The non-challan we will make an original series out of it and sell it to a streaming service must be the funniest thing I've read in a long time. cryptobros really are funny if you are not getting scamed by them.
sorry I hate to be that guy but its not non-challan, its nonchalant. I was confused for a minute their by what non-challan meant ... i was thinking tthat maybe it is related to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/challan
I got stuck on that sentence too. I think it is the lack of quotes around the “we will make an original series out of it and sell it to a streaming service”-bit following it that stopped me from seeing 'non-challan' as a mistyped 'nonchalant'.
If the person who owned the book is the same as the bidder, or in cahoots, they can buy cryptocurrency with dirty money, buy the book at an inflated price, get ostensibly legitimate money back but have to pay the auction house a commission for the privilege. Since most of the crypto world does not do AML-KYC, it is a very attractive for money laundering, and I would say this is by design.
Not if it’s a pump and dump. The DAO collected a couple million dollars of other people’s money and used it to win an expensive auction, thus “proving” that the idea is worth lots of money. Now their second DAO can collect even more because it’s been legitimized.
> Since it is an auction, besides the winning bidder, there was at least another bidder, which makes two of them and is even more perplexing.
I see nothing perplexing about it because this was not an ordinary auction, but an auction with one member being a public DAO, where the amount of money the DAO will bid is thus public.
Let's say the DAO bids $100, but they have $200 in contributions. Someone can then safely bid $190, knowing that the DAO will raise to $200. It's in the agreement for the DAO more or less, and because it's on the blockchain and organized in a public-ish discord server, their cap is absolutely public.
So, who has the motivation to make these known-bad bids? Anyone who profits off the sale being more, and anyone who just doesn't like crypto-techbros and wants them to lose more money than they would otherwise.
I think the use of DAOs for auctions is quite funny for this reason. A private company that kept the total contribution amount private until just after the auction ended would end up with a much more favorable dynamic than this "the amount we can bid is on the blockchain, you already know our move when you bid".
Disclaimer: I know nothing about this specific auction, and may be missing some key detail. This is simply an observation and speculation from a naive bystander
>Disclaimer: I know nothing about this specific auction, and may be missing some key detail. This is simply an observation and speculation from a naive bystander
Sorry, but how do you know it was a DAO (whatever it is)?
>Les enchères se sont rapidement envolées et ont donné lieu au final à une rude bataille entre deux enchérisseurs étrangers, au téléphone. L'enchérisseur gagnant est américain.
it was a normal auction with two bidders (on the telephone).
The twitter thread this post is to retweets the DAO in question claiming responsibility, specifically this twitter account: https://twitter.com/TheSpiceDAO
In real time you are either on the auction in person or at the telephone, and there is someone else on a telephone connection.
How do you know who that someone else is?
All you know is the auction firm personnel on that phone line raises against your bid and conversely all the someone else knows is that someone (you in this hypothetical case) is offering and counter-raising.
To go from 25,000 to 2,500,000 (100x) two bidders are needed, and the question remains, given that one of the two is some crazy[1] guy backed by a DAO, who is the other one (almost as crazy as the first one).
From that page, you could tell how much money they had raised in etherium, and you could guess their cap from that.
I also give it better than even odds that the person bidding on behalf of the DAO was in discord, bragging about how much money they had to bid, right up until they won.
If you were interested in this auction selling for a large amount, would you not google a bit and find the spice DAO? Would you, perhaps, join their discord server, get on the auction call, and bid it up a bit?
This seems like something that quite reasonably could happen.
That's what I was suggesting above. One bidder is the DAO guy, the other bidder is someone who knows how much the DAO will bid, since it's public, and so raises it up to near that price for some ulterior motive, whether it's because they get a profit off of a high sell, or because they want the idiots who put money into the DAO to lose it. I have no doubt there are many people in both camps who were aware of the DAO before the auction started.
I see, but it is actually risky business, what if the "crazy" guy stops raising offers (for whatever reasons, let's say because he is struck by a lightning) and you win the auction with a bid of - say - 2,400,000 dollars?
I don't know how exactly offerers are "checked" or "validated" by Christie's in these kind of auctions, but there should be some process of some kind - particularly for telephone bidders - of checking identity and financial capabilities.
Or anyone can offer crazy amounts of money and then retire the offer without consequences?
Although I assume, like everything crypto, there’s some centralized SPOF; in this case, the one guy from the “team” making the actual bids, who could stop things from getting truly out of hand.
1. I think the winning bidder posted that right away. How terrible it must feel to wonder whether there's anyway to stop payment, cancel, back out, anything.
2. And what luck the runner-up must feel. (Who may now perhaps offer the winner 40k for the book.)
> why does the thread mention "cryptobros" about buyers when the auction was nothing related to crypto in any way?
Because the group who won it crowdfunded the money via cryptocurrency, wants to turn the book into NFTs and is organized in a DAO, if I looked into this a bit more I am sure I would find something about web3 and metaverse and whatever else fits in the bullshit bingo of current discourse around the whole crypto scene. If this does not count as „cryptobros“ then I imagine nothing does.
I guess, if you think in NFTs all day and truly believe that your JSON receipt is worth anything and gives you legal ownership, stuff like this happens to you in the real world, too.
