
  - sharperguy 4y ago
    So are they going to rename the company again?
    - Yizahi 4y ago
      They will save that card until the next privacy scandal. After it they will rename.
rkagerer 4y ago
Was excited when I learned about Bitcoin, how it's 'cash you can email'. Struggled to ever see the point of NFT's - at least as anything beyond 'trading cards' (which granted have their place). No problem with the hype moving on. Leaves a cleaner space behind for more compelling innovations to gain some limelight.
- mettamage 4y ago
  Well the concept of something to be non-fungible was pretty cool to me. I was just thinking about tokens being interchangeable until the concept of NFTs was explained. The fact that they've mostly been made to create bored apes and all that was a bit mind boggling unimaginative :')
ak_111 4y ago
It is amazing to think how wild the nft craze was, definitely history will look back at it as peak zero interest rate phenomena. My favourite stories: - BBC: Twelve-year-old boy makes £290,000 from whale NFTs https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58343062 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58343062 - Guardian: Rishi Sunak asks Royal Mint to create NFT (note 11 months later, it seems this project has quietly died) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/04/rishi-sunak-asks-royal-mint-to-create-nft https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/04/rishi-sun...
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Which makes it all the more baffling that Sesame Street just jumped in. https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/sesame-street-nfts-cookie-monster-veve-1235545680/ https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/sesame-street-nfts-coo...
- hef19898 4y ago
  NFTs are the tulips of the 21st century.
- brianmcc 4y ago
  It's amazing the feeling of "what the hell is going on with all this apparently credulous attention being paid to a total nonsense" that one feels watching this stuff happen in real time. It was always screamingly obviously a scam/sham/whatever, yet it was lapped up. Unreal. Critical faculties chucked enthusiastically out of the window, including by people and companies that should've known far better. And I appreciate there was of course some cynical deliberate bandwagon jumping, but still. "I don't understand the first thing about what's going on with all this but smart people seem excited so what could go wrong" is a horrific basis for anything involving money and possible consequent loss of huge amounts of it!
ChildOfChaos 4y ago
Interesting reading through the comments here, everyone talking like it’s dead. Is this true? Are NFT’s / crypto done? You know some people that are involved in it and they still seem to be hard into that world, so I was surprised to read all of this.
- 1337biz 4y ago
  The HN moral judgement cycle is in overdrive again. There seems a genuine distain for people that make money based on speculation.
  - jatins 4y ago
    HN has disdain for grifters and scammers. You are confusing them with speculators.
    - 1337biz 4y ago
      That is the case with every market that is not (yet) fully governmental regulated. Full of scams, dirt and some people who are able to navigate these waters to get incredibly rich.
      - JohnFen 4y ago
        Perhaps, but the legit new markets have real value to them aside from just being a conduit for grifting.
  - neom 4y ago
    HN is mostly about statups, basically speculation of product and potential market value. Many of us make our livings on speculation. I think you'll find it's more the case the people here are a) educated on how the technology literally works b) educated on how product as it applies adoption literally works c) able to think abstractly about market need. NFT as a technology and product... use case is... incredibly small.
    - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
low_tech_love 4y ago
"The Web3 community responds" --- is it a community though? And is that really the expression of the "community"? Or just some selected few statements that "by coincidence" happen to be aligned to theirs? Just because there are some people around the world doing similar things to you doesn't mean it's a community. I feel like people crave so much this feeling of "being a part of a community" that they try to apply this to everything, up to a point where the term is becoming meaningless.
- vitabenes 4y ago
  The term "community" is a buzzword. I'd say about 1% of what is claimed to be a community is an actual community.
communism 4y ago
Socialize all NFTs! Socialize Instagram and implement NFTs -- features that the world has waited for.
ar9av 4y ago
There are lots different scams to pull, and you can't know which ones they'll be pulling until you get further into it. Suppose you say "sure I'll sell, how much will you pay?" "Oh lots of money, I represent Nigerian princes of limitless wealth, but first you must convert your artworks to NFTs." "Sure thing, how?" "I am expert in this process, you just need to pay me the gas fees required to mint the NFTs". From here they can go a few ways. They could just quote a standard market rate in gweis, and you'll be like "in what?", and they'll explain that a gwei is a billionth of an Ether, a trivial amount, and you'll google all that and determine "oh yeah, of course people pay gas fees to mint NFTs in gweis", so you ask "ok, how do I send you gweis?" They could send you to a scam site that will try to drain whatever source of money you tried to buy gweis with, or they could tell you legitimately, then you send them your gweis, and they could just fuck off with your money and celebrate a scam well done. But if they have your gas fees, they could keep it going by explaining the prince is eager to buy the NFTs, now you just need to create an account on the NFT marketplace he uses, which you'll google and realize "well of course I need to gwei up for a marketplace account", so maybe you send more gweis to the scammer to create the account, or the scammer sends you to a third party site from which they get a referral commission, but ideally the scammer sends you to a sham NFT marketplace that they run and keep the proceeds from. Then they could fuck off with even more of your money and celebrate a scam well done. But since you're in this deep, they're going to milk it, and explain how the prince has transferred a trillion gweis to the marketplace to buy your NFTs, all you need to do is list them on the marketplace. I'm guessing you can see where this is headed...listing them on the marketplace requires a listing fee! Google confirms all this is perfectly normal. You're hesitant, but the prince is a busy man, and in a hurry to close the transaction. This is not just a one time deal, he's an ongoing benefactor to a select group of Instagram AI artists who are now fabulously wealthy...but he can't be inconvenienced with delays like this! He's being driven to one of his jets, and if you don't list the NFTs by takeoff time, the deal will be scuttled!!
leokennis 4y ago
Recently https://tychomusic.com/ https://tychomusic.com/ released some old vinyl record as digital music for the first time. You'd think a market place like https://bandcamp.com/ https://bandcamp.com/ would make this a trivial event: create the release, set the release date, let people pay, once the release date hits everyone downloads a ZIP with some FLAC files and a JPEG cover. Instead, this was an "NFT" release: took 15 tries (and several credit card charges) to "reserve" my spot. My purchase is now on some confusing website with random ID's all over the place, and I need to "mint" a "ticket" to log into it. If ever there was a solution in search of a problem, NFT's are it.
billpg 4y ago
But what will I right-click-save-as now?

