NFTs may be a way for open source developers to make some money off of their work. Linus Torvalds could make a few hundred millions by selling an NFT for Linux, considering a JPG file sold for $69 million [1].
what is an "NFT for anything" other than an arbitrary association between a number and some sort of artifact, presumably declared by the creator of said artifact. It's so bizarre to me that people will pay so much for these things.
Amy is wrong, as she often is. Metakovan gifting the artist some tokens as a thank you is not self-sealing. It's just a guy overpaying for an artwork, and possible having an interest in promoting an artist he already owns work from.
Sure, Linus can sell an NFT containing the word "Linux" the same way he can sell a picture of his feet or just about anything else. It is all meaningless since (1) the NFT does not grant any ownership rights or licenses and (2) Linux code is anyways available under GPLv2.
Not that I know of directly, but there is a phenomenon where the ultra-rich "purchase" (but rarely take possession of) items in an exclusive catalog and the item's ownership/heritage is seen as a status symbol. The first thing that comes to mind is the Codex Leicester, which is now owned by Bill Gates and people were expecting him to rename it "Codex Gates" but he didn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Leicester
But then the hustle would stop working. My take on the hustle is you post some garbage art as an NFT and have a rich buddy buy it for $100,000(?). Then your other garbage arts instantaneously become worth thousands because the media will pick up this story in proportion to the price*garbage factor. You then start dumping said garbage, eventually return the initial payment to your rich buddy and split the take.
Unfortunately we are likely past peak stupid in the crypto-world but you'll have another chance ~3 years from now since that's the crypto dumb-money time-constant. But if you still think there's time, visit https://mintable.app/ follow the advice above and report back.
It is interesting in this day and age how digital rights can be transferred, but I can't say that this represents some great loss of access to a landmark cinematic achievement for mankind, or anything like that.
An NFT affords no rights at all. It's equivelant to a piece of paper with a URL that points to a site that has a link the video on it. Except the link no longer works, since the video was taken down.
This is potentially the beginning of a very interesting trend, and something I have spent some time thinking about. My sense is that owning an NFT should allow you to control access to that content (even if your choice is just to make it publicly accessible). NFT doesn't have an ACL layer built in, so this would need to be added (has anyone already done this?)
One open question is whether it actually makes sense to have an ACL for an electronic asset, because once someone has access to it, they can easily make a perfect copy of the bits and give it to anyone they want. But I guess you could make the same argument about selling access to digital content that is available on a torrent somewhere.
Yes, and I believe that's one of the reasons why there is so much hate for NFTs on this thread. People are selling tokens for huge amounts of money that confer no rights other than being able to say that you own the NFT.
Obviously you would need to actually own the asset to be able to hand over access control as part of the NFT sale. NFTs potentially have real use cases, but the technology and infrastructure isn't mature enough to support those use cases.
Right. The question that people keep coming back to is what ownership rights are actually conveyed with an NFT. The most common answer I'm seeing is "none", which makes it feel dishonest to equate the sale of the NFT as a sale of the thing it (supposedly) represents.
I don't have any problems with people buying or selling art for large sums of money, nor do I have a problem with people classifying art as pretty much whatever they want.
The only thing I mind are the people pretending a real problem has been solved with NFTs. In any current (or conceived as far as I know) implementation of NFTs you have to trust so many people, technologies, and companies that the blockchain being technically "trustless" is not solving a real problem at all.
Overall I don't understand the point of a blockchain if you have to interact with anything off-chain at all. If I have to trust an oracle or similar why even bother with a blockchain in the first place?
Art has a couple of sticky points that allows it to be used as storage of value:
* It is impossible to copy and produce second original
* It is recognizable by trained and common people alike, it is useful a symbol of status
* New art inherits some of artist's prestige; say a newly discovered Picasso painting will be recognized as valuable just because it's a Picasso
* It is very difficult to produce enmasse - a computer-generated drawing in the style of Picasso will not be valued as an original Picasso
* Wealthy people agree it's a storage of value - when somebody needs liquidity they can be assured that somebody will buy their unique piece.
Do NFTs touch all of these points? 1, yes. 2. they're trying to build the fame of NFTs now. 3. they're trying to build it now, very unlikely it will succeed. 4. Are some NFTs esthetically pleasing ? I would guess this is why it's needed to be tied to an artwork. 5. Unlikely.
At the end of the day doesnt the trust still fall back to the author? If you are getting 1/1 of a digital autograph or something, you are trusting the author to later not make more autographs.
Even if the institutions that authenticate the autographs go away, their record of the work they did so far is printed into the permanent record, no?
Or really trusting anyone who downloaded it and reposted it, etc. This is not about scarcity but about a certificate of authenticity that you can show around. The actual good is worthless, the certificate is what is hard to forge.
Correct, downloading and reposting the photo isnt the same thing, and not really a part of the conversation. Youre buying the print number, not the work.
You are buying the print number in a specific blockchain, tomorrow anyone can create a few thousand blockchains from scratch where this print number doesn't exist; just like one has to believe a currency has value to assume any value on one of its coins/tokens.
If you are someone that believes in blockchain being something as revolutionary as the internet, you might see oracles as a temporary solution. Currently, we need a bridge between the blockchain and the rest of the world since there is no other way to link information between the two.
But if you believe in this potential blockchain-everything future, all of this information will be on the blockchain as the single source of truth. At that point, oracles will not be needed and the information will be stored directly on the chain.
There are some very interesting technical challenges that NFTs are being used for. Stuff like baskets of assets, appraising and taking out loans on assets, and certain distributed games like aavegotchi. At the end of the day, representing non-fungible assets is something useful. It's just that most people's exposure to it is seeing someone riding the hype to sell something that would probably have sold for a lot of money without being on the blockchain. Nothing wrong with that either if both sides are happy with the deal.
There are a lot of interesting technologies being worked on in moving real world data on chain as well. I'd highly suggest you look into chainlink. They cover all sides of the vulnerabilities associated with getting accurate data when you could be trusting a potentially malicious data provider.
> The only thing I mind are the people pretending a real problem has been solved with NFTs.
It's not a pretend problem at all.
The author could have used any existing auction platform too sell the rights to that video without involving NFT or crypto-currency. But they would never have gotten that much money for it. NFT solves that.
People keep measuring this stuff by things it doesn't want to be. It's a digital equivalent of a signed print. You have to trust the author not to print 100 copies more in the same way you trust an author selling physical prints. No one is claiming it is any more trust less than that.
NFTs exist that aren't pointers to artwork and are entities in games that can be traded or used outside of the game itself. Since the game state exists onchain, you don't have a dependency on oracles.
It totally disagree. I think it is quite equivalent. The difference is that we don't have a centralized authority to recognize valid NFTs, as we do for deeds. But if we did have a central authority, like perhaps the artist responsible for the work protected by the NFT, and if the artist made it clear and public that only the NFTs she recognizes could be considered valid proof of ownership of her works, then indeed an NFT would function like a deed.
A common misunderstanding of NFTs is that they give you some level of legal rights. NFTs do not inherently give you rights. That's why a comparison with a deed is fundamentally flawed. A deed is a legal construct - inherently it gives you ownership. So even if it were sold, without the institutions notarizing the transaction it would not be a valid sale and could be easily reversed by the original owner.
I could sell an NFT to your comment trivially because it doesn't mean anything. You can think of it as the digital equivalent of me taking a screenshot of your comment and selling that - sure it doesn't give the purchaser rights to your comment, but that isn't what was for sale anyway.
I have no misunderstanding about this whatsoever, in fact. I understand that NFTs confer no rights, which is why I posited the idea of a necessary authority who can declare which NFTs are valid representations of ownership of their works. It is the pairing of NFT and authority which grant the possibility of ownership.
Many people immediately jump on the idea that NFTs cannot confer ownership, and thus are worthless as a concept, but they fail to recognize that it is only one half of ownership, just as a deed to a house is just a piece of paper (that anyone can photocopy) without an authority to recognize it.
again a deed is referring to a specific thing. a photocopied deed is not a deed anymore than a photocopied dollar bill is legit money. in other words a deed is already authorized by definition.
if you have an authority to confer rights then the NFT itself was unnecessary to begin with.
anyway, the original point I was trying to make is that situation you described (selling a deed to a house you don't own) doesn't make sense since by definition the own who does not own the deed can not sell it. if, somehow the sale did go through, the original owner could easily get it back. this situation is not possible with NFTs without a central authority, but with a central authority NFTs would not be necessary to begin with.
A deed does not refer to a specific thing. It only does so in daily life as a matter of convention. It is the authority of the banks or the government or whatever that gives your particular deed any weight at all. A deed, like a dollar bill, is a piece of paper with no value. Indeed, a photocopied dollar bill has no value whatsoever. It is only our collective agreement to pair value with officially recognized papers that grants those papers value.
The situation I described does make sense, because it's exactly what we are circling around here. Anyone can sell anything; it is merely a question of whether the sale will be recognized by the parties that matter. An NFT is necessary because it distributes the transfer and sale of things without a central intermediary. There is and always will be a required authority to recognize the value of a given NFT, however.
Note that these two ideas of central authority are not equivalent. In one hand, you have a centralized authority over trade; in the other, an authority over value. Note also that in the case of NFTs, there is no "one central authority who governs all value", but instead many authorities, i.e. the creators! The artist or creator of a given work is free to recognize the NFTs that grant ownership of their creations. It is they who have the power of authority.
> A deed does not refer to a specific thing. It only does so in daily life as a matter of convention. It is the authority of the banks or the government or whatever that gives your particular deed any weight at all. A deed, like a dollar bill, is a piece of paper with no value. Indeed, a photocopied dollar bill has no value whatsoever. It is only our collective agreement to pair value with officially recognized papers that grants those papers value.
What? A deed, per common law, is a legal instrument which affirms ownership of something. I'm not going to talk about value as that is independent of the purpose of a deed (you could have a deed to something that everyone agrees is worthless, but regardless you are the owner according to the government(s) in question)
Again, if you have a central authority an NFT is unnecessary and pointless to begin with. Nothing you've said really refutes that. All of the functionality of an NFT can be trivially replicated by a central authority, and indeed it already is.
