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Comment by neuralzen | Hacker News Reader

As someone who was early in both crypto and NFTs, I really don't get the hate from the crypto community especially. They are a powerful tool for artists and creators to manage their works, especially digital artists who could never control their art before. They can and do manage commercial and IP rights, artist royalties, help self-organize DAOs and other efforts, and assure the authenticity and provenance with a categorical shift in confidence which could never be done before. They will and are changing and improving our digital world such that it will never be the same, just as crypto has.

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Crypto hasn’t improved our digital world. It’s made it measurably worse through (among other things) making it trivial to profit from ransomware and DDOS-for-hire services. And of course there’s the indefensible environmental impacts and the destabilizing effect on the market for consumer computing hardware like GPUs.

I don’t doubt there exist people whose lives have been improved (for the time being) by the existence of cryptocurrency, but the overwhelming impact has been a disaster.

The hate is because the realized instantiation of the supposed value creates a bunch of collections of four thousand images of a rabbit or something stupid. The NFT community is largely a bunch of people hyping up crappy animal picture collections on twitter as the next big thing. The attraction to the medium is not through aesthetics or craft, but through FOMO.

I agree there are issues, but the same was (and still is) true in crypto - shitcoins and shitNFTs. That doesn't mean there aren't valuable use cases, or real artistic value and utility in some NFTs, and it doesn't mean there aren't real visionaries building things with authenticity and heart behind them.

That there are real visionaries in NFTs does not change the fact that the zeitgeist of the community is centered in the shitNFTs, not in the visionaries, nor does it change the fact that for the huge majority of participants the phrase “I love the art and the community” is largely a lie and a basis for a pump and dump.

Yes it’s very like cryptocurrencies, full of grifters, gamblers, fraud and snake oil salesmen and of course marks who think this ‘revolutionary’ technology is going to change the world and believe the made up prices and wash trades are real.

Most of the visionaries have left cryptocurrencies because they realised just how riddled with fraud and grift the ecosystem is so what’s left is people attracted by the money. I expect NFTs will have the same trajectory.

It remains to be seen, the future is uncertain. There is also a lot more emotional attachment in the space...people do really like the art. Maybe not when it comes to cryptonarwals or whatever, but pieces that are genuine creative endeavors...deafbeef, art blocks, cryptopunks - there is a real love of these in the space, and it does help bind communities together. There will always be scammers and grifters in every walk of life, and it's a personal responsibility to apply critical thinking. But it doesn't discount the value of what is bring brought into focus with the innovation.

That's the best part. If you don't like it, you don't have to participate. If you want to copy an NFT's image and use it as your wallpaper without paying, you can still do that.

On the other hand, if you voluntarily would like to value an NFT by purchasing it, that's your option as a consumer.

Don't like it, don't buy it. Seems simple enough. Contrast this to the existing structures of copyrights and intellectual property. NFTs may not enforce ownership rights in the same way as other mechanisms, but they do commodify existing voluntary relationships.

A better question might be why the premises of subjective valuation and voluntary association upset so many individuals?

Why must we all agree upon a standard of value? Different consumers have different desires.

> They can and do manage commercial and IP rights, artist royalties [...] and assure the authenticity and provenance

They literally do nothing of the sort. An NFT has no capability to restrict or monetize the usage of the work it is linked to, nor does its existence prove anything about the origin or authenticity of the work it is attached to. These are myths with no basis in fact.

By way of example -- I could, if I wished to, create a NFT associated with a public-domain photograph of the Mona Lisa, and assign that NFT to myself. This doesn't give me any capability to manage rights to that image, nor should it assure anyone that I painted it.

Perhaps you can email Universal Talent Agency and tell them they are wrong. Trademarks and copyright infringement exists in the NFT world, just because you can mint an NFT doesn't mean you own the art associated, particularly if you didn't create it.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/uta-crypt...

https://meebits.larvalabs.com/meebits/termsandconditions

> Perhaps you can email Universal Talent Agency and tell them they are wrong.

About what? If anything, this goes to prove my point. These NFTs cannot "manage commercial and IP rights" to themselves, so Larva Labs has contracted with UTA to perform that task.

> Trademarks and copyright infringement exists in the NFT world, just because you can mint an NFT doesn't mean you own the art associated, particularly if you didn't create it.

Yes. Again, that's exactly the point I was making -- that a NFT does not "assure the authenticity and provenance" of anything.

Alright, it is a fair point that it isn't a closed system, but you have to start from somewhere in order to grow from there into something with more of a closed loop. At the end of the day, courts of law have to decide on the outcomes of contentions, and this holds true with traditional crypto as well. - Perhaps one day we'll see smart contracts which are honored by courts to uphold the contracts in a lawful way, if written in a specific way (like what Agrello is/was trying to do...dunno if they are still around), but it has to be built first, it can't be perfect day one out the door, it's a journey.

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