270 points by 0xedb 4y ago

craigmcnamara 4y ago

And nothing of value was lost.

kstrauser 4y ago

It’s rare I’d say this, but good for Facebook.

1attice 4y ago

I'm no NFT cheerleader, but I do bemoan the failure of yet another attempt to provide artists with revenue. NFTs were always daft, but the fiction, as fiction often does, spoke to a real need.

jtode 4y ago
I think the Bored Ape thing was a perfect illustration of who is provided with revenue by NFTs.
- 1attice 4y ago
  You aren't wrong, and again, I am at pains to indicate that I don't support NFTs, was disappointed with NFTs, and I genuinely believe they're a standout sign of cultural decay. Again, my concern is for the artists who were briefly given hope, however false. For context, this book is helpful: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Artist-Creators-Struggling-Billionaires/dp/B083QMCJ5H/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=death+of+the+artist&qid=1678749374&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Death-Artist-Creators-Struggling-Bill...
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Artists can easily make money, they just have to produce what the market demands, like any other business. Draw furry porn comics and paywall them behind patreon and watch the cash roll in. Of course no one was going to pay $1000 for landscape_digital_painting.png which you can get a dime a million on dall-e.
    - 1attice 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - libraryatnight 4y ago
        There's lots of ways for artists to make money professionally (probably not paid enough in the corporate creative world, but nft's were never an answer to that issue, an issue plaguing a lot of industries and professions lately) and independently. I appreciate that it would be nice if everyone who painted or sang or wrote could support themselves with that passion, but if nobody is buying what you're selling NFTs weren't going to help. There's so much more than the art that goes into supporting oneself with art, and at that point it very much intersects with business. NFTs are just one more thing to sell if you have the thing a starving artist doesn't - an audience.
      - 1attice 4y ago
        [flagged]
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        JohnFen 4y ago
        I didn't downvote you, but I respectfully submit that it's possible that the people who did do so, and gigachad, understand the underlying issues and simply disagree with you.
        lgeorget 4y ago
        I think the reason that comment was downvoated is because "you need to read more about the issue" is not a rational argument. In the wrong context, it may even sound like an ad hominem.
        piqi 4y ago
        [flagged]
    - jandrese 4y ago
  - pornel 4y ago
    In the original post you've called it an "attempt to provide artists with revenue" and let's be clear it was never that. The only attempt was to provide revenue for Facebook, and both NFT scammers and Facebook only used artists as a fig leaf for the get-rich-quick scheme of wash trades and piracy.
    - 1attice 4y ago
      At pain of downvoting, I respectfully need to ask if you read the article? It literally describes an effort by Meta to put NFTs to use for artists. Again, decay.
Semioj 4y ago
[flagged]
- jsemrau 4y ago
  One can argue that the way we implemented this on finclout it even simpler. Its as simple as receiving a share of the Stakepool revenues based on relative performance on the platform. Passive content income through real yield treasuries.
  - Semioj 4y ago
    I have spent 10 minutes on your site an still don't get it. Bravo for that. Already a good sign of a well running crypto thing. And I'm still not sure how value is created if no one has to pay?! Right now for me it feels like a soon imploding weird microbubble of investment Tipps
    - sleepybrett 4y ago
      Shhh, if he actually explains what he does in plain english people might figure out that it's huge fucking grift.
    - jsemrau 4y ago
      One could view Proof of Stake (PoS) Systems as being similar to the Federal Reserve System. In the latter, the central bank provides liquidity to the banking system. The banking system then provides financial services (working capital, managing deposits, etc) to companies within an economy. These companies can then use this capital / service to provide goods and services to the economy. The banking system is, in simplified terms, a margin business that borrows funds from the central banks and lends out further. Through this margin all costs have to be covered. In the former this role is taken on by the Treasuries of the PoS (Eth, Cardano, etc). Stakepool operators take on the role of the banking system and Apps like finclout take on the role of a business in this ecosystem. Stakepool operators validate the chains, at a low energy overhead one might add, and thus provides services to the Central Treasury. For this service they receive a fee. This fee can be seen as being similar to the margin of the traditional banking system. Moreover, stakepool operator then can take on the role of distributing the liquidity they received from the treasury further into the economy of the block chain. Thereby providing liquidity to App Operators. In theory this could provide an efficient means to monetize content. And this is what the finclout app is aimed to solve. Absolutely, it doesn't do that well yet. Yet if you look into the consequences of Mandated Payments for content in Canada (https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2023/03/the-consequence-of-mandated-payments-for-links-facebook-confirms-it-will-drop-news-sharing-in-canada-under-bill-c-18/ https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2023/03/the-consequence-of-manda...) this solution could provide a better monetization mechanism. A tertiary benefit is that there is no need for a ponzi-like investing scheme through such a method.
mjr00 4y ago
Artists have been poor forever. There's a reason the expression is "starving artist" and not "well-fed artist." It's also easier than ever now for an independent artist to make money. Patreon, Fanbox, Skeb have vastly simplified the logistics of getting money for your work. Promotion through social media is free, though time-consuming. The problem is the same as it always was: artists want to focus on creating art, and not running a business. If I told you I was going to make a software company, with the expectation of a livable salary, but spend $0 on sales, marketing, or customer support, you'd call me an idiot, because there's a lot more to a software business than churning out code. Similarly, there's a lot more to making a living as an artist than drawing pictures or creating music. Ironically, NFTs were most successful with people who already understood all this. Unscrupulous people like Steve Aoki aggressively marketed their own NFTs using their existing brand power and made a hefty sum, while your dime-a-dozen 10k Twitter follower artist got nothing.
- grugagag 4y ago
  In an ideal world you’d do what you are best at. If that was churning useful code then be it. If that was selling that code without needing to churn code yourself then be it. It’s unfortunate we can’t collaborate with eachother without stealing eachother’s livelyhood.
  - mjr00 4y ago
    Aren't you just describing a business? Maybe even a startup specifically, with a CTO who's great at building things and a CEO who's great at selling them? I don't really see how that's stealing each other's livelihood; neither of those people can be successful without the other.
- flockonus 4y ago
  > while your dime-a-dozen 10k Twitter follower artist got nothing Very condescending and, at the same time, not true at all. Many existing artists did much better in revenue than ever in the way of getting paid for their craft during the rise of NFTs, there were many spaces where artists would brag about their success and help onboard others into the space, often paying their transaction fees. For many of the small audience artists it's very sad the momentum faded, and the spring of generative AI doesn't help them either.
delecti 4y ago
On the contrary, I'm glad to see the death of yet another scam targeting artists. People might have been trying to convince artists it could provide revenue, but I don't believe many of those people were themselves artists. It felt very much like "here you go, use this technology, we know best", because from the very start of the scam I saw artists unambiguously asserting they wanted no part in it, but lots of art being wrapped up in NFTs without permission.
2pEXgD0fZ5cF 4y ago
As someone who still knows a number of professional Illustrators I highly suggest talking to artists about this topic then for once, both hobby and professional. Actually talk to a few artists and you will quickly find a number of them who were already hurt by NFTs via art theft or spam and scam. NFTs and the guys pushing them were only out to hurt artists and exploit them, and nothing else. If they weren't out to scam them, they were out there just stealing the art. It was not "a nice idea" and the fact that people still try to tie them to "but what about the artists" narrative is a disgrace. I'm sorry, but there is no "but" here. Yes something for artists would be nice, everyone agrees. NFTs were never that, not even a little bit. It was not "an attempt to provide artists with revenue", it was an attempt to use artists for revenue. You make a difference between what you say, and the people cheering for NFTs, but the whole "yeah but what if it works" or "yeah but wouldn't it be nice if..." angle is exactly the type of crowbar all the cryptocurrency/NFT scammers used and still use to stay relevant.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  The artists don't matter. The art on the bored ape whatever was never the value. Artists pushing crypto are just looking to grift off their fanbase and are either stupid or malicious - in both cases reason for normal people to stay away.
mattdesl 4y ago
Most artists using NFTs for revenue are not using IG, so are unaffected by this news. This is dead in the water in any app, anyways. Apple charges 30% fee on all in-app NFT sales, and on top of that Apple ToS prohibits any “functional” use of NFT tech in their apps. [1] [1] https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1584609845570768897?s=20 https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1584609845570768897?s=2...
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  Thanks, Apple! No, seriously.
  - mattdesl 4y ago
    Hooray for tech monopolies prohibiting the use of open source payment protocols and continuing to force a ridiculous rent on users and developers? Typical HN view, at least.
    - DonHopkins 4y ago
      Thanks for nipping scams in the bud, and thanks for crushing Flash, Apple!