> Anyone can sell anything
No, they can't. By your own logic, anyone can do anything. Surely you already see that is not true. We live in reality, and in reality others must recognize actions in order for them to be recognized as legitimate.
I’d guess it wouldn’t be a sale of rights to the comment (because you don’t own them).
If you advertised it as the sale of rights to the comment, then it would be a fraud? Or you could advertise it as “a collectible item representing one of endisneigh’s parent comments as issued by endisneigh, collect them all”?
It's even less than that. A deed contains some language to the effect of "the holder of this deed owns the house at such-and-such address", whereas most of these NFTs seem to stop at "the house at such-and-such address".
Is there a way to see the actual language of these NFTs that receive press attention? Do any of them actually claim anything one way or the other?
You can sell a "quit claim deed" for any property. All it means is that you assign all your interest in the property to another party. If you have no interest in the property then you have transfered nothing, but the document itself is valid.
You could do it to public domain art. Maybe set yourself up a shell business, 'NFT Certification Enterprise', and offer your official NFT for each object, with a guarantee you be generating only one NFT for each object. Deceptive, but not fraudulent.
It's not very different than selling overpriced and numbered collectibles.
The difference is that a facsimile autograph would inevitably be of worse quality. The phony NFT on the other hand would be indistinguishable from "the real thing". Beyond the payload it's just pseudo-random bits generated by an arbitrary CPU, isn't it?
I am not sure what you mean by this. Are you referring to art being duplicated, or a digital signature? You can verify that its a forgery, or from a different account than the first author. The digital signature isnt something you can replicate. You can print another one, but you cant duplicate the property of "first" itself.
I can't replicate the exact numbers, but I don't see how one random string looks more authentic than the other. Whereas a handmade autograph with all its human inconsistencies looks more authentic than one made with a mechanical device.
I'm just as good as the most accomplished artist at reading numbers from /dev/random, that's why I don't see why one random-looking string would be more valuable than the other.
That depends on who thought of making the NFT first. Which isn't necessarily the artist.
> or its proven to have been generated by a person who exclusively had a certain private key
That has the same problem, it's generated by arbitrary pseudo-random numbers, rather than a real, living human hand. Look, I'm not disputing the underlying cryptographic principles. I'm happy they exist, because they are immensely useful for many purposes, like securing communication and financial transactions. I just struggle to see the artistic merit in someone having pulled some numbers out of /dev/random and having done some math on them.
The NFT is not the image/media - it is the transaction securing a relationship and/or movement of tokens from the artists wallet to the buyers wallet (which may or may not point to a file hash, or some other data).
The authenticity of this is easily verified by querying the transaction directly from the on-chain smart contract.
How do you verify the person in control of the "artists wallet" is actually the person who created the work (or is authorized by them to create the NFT)?
The artist needs to confirm this. For example, many artists selling on Hicetnunc[1] will put their Tezos wallet address as a link in their Twitter bio. If you spot an artwork that looks like theirs minted by a different address, it’s likely a “copymint” (typically seen as worth no value).
There are other blockchain/crypto art projects that use the chain itself to store data; such as Autoglyphs[2], which is essentially a first of its kind generative artwork on Ethereum coded entirely within the Solidity smart contract. In this case there is no question about the authenticity; you simply look at that contract address and the tokens it initiated.
This is already happening[1] to smaller creators, and people still buy them because NFTs don't offer any guarantees of authenticity beyond what you'd see on eBay.
When someone bought this NFT (or in general), did someone sign a contract with you saying they transferred ownership in the intellectual property the NFT "represented"? (Ie, was at the other end of the URL, I guess?)
Cause the NFT itself means nothing to courts or laws, does it?
If someone owns the copyright in that video, they can send YouTube takedown notices. But what, if anything, makes NFT proof of ownership of copyright? How do you even know the person that sold it to you had the copyright to transfer, and did they transfer it?
One of the things that seems irraitional about this NFT market.
I don't think it means nothing to a court,even if it isn't a formal contract. Verbal agreements also carry some weight in court in most jurisdictions, they just aren't as bulletproof. I would guess an nft is somewhere on that level?
> Cause the NFT itself means nothing to courts or laws, does it?
We won't know till it's tried in court, but given that handshake agreements can carry weight in court if they can be proven, I'd suspect an NFT could be binding.
Is there a handshake agreement that copyright was transferred? Do the NFT auction sites say anything about this?
What if the seller says "Oh, you thought I was selling you the copyright in the thing the NFT represents? I don't know how you got that idea, I never said that! I just sold you the NFT, that's it." Do people buying NFT's actually get some kind of agreement that the seller owned the copyright in the thing represneted and sold it with the NFT purchase?
Aren't the people who are selling NFTs attaching terms and conditions to the effect of "this doesn't give you actual ownership"? In fact, the article states:
> its owner does not actually buy the copyright itself
This was kind of my question too. I am still yet to properly understand what the point in owning an NFT tied to a piece of digital art is.
Traditionally owning art is meaningful because you get to display it in your home/office etc. The artwork is intrinsically valuable as a unique material object. Digital art, on the other hand, can be duplicated easily so there is nothing you can point to and say "this is the original".
I don't see how that is synonymous with owning traditional art, you don't have anything unique since everyone can "own" Charlie bit my finger as much as the NFT owner owns it. We can watch the video whenever we want, even if it's taken down off of the official YT channel, there are thousands of copies everywhere. So unless you own the rights to the video and royalties or whatever then all you have is an NFT token that symbolizes something important to whoever thinks it's important (much like currency).
Seems to me that an NFT itself is more like a vanity plate on a car than anything else, basically bragging rights that you can sell on if anyone else sees value in bragging. I suppose the gamble is that NFTs will continue to mean something to someone but it does seem to me to be a long bet that people with piles of cash are hedging or simply don't mind paying $$$s for a fashion statement.
> An NFT is a bit like a collectible certificate of authenticity, but its owner does not actually buy the copyright itself - meaning the artwork the NFT represents can still be shown wherever the original artist or creator chooses.
So the whole question is moot. All you own is the NFT and the NFT is associated with some cultural artifact but doesn't represent any legal rights. Like other cryptocurrencies it's a speculative asset whose value is based on the fact that people want to buy them and little else.
The question seems to be subject to a lot of confusion. A lot of other people in this thread seem to believe differently.
The article in the OP also seems to believe differently, which is what made me ask the question.
> But now the much-loved clip of baby Charlie gnawing on his brother Harry's finger will be taken off YouTube after it was sold for $760,999 (£538,000).
> The Davies-Carr family auctioned the clip as an NFT, a non-fungible token.
The quote says the video was sold, and that this will naturally result in it being removed from you tube, and then explains it was sold "as an NFT" which is "like a certificate to say that you own something digital".
I think you may be right, but the majority of people talking about NFT's don't seem to realize it. Including a bunch of people in this thread.
The owners can choose to remove the video from YouTube if they want. If the buyers are at least half-savvy, the sellers might opt to do that in order to give the NFT more 'worth'. But there's nothing inherent in NFT that means that's necessary, or that they couldn't just put it back on YouTube next week. Or that they couldn't sell hundreds of other NFTs for the same video, or sell the copyright to the video, the one thing in all this that's really meaningful.
I would describe myself, usually, as not a jealous man. I don't recollect the last time I've felt jealousy. But, something about NFTs provokes anger within me. Maybe that anger is jealously.
It feels like NFTs are a mockery of the "market" for lack of a better word. When I think of what I would need to sell (items or time doing labor) to get these amounts and how incredibly useless NFTs actually are... It's frustrating.
I don't feel this way about inherited wealth, or people who got money through the lottery, or for being famous reality show people, but something about NFTs really rubs me the wrong way.
I remember some of the people who worked hard designing the hardware and software that went into feature phones being outraged, perhaps in a similar way, by the stupid amounts of money people were spending on ringtones at that time (about 20 years ago).
And yet now I don't know anyone with a 'novelty' ringtone. Even though it's ludicrously simple to choose a song or whatever else - literally everyone I know, or strangers whose phone rings - it's a vibrate or a ring.
Technology like NFTs being promoted in the way that they have been impacts the rest of the market. Not only do they manipulate relative values of legitimate applications of technology, they make people distrust the entire tech sector once the hype cycle dies down.
Look at blockchain today versus 4-5 years ago. There might actually be some legitimate uses for the technology, but that market has been soiled by the scammers and their ICOs.
Right - seeing so much money thrown around with so little backing/reason/substance doesn't really motivate you to go back to your life and put in a full workweek in exchange for whatever your salary is.
There seem to be 2 economies: There's the 1% (0.1%?) economy where there is a lack of productive places to "put" money that might generate a return so people are buying up any shiny, new thing that comes along. Then there's the 99% economy where people need to buy food/clothing/shelter and money is getting increasingly tight.
It's almost as if transferring some of the (marginally useless) money from the 1% to the 99% might actually be a better investment in the future than some of these dubious "assets". But there's no NFT for that.
Your model for 1% should be “professional couple that owns a pretty good home in an expensive city” not “casually drops multiple hundreds of thousands on nonsense.” That’s like Saudi prince level wealth.
I am more bewildered as I try to figure out where the value is coming from. An NFT as far as I can tell is just saying 'yes I own this thing'. But the original creator still owns everything really relevant about that thing anyway. What are they buying? Are there any relevant resources out there that lay out where the value is derived?
As near as I figure, it's not even 'yes I own this thing'. It's 'I own the NFT that refers to that thing', which only happens to connote ownership by convention.
IE... somebody could sell the object and keep the NFT, or vice versa. There's no legal concept tying the NFT to ownership of the object, except perhaps indirectly via contract.
William Shatner is working with a startup that actually has a legal framework around NFTs, where the NFT denotes ownership of a collectible in a vault. You can trade the NFT around but the current owner can redeem it and take delivery of the physical item.
It's similar to what's been done in the high-end art world for years. People who buy a $50M painting don't usually hang it on their walls, they just leave it in a vault and get their name recorded on a public art registry saying they own it.
Seems like a similar legal framework granting NFT owners either copyright ownership or a usage license could be interesting.
>You can trade the NFT around but the current owner can redeem it and take delivery of the physical item.
