Add an unlimited supply of unique things, and how could anyone expect to make money from this?
This is also why every project do to X but with blockchain (like solving counterfeiting/authenticity, copyright, etc) is either stupid or a con using a buzzword to try and solicit investment or media attention.
The reason blockchains work for cryptocurrencies is because the source of truth is the blockchain itself. This breaks down in the real world where the state of the real world is the source of truth and you'd need a trusted, centralized entity to bridge the two worlds, but at this point why use a blockchain instead of a database if you're going to trust a single entity anyway?
Who is hosting this db?
I mean, this gives you all the control, you can charge for all sorts of services and "value adds". There's no reason you, as the maker of this software, would want this available as a block chain.
Unless you also create a token and start having people speculate on your anti-counterfeiting blockchain?
That's what it looks like to me anyway.
Jacob Collier tried to sell an nft that granted lifetime access to his concerts.
The appeal of such an nft is that it can be traded independently of any third party, on the open market.
Of course it depends on Jacob's promise to honor it.
He went back on it when people raised environmental issues.
The arguments about SpicyNFTs is just kind of a distraction. It would be like if I argued against banks by saying, I could hang a shingle, accept deposits, and then just run with the money.
Do we really need to enumerate all the possible ways that a new, very limited, technology can be misused? We might be here a while, I'm pretty sure there are infinitely many ways that NFTs can be abused.
In other words, worthless.
It could be tied to an actual contract.
The value prop of an NFT is pretty much limited to just being able to transfer it reliably without relying on a trusted third party.
It's not like it provides a cryptographic guarantee that some contract that exists outside it will be honored.
NFTs are essentially sleek frontend UIs mixed in with a speculative volatile currency less juridicial than dollars. It also helps that blockchain assets led by bitcoin are in a bull run.
The innovation is now a company like Dapper Labs can provide a marketplace like NBA Topshot providing a digital experience with licensed content. This digital experience can be traded using Paypal but using a traditional method comes with tradeoffs. Dapper Labs created an in-house blockchain called Flow. The benefits of a blockchain is it is harder for double spends to occur. Blockchain makes it hard for race conditions to occur when the source of truth is distributed among computers in a network.
It would be easier to make a database of hash values but traditional databases are less transparent than blockchains. Blockchains are too expensive. Some digital experiences are worth it, most probably aren't, enough people care about the frontend.
NBA Topshot would be better served by a DB. The NFT part is there for hype.
But it doesn't really.
I learned the other day that NFT standards don't even store a hash of the digital asset.
So, ransomware will wipe out a lot of NFTs one day, because the blockchain smart contracts dont know (have any cryptographic proof) what digital asset they hold.
Herr an article that was posted the other day: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2021/broken-nft-standar...
In any event I can’t see authorities keeping a blind eye on this.
why bother with involving a computer and a hard to modify paper trail?
Patents & trademarks?
The interesting facets all come from the legal consequences of ignoring them, not the serial number or whatever.
Could one say the same about tokens?
I’m equivocating if this is the is/ought problem or the Münchhausen trilemma, kinda feels like both.
There's no reason to assume that in other domains what you said should be the case more often than what I said if we both don't know the details of said domains.
That's not what "regulated" means. There is no enforcement, so you can simply copy the work and the "chain/protocol" does nothing.
And there are rules about how the trademarks/patents from one country applies in other countries. (IIRC you must fill some paperwork in every country, but copyright is similar and easier to extend globally.)
Anyway, everyone can create a new chain of NFT, so the same object can be NFTed in many blockchains. Specially because some NFT implementations don't even ask if you are the creator of the digital object.
People literally burnt a Banksy painting before auctioning its NFT.
If there's anything that's not absolute evil in all that, I fail to see it.
If people want to expend their own resources on NFTs, that's entirely their right to do so, and calling it evil because the process consumed energy is absurd.
If you have a problem with CO2 emission, by all means advocate for laws requiring energy production to not emit CO2 as a by-product. But to single out some non-essential activity that you personally don't like because of the imagined motives of those behind it, while ignoring every other non-essential activity that uses energy, is disingenuous and irresponsible.