Calvin02 4y ago

I'll preface this by saying that I'm not a crypto fan, but I felt that NFTs were at least a promising use case for blockchain (* in addition to money, to avoid derailing this discussion). They solve a real world problem of ownership of digital assets in an interesting way. We need a solution here and NFTs proposed an "open" one. I wish we keep exploring this space.

buildbot 4y ago
How? They literally just point to a URL right? It's like buying the name of the a star but high tech....
- kipchak 4y ago
  Ones that had larger image sizes did, but some such as Cryptopunks for example are "on-chain", hence the small image size. Definitely a limitation for larger file sizes though.
- burnished 4y ago
  No, that is just one example of a payload - the token itself is non-fungible, so presumably some one could write code to associate the ownership of that token to some game feature. Lets say a mount in WoW, then you could trade said token as part of a secondary market. I dont think its a great idea, largely because making the ledger operate in a zero trust environment isnt a great value add for video game tokens, but it's important to judge things on their merits and in this case you could build a system as described.
  - drusepth 4y ago
    > Lets say a mount in WoW, then you could trade said token as part of a secondary market. This use-case always broke down for me when I realized you inherently can't have a secondary market when you still rely on the first market (the owners/operators of WoW) to maintain the integration(s) with token<->game. If I sell an owned mount token to a friend but the ownership of that mount doesn't actually transfer in-game, the entire system breaks down. Ergo, the livelihood of any secondary market relies entirely on Blizzard maintaining whatever in-game functionality uses the tokens, rather than solidifying a promise of any real decentralized ownership.

poopsmithe 4y ago

Instagram had NFT features?