What happens if someone buys my NFT but I refuse to deliver the physical item? It seems we need to pull in the legacy legal system to enforce the transfer, at which point I wonder what value the blockchain added in the first place.
You don't hold the item. It's held in a vault by one of various professional vault providers with contractual obligations. If you want the physical item you turn over the NFT and it's destroyed.
Blockchains can be useful without totally replacing the legal system. Just making things a little better and more efficient is fine. In this case, it lets people easily trade collectibles without all the hassle of shipping physical items.
Isn't it more like "I own an NFT that refers to that thing"? There's nothing to stop the actual owner from 'printing' as many NFTs as they want, right?
I'm one of the founders of Origin, the project that hosted this auction. Here's my take on it: It's a social contract between the creator and the collector.
Today when you buy a home you have someone go down to the local courthouse and check that there are no leans against the property and no one else is claiming ownership. In the future, you can imagine a world where that title would live on the blockchain and everyone could see the true owner based on their ability to sign a message with their wallet. You could transfer your title just as easily as any other blockchain transaction. While blockchain titles have obvious advantages, they are hard to pull off because you need 100% participation of everyone in the community for it to work.
The reason we're seeing art NFTs take off first, is that you only need the participation of the creator and a small group of collectors. The creator promises to sign all of their work with their digital wallet and as long as the buyer of the NFT trusts the creator, it works.
NFTs are like the modern day equivalent of Tracy Emin’s unmade bed [0]
It’s funny to think back at how many people were horrified about that being considered “art” at the time.
Compared to {what I see as} the complete lack of *actual value* in some of these high profile NFTs, I’d say that bed now looks like the highest of high art.
I appreciate I might be missing something, but I do not understand one bit of the psychology behind NFT sales like this. I don’t understand where even the perceived value is.
Unless it was bought by that guy that refused to sit in the front of his Tesla, perhaps to watch on his headrest display while streaming the cops chasing him…
It's righteous anger at a waste of resources and critical lack of understanding.
NFTs aren't commodities or assets, they're just conspicuous consumption. Dramatically showing off how much money a person can waste on an illusion is cringe-worthy. It makes me annoyed in the same way pay-to-play games annoy me.
Yup. Especially since a lot of people have made gazillions in crypto for doing no labor so spending this sort of “funny money” as a lark is a frustratingly common occurrence.
Why must they do labor to earn money? If I mow lawns for a summer, then invest in a lawn mower which I then lease out to someone else to mow lawns, am I not entitled to the lease money because I'm not doing the labor?
Investing the fruits of one's labor is widely considered a human right, and is even explicitly listed in the Declaration of Human Rights. And hedging ones investments with gold, silver, bonds or crypto is not an unreasonable thing to do.
Agreed, and it's a very weird type of conspicuous consumption. You can't really hang the NFT on your wall, or drive up to a fancy dinner in an NFT. I guess you can brag about it?
I don't get how you can even brag about it. You can't say "I own this piece of art", you have to say "I own a pointer to this piece of art". And even that could end up a null pointer on somebody else's whim.
NFTs are the sole value they encode, ala cryptokitties. NFTs that people pretend are related to real-world objects are basically Moon or Florida[1] real estate.
You should be concerned about where society consumes resources. labor. concrete. gold. machine time. These things, in a given year, have limited supply.
You should not be very concerned about society consuming dollars - which is impossible to do (apart from burning it or fed decisions). Dollars are often a useful proxy for resources, but are not intrinsically linked. In the case of NFTs, the stock market, etc, they don’t consume as many resources as the large dollar figures would imply.
Yes there is some electricity use, I know. etc.
Point being, a wealth transfer does not consume resources. Carry on.
For most of us there is a disconnect between what we perceive as valuable to society and what is valuable in monetary terms. And yes, if someone can gain enormous sums of money by a stroke of dumb luck (in this case having made a video that went viral because it was just at the right time) than that tends to rub people who strife for fairness in life the wrong way.
About inherited wealth: once you grok the ideological arguments for heavily taxing inheritances, and then also realize that above a certain threshold people can just spend a minute fraction of that wealth to ensure that those rules don't apply to them and their offspring, you might feel the same way depending on your idealogical outlook. The idea that taxation is unfair or even theft is very pervasive in society though, and it is such a sucesful memetic device that people who stand to lose the most by it are often staunch supporters of tax evasion. The idea being that just as with the lottery, one day they too might hit it big time, and then they too would benefit! Statistically, this is unlikely to the point of being negligible, but it is easier on the mind than understanding the situation for what it really is.
Yeah, we're all living in some kind of clown world. Even in the irrational cryptocurrency market we have utterly insane stuff like DOGE being valued at almost one dollar because Elon Musk made memetic tweets. There's no point in arguing with it, better to profit off of it.
I recently heard someone say "I'm not stupid enough to make money in this market", and I think it rings very true.
With the short squeeze speculation on stocks, the crypto run+crash and NFT's. The market is a very confusing place nowadays. You'd have to be bonkers to invest in these things on paper, but yet, lot's of people are making bank from it every day (and vice versa).
NFT is probably the most confusing of the bunch. I understand the technology and what it actually is, but I see little to no value in it. I strongly suspect that the vast majority of these NFT sales are just people buying from themselves to inflate perceived value or just money laundering. That said, it actually looks like this false hype has turned into real hype somehow and people are actually making money from this. NFT's are probably the closest thing we'll see to Tulip mania for long time, at least cryptocurrency has some (largely unrealized) utility and potential to become something widely used in the future.
In order to make lot's of money nowadays, you shouldn't ask yourself "What is actually going to make a profit and/or provide utility in the future?" but rather "What are all the stupid people going to pile in on next so i can get in and out before it crashes?".
So, I have been working on a very stupid idea for some time now, that actually started as a social fart sharing app, record your farts, etc.
Then, I needed a way to make sure people were actually sharing farts, and not other noises (like burps or dog barks).
So, ML to the rescue. Train on a corpus of real fart audio and other sounds.
But then, I needed to make sure the farts were not copies or derivative works.
So, audio fingerprinting.
Then, I figured why not throw in blockchain (does not need to be distributed to be able to use the buzzword), to ensure the verified, original farts could not be tampered with.
Now, I believe I have a way for anybody to create unique content that can be ‘converted’ into an NFT.
For the huge sales yes, but it's not for nothing. They are pouring 10s of millions into NFTs as a land grab in a potential new economy. If they lose it, nbd, since they have "fuck you" money anyway.
Actually its one of the few use cases that makes sense
Gamestop's whole business was used games. I mean they'd sell you a new copy happily, and you could sell it back at discount and spend the money on a different used game
Playstation / Xbox digital stores killed the market, now I pay $60 for the new assassin's creed and can never sell it, there's no such thing as a used game anymore
If Gamestop has streaming rights for certain games, then NFTs can represent who ones a copy of a game. If you're bored of a game, sell the license to play to someone else. (This is not even mentioning in-game items that could be traded on secondary markets)
Of course GameStop could conceivably build a tech stack that lets them manage 'who owns what license to what game' and a whole marketplace around that, but why build it yourself when people are already out there sending NFTs from one wallet to another.
It seems like any potential success GameStop could have in the digital world solely depends on Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo/Valve explicitly allowing them to do so. And I see no reason why they would do so, considering not only could these companies completely handle reselling of digital games on their own market, there's little-to-no incentive for them to allow resale of digital games at all.
There's already an attempt at doing this on PC [0] led by Brian Fargo of Interplay / inXile fame. I can't speak to how effective it is or how many people use it but it seems to be still operative after a year on public beta.
One key issue I see is that it's still quite centralised - you have to resell through their store and can't just exchange a game license for crypto at an arbitrary price. No surprise though that this is a necessary step on the way to getting publishers on board.
> I'm not stupid enough to make money in this market
> What are all the stupid people going to pile in on next so i can get in and out before it crashes?
Haha that's awesome. I spent so many hours researching stuff to invest in so I could make a good decision or at least an educated one. Company stock, cryptocurrency projects, whitepapers... And then I watched people making ridiculous amounts of money off of DOGE of all things just because a billionaire tweeted funny dogecoin memes. Then people pumped the huge wave of animal shitcoin scams that came after to ridiculous prices as well. Now I'm watching people spend millions on non-fungible tokens that do nothing.
It's the kind of mind screw that makes you lose all sense of right and wrong. The world just stops making sense.
I mean it's what happens when entry barriers to "invest" are low enough and you have meme marketing. Everyone in the middle of the bell curve piles in and things of average reasoning happen. A bit like football making billions from people watching some people kick a ball about. You can monetise the banal with fun.
Nah, it's a common story. When electricity and physics-based innovations started in France, people were so enamoured with novelty they started believing in anything remotely associated.
Hence magnetism and homeopathy, still limping along to this day, came to have huge amounts of followers. "if you can turn on a powerful light at night, surely you can cure with magnetic fields coming out of your hands".
Here is the same, if you can store value simply by convincing each other without central authorities (bitcoin), surely you can explore it to its conclusion with NFTs. Ill remind you that before the 2017 crash, we were already seeing joke tokens, it just disappears once the hangover starts.
> if you can store value simply by convincing each other without central authorities (bitcoin), surely you can explore it to its conclusion with NFTs
Cryptocurrency has actual value though. I don't think bitcoin has any inherent value, it's just famous because it came first. Technology like Ethereum and Monero are extremely valuable though. They aren't made up tokens that do nothing.
If you’ve ever played poker where you’re the only serious player at the table and everyone else is very loose you’ll know it’s almost impossible to win. By taking lots of risky bets the other players aren’t doing any favours for themselves personally but as a group they’re (unintentionally) teaming up to guarantee one of their number will have an unassailably large stack. That’s much how I feel about the current investment market.
Anecdotes aside, I wonder if this is really true. I wonder if it has been tested. Poker bots are strong enough that it should be testable. Is there really a scenario in which a stronger bot reliably loses to a group of weaker bots?
I don’t follow; can’t you play conservatively until you have a great hand and bet accordingly? If the other players are loose, they’ll call with anything.
If they observe you are doing this and don’t play so loose against you, then I would take issue with the claim that they are not playing seriously.
