Stop this digital ownership madness, NFTs are bullshit | Hacker News Reader

Stop this digital ownership madness, NFTs are bullshit

shkspr.mobi

27 pointsaminozuur21 comments

I don't even know where to begin.... :/

"An Original Banksy Has Been Burned and Turned Into an NFT" https://decrypt.co/60070/an-original-banksy-has-been-burned-...

I would start with the title of the artwork that was destroyed.

> An original artwork by iconic British street artist Banksy, named “Morons,” has been physically burned and transformed into a digital representation — known as an NFT — by a group of collectors and investors.

> The 2006 work ridicules collectors who pay vast sums of money for art.

Seems quite fitting, doesn’t it.

Eh, this is just some crotchety "get off my lawn" style rant. The truth is that regardless of hype around NFTs, the world is digital and there are people looking to create meaning around "digital ownership". Not everyone is after it to make a buck, the same way that early adopters of crypto currency are interested in the technology and its social implications.

The thing is you don't have to participate, it's not hurting you, so what's the problem?

And before you highlight the environmental impact, I'd say that point just highlights some issues our society has with mismanaging energy. Let's switch to nuclear power and proof of stake blockchains.

> The thing is you don't have to participate, it's not hurting you, so what's the problem?

Why do people get upset when they see people falling for scams?

It's upsetting to some people to watch a gullible person get scammed. It's a drain on society. It rewards parasites and charlatans, and most people want fewer of those in society.

> I'd say that point just highlights some issues our society has with mismanaging energy. Let's switch to nuclear power and proof of stake blockchains.

Proof-of-stake is the real solution here, and I'm not really sure why you're blaming "society" for mismanaging that part. People could switch to proof-of-stake without any involvement from social institutions (government, nonprofit, media, etc.) just as they say they can adopt crypto without those institutions.

I think the part where it's a "scam" that people are falling for is entirely subjective. People who relate to the idea of digital ownership don't feel ripped off, and I think there are plenty of people involved in NFTs without grandiose expectations. But you're right anything that involved high stakes sums of money will disproportionately reward sharks and ruthlessness, this includes finance and politics as well. There is perhaps little room for idealists. With NFTs and Crypto and anything else, you can take what you like, it's a freedom that we have.

RE: society mismanaging energy. That was not a reference to POS, but that there's an aversion to nuclear energy which leaves less of carbon footprint.

> The thing is you don't have to participate, it's not hurting you, so what's the problem?

Because society is held together and characterized by a set of values. A society without shared values is no society. I want to promote a society where scarcity is not an artificial construct.

On the other hand, I don't care if people obsess over pokemon cards. So maybe it's fine.

No social phenomenon is independent of any other. Promoting this sort of thing accelerates the virtualization of the economy and the addition of artificial scarcity. It rewards bad actors. It saps the resources of people who fall for bubbles and pump-and-dumps. There are great aspects to it, notably artists making a living out of their art, but it's a symptom of broader issues and certainly not something innocent or unrelated to our own lives.

"It rewards bad actors." - But doesn't ANYTHING with financial incentives?

First, I absolutely agree that promoting NFTs as a vehicle of investment is insane irresponsible, but promoting NFTs as a potential avenue for "digital ownership" makes reasonable sense.

Like any new thing there will be profiteers, scammers, spammers and the like. The true value, just like any other art, comes from the value you place on it. I could 100% imagine myself buying a digital frame, hang it on my wall and display some NFTS that I own. Those tweet spammers who are pumping tweets onto the chain every second automatically are stupid in my opinion. Often times it isn't about the art as much as it is about the artist. They're just muking up the seas.

NFTs for video games objects (such as guns in Counter-Strike):

1. Can be traded on the chain the publisher integrated in their game,

2. Can be limited in numbers based on random drops, such that the publisher will not have infinite "printing" privilege,

3. Will require the wallet connected to your account in the game,

4. Owning the digital file permits the owner to actually use the item.

I don't see digital ownership for video games NFTs as unfeasible, nor bullshit.

Ironic. We create digital worlds where we're utopically not bound by scarcity any more, and then we build scarcity back into them.

I guess it turns out scarcity is pretty enjoyable as long as you don't actually need whatever is scarce. Maybe future utopias will also have fake scarcity to keep people entertained

>The first Matrix I designed was quite naturally perfect, it was a work of art, flawless, sublime; a triumph equaled only by its monumental failure.