grugagag 4y ago
Nobody was using it turns out.
- hypothesis 4y ago
  Sound like no one even knew it was a thing, which also might explain that nobody used it.
  - dbbk 4y ago
    Barely anyone even owns an NFT so I don't think product education was the primary problem
    - DANmode 4y ago
      It's both surprising that they had the feature this early in the adoption of token-based ownership, and that they wound it down so quickly.
      - trophycase 4y ago
        Common problem for many corporations, especially in times like these. They basically put it on life support the moment it is released so it never has a shot
      - namaria 4y ago
        > token-based ownership It's just token ownership. What ties tokens to actual physical assets is the institutional framework of laws, contracts, courts and law enforcement. Not a glorified pointer in a glorified ledger.
        DANmode 4y ago

colesantiago 4y ago

[flagged]

avnsadlfnlsaei 4y ago
Interestingly enough, bitcoin is up 10+% today and I think few other crypto currencies as well. Seems like when people see banks failing, bank runs and risk of losing their deposits, they see value in crypto.
- berkle4455 4y ago
  That's why bitcoin is rallying today after the US government swore to protect the banks and the integrity of the US dollar, and bitcoin crashed when the actual bank run happened and the outcome was up to speculation? Your commentary is quite literally the opposite of what happened.
- worksonmine 4y ago
  Yes, the same people seeing their fiat at risk finally understand the point of crypto is control and not NFTs. Hope they're smart enough to keep it safe and not on an exchange though, defeats the purpose.
- ourmandave 4y ago
  Bitcoin always rallies when crypto has bad news. It's propped up by wash trading by the tether cartel so people think everything is fine.
  - Lapsa 4y ago
    sensible but more likely folks are just desperately trying to hedge even if that means using crypto

luckydata 4y ago

the crypto tech cycle was one of the stupidest things a bunch of supposedly smart people bought hook line and sinker in a REALLY long time. The sweaty FOMO was incredibly real for something that never withstood an even cursory amount of scrutiny.

Gigachad 4y ago
NFTs didn't hold up to even the smallest amount of scrutiny. You'd have people say we will all be trading land as NFTs but can't answer what happens when hackers steal your land NFT. Obviously it makes no sense for the police and government to respect the stolen NFT but there is also no mechanism for correcting this mistake so the blockchain is now out of sync with reality. And in the end, people care about reality a lot more than they do about blockchain data.
- simonw 4y ago
  So you're telling me that this thing is going to have value because of artificial scarcity... but anyone can create their own new NFT (including one that links to the exact same image) at any time? Oh, and many of the people involved are going to stay anonymous, and attempting to prove the authenticity of one of these things by deferring to off-chain authorities goes against the intended spirit of the entire thing. Utterly baffling.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    There was a joke "It's obvious now in hindsight that NFTs are a scam, but to be fair, it was also obvious before, and in the middle too" I'm not sure anyone at any point thought they were legit, it was crypto chuds hyping their next scam, and the media willing to join in for extra clicks. The real losers were the the ones who bought in thinking they would find a greater fool to off load their magic beans to later.
    - bawolff 4y ago
      The baffaling part is it even sounds like someone making up an over the top scam. If you believe that ownership of a hash of the brooklyn bridge in a ledger is the same as the real thing. Well i have the brooklyn bridge to sell you.

pram 4y ago

My favorite recent NFT story was the exchange that opened an NFT market, and then closed it 30 days later because they only had $100 in trades: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=wazirx-closes-nft-marketplace-after-processing-112-in-trades-over-a-month https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=wazirx-closes-nft-marketpla...

jandrese 4y ago
Imagine starting an NFT market and not even doing the standard wash trades to set the ridiculous prices for all of the FOMO spam. Oh my god, these guys were true believers. That’s even more hilarious.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- oliwarner 4y ago
  Washing is pretty abrasive when there's a 5% sales commission.
  - adastra22 4y ago
    Not for the people running the market.
  - uncletammy 4y ago
    I think they are suggesting that the exchange would use bot accounts, exempt from trading fees.
  - jandrese 4y ago
    You gotta spend money to grift money.
  - kuhewa 4y ago
    Even if they did pay it they would be collecting their own vig
  - shapefrog 4y ago

0xB31B1B 4y ago

If there is a future for crypto it is in the cyberpunk/pirate zone. The idea the institutional investors thought they could make a buck off all these folks is hilarious. Even in their delusional unrealized apotheosis the crypto/web3 crowd was building the anti Facebook. I think all the web3 investment was horrible BS and crypto is not a place for venture investing. If it has a future at all it should embrace the drug dealing ponzi scheming tax evading ransomwaring heart of itself. It’s not chase bank, it’s the Medellin cartel.

bawolff 4y ago
On the contrary, true believers are usually the easiest people to make a buck off. Their bias makes them easy to trick/manipulate.
- beepbooptheory 4y ago
  I feel like those are second order "true believers". The real guys never left Cypherpunks mailing list, or you wont find them on Twitter at least.
- kuhewa 4y ago
  There were Gamestop true believers for Christ's sake, who knew they bought in high and would probably not get out before it crashes, but still let themselves convinced their disposable income that month was worth the price of sticking it to the man.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    It was a fun time though, and watching hedge funds lose billions of dollars in value definitely was worth the 100$. The way I see it, the fun went on for months, way better entertainment value than movie tickets in that time. And I still have some GME and AMC to remember that glorious time. Ape together strong.
    - kuhewa 4y ago
      If the value was real to you there is no arguing, likewise i spend more on inputs to grow tomatoes every year than the market value of what I get out, for similar reason. but I'm sure you are aware someone that repeated the line about sticking it to the man is still laughing about you believing it and getting left holding the bag.

xnx 4y ago

Even Salesforce has some NFT feature: https://www.salesforce.com/products/web3/nft/ https://www.salesforce.com/products/web3/nft/

oblio 4y ago
Salesforce probably has SOAP and RPC and XML DB features, so that's not such a high bar to clear.