You could wait until you have the nuts, but that might never happen. If you play too conservatively you risk just leaking blinds until you have nothing left, and because almost everyone goes in on almost every hand, you're playing against quite diminished odds that you're going to have the best hand.
Perhaps an excellent player might be able to crack the code (or at least be up over the course of enough games), but I'm not an excellent player.
I'm not referring the technology itself. That's actually quite useful with real-world applications that may be worth investing in. The ticketing use case and also Gamestop's rumored use of NFT for reselling digital game licenses are actually awesome ideas. I'd invest in companies using this technology provided they had a valid business case for it and aren't just chasing the hype.
The craziness i'm pointing out is the apparent sale/purchase of NFT tokens for lackluster pieces of digital art at insane amounts. You aren't really investing in the technology in this case, you're investing in that piece of art. It confers no proven legal privileges, meaningful ownership or protection from being copied. It just gives you the ability to prove to someone that at a specific point in time you made a token for that bitstring or bought it from someone who did. Would these pieces fetch the similar prices on the art market right now where you can actually buy real proven legal rights/ownership of the piece? I highly doubt it.
Money laundering. That's what most of it is. It's confusing because the story they tell you about why they want them is not why they want them. Just like art dealing and expensive watches, the market must be propped up by this story about creativity and workmanship and aesthetic value and intrinsic value, but what it really is is the ability to park a lot of money in something that is easy to move around.
Yes, but no one mentions the downside: that timing the exact bubble end, catching the proverbial falling knife without getting cut, is nearly impossible for the vast majority of bubble investors. The key would be to take your profit we’ll before the collapse, which you’ll notice is antithetical to the whole “HODL” and “never sell” mantra being spoonfed to the first-time meme stock/coin investors.
> In order to make lot's of money nowadays, you shouldn't ask yourself "What is actually going to make a profit and/or provide utility in the future?" but rather "What are all the stupid people going to pile in on next so i can get in and out before it crashes?".
This has always been true [0]. Your comment had generated a thought for me: maybe as humanity has covered its essential needs, the idea of what has utility and value has progressively become less clear? Or is it just a side effect of QE and Central bank excess? Time will tell...
The dumbest thing about them in my haven't-been-bothered-to-so-much-as-search-for-them understanding (first and only really heard about them from Matt Levine's Money Stuff column) is that.. I can represent a painting or whatever as md5sum, sha256sum, anything else sum; take the photo again or compress it first?
Unless I really should read up on it because I'll be blown away, just seems like any uniqueness necessarily hinges entirely on hoe you choose to encode a thing, which is arbitrary, meaningless, and pointless?
But then, I haven't made any money from it, people have, what do I know.
It's worse than that. I can take the same exact digital image and issue 2 different NFTs for it on the same blockchain. Only the NFT itself is "provably unique" not the thing it represents.
I mean, sure, they make a mockery of the art market. But the art market seems to have had no trouble making a mockery of itself before NFTs came along.
Like, why is this worth $58 million? It's a 10-foot tall balloon animal.
At least NFT creators tend to be honest about how ridiculous they are (see any interview with Beeple, for example), as opposed to conventional artists who like to pretend there's some sort of objective reason why their work is so highly valued.
With the art market, at least you're buying something. Ownership is being transferred. As far as I can tell (I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong), with NFTs you're effectively buying nothing. The seller could just turn around tomorrow and make whatever it is you have worth literally nothing (if it wasn't already).
Well, I guess you could include some kind of hash/checksum too. That could prove your 'ownership' without any platform whatsoever. (It doesn't make it more meaningful, but at least decreases the dependency on whoever owns the platform hosting the link.)
Indeed, the disconnect between the digital and the physical is why NFTs do not represent physical objects. beeple however cannot destroy the original JPEG, as there isn't one.
An artist renouncing the copyright (as in putting it into the public domain) does not per se devalue the NFT. It is not strictly obvious if you legally need to own the copyright to sell an NFT of something in the first place (it is likely just fraud to misrepresent your authorship of the work).
The creator of a famous photograph which they have previously put into the public domain would likely find a buyer for its NFT, while you would not. NFT buyers are under no illusion about what they are buying here - it is the official sanction of the creator of a digital edition of the artwork.
Similarly, a creator could print billions of NFTs, but Damien Hirst could also sell 499 more further sharks in formaldehyde. NFTs cannot and do not set out to solve this problem.
I think the difference is that, with NFTs, you know someone else is losing out BIG time and, being a compassionate human being, you feel sad that they're being taken advantage of. In the cases of inherited wealth and the lottery, huge numbers of people are losing out to an infinitesimal degree, so it doesn't seem as bad.
How are huge amount of people losing out if someone passes money to their children, exactly? Was the money supposed to be given to the government and redistributed?
And as for the lottery, the reason that states/countries have lotteries is because they make buckets of money off of them. Is the state at fault, then? While I personally think it's a waste of money to participate, people choose to give money to the lottery, and are told up front what the odds are of winning, which are very bad.
> How are huge amount of people losing out if someone passes money to their children, exactly?
In the context that, otherwise, it would go to the state in taxation and everyone would benefit to a tiny extent.
> Is the state at fault [for running the lottery]
I'm not sure what you mean by 'at fault', exactly. As you say, people participate of their own accord. The only thing that you could take slight issue with is the "are told up front what the odds are of winning" because (many? most?) humans are notoriously bad at rationalising probabilities, especially astronomically low ones such as the chance of profiting from a lottery.
> I don't feel this way about inherited wealth, or people who got money through the lottery, or for being famous reality show people, but something about NFTs really rubs me the wrong way.
This paragraph interests me deeply. It is clearly a personal feeling and one that I have empathy for. However, a few things came to my mind when I read it.
1) You and I were born into a world where inheritance, lotteries, and celebrities existed, but NFTs were invented in our lifetime. Is it the newness/novelty of NFTs at issue?
2) Suppose the answer to 1) is no i.e. I am not troubled by the newness of NFTs. Alright, instead let’s imagine the first incidence of inheritance, or lotteries, or celebrity status that yielded material/monetary reward. Did people feel similarly about these ways of acquiring money back when these ways were novel?
3) What about applying the general idea of finding/inventing/innovating to create new industries e.g. advertising technology? Some people have similar feelings about the nominal value being created versus the perceived value of a whole host of activities: venture capital, e-sports, advertising, sex work, content creation, financial services/instruments, the creative arts and their subfields, etc. You can search for posts and comments on this forum expressing exactly that on each of the examples I listed.
4) What do we call it? I would say the word jealousy captures one side of the dimension where perceived value doesn’t match up with actual value that was exchanged (perceived value is less than the value exchanged).
5) Why do we do it? Why do we judge the perceived fairness of transactions that we are not party to?
6) Now, back to the initial question: what makes some forms of wealth transfer fair and others not?
> Why do we do it? Why do we judge the perceived fairness of transactions that we are not party to?
How could we not? Someone dropping millions of dollars on a useless token really puts into perspective the value of my actual work and contributions to society. If literally nothing is worth millions, I must be worth less than nothing because I'm certainly not getting paid millions.
Imagine buying a painting for a million dollars. Or a hand crafted watch. The markets for these talk a whole lot about the intrinsic value, the workmanship, the creativity. And people do love them for those things, but that's not why they pay so much for them.
Imagine being able to park a retirement fund into something that fits in your pocket. You can't even do that with gold bricks. But you can do that with watches.
It's just a way to store a very large amount of money in something you can take with you anywhere in the world without anyone noticing. NFTs are even smaller than a watch. They're just the new version of the art dealing hustle that has been going on for centuries.
not sure about this one but if it makes you feel better most of those high profile ones are either blatant money laundering or advertisements in disguise.
for instance the beeple one that sold for a lot was purchased by a guy who runs and nft website as basically an advertisement for his site.
who knows if they even had a prior deal before the auction where the artist would return some of the money
I think it's more of a moral problem. Would you commit a fraud to earn money?
If you start selling a proof of flat earth, 5G tower cause the COVID-19, a herb that cure cancer or similar nonsense, there are people willing to pay a huge money for. But would you?
NFT in its current implementation is totally bullshit. They relies on SaaS wallet service rather than running full Ethereum node, and instead of embed all data to Ethereum blockchain, they relies on traditional HTTP server hosted by... wallet service itself!
If you relies on a central authority, there are better and more efficient services to use. But oh the ignorance and speculation.
The flip side to this jealousy, like many things in life, is the unsexy realities: even an investment in an index fund this past year would’ve outperformed the average year’s ROI several times over. The upside is right there, available just by following the same common sense, safe investing advice being preached for decades.
Definitely not as fun as making millions on meme’d speculation.
What is preventing people from uploading the video back to YouTube? after all there are tons of shows already on there that are owned by media companies. I am sure this Charlie video has a lot of copies floating around.
I'm not going to pretend I have an intimate knowledge of how NFT's work (I need to basically re-research the idea everytime it comes up), but I never understood the financial incentive to buy one, especially for these very old viral videos. I doubt any amount of merch made would make back hundreds of thousands, and I imagine most/all of the B2B potential is gone since these kinds of videos have long since left their 15 minutes of fame.
And As seen here, even the "rich trolling" potential is practically impossible to enforce since we run into the idea of "piracy" (in the loosest form of quotes you can imagine). A problem even billion dollar media empires can't fully enforce. Is there something here I'm missing?
----
on a side note: while memes like nyan cat make sense, I find it very ethically dubious to "own" what's essentially a personal memory of a real family. But I guess if it's the family themselves that sold it, the consentual factors are already in place.
How do we define "original" when talking about digital works? As soon as you upload it you are making a copy. Then that copy gets bounced around and duplicated across edge servers all over the world.
You'd have to own the SD card to own the 'original'. But who really cares? I don't understand NFTs, I just don't understand the value.
My main basic questions remain after reading about these NFT sales.
Why can't someone just buy all rights to this video the same way a company can buy the rights to a film? What does the blockchain do that a couple lawyers and some paperwork couldn't?
Why a blockchain-based digital "certificate" instead of just a certificate? Does my birth certificate or marriage certificate or college diploma need an upgrade to an NFT, too?
It's a similar concept to a trading card, in which you don't own nor have any relation to the actual asset depicted on the card. If trading cards were not a thing, you would think the purchase of a Hank Aaron card worth $10,000 would be ridiculous.