I recently saw Twitter thread where a big pusher of NFTs was moaning on about how the real issue is we didn't create enough nuclear power plants and now we're blaming NFTs for this.
It's blatantly obvious that this is all a pyramid scheme capitalizing on people's complete ignorance and optimism with crypto. Enjoy your pyramid scheme and I hope you make out like a bandit and eventually develop a conscience for the people you're grifting.
You're obviously getting overly emotional, and throwing whatever you can at the people involved in cryptocurrency ("they're evil for using energy") to see what sticks.
I reiterate, it's a reckless and disingenuous way to conduct oneself, regardless of whether the underlying grievances motivating the hostility have merit.
I think he or she is saying that "climate change" is a ridiculously hyperbolic attack vector. And they're right. Of all the idiotic aspects there are to NFT's, Ethereum energy consumption may not crack the Top 100.
Not sure if anyone called that evil or idiotic
Nothing was actually destroyed, and the partially shredded artwork was a new artwork in its own right.
I mean aren't works of art exactly NFT in real life. Sometimes they also happen to look pretty to look at seems to be a archiach byproduct.
Look, if it's okay to buy limited edition numbered tins with the feces of an artist for 300k then it means anything goes. I don't understand where all these "Destroyed with Facts and Logic" people are coming from.
Its clown world out there already. Maybe, you're just too old to like the new clowns. Nothing wrong about that.
NFTs are no longer original and so are not art.
Since there’s nothing to own or even point to, what’s stopping a second party from claiming they actually have the original Banksy NFT and selling their own? Just the time stamps on the blockchain?
What a miserable destruction of real art to profit on a trading frenzy.
This can either be a crypto exchange (regulated on conversion to fiat, lest they get shut down by some SEC thing) or on those "vote on the blockchain" or "verified supply chain on the blockchain" things: eventually some non-blockchain entity has to be trusted enough to set state on the blockchain (e.g. "party A did indeed fulfill the contract to party B. please fulfill this smart contract", or "your food ingredient was prepared in accordance to your green/bio label's requirements").
If the owners of the Banksy came out a few days later and claimed that someone else sold a fake Banksy NFT, but they're now going to sell the real NFT, the private keys won't help.
Only Banksy can mint an NFT for his artwork for it to be of ANY value. The same way that only Banksy can create Banksy art.
Public-private key encryption is how you verify that something was signed by the original author.
There seem to be ... quite a lot of them.
NFTs sold on other chains are akin to copies of the Mona Lisa: worthless
Link item: 1909 T206 baseball card
Value: $2 million
Why don't you start printing these baseball cards and sell them?
Ha, but you say the baseball card is a real physical item, and a NFT is not. Well, an NFT is as real as the movie I watch on YouTube, the song I listen to on Spotify, and the numbers my bank shows.
But now you say the baseball card was part of a game, and so it's value is not from the person but from the collection game itself. Well, a lot of NFT's are also part of a collectible game.
Would love to hear the difference between a "physical" item and a "digital" item, or a "physical link to a physical item" or a "digital link to a physical (or digital) item".
Unfortunately getting used to that for crypto topics on HN.
It’s not an issue of realness. Of course an NFT is real, it’s a long number and is just as real as 3 or PI or any other number.[1] The issue is instead ownership. When I own a baseball card I have a physical card no one can take from my house/vault/whatever without the police getting involved. When I own the copyright to a movie I can choose to let other people watch it or not.
When I own an NFT it means there’s a blockchain somewhere that says I own a particular number. As long as the blockchain is still in existence I can prove that the blockchain says I own the number and I can transfer that number to you.
That’s not exactly nothing but it’s pretty darn close. It smells like a scam. You do raise a good point that it smells like a scam in the same way that a lot of consciously created collectibles do. Once comic books, baseball cards, or stamp producing nations started pushing their products as something people should buy because they’d appreciate in value they started to feel a lot scummier (and not conincidently the items in question rarely increased in value the way organic collectibles had.)
So, sure if you can get someone to pay you a lot of money for the “ownership” of some 256 digit number in some blockchain somewhere by claiming it represents the star Vega, as long as you don’t lie I suppose it shouldn’t be a crime. But you can’t expect the rest of us to respect the way you’ve chosen to make a living. You are going to get downvotes because you are promoting a disreputable activity.