nailer 4y ago

Most of the comments made in this thread about NFTs could also be made about digital signatures, HTTPS, Signal, PGP and traditional forms of crypto. “I can open up devtools and change the words on this page. HTTPS has no value.“ “I can photoshop you digitally signing a different document. Digital signatures have no value.” I fairly obviously disagree with those statements but if you do too - you may wish to put your pitchfork down for a moment and think deeper about the value of digitally signed artwork.

sleepybrett 4y ago
In most nft marketplaces the actual artwork was not signed. They signed a url, not even a fucking hash of the jpg.
- cypress66 4y ago
  That's not how it works. The url was ipfs, which is immutable and is a hash by itself.
  - illiarian 4y ago
    >The url was ipfs, which is immutable and is a hash by itself. 1. For the majority (perhaps even vast majority) it was never pointing to ipfs, but to some server running somewhere. 2. On ipfs files will disappear eventually if there's no one to pay for their storage
    - nailer 4y ago
      1. Sites like https://nft.storage/ https://nft.storage/ (which I dislike as they have a silly bug with content types) or Pinata also go to IPFS. Just because the https URL doesn't look like a well known IPFS HTTP gateway doesn't mean it's not on IPFS. 2. Good point. I haven't investigated this but I should.
      - illiarian 4y ago

sebastien_b 4y ago

>“You’re not thinking in the long run. What if you would have said goodbye to the internet when the bubble exploded back in the 2000s? There would be no Google. Or Meta whatsoever,” she said. She says that like it would’ve been a bad thing.

sebastien_b 4y ago
[flagged]
- sebastien_b 4y ago
  LOL!
- dang 4y ago
  We've banned this account for repeatedly posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments and ignoring our requests to stop. Not cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

jiqiren 4y ago

nature is healing

ht85 4y ago
non fungus token

web3-is-a-scam 4y ago

Passed few days have been really really juicy for the crypto space. Purchase popcorn futures while you can.

philihp 4y ago
Must be driving really fast.
Lapsa 4y ago
+50% capital gains on a single day. unlikely I will beat that record anytime soon

sleepybrett 4y ago

This is good for bitcoin.

paxys 4y ago

But think about the money laundering industry...

PretzelPirate 4y ago

Just a reminder: NFTs that link to an image is a simple use case for the NFT token standard, and most of the time it didn't make any sense. NFTs make more sense when representing ownership of digital assets that grant some utility. I am a believer in the idea that in-game assets will become NFTs. Playing video games professsionally is like being a tradesperson, and just like a carpenter doesn't need to use a different hammer for each job, a gamer shouldn't need to get new stats or weapons for each game they play. Just like a famous musician might, a gamer should be able to sell the gun they used professionally to a fan and that fan can have that represented in any game (using that game's native assets). I see a lot of value in an open registry of digital items I own, each with a cryptographic proof of provenance, and which doesnt require a centralized entity to control and decide which games can and can't participate. This can be done without a blockchain, but then there's no central proof of who owns what (I can own the item, sell it, but still submit old proofs to a game to keep using the item). I may think this way because I own a lot of digital goods that are stored in private databases which will someday shutdown. At that point, I'll loose all of those items.

AlotOfReading 4y ago
Why would any game developer ever implement that? - If they want money, NFTs are directly competing with microtransactions/loot boxes. Any NFT imported is money the developer isn't making off their own content. - If they want a good game, allowing users to import random items from other games is going to be impossible to balance. - If they want a free for all, they can already implement mods and steam workshop without the crypto aspects. As an aside, if the goal is simply trading items between players, that's better done with a traditional market. Allowing real money to enter the game tends to incentivise all the worst player behaviors and ruin the experience, as Blizzard discovered with the Diablo auction house.
throw_m239339 4y ago
NFT, like 99% of blockchain tech, are a solution looking for a problem. They have absolutely zero practical use in the real world. The only people getting rich with NFT are the people selling ETH.

janalsncm 4y ago

Sounds like they didn’t roll out any actual meaningful features until long after the crypto hype died down. Peak crypto/NFT frenzy was early/mid 2021. So not only were they bandwagoning, they were slow too.

BigCryo 4y ago

Nft is no longer fashionable among the intelligentsia of the internet

faefox 4y ago

NFTs: the thing nobody needed, let alone wanted, but which proved to be a sufficiently effective money laundering (sorry, "speculative") instrument that we all had to have it shoved down our throats for the better part of a year anyway. Goodbye and good riddance.

eric-hu 4y ago
What makes NFTs any more effective at money laundering than cryptocurrency?
- DebtDeflation 4y ago
  You can sell them to yourself (at arm's length, using separate entities) to establish a price, and then sell them to yourself again (using a different entity) to take the profit and launder the money. Crypto may be manipulated, but you can't just set an arbitrary price equal to the amount of money you need to launder.
- michaelt 4y ago
  Hypothetically? If I made $1M of bitcoin proceeds-of-crime and I put it through a coin tumbler then cash out, it can't be directly linked to the crime - but I also can't explain where the money came from. On the other hand, if my legitimate account creates some shitty digital art and auctions it, then my proceeds-of-crime account buys it, I get slightly less money (auction fees etc) but a good explanation of where I got the money from: I'm an artist, you don't understand my work because you're a dumbass. Of course, there are plenty of other ways to launder money - feed the proceeds of crime through a fixed-odds betting terminal and I'm just a lucky gambler. Anonymously buy fine art with a suitcase full of cash, then resell it as something I found in grandpa's attic. Sue my own anonymous tax-haven company, and report a big payment as an out-of-court settlement. And so on.
  - mikhael28 4y ago
    This was a great explanation.
- 4y ago

Kye 4y ago

And Sesame Street just announced its NFT, long after the hype has passed. I knew they were desperate for funding when they let HBO get first shot at new episodes, but I figured that solved things.

mattdesl 4y ago

Most artists using NFTs for revenue are not using IG, so are unaffected by this news. NFT is in many ways anti-Meta, just buy/sell/mint directly with your wallet. It is now dead in the water in any app, unfortunately. Apple charges 30% fee on all in-app NFT sales, and on top of that Apple ToS strictly prohibits any “functional” use of NFT tech in their apps.[1] As you’d expect, NFT markets have moved to web in general, outside of app space. [1] https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1584609845570768897?s=20 https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1584609845570768897?s=2...