An NFT is essentially a trading card for the thing that it's attached to. Just like you don't "own" Babe Ruth in any meaningful sense by owning a Babe Ruth trading card, you don't "own" the artwork associated with an NFT by owning the NFT itself. The exception is if there's some arrangement external to the NFT that links ownership of the NFT to ownership of the thing.
Could I sell an NFT for my birth certificate to raise some cash, while my original birth certificate remains at the state's Vital Records Department under ownership of the state?
If so, what exactly would the buyer be buying? Just a virtual trading card and a promise that I won't sell my "birth-certificate NFT" trading card to anyone else?
> Could I sell an NFT for my birth certificate to raise some cash, while my original birth certificate remains at the state's Vital Records Department under ownership of the state?
Yes, and it's basically equivalent to writing the words "My Birth Certificate" on a piece of paper and selling that piece of paper. It holds no weight whatsoever.
> If so, what exactly would the buyer be buying?
Nothing.
> Just a promise that I won't sell my "birth-certificate NFT" to anyone else?
Not even that, unless you also did that. You can make multiple NFTs from the same thing. Just like nothing would prevent you from writing "My Birth Certificate" on a second piece of paper and selling that too, unless there was some external agreement that you wouldn't.
And the horrifying thing is that they are selling NFTs for NBA trading cards (GIFs). So people now own a trading card of a trading card of a real person dunking :(
That actually seems less horrifying to me. That feels like those NFTs at least acknowledge that they're basically trading cards. It's not an "NFT of a trading card" it's "an NFT which stopped pretending it wasn't just a trading card."`
> You acknowledge and agree that the DCF (or, as applicable, its licensors) retains ownership of all legal right, title and interest in and to the Media and all intellectual property rights therein. The rights that you have in and to the NFT are as described in this License. The DCF reserves all rights in and to the Media not expressly granted to you in this License.
Ha! This is an excellent take. Maybe minus the "limited edition" part, since whoever minted the NFT can just mint the same one again. Even if they claimed they wouldn't.
Anybody producing real world „limited edition“ merch could in theory produce it again, so this is no different here.
I guess it‘s some form of „trust“ between the issuer and the buyer.
Or the 2nd NFT wouldn‘t be as memey anymore and thus not worth as much.
(It would probably be worth more the first time in reality, since issuing an NFT twice is not „supposed to happen“, so there would be some novelty to it, and I guess novelty is part of what drives the prices. See also Banksy‘s image that actually increased in value after it got publicly shredded by a built-in mechanism after being auctioned off.)
The only explanation for NFTs that made sense to me is that people with an interest in the network (e.g. early investors) are bidding up some choice NFTs to make news and drive interest in their network. There is no actual market for NFTs at these prices, but that doesn't stop groups with deep pockets from pretending like there is by purchasing well known memes for eye popping amounts. If internet "celebrities" are able to cash in on this nonsense, I see no harm in it. It's sort of like living off of VC subsidized products.
Could be money laundering related too. Buy NFTs for small sums with clean crypto, sell it to your dirty wallet for inflated sums. In order for something like that to work there needs to be plausible deniability so they also buy NFTs with clean wallets which would explain the volume. Plus the legitimate crypto speculators see these crazy numbers and jump aboard too.
The real market would be owning early works by an unknown, who later becomes known.
That will evolve into the patron system again, where the owner of early works becomes a hype machine to drum up their artists clout, and then offloads their early work.
> If internet "celebrities" are able to cash in on this nonsense, I see no harm in it. It's sort of like living off of VC subsidized products.
If you only look at it from the perspective of the influencer, it doesn't seem like there's any harm. They managed to extract some wealth from crypto whales.
-- where's the harm in that? But at the end of the day, they're selling a lie. The NFT-proponents want people to believe that NFTs are inherently valuable so that they can extract all of their money back, and then some. It's propaganda, and I can't get behind it, even if it means some artists are cashing out.
Yes, this and Bitcoin both feel like pyramid schemes.
There is a lot of initial investment from top-tier people who convince others to invest (by showing eye-popping returns) and drive more investment. Soon the people on the top-tier gradually cash out and eventually it's the common people who lost their hard-earned money.
The whole concept of wealth feels like a pyramid scheme.
Your second paragraph could be applied to any non-crypto asset class. The only difference I can see is that crypto just made this scheme more obvious, unobfuscated then let's say the stock market with its different investor classes.
> Sunday's spending spree means the mysterious anonymous bidder will become the owner of the Charlie Bit My Finger clip.
> its owner does not actually buy the copyright itself - meaning the artwork the NFT represents can still be shown wherever the original artist or creator chooses.
Genuinely curious. What does it mean to own a widely shared digital content, if you don't have the copyright to it? What's stopping the copyright-owner from continuing to license the copyright to others, or even enforcing their copyright against you in future? From a legal perspective, how would the NFT owner even enforce their ownership against anyone else?
But the important thing is that clueless buyers didn't put together the above reasoning
Or think somehow blockchain and AI can be used the amazing technoutopian future™ to combat piracy (including piracy of the image or video of the NFT they bought it)
> What does it mean to own a widely shared digital content, if you don't have the copyright to it?
Therein lies the question. It's basically selling a digital derivative of something that gives you no rights besides owning that derivative itself.
Is there anything saying that the copyright owner can't sell another NFT to a competing NFT blockchain? What if people start using different NFTs for the same digital good?
>> I've never seen this video before, and I've been on the Internet since the mid-90s.
I dunno, so have I; and just - it was big, but there were so many of these kinda nonsense YouTube videos at the time this was trending it was kind of hard to catch them all.
Me too. Yet now I am supposed to know. It is the same with the collage by Beeple. Never. Heard. Of. Him.
I suspect there is more to come, art that you have never heard of by an artist you are supposed to have heard of, now with NFT shiny and journalists that think they know the story.
This would not happen if linear broadcasters from yesteryear and their dead tree brethren didn't suck up the press releases to give them the oxygen of publicity.
I'm curious what will happen when an NFT for the same piece of art gets sold on multiple blockchains. Now you can "own" a "Charlie Bit My Finger" NFT on Ethereum and someone else owns it on the FooBar blockchain. Which one is "authentic"? Blockchain doesn't help you here - you're going to have to go to court to prove you own the "authentic" one or sue the artist for selling 2 copies instead of one.
You might buy a piece of artwork from famous artist X, but society and the market decide that art by Y is also valuable.
You might buy a painting because we all agree that paintings are valuable. But what's to stop framed original poetry, or sculptures, or photographs, becoming more valued and supplanting paintings as the preferred form of desirable art.
I don't get it. I just don't understand. One, why did anyone want to buy this meaningless video? Two, why did it need to be done via NFT, and finally why for such a large sum of money?
Is this a form of money laundering? I am so confused, no part of this makes any sense to me at all.
Imagine you got into Bitcoin in 2010 and bought a few hundred dollars worth. Now that is worth more money than you could even dream about. The real question is why not buy an nft for the lulz?
I don't think that's what's happening here for the most part. Many NFTs are not even purchased with crypto, they're bought with credit cards or bank transfers on sites like NiftyGateway.
Humans have always enjoyed collecting things, whether it's homes, or cars, or luxury handbags. We like to share the things we own with our friends. We often like to show off and flex and share the things we're proud to own. But what happens when you're better friends with someone on the other side of the world that you've never met than you own neighbor next door? That desire to own and collect things is still there, but now it just happens in a digital world. As our lives increasingly move online, it makes sense that the things we own and collect should be digital as well. The desire to be the single owner of the Charlie Bit Me video that has been enjoyed by hundreds of millions of people around the world, is the same desire that causes people to collect fine art or invest in digital cryptocurrencies.
Are there laws to prevent owners of culturally significant artworks, e.g. van Gogh and da Vinci paitnings, from being destroyed, and from being shipped to countries that do not have regulations against them being destroyed? It seems the free market is moving in the direction of valuing destruction of art more than the art itself. In the absence of regulations, it would be a matter of time until some investor buys up a bunch of masterpieces, turn them into NFTs, destroys them, and ends up doubling their money in the process.
You can't turn a real Van Gogh into a NFT. If anything the actual painting is the real life NFT to the image that is public domain on the internet. By destroying an original you own you are just burning money.
And by doing that, you will also piss off pretty much everyone on the planet, and no one will want that (digital) NFT. In fact, I wouldn't want to take that shameful NFT even if you paid me for it.
I would rather not leave it to chance. If there aren't regulations yet, they should pass some ASAP. It didn't matter how many millions of people cared about Cecil the lion; it still took just one rich asshole for him to lose his life.
Someone burned a Banksy print and converted it into an NFT. It's certainly possible. In the US, there are moral rights of an artist that would probably make the destruction of work illegal, but that might only apply to living artists.
I feel what your talking about is a non issue. Now, I think NFT is all a scam but I do believe that people think they can make money out of it.
NFTs are for digital artworks, it is an artificial way to create scarcity. A physical painting is already scarce. Burning an actual Van Gogh would be like burning down a house and saying it's okay because the deeds to the house are fine.
> An NFT is a bit like a collectible certificate of authenticity, but its owner does not actually buy the copyright itself - meaning the artwork the NFT represents can still be shown wherever the original artist or creator chooses.
What you "own" when you buy an NFT is bragging rights about owning the NFT.
Edit: It's like if you bought the gold masters for Abbey Road. You don't own the copyrights, just a one-of-a-kind representation of that album that you can tell your golf buddies about.
An NFT has nothing to do with ownership of the property. But... if the property is ALSO sold along with the NFT, it will lose copyright protection at life + 70 years just like any other created art. The NFT will then refer to a public domain object, but it gives no power over it.
As the laws currently stand, at least.
I wonder if the NFT token itself loses copyright and becomes public domain at some point?
I think the purpose of NFTs doesn’t make sense today but maybe the future of the internet are browser implementations by Google and Apple that check ownership of assets embedded in HTML and fail to display them until you pay a royalty fee?
I guess Firefox and Chromium wouldn’t need to go along unless someone lobbied Congress to change the laws.
I don’t know how similar this would be to DRM, which seems to have failed to stop piracy.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] thread[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/arts/design/nft-auction-c...