-The Architect to Neo

>Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your "perfect world". But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. So the perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.

-Agent Smith to Morpheus

I don't neccessarily think it needs to be suffering, people just want something tangable to work towards. Noone is suffering or miserable without a fortnite skin, but without working towards them the game would be far less fun.

People are in fact suffering for not having Fortnite skins:

https://www.thegamer.com/fortnite-default-insult-kids/

This might even be the point of having scarce skins, if we combine it with the causes for bullying:

https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/most-teen-bullying-occurs-among...

I can agree with limitations giving structure to our expression, but the consequences don't end there.

I don't know, Ive spent a bit of time around children. If they don't have a actual reason to bully other kids then they will invent a reason whole cloth. You would have a hard time convincing me that scarcity has anything at all to do with that. If fortnite skins didn't exist it would be freckles, or names, or head shape, or literally something made up. You're second link even says bullying is just climbing the social ladder, I don't think scarcity of being the popular one is solvable unless everyone lives in a personal world full of only ai. Alot of kids and teenagers are honestly just dicks.

> NFTs for video games objects (such as guns in Counter-Strike)

You don't want or need blockchain for this. The game publisher is the centralized source of truth. You're essentially talking about decentralized DRM, which has no benefit on top of DRM for either the user or the publisher.

> Can be limited in numbers based on random drops, such that the publisher will not have infinite "printing" privilege

This does absolutely nothing to curb the publisher's power to make more items.

They own the game. They can agree to the "contract" of the blockchain and then break it at any time. As long as they can change the game bits, there is no added security from blockchain.

> Will require the wallet connected to your account in the game

Who would want this and why? If anything, it's another avenue for de-anonymizing a wallet with no added benefit for the wallet owner.

> Owning the digital file permits the owner to actually use the item.

Again, the game developer permits the owner to use them. Blockchain could be an authentication scheme, but it doesn't take that power away from the developer.

> I don't see digital ownership for video games NFTs as unfeasible, nor bullshit.

You haven't proposed a problem that blockchain can actually solve. For the problems you implied, I offered easy workarounds.

The problem with NFTs is that they don't actually prove anything outside of themselves. You can "own" a copy of some 0s and 1s in a particular order, but that doesn't change the fact that the file can be infinitely replicated by anyone once it's decrypted.

Assumed is the model of production: bespoke assets for each game.

This is untenable going forward if the industry continues to have a rising cost curve. Raph Koster's discussion of game cost is a good overview of what's happening and the challenges that result from it.

The step towards an NFT market begins with the creation of viable transfer mediums - assets not optimized towards particular games but with a reasonable degree of retargetability. The market for modding and independent asset creation then writes to that format and some games start to subscribe to it, enacting a "Multiverse". At that point opting in to an NFT market and allowing trade across games becomes a viable way to offer new experiences at lower cost, and the tokens themselves are meaningful for the same reasons that existing microtransaction tokens are - use value in-game, ability to "flex", but probably not an in-game advantage(unless we go full "Barcode Battler" and manufacture a randomized meaning from the token).

This isn't hypothetical - ESPA/Digitalax is an example of an attempt to make this market. It's pre-launch with a lot of unanswered elements on the technology side of things - I doubt the format that they currently propose - but the concept otherwise makes sense, and it's possible to pivot, aim lower, and not go for universal formats right off the bat.

Wow, none of that makes sense. Let me go through it point by point.

> The step towards an NFT market begins with the creation of viable transfer mediums - assets not optimized towards particular games but with a reasonable degree of retargetability.

You seem to be completely ignoring the points in my post.

You can do this without blockchain. In fact, blockchain would be a hindrance. If I create a game that supports a common asset format (which is a dubious concept to begin with), then I have already centralized the "truth" of the asset's value. I, the developer, and not the blockchain, determine the ownership. I can completely ignore whatever the blockchain says at any time. There is no contract. The ownership is meaningless because it is instantly ignorable.

> At that point opting in to an NFT market and allowing trade across games becomes a viable way to offer new experiences at lower cost

This would increase the cost of the game, not decrease it. It would do this in two ways:

1. Supporting a third-party format is going to take extra dev time. Games are not standardized enough at this point for the behavior of an asset to be fungible between games.

2. Selling unique assets (not allowing people to reuse existing assets) is what gives devs the highest margins. Custom assets are a revenue center, not a cost center.

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