1337biz 4y ago
I think they always were out of conventional fiat markets. Its just that big corps try to get a slice of the market (and so far mostly fail at it).

RancheroBeans 4y ago

I'll be honest, it hurts me to see people shit on something, likely because of the sentiment towards NFTs at the moment. It's definitely not the first time I've seen a lot of smart people on HN look at things in an off-way. There are bad actors, there are bad actors everywhere with any physical goods as well. I'm just trying to build something I enjoy and others will too. That something happens to use NFTs.

ofchnofc 4y ago
[dead]
pcthrowaway 4y ago
What is that thing you're building, and why does it use NFTs?
atoav 4y ago
Sorry, as someone who is fascinated with cryptographgy I have to say that NFTs are a technology nobody could explain me the benefits of. Most of them who tried were either naive (and lost money on NFTs) or bad actors trying to sell me something. The fact that I have not met a single knowledgable person who managed to convince me that NFTs are a good technology that solves problems that need solving in elegant ways doesn't speak about me, it speaks about the topic at hand. To me NFTs look like this: Somebody was like "how can we make money off the internet if people just can copy everything? We need to limit the supply somehow!" and then they tried to market it to artists "you will earn money this way". I don't even agree that copyability of data is a problem, and the argument of "we can make money by owning and not putting in a lot of work" attracts exactly the kind of bad actor you talked about. Any technology doesn't live in isolation from society, especially not something like NFTs that makes the extraordinary claim to introduce something as fundamental as ownership within a system that has been built on free copying of data. That means bad actors need to be factored in, especially if you're marketing the thing in the style of a get rich quick scheme. Maybe you can explain why this is something we want and why this is the technology that solves it?
- ahnick 4y ago

atoav 4y ago

NFTs to me felt from the start like stereoscopic film: Sure technologically it has some interesting aspects, but I couldn't really see how the results are worth the extra effort. And anybody kept telling me it is the future. That being said, with NFTs I have never met any truly technologically knowledgeable person who could explain me in detail why it solves the problems it (wrongfully) claimed to solve.

trophycase 4y ago
The killer app of Ethereum already exists, and it is the set of standards being built on it that allow you to easily interoperate with other financial applications. NFTs are basically what the name implies, whereas "tokens" represent something fungible (e.g. stocks in a company), NFTs are a new standard (ERC721 or others) for representing non-fungible digital goods (deeds for houses, collectibles, game assets, etc.). Suppose I'm a small indie game studio. I create a game, and this game has skins for characters, weapons, what have you. I want to build a real money economy around these assets, but don't have the manpower to deal with payment processors, build a marketplace, etc. My company could just represent the skins as ERC721 tokens and instantly have access to the wealth of infrastructure that already supports the ERC721 standard. People can buy and sell on a marketplace of their choosing (Opensea, Blur, etc.), they can manage their assets using a wallet of their choice (Metamask, Rainbow, Frame, Coinbase Wallet, etc.). This is just one example, but can be applied to literally any non-fungible asset that be represented digitally. And although the application I mentioned is primarily a financial one (because Ethereum is the internet of finance), there are certainly non-financial use cases for having a fully interoperable, decentralized representation of a digital good. It's important to understand that NFTs didn't invent digital scarcity. This is an idea that's existed for a long time. Downloading a song I have to pay for, League of Legends issuing a limited edition skin, even the notion of a privileged role on a website (e.g. moderator) implies some sort of digital scarcity. People value having status, people value having scarce things, NFTs didn't invent that idea, they just make it much easier to represent these things in a very standard way and plug into mechanisms that allow for price discovery of these things (which I repeat, already are deemed to have value, but have extremely high friction to trade). Maybe you don't understand because you aren't a digital native. I grew up playing World of Warcraft, and even from a young age I understood the power of having something other people didn't have. When I saw other players with their Naxxramas gear and I'm sitting there in normal Uncommons, it implied a difference of status. There was value in getting this gear because it made you feel special and important, or part of a certain community. The entire premise of the game revolves around the idea of scarcity (people have to work to get the best gear). If people had the best gear from the start, they wouldn't show up to raid every week, they wouldn't spend hours and hours farming materials or gold. That's digital scarcity, it's always existed.

domatic1 4y ago

you couldn't do anything with it, just display it, what's the point then if you can't trade it or sell it.

brettermeier 4y ago
If you don't want to look at it, why buy it in the first place? I mean, anybody needs to look at it, or all this stuff makes no sense...

chrisbrandow 4y ago

I have yet to hear anyone say they are embarrassed by their crypto/NFT dabbling a, but a quiet withdrawal from this space is satisfying enough.

highwaylights 4y ago

Reading the linked article is hard going. “Imagine if you gave up on the Internet in 2000”. This again. This is how distorted people’s perceptions become when they live their whole life in echo chambers. Leaving the obvious aside, It genuinely seems like a lot of those still pushing this are utterly unaware of the harms their whole mess has caused. Also, they’ve made it way harder to teach non-techies how to stay safe online in the future by co-opting the term “crypto”. They immediately think any use of the term crypto is related to this stuff. Your Digital ponzi scam != cryptography. The worst part is how the public now thinks if you’re involved in software you must be a massive believer in cc/NFTs because they keep hearing about it so all techies must think it’s awesome, right!? It’s exhausting.