Maybe selling a banana taped to a wall could be a way for people to make money, considering one of those sold for ${OUTRAGE}.
Is Linus running out of money or something?
What is an NFT for a JPG file? I don't know, but we know it got sold for $69 million.
> Is Linus running out of money or something?
I have no idea, but since when does someone have to run out of money in order to want to make more?
Yes, it doesn't stop anyone from using Linux. So win-win for all.
Bragging rights. That's it.
Unfortunately we are likely past peak stupid in the crypto-world but you'll have another chance ~3 years from now since that's the crypto dumb-money time-constant. But if you still think there's time, visit https://mintable.app/ follow the advice above and report back.
An NFT affords no rights at all. It's equivelant to a piece of paper with a URL that points to a site that has a link the video on it. Except the link no longer works, since the video was taken down.
One open question is whether it actually makes sense to have an ACL for an electronic asset, because once someone has access to it, they can easily make a perfect copy of the bits and give it to anyone they want. But I guess you could make the same argument about selling access to digital content that is available on a torrent somewhere.
are you aware that anyone may sell NFT for anything?
I could produce and sell NFT pointing to say Walmart website.
Or HN. Or Wikipedia.
Obviously you would need to actually own the asset to be able to hand over access control as part of the NFT sale. NFTs potentially have real use cases, but the technology and infrastructure isn't mature enough to support those use cases.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=charlie+bit+my+...
The only thing I mind are the people pretending a real problem has been solved with NFTs. In any current (or conceived as far as I know) implementation of NFTs you have to trust so many people, technologies, and companies that the blockchain being technically "trustless" is not solving a real problem at all.
Overall I don't understand the point of a blockchain if you have to interact with anything off-chain at all. If I have to trust an oracle or similar why even bother with a blockchain in the first place?
Well how else do you generate hype with an aura of breaking edge tech to impress the clueless and give credibility to your scam?
Art has a couple of sticky points that allows it to be used as storage of value:
* It is impossible to copy and produce second original
* It is recognizable by trained and common people alike, it is useful a symbol of status
* New art inherits some of artist's prestige; say a newly discovered Picasso painting will be recognized as valuable just because it's a Picasso
* It is very difficult to produce enmasse - a computer-generated drawing in the style of Picasso will not be valued as an original Picasso
* Wealthy people agree it's a storage of value - when somebody needs liquidity they can be assured that somebody will buy their unique piece.
Do NFTs touch all of these points? 1, yes. 2. they're trying to build the fame of NFTs now. 3. they're trying to build it now, very unlikely it will succeed. 4. Are some NFTs esthetically pleasing ? I would guess this is why it's needed to be tied to an artwork. 5. Unlikely.
Even if the institutions that authenticate the autographs go away, their record of the work they did so far is printed into the permanent record, no?
But if you believe in this potential blockchain-everything future, all of this information will be on the blockchain as the single source of truth. At that point, oracles will not be needed and the information will be stored directly on the chain.
There are a lot of interesting technologies being worked on in moving real world data on chain as well. I'd highly suggest you look into chainlink. They cover all sides of the vulnerabilities associated with getting accurate data when you could be trusting a potentially malicious data provider.
I wish hn would cover some of these more often
It's not a pretend problem at all.
The author could have used any existing auction platform too sell the rights to that video without involving NFT or crypto-currency. But they would never have gotten that much money for it. NFT solves that.
NFT is to auctions what adding "Blockchain" to your publicly-listed company-name was a few years ago, it increases valuation to ridiculous levels. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-27/what-s-in...
It's stupid, but it works.
I could sell an NFT to your comment trivially because it doesn't mean anything. You can think of it as the digital equivalent of me taking a screenshot of your comment and selling that - sure it doesn't give the purchaser rights to your comment, but that isn't what was for sale anyway.
Many people immediately jump on the idea that NFTs cannot confer ownership, and thus are worthless as a concept, but they fail to recognize that it is only one half of ownership, just as a deed to a house is just a piece of paper (that anyone can photocopy) without an authority to recognize it.
if you have an authority to confer rights then the NFT itself was unnecessary to begin with.
anyway, the original point I was trying to make is that situation you described (selling a deed to a house you don't own) doesn't make sense since by definition the own who does not own the deed can not sell it. if, somehow the sale did go through, the original owner could easily get it back. this situation is not possible with NFTs without a central authority, but with a central authority NFTs would not be necessary to begin with.
The situation I described does make sense, because it's exactly what we are circling around here. Anyone can sell anything; it is merely a question of whether the sale will be recognized by the parties that matter. An NFT is necessary because it distributes the transfer and sale of things without a central intermediary. There is and always will be a required authority to recognize the value of a given NFT, however.
Note that these two ideas of central authority are not equivalent. In one hand, you have a centralized authority over trade; in the other, an authority over value. Note also that in the case of NFTs, there is no "one central authority who governs all value", but instead many authorities, i.e. the creators! The artist or creator of a given work is free to recognize the NFTs that grant ownership of their creations. It is they who have the power of authority.
What? A deed, per common law, is a legal instrument which affirms ownership of something. I'm not going to talk about value as that is independent of the purpose of a deed (you could have a deed to something that everyone agrees is worthless, but regardless you are the owner according to the government(s) in question)
Again, if you have a central authority an NFT is unnecessary and pointless to begin with. Nothing you've said really refutes that. All of the functionality of an NFT can be trivially replicated by a central authority, and indeed it already is.
> Anyone can sell anything
No, they can't. By your own logic, anyone can do anything. Surely you already see that is not true. We live in reality, and in reality others must recognize actions in order for them to be recognized as legitimate.
I’d guess it wouldn’t be a sale of rights to the comment (because you don’t own them).
If you advertised it as the sale of rights to the comment, then it would be a fraud? Or you could advertise it as “a collectible item representing one of endisneigh’s parent comments as issued by endisneigh, collect them all”?
I suppose I could sell a token for Hacker News, I just couldn't claim that the holder of the token gets any kind of special privilege here.
Is there a way to see the actual language of these NFTs that receive press attention? Do any of them actually claim anything one way or the other?
Sounds like an NFT alright.
How will they know?
Not sure whether NFT situation got dumb enough for this to work.
It's not very different than selling overpriced and numbered collectibles.
I am not sure what you mean by this. Are you referring to art being duplicated, or a digital signature? You can verify that its a forgery, or from a different account than the first author. The digital signature isnt something you can replicate. You can print another one, but you cant duplicate the property of "first" itself.
I'm just as good as the most accomplished artist at reading numbers from /dev/random, that's why I don't see why one random-looking string would be more valuable than the other.
That depends on who thought of making the NFT first. Which isn't necessarily the artist.
> or its proven to have been generated by a person who exclusively had a certain private key
That has the same problem, it's generated by arbitrary pseudo-random numbers, rather than a real, living human hand. Look, I'm not disputing the underlying cryptographic principles. I'm happy they exist, because they are immensely useful for many purposes, like securing communication and financial transactions. I just struggle to see the artistic merit in someone having pulled some numbers out of /dev/random and having done some math on them.
The authenticity of this is easily verified by querying the transaction directly from the on-chain smart contract.
There are other blockchain/crypto art projects that use the chain itself to store data; such as Autoglyphs[2], which is essentially a first of its kind generative artwork on Ethereum coded entirely within the Solidity smart contract. In this case there is no question about the authenticity; you simply look at that contract address and the tokens it initiated.
[1] - https://hicetnunc.xyz/
[2] - https://www.larvalabs.com/autoglyphs
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/20/22334527/nft-scams-artist...
Cause the NFT itself means nothing to courts or laws, does it?
If someone owns the copyright in that video, they can send YouTube takedown notices. But what, if anything, makes NFT proof of ownership of copyright? How do you even know the person that sold it to you had the copyright to transfer, and did they transfer it?
One of the things that seems irraitional about this NFT market.
We won't know till it's tried in court, but given that handshake agreements can carry weight in court if they can be proven, I'd suspect an NFT could be binding.
What if the seller says "Oh, you thought I was selling you the copyright in the thing the NFT represents? I don't know how you got that idea, I never said that! I just sold you the NFT, that's it." Do people buying NFT's actually get some kind of agreement that the seller owned the copyright in the thing represneted and sold it with the NFT purchase?
Real questions, I don't use these things!
> its owner does not actually buy the copyright itself
Maybe. If I do, I guess I can sell that event as an NFT. Or something.
Traditionally owning art is meaningful because you get to display it in your home/office etc. The artwork is intrinsically valuable as a unique material object. Digital art, on the other hand, can be duplicated easily so there is nothing you can point to and say "this is the original".
I don't see how that is synonymous with owning traditional art, you don't have anything unique since everyone can "own" Charlie bit my finger as much as the NFT owner owns it. We can watch the video whenever we want, even if it's taken down off of the official YT channel, there are thousands of copies everywhere. So unless you own the rights to the video and royalties or whatever then all you have is an NFT token that symbolizes something important to whoever thinks it's important (much like currency).
Seems to me that an NFT itself is more like a vanity plate on a car than anything else, basically bragging rights that you can sell on if anyone else sees value in bragging. I suppose the gamble is that NFTs will continue to mean something to someone but it does seem to me to be a long bet that people with piles of cash are hedging or simply don't mind paying $$$s for a fashion statement.
Expensive art is just as much a vanity plate as NFTs are.
> An NFT is a bit like a collectible certificate of authenticity, but its owner does not actually buy the copyright itself - meaning the artwork the NFT represents can still be shown wherever the original artist or creator chooses.
So the whole question is moot. All you own is the NFT and the NFT is associated with some cultural artifact but doesn't represent any legal rights. Like other cryptocurrencies it's a speculative asset whose value is based on the fact that people want to buy them and little else.
The article in the OP also seems to believe differently, which is what made me ask the question.
> But now the much-loved clip of baby Charlie gnawing on his brother Harry's finger will be taken off YouTube after it was sold for $760,999 (£538,000).
> The Davies-Carr family auctioned the clip as an NFT, a non-fungible token.
The quote says the video was sold, and that this will naturally result in it being removed from you tube, and then explains it was sold "as an NFT" which is "like a certificate to say that you own something digital".