[1] Hope you appreciate the effort it took not to make a math joke here.
a) You have the physical card. It is in your possession, and the only way for you to lose it is for something physical to happen to it.
b) You can look at and enjoy the card in its physicality. You can show it to others, and the only reason that is the case is that it is physically in your possession.
Contrast that with NFTs, where all you "own" is the idea of owning a thing. If the thing your particular NFT says you own is a digital image, anyone can still see that image, and it can be deleted from the internet without your permission or any warning. You lose the exclusivity that's the main draw of owning something rare and special, and you don't have any practical control over the thing either.
They're not worthless, they're worth less. I could easily hang up a counterfeit Mona Lisa on my wall and get a kick out of it. And if I stop getting a kick out of it, I can put it on Craigslist for $100 afterwards.
Of course, there's absolutely no history behind the painting as it wasn't painted by the renaissance man. No one would pay to see it because it would be about as significant as a JPEG of the Mona Lisa. However, that doesn't mean that it's worthless. Even that JPEG can make for a good phone wallpaper.
It turns out that when you take stupid and scale it up massively, it becomes even more stupid.
Ownership is based on the ability to have something tangible of a limited supply, but as I established before, digital assets can be freely copied. What are you trying to do? Artificially limiting this? Trying to push through a completely new idea of 'ownership'?
The only thing owning an NFT gives you is bragging rights of a perceived ownership. But if I say "I don't recognize this NFT proving anything", copy your asset, reproduce it and sell it somehow, you can't stop me. You claim to own some bits and claim to be able to prove that, but I can just ignore that completely, since there is zero legal grounds for this.
This is why it is absolutely moronic in my mind to have an 'ownership' idea on digital assets. It's already bad enough in online games to have in-game assets, which is in a walled-garden, under control of the company making the game, so yeah, there they can do this, it adds some perceived value. But to actively introduce this concept in an open digital world sounds absolutely crazy, counter-productive and conceptually against everything my ideal version of the internet would be: open and free as in beer.
What is missing is centralization and consensus of validity, db entries linking to the real world is done everyday.
Particularly the "Number Go Up" section, which shows that the buyer also runs (and owns a majority of) a crypto token called "B20", which curiously enough, Beeple also has a 2% stake in.
As usual for “like X but with a blockchain” this is a solution in search of a problem. Because despite all the protestations to the contrary the real motivation for crypto is not providing useful goods or services in exchange for reasonable compensation, it is getting rich by being an early adopter.
It’s like creating a contract that sells the contract itself. Then maybe you stamp a photo of Michael Jordan on the cover and call it a Michael Jordan contract, even though the contract doesn’t give the buyer any rights to anything Michael Jordan related, except the contract itself.
Then you can go out and make more Michael Jordan contracts, because there’s nothing in the first contract stopping you from making more.
So yes, actual ownership must be done with real physical contracts still if you want to enforce things in the real world. NFTs can only enforce things within the NFT itself, which is useless for real-world ownership.
You could potentially create a real-world contract that ties ownership of the real-world asset to whoever holds the NFT, but that would introduce real-world legal issues like voiding the NFT in the event that it was transferred fraudulently and so on.
It seems a lot of people have been misled into believing that NFTs are something they're not. NFTs are like a special URL that points to some other content. You can trade that URL, but the content being pointed to still exists separately.
(And yes, it's just baffling that people pay for these NFTs when they really get nothing out of them.)
More commonly, people are just buying an authenticated digital asset which confers no rights over the source material.
For example, An artist could sell unsigned instances of their digital art as .JPG files, and they could sell authenticated copies as NFT.
In both cases, you get a copy of the art. In neither case are you getting an implicit copyright to the work that would allow you to redistribute the work.
You can buy original animation cells from Disney movies, but try to resell that image commercially and you're probably gonna have a bad time.
AFAICT, NFTs are orthagonal to copyright. But it gets confusing because at least some sellers of NFTs are purposely trying to mislead, by omission if nothing else.