eterm 4y ago
If you're in the cryptography business I'd just refer to it as digital security. ( Or cybersecurity if you prefer ). It's the same concept but without the baggage of "crypto".
- klabb3 4y ago
  Yes but Why should I change? They’re the ones who suck.
  - siwatanejo 4y ago
    Come on, I'm sure that before bitcoin was invented, no one used the term "crypto" to refer to "cryptography"; doing that would be more cringy than this article itself.
    - lordfoom 4y ago
      > I'm sure And yet you are wrong :)
    - sunbum 4y ago
      Literally everyone did

pavlov 4y ago

I worked at Facebook in 2021, and NFTs were like a honeypot for the most useless managers. If I were Zuck, I might start another crypto project next year and ask for volunteers because it seems like a pretty good way to extract the worst performers into a neat org chart box that can be shut down without breaking anything else.

dsco 4y ago
This could be a symptom of Facebook and not software as a whole. I mean, you could say the same thing about what’s happening in AI and large corporations. Same for IoT etc.
- pornel 4y ago
  No, you couldn't, because the other things have useful applications, and can possibly work.
  - dsco 4y ago
    You could use blockchain based transactions to reduce overhead and complexity. Here’s JPM doing it https://cointelegraph.com/news/jp-morgan-executes-first-defi-trade-on-public-blockchain/amp https://cointelegraph.com/news/jp-morgan-executes-first-defi... Have you ever tried steelmanning your arguments?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
patatino 4y ago
Or with metaverse, only idiots would work on that.
- threeseed 4y ago
  John Carmack is hardly an idiot.
  - 4y ago

kristiandupont 4y ago

>This is a breaking story and was updated. Really? Will nftnow.com be sending their helicopter to the Meta headquarters?

siquick 4y ago

I am still regularly contacted by recruiters trying to peddle Web3/NFT startup jobs - how are these companies still existing and how are they making money?

yoavm 4y ago
IMO, some investors are just slower in recognizing a scam. I know a few Web3 people that are still raising funds - it might be harder, but still happening. Some investors know very little about technology and are buying into the big promises of this new (now old) religion. To make it clear, this doesn't mean that these companies are actually _making_ money.
dsco 4y ago
Have you tried https://cryptofees.info https://cryptofees.info ? Some of them are making bank.

pie_flavor 4y ago

I've got no illusions about NFTs, but I also think they're perpendicular to the real takeaway from this article: Instagram yet again tried to ape a competitor's (in this case Twitter's) feature, yet again did not check whether any of their users wanted it, and yet again shuttered it after wasting a lot of time, money, and goodwill. I am starting to wonder if it is Facebook's dumping ground for features that they don't want to test-in-prod on Facebook actual.

status200 4y ago
Totally agree, single projects on Blur have $3 million in 1D volume and a floor price above $100k (at time of writing, 66 eth), the copycat markets were a little silly to think they would catch the spillover of the popularity of the platforms that started it just because they made the same thing on their side of the fence. It's a shame that it was a feeding frenzy for scammers, it's just another protocol when you look under the hood [0] [0] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc-721/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc...
- xwolfi 4y ago
  Especially if they dont market to fraudsters and money launderers but to normal people who already pirate movies and wont start paying for monkey jpeg.
spacebanana7 4y ago
Yet they still haven't made an iPad native app. An obviously profitable project that users want.

INTPenis 4y ago

Genuine question but does this feel like yet another nail in the coffin of cryptocoins in general? I feel like the general sentiment is that cryptocoins have mostly been used to scam people out of money. The field seems full of manipulative tactics all for the purpose of feeding the early investors. Blockchains are not a magic technology, they will probably have a niche use somewhere, but cryptocoins seem like a dead end.

ciropantera 4y ago
After the 1000th "last nail in the coffin" I gave up believing that this will end someday. I see it becoming one of those ever-lasting scams that go up and down in popularity, like piramid schemes, tourist scams, 419 scams etc.
- INTPenis 4y ago
  Oh it will absolutely be drawn out. I see that first hand because I know some people who write blockchains. There are still new "products" being launched that seem to be only for promoting the use of various cryptocoins. So it might be like e-mail spam, it'll stick around as long as there are suckers born every minute. But I'm hoping it will fade away from the mainstream at least.

baerrie 4y ago

Oh, integrating a form of gambling/pyramid scheme into your app was a bad idea? What a surprise!

trojanalert 4y ago

Something is off. Given Meta's ambitions with the metaverse, shutting this down seems contrary to how Meta is thinking of NFT art? Does this mean there's no place for NFT art in the metaverse? Or did something real shady happen in the plaftorm; data that shows people are susceptible to buying NFTs are exorbitant prices, and Instagram wants to stop this behaviours before market education kicks in?

onion2k 4y ago
Given Meta's ambitions with the metaverse.. Zuck announced that they're pivoting to AI, shuttering Reality Labs, and moving Oculus to a pure gaming platform. They have no ambitions for the metaverse any more.
- sharperguy 4y ago
  So are they going to rename the company again?
  - Yizahi 4y ago
    They will save that card until the next privacy scandal. After it they will rename.

rkagerer 4y ago

Was excited when I learned about Bitcoin, how it's 'cash you can email'. Struggled to ever see the point of NFT's - at least as anything beyond 'trading cards' (which granted have their place). No problem with the hype moving on. Leaves a cleaner space behind for more compelling innovations to gain some limelight.