I think you may be right, but the majority of people talking about NFT's don't seem to realize it. Including a bunch of people in this thread.
It feels like NFTs are a mockery of the "market" for lack of a better word. When I think of what I would need to sell (items or time doing labor) to get these amounts and how incredibly useless NFTs actually are... It's frustrating.
I don't feel this way about inherited wealth, or people who got money through the lottery, or for being famous reality show people, but something about NFTs really rubs me the wrong way.
Look at blockchain today versus 4-5 years ago. There might actually be some legitimate uses for the technology, but that market has been soiled by the scammers and their ICOs.
At least that's where my frustration comes from.
It's almost as if transferring some of the (marginally useless) money from the 1% to the 99% might actually be a better investment in the future than some of these dubious "assets". But there's no NFT for that.
IE... somebody could sell the object and keep the NFT, or vice versa. There's no legal concept tying the NFT to ownership of the object, except perhaps indirectly via contract.
It's similar to what's been done in the high-end art world for years. People who buy a $50M painting don't usually hang it on their walls, they just leave it in a vault and get their name recorded on a public art registry saying they own it.
Seems like a similar legal framework granting NFT owners either copyright ownership or a usage license could be interesting.
What happens if someone buys my NFT but I refuse to deliver the physical item? It seems we need to pull in the legacy legal system to enforce the transfer, at which point I wonder what value the blockchain added in the first place.
Blockchains can be useful without totally replacing the legal system. Just making things a little better and more efficient is fine. In this case, it lets people easily trade collectibles without all the hassle of shipping physical items.
Isn't it more like "I own an NFT that refers to that thing"? There's nothing to stop the actual owner from 'printing' as many NFTs as they want, right?
Today when you buy a home you have someone go down to the local courthouse and check that there are no leans against the property and no one else is claiming ownership. In the future, you can imagine a world where that title would live on the blockchain and everyone could see the true owner based on their ability to sign a message with their wallet. You could transfer your title just as easily as any other blockchain transaction. While blockchain titles have obvious advantages, they are hard to pull off because you need 100% participation of everyone in the community for it to work.
The reason we're seeing art NFTs take off first, is that you only need the participation of the creator and a small group of collectors. The creator promises to sign all of their work with their digital wallet and as long as the buyer of the NFT trusts the creator, it works.
It’s funny to think back at how many people were horrified about that being considered “art” at the time.
Compared to {what I see as} the complete lack of *actual value* in some of these high profile NFTs, I’d say that bed now looks like the highest of high art.
I appreciate I might be missing something, but I do not understand one bit of the psychology behind NFT sales like this. I don’t understand where even the perceived value is.
Unless it was bought by that guy that refused to sit in the front of his Tesla, perhaps to watch on his headrest display while streaming the cops chasing him…
[0] https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/emin-my-bed-l03662
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist%27s_Shit
And that's what we have on record today.
I can imagine some hominid tribe prized the perfectly straight banana, or whatever, beyond belief.
NFTs aren't commodities or assets, they're just conspicuous consumption. Dramatically showing off how much money a person can waste on an illusion is cringe-worthy. It makes me annoyed in the same way pay-to-play games annoy me.
Investing the fruits of one's labor is widely considered a human right, and is even explicitly listed in the Declaration of Human Rights. And hedging ones investments with gold, silver, bonds or crypto is not an unreasonable thing to do.
They should.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swampland_in_Florida
I mean aren't they arguably also wealth redistribution from the stupid-enough-to-buy-an-nft to the insanely-lucky?
This is going to put Charlie through college no doubt.
You should be concerned about where society consumes resources. labor. concrete. gold. machine time. These things, in a given year, have limited supply.
You should not be very concerned about society consuming dollars - which is impossible to do (apart from burning it or fed decisions). Dollars are often a useful proxy for resources, but are not intrinsically linked. In the case of NFTs, the stock market, etc, they don’t consume as many resources as the large dollar figures would imply.
Yes there is some electricity use, I know. etc.
Point being, a wealth transfer does not consume resources. Carry on.
About inherited wealth: once you grok the ideological arguments for heavily taxing inheritances, and then also realize that above a certain threshold people can just spend a minute fraction of that wealth to ensure that those rules don't apply to them and their offspring, you might feel the same way depending on your idealogical outlook. The idea that taxation is unfair or even theft is very pervasive in society though, and it is such a sucesful memetic device that people who stand to lose the most by it are often staunch supporters of tax evasion. The idea being that just as with the lottery, one day they too might hit it big time, and then they too would benefit! Statistically, this is unlikely to the point of being negligible, but it is easier on the mind than understanding the situation for what it really is.
With the short squeeze speculation on stocks, the crypto run+crash and NFT's. The market is a very confusing place nowadays. You'd have to be bonkers to invest in these things on paper, but yet, lot's of people are making bank from it every day (and vice versa).
NFT is probably the most confusing of the bunch. I understand the technology and what it actually is, but I see little to no value in it. I strongly suspect that the vast majority of these NFT sales are just people buying from themselves to inflate perceived value or just money laundering. That said, it actually looks like this false hype has turned into real hype somehow and people are actually making money from this. NFT's are probably the closest thing we'll see to Tulip mania for long time, at least cryptocurrency has some (largely unrealized) utility and potential to become something widely used in the future.
In order to make lot's of money nowadays, you shouldn't ask yourself "What is actually going to make a profit and/or provide utility in the future?" but rather "What are all the stupid people going to pile in on next so i can get in and out before it crashes?".
Then, I needed a way to make sure people were actually sharing farts, and not other noises (like burps or dog barks).
So, ML to the rescue. Train on a corpus of real fart audio and other sounds.
But then, I needed to make sure the farts were not copies or derivative works.
So, audio fingerprinting.
Then, I figured why not throw in blockchain (does not need to be distributed to be able to use the buzzword), to ensure the verified, original farts could not be tampered with.
Now, I believe I have a way for anybody to create unique content that can be ‘converted’ into an NFT.
Investors?
Possibly you!
https://youtu.be/fgsltPQQGxY
This could be a network for farters and poopers.
I think some people have just gotten very very crypto rich over the past year or two and this is just something they are spending their money on.
https://nft.gamestop.com
GME as an NFT?
Gamestop's whole business was used games. I mean they'd sell you a new copy happily, and you could sell it back at discount and spend the money on a different used game
Playstation / Xbox digital stores killed the market, now I pay $60 for the new assassin's creed and can never sell it, there's no such thing as a used game anymore
If Gamestop has streaming rights for certain games, then NFTs can represent who ones a copy of a game. If you're bored of a game, sell the license to play to someone else. (This is not even mentioning in-game items that could be traded on secondary markets)
Of course GameStop could conceivably build a tech stack that lets them manage 'who owns what license to what game' and a whole marketplace around that, but why build it yourself when people are already out there sending NFTs from one wallet to another.
- Games and consoles made years ago still generating revenue. - It would incentivise companies to support repair and continued use of old products.
I think it would be instant buy-in from those larger companies.
One key issue I see is that it's still quite centralised - you have to resell through their store and can't just exchange a game license for crypto at an arbitrary price. No surprise though that this is a necessary step on the way to getting publishers on board.
[0] https://store.robotcache.com/
> What are all the stupid people going to pile in on next so i can get in and out before it crashes?
Haha that's awesome. I spent so many hours researching stuff to invest in so I could make a good decision or at least an educated one. Company stock, cryptocurrency projects, whitepapers... And then I watched people making ridiculous amounts of money off of DOGE of all things just because a billionaire tweeted funny dogecoin memes. Then people pumped the huge wave of animal shitcoin scams that came after to ridiculous prices as well. Now I'm watching people spend millions on non-fungible tokens that do nothing.
It's the kind of mind screw that makes you lose all sense of right and wrong. The world just stops making sense.
Presumably ritualized tribal combat has a long history.
As does religion.
Hence magnetism and homeopathy, still limping along to this day, came to have huge amounts of followers. "if you can turn on a powerful light at night, surely you can cure with magnetic fields coming out of your hands".
Here is the same, if you can store value simply by convincing each other without central authorities (bitcoin), surely you can explore it to its conclusion with NFTs. Ill remind you that before the 2017 crash, we were already seeing joke tokens, it just disappears once the hangover starts.
Cryptocurrency has actual value though. I don't think bitcoin has any inherent value, it's just famous because it came first. Technology like Ethereum and Monero are extremely valuable though. They aren't made up tokens that do nothing.
If they observe you are doing this and don’t play so loose against you, then I would take issue with the claim that they are not playing seriously.
Perhaps an excellent player might be able to crack the code (or at least be up over the course of enough games), but I'm not an excellent player.
The craziness i'm pointing out is the apparent sale/purchase of NFT tokens for lackluster pieces of digital art at insane amounts. You aren't really investing in the technology in this case, you're investing in that piece of art. It confers no proven legal privileges, meaningful ownership or protection from being copied. It just gives you the ability to prove to someone that at a specific point in time you made a token for that bitstring or bought it from someone who did. Would these pieces fetch the similar prices on the art market right now where you can actually buy real proven legal rights/ownership of the piece? I highly doubt it.
Me: “but this is a giant bubble! None of this is intrinsically valuable! You’re buying to sell! A huge crash will wipe you out!”
Them: “you must be new around here... there is always a bubble, the key is riding it as long as you can safely do so.”
I found this so enlightening. I wonder if economic cycles are a result of this thinking.
This has always been true [0]. Your comment had generated a thought for me: maybe as humanity has covered its essential needs, the idea of what has utility and value has progressively become less clear? Or is it just a side effect of QE and Central bank excess? Time will tell...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest
https://stockx.com/nike-dunk-sb-low-paris
That is an $80k shoe currently.
If you can get somebody to buy it, that is what it is worth.
Unless I really should read up on it because I'll be blown away, just seems like any uniqueness necessarily hinges entirely on hoe you choose to encode a thing, which is arbitrary, meaningless, and pointless?
But then, I haven't made any money from it, people have, what do I know.
Like, why is this worth $58 million? It's a 10-foot tall balloon animal.
https://www.doublestonesteel.com/blog/art-and-sculpture/koon...