mettamage 4y ago
Well the concept of something to be non-fungible was pretty cool to me. I was just thinking about tokens being interchangeable until the concept of NFTs was explained. The fact that they've mostly been made to create bored apes and all that was a bit mind boggling unimaginative :')

ak_111 4y ago

It is amazing to think how wild the nft craze was, definitely history will look back at it as peak zero interest rate phenomena. My favourite stories: - BBC: Twelve-year-old boy makes £290,000 from whale NFTs https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58343062 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58343062 - Guardian: Rishi Sunak asks Royal Mint to create NFT (note 11 months later, it seems this project has quietly died) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/04/rishi-sunak-asks-royal-mint-to-create-nft https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/04/rishi-sun...

ceejayoz 4y ago
Which makes it all the more baffling that Sesame Street just jumped in. https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/sesame-street-nfts-cookie-monster-veve-1235545680/ https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/sesame-street-nfts-coo...
hef19898 4y ago
NFTs are the tulips of the 21st century.
brianmcc 4y ago
It's amazing the feeling of "what the hell is going on with all this apparently credulous attention being paid to a total nonsense" that one feels watching this stuff happen in real time. It was always screamingly obviously a scam/sham/whatever, yet it was lapped up. Unreal. Critical faculties chucked enthusiastically out of the window, including by people and companies that should've known far better. And I appreciate there was of course some cynical deliberate bandwagon jumping, but still. "I don't understand the first thing about what's going on with all this but smart people seem excited so what could go wrong" is a horrific basis for anything involving money and possible consequent loss of huge amounts of it!

ChildOfChaos 4y ago

Interesting reading through the comments here, everyone talking like it’s dead. Is this true? Are NFT’s / crypto done? You know some people that are involved in it and they still seem to be hard into that world, so I was surprised to read all of this.

1337biz 4y ago
The HN moral judgement cycle is in overdrive again. There seems a genuine distain for people that make money based on speculation.
- jatins 4y ago
  HN has disdain for grifters and scammers. You are confusing them with speculators.
  - 1337biz 4y ago
    That is the case with every market that is not (yet) fully governmental regulated. Full of scams, dirt and some people who are able to navigate these waters to get incredibly rich.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      Perhaps, but the legit new markets have real value to them aside from just being a conduit for grifting.
- neom 4y ago
  HN is mostly about statups, basically speculation of product and potential market value. Many of us make our livings on speculation. I think you'll find it's more the case the people here are a) educated on how the technology literally works b) educated on how product as it applies adoption literally works c) able to think abstractly about market need. NFT as a technology and product... use case is... incredibly small.
  - 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

low_tech_love 4y ago

"The Web3 community responds" --- is it a community though? And is that really the expression of the "community"? Or just some selected few statements that "by coincidence" happen to be aligned to theirs? Just because there are some people around the world doing similar things to you doesn't mean it's a community. I feel like people crave so much this feeling of "being a part of a community" that they try to apply this to everything, up to a point where the term is becoming meaningless.

vitabenes 4y ago
The term "community" is a buzzword. I'd say about 1% of what is claimed to be a community is an actual community.

communism 4y ago

Socialize all NFTs! Socialize Instagram and implement NFTs -- features that the world has waited for.

ar9av 4y ago

There are lots different scams to pull, and you can't know which ones they'll be pulling until you get further into it. Suppose you say "sure I'll sell, how much will you pay?" "Oh lots of money, I represent Nigerian princes of limitless wealth, but first you must convert your artworks to NFTs." "Sure thing, how?" "I am expert in this process, you just need to pay me the gas fees required to mint the NFTs". From here they can go a few ways. They could just quote a standard market rate in gweis, and you'll be like "in what?", and they'll explain that a gwei is a billionth of an Ether, a trivial amount, and you'll google all that and determine "oh yeah, of course people pay gas fees to mint NFTs in gweis", so you ask "ok, how do I send you gweis?" They could send you to a scam site that will try to drain whatever source of money you tried to buy gweis with, or they could tell you legitimately, then you send them your gweis, and they could just fuck off with your money and celebrate a scam well done. But if they have your gas fees, they could keep it going by explaining the prince is eager to buy the NFTs, now you just need to create an account on the NFT marketplace he uses, which you'll google and realize "well of course I need to gwei up for a marketplace account", so maybe you send more gweis to the scammer to create the account, or the scammer sends you to a third party site from which they get a referral commission, but ideally the scammer sends you to a sham NFT marketplace that they run and keep the proceeds from. Then they could fuck off with even more of your money and celebrate a scam well done. But since you're in this deep, they're going to milk it, and explain how the prince has transferred a trillion gweis to the marketplace to buy your NFTs, all you need to do is list them on the marketplace. I'm guessing you can see where this is headed...listing them on the marketplace requires a listing fee! Google confirms all this is perfectly normal. You're hesitant, but the prince is a busy man, and in a hurry to close the transaction. This is not just a one time deal, he's an ongoing benefactor to a select group of Instagram AI artists who are now fabulously wealthy...but he can't be inconvenienced with delays like this! He's being driven to one of his jets, and if you don't list the NFTs by takeoff time, the deal will be scuttled!!

leokennis 4y ago

Recently https://tychomusic.com/ https://tychomusic.com/ released some old vinyl record as digital music for the first time. You'd think a market place like https://bandcamp.com/ https://bandcamp.com/ would make this a trivial event: create the release, set the release date, let people pay, once the release date hits everyone downloads a ZIP with some FLAC files and a JPEG cover. Instead, this was an "NFT" release: took 15 tries (and several credit card charges) to "reserve" my spot. My purchase is now on some confusing website with random ID's all over the place, and I need to "mint" a "ticket" to log into it. If ever there was a solution in search of a problem, NFT's are it.

billpg 4y ago

But what will I right-click-save-as now?