Or why is this worth $200 million? It's something a 5-year-old would make if you gave them an unlimited amount of finger paint.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_17A
At least NFT creators tend to be honest about how ridiculous they are (see any interview with Beeple, for example), as opposed to conventional artists who like to pretend there's some sort of objective reason why their work is so highly valued.
An artist renouncing the copyright (as in putting it into the public domain) does not per se devalue the NFT. It is not strictly obvious if you legally need to own the copyright to sell an NFT of something in the first place (it is likely just fraud to misrepresent your authorship of the work).
The creator of a famous photograph which they have previously put into the public domain would likely find a buyer for its NFT, while you would not. NFT buyers are under no illusion about what they are buying here - it is the official sanction of the creator of a digital edition of the artwork.
Similarly, a creator could print billions of NFTs, but Damien Hirst could also sell 499 more further sharks in formaldehyde. NFTs cannot and do not set out to solve this problem.
And as for the lottery, the reason that states/countries have lotteries is because they make buckets of money off of them. Is the state at fault, then? While I personally think it's a waste of money to participate, people choose to give money to the lottery, and are told up front what the odds are of winning, which are very bad.
In the context that, otherwise, it would go to the state in taxation and everyone would benefit to a tiny extent.
> Is the state at fault [for running the lottery]
I'm not sure what you mean by 'at fault', exactly. As you say, people participate of their own accord. The only thing that you could take slight issue with is the "are told up front what the odds are of winning" because (many? most?) humans are notoriously bad at rationalising probabilities, especially astronomically low ones such as the chance of profiting from a lottery.
This paragraph interests me deeply. It is clearly a personal feeling and one that I have empathy for. However, a few things came to my mind when I read it.
1) You and I were born into a world where inheritance, lotteries, and celebrities existed, but NFTs were invented in our lifetime. Is it the newness/novelty of NFTs at issue?
2) Suppose the answer to 1) is no i.e. I am not troubled by the newness of NFTs. Alright, instead let’s imagine the first incidence of inheritance, or lotteries, or celebrity status that yielded material/monetary reward. Did people feel similarly about these ways of acquiring money back when these ways were novel?
3) What about applying the general idea of finding/inventing/innovating to create new industries e.g. advertising technology? Some people have similar feelings about the nominal value being created versus the perceived value of a whole host of activities: venture capital, e-sports, advertising, sex work, content creation, financial services/instruments, the creative arts and their subfields, etc. You can search for posts and comments on this forum expressing exactly that on each of the examples I listed.
4) What do we call it? I would say the word jealousy captures one side of the dimension where perceived value doesn’t match up with actual value that was exchanged (perceived value is less than the value exchanged).
5) Why do we do it? Why do we judge the perceived fairness of transactions that we are not party to?
6) Now, back to the initial question: what makes some forms of wealth transfer fair and others not?
How could we not? Someone dropping millions of dollars on a useless token really puts into perspective the value of my actual work and contributions to society. If literally nothing is worth millions, I must be worth less than nothing because I'm certainly not getting paid millions.
Imagine buying a painting for a million dollars. Or a hand crafted watch. The markets for these talk a whole lot about the intrinsic value, the workmanship, the creativity. And people do love them for those things, but that's not why they pay so much for them.
Imagine being able to park a retirement fund into something that fits in your pocket. You can't even do that with gold bricks. But you can do that with watches.
It's just a way to store a very large amount of money in something you can take with you anywhere in the world without anyone noticing. NFTs are even smaller than a watch. They're just the new version of the art dealing hustle that has been going on for centuries.
for instance the beeple one that sold for a lot was purchased by a guy who runs and nft website as basically an advertisement for his site.
who knows if they even had a prior deal before the auction where the artist would return some of the money
If you start selling a proof of flat earth, 5G tower cause the COVID-19, a herb that cure cancer or similar nonsense, there are people willing to pay a huge money for. But would you?
NFT in its current implementation is totally bullshit. They relies on SaaS wallet service rather than running full Ethereum node, and instead of embed all data to Ethereum blockchain, they relies on traditional HTTP server hosted by... wallet service itself!
If you relies on a central authority, there are better and more efficient services to use. But oh the ignorance and speculation.
Definitely not as fun as making millions on meme’d speculation.
And As seen here, even the "rich trolling" potential is practically impossible to enforce since we run into the idea of "piracy" (in the loosest form of quotes you can imagine). A problem even billion dollar media empires can't fully enforce. Is there something here I'm missing?
----
on a side note: while memes like nyan cat make sense, I find it very ethically dubious to "own" what's essentially a personal memory of a real family. But I guess if it's the family themselves that sold it, the consentual factors are already in place.
You'd have to own the SD card to own the 'original'. But who really cares? I don't understand NFTs, I just don't understand the value.
How pathetically desperate for validation you must be to pay this much for a unique thing, and to deprive others of access to it.
Why can't someone just buy all rights to this video the same way a company can buy the rights to a film? What does the blockchain do that a couple lawyers and some paperwork couldn't?
Why a blockchain-based digital "certificate" instead of just a certificate? Does my birth certificate or marriage certificate or college diploma need an upgrade to an NFT, too?
If so, what exactly would the buyer be buying? Just a virtual trading card and a promise that I won't sell my "birth-certificate NFT" trading card to anyone else?
Yes, and it's basically equivalent to writing the words "My Birth Certificate" on a piece of paper and selling that piece of paper. It holds no weight whatsoever.
> If so, what exactly would the buyer be buying?
Nothing.
> Just a promise that I won't sell my "birth-certificate NFT" to anyone else?
Not even that, unless you also did that. You can make multiple NFTs from the same thing. Just like nothing would prevent you from writing "My Birth Certificate" on a second piece of paper and selling that too, unless there was some external agreement that you wouldn't.
> “DCF” means the Davies-Carr Family.
> You acknowledge and agree that the DCF (or, as applicable, its licensors) retains ownership of all legal right, title and interest in and to the Media and all intellectual property rights therein. The rights that you have in and to the NFT are as described in this License. The DCF reserves all rights in and to the Media not expressly granted to you in this License.
I guess it‘s some form of „trust“ between the issuer and the buyer.
Or the 2nd NFT wouldn‘t be as memey anymore and thus not worth as much.
(It would probably be worth more the first time in reality, since issuing an NFT twice is not „supposed to happen“, so there would be some novelty to it, and I guess novelty is part of what drives the prices. See also Banksy‘s image that actually increased in value after it got publicly shredded by a built-in mechanism after being auctioned off.)
That will evolve into the patron system again, where the owner of early works becomes a hype machine to drum up their artists clout, and then offloads their early work.
If you only look at it from the perspective of the influencer, it doesn't seem like there's any harm. They managed to extract some wealth from crypto whales. -- where's the harm in that? But at the end of the day, they're selling a lie. The NFT-proponents want people to believe that NFTs are inherently valuable so that they can extract all of their money back, and then some. It's propaganda, and I can't get behind it, even if it means some artists are cashing out.
There is a lot of initial investment from top-tier people who convince others to invest (by showing eye-popping returns) and drive more investment. Soon the people on the top-tier gradually cash out and eventually it's the common people who lost their hard-earned money.
Your second paragraph could be applied to any non-crypto asset class. The only difference I can see is that crypto just made this scheme more obvious, unobfuscated then let's say the stock market with its different investor classes.
> its owner does not actually buy the copyright itself - meaning the artwork the NFT represents can still be shown wherever the original artist or creator chooses.
Genuinely curious. What does it mean to own a widely shared digital content, if you don't have the copyright to it? What's stopping the copyright-owner from continuing to license the copyright to others, or even enforcing their copyright against you in future? From a legal perspective, how would the NFT owner even enforce their ownership against anyone else?
Nothing.
> What's stopping the copyright-owner from continuing to license the copyright to others, or even enforcing their copyright against you in future?
Nothing.
> From a legal perspective, how would the NFT owner even enforce their ownership against anyone else?
They can't.
Or think somehow blockchain and AI can be used the amazing technoutopian future™ to combat piracy (including piracy of the image or video of the NFT they bought it)
Therein lies the question. It's basically selling a digital derivative of something that gives you no rights besides owning that derivative itself.
Is there anything saying that the copyright owner can't sell another NFT to a competing NFT blockchain? What if people start using different NFTs for the same digital good?
It doesn't make sense to take down the video though, because it's the views that make it more valuable.
I dunno, so have I; and just - it was big, but there were so many of these kinda nonsense YouTube videos at the time this was trending it was kind of hard to catch them all.
I suspect there is more to come, art that you have never heard of by an artist you are supposed to have heard of, now with NFT shiny and journalists that think they know the story.
This would not happen if linear broadcasters from yesteryear and their dead tree brethren didn't suck up the press releases to give them the oxygen of publicity.
You might buy a piece of artwork from famous artist X, but society and the market decide that art by Y is also valuable.
You might buy a painting because we all agree that paintings are valuable. But what's to stop framed original poetry, or sculptures, or photographs, becoming more valued and supplanting paintings as the preferred form of desirable art.
FTFY
Is this a form of money laundering? I am so confused, no part of this makes any sense to me at all.
And by doing that, you will also piss off pretty much everyone on the planet, and no one will want that (digital) NFT. In fact, I wouldn't want to take that shameful NFT even if you paid me for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Cecil_the_lion
NFTs are for digital artworks, it is an artificial way to create scarcity. A physical painting is already scarce. Burning an actual Van Gogh would be like burning down a house and saying it's okay because the deeds to the house are fine.
Such products will never see the public domain, as they are owned forever. I wonder if the major publishing companies are eyeing these up
> An NFT is a bit like a collectible certificate of authenticity, but its owner does not actually buy the copyright itself - meaning the artwork the NFT represents can still be shown wherever the original artist or creator chooses.
What you "own" when you buy an NFT is bragging rights about owning the NFT.
Edit: It's like if you bought the gold masters for Abbey Road. You don't own the copyrights, just a one-of-a-kind representation of that album that you can tell your golf buddies about.
As the laws currently stand, at least.
I wonder if the NFT token itself loses copyright and becomes public domain at some point?
I guess Firefox and Chromium wouldn’t need to go along unless someone lobbied Congress to change the laws.
I don’t know how similar this would be to DRM, which seems to have failed to stop piracy.