Fortune, e.g., misinterpretes it in that same way. Anyone can make copies of an NFT backed asset unless you use other legal or technical methods to limit copies.
That definition isn't wrong. However, the "one-of-a-kind digital asset" is the NFT itself—basically a digital autograph—not a copy of the image (or book) the NFT describes, or even a license to such a copy, and certainly not the copyright, unless the copyright holder explicitly agreed to that when minting the NFT. (And you would need some out-of-band proof that the NFT was truly minted by the copyright holder.)
I think I'm beginning to understand the prices of art NFTs: the majory of people simply don't understand that NFTs aren't representing much anything of value. It's even harder to believe that the box is empty when its price was so high.
I came here to comment something in the likes of this, just to add it helps to understand not only the price of art NFTs but the dynamics of it.
These "investments" are all backed up by some fantasy that works in their "realm" - like buying an avatar that will be used in "the metaverse", being the metaverse a collective fantasy and illusion.
Just like these fellows are so emotionally invested in this fantasy that they were already selling the rights of a TV Show to a streaming service... and I bet that if you go to them now they have the narrative that this will be sold to some yet to exist streaming service of the metaverse based on NFTs.
Anti-art is actually a thing and kind of interesting, if also arguably also kind of dumb and pointless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-art. It's sort of the equivalent of trolling in the art world, and is usually a meta-commentary on what it means for something to be art.
I wouldn't really say that it makes up much of the art market, though they always get a lot of news attention when they appear.
It's probably even more than that with the "Buyer's Premium" tacked on - the Christie's cost calculator linked reckons that would be another EUR540,000 on top...
1. This was a normal auction and not an NFT one. How is a DAO enforced in this case? What happens if the nominated bidder decides to go rogue and bid more or less than the decided cap? What happens if the price of Ethereum drops to the point that the DAO is no longer able to find the 2.6M they need?
2. If this is an auction then there has to be another bidder (I doubt even the people in this DAO are dumb enough to make their initial bid 2.6M). Who was bidding 2.5M against them?
As expected, the problem of interacting with the real world comes up again.
It doesn't matter how decentralized your blockchain or "DAO" is, ultimately all interactions outside the blockchain will rely on one or more trusted parties that can go rogue or be coerced... at which point you may as well not have a blockchain and just trust these people directly.
They bought a rare Dune storybook, created by an all-star team of artists (Jodorowsky, Moebius, HR Giger, ...). I think that storybook was used to pitch the concept art to Movie Producers and Studios.
To make this easier to understand, substitute "Dune book" with "Gutenberg Bible" or, even better, "historic, ultrarare, pre-medieval parchment of a Bible translation".
The new owners of that Bible probably do not think (and do not intend to promote the idea) that they now own the property rights for "the" Bible, or for all Bibles, or for any Bible - except for that particular instance of the Bible.
Rather they now own that parchment, with all its decorated pages, handwriting, scripts, gemstones, peculiar translations, and compilation of Gospels and Letters.
These content, drawings and illustrations inside that Bible are really unique, unless the monks decided to draw everything ( or even more often.)
This content could indeed be monetized, or shared with the world, for the greater good.
If so, why would they think they now have the right to make an animated series based on the IP (which their tweet explicitly states)? You’re being way too charitable.
And as the sibling comment said, this is not the only copy (but seeing elsewhere in the thread that they’ve talked about burning it, perhaps they thought so, too. That’s honestly not an impressive amount of due diligence in that case, to put it mildly).
> This content could indeed be monetized, or shared with the world,
I suggest you read the rest of the discussion. No, it can't be shared, and it can't be monetized. You said it yourself - they do not own the intellectual property rights. They own a printed version of that content that does not include any rights for digital reproduction, derivative work or anything of the sort. Like any other book (!).
> “We can’t just scan it and put it on the internet,” Fang said. But by raising the money as a DAO, Fang said they hoped to show the various estates and stakeholders that there is a massive online interest in making the bible more accessible to the public.
I don't know what they're doing, but it seems that they are at least a bit aware that they don't own the rights.
Who exactly are they trying to convince, and about what? I mean they don't just need the rights to the art in the book itself, but they also need to get the movie/TV rights for Dune itself.
Is this really spending €2.6M just to get a foot in the door, to be able to spend, what, another $200M for the actual rights?
But even then, why do they think this DAO is the best way to execute this vision?
They could just go "oh, people are interested in Dune? Ok, let's make a movie, but without involving these DAO people". Oh wait, there already is a Dune series of movies currently being made/in theaters.
Now it will be hosted on some other server as well (THE REAL DECENTRALIZED SERVER) but wrapped into some NFT, where they will sell each page - or even better - each square of the storyboard, coated into some fucked up story like:
"You can own a piece of a future TV Show based on this story board!"
And they will probably come out profiting because people will buy this illusion.
Edit: From a quick Google search there's around 3000 drawings, so 3000 NFTs at some absurd price that people will want for a piece of the pipe dream. They didn't even had to pay an artist or create a story this time around...
They can't, of course, sell the images themselves; they don't hold the copyright. But they can sell URLs referring to the content.
That's pretty clever. I mean it's super dumb, but it's clever.
By that I mean that an NFT whose content is an URL to an image you don't own, is dumb. But it's clever to "mint" these, and you'll find more fools to buy the NFTs if you give the appearance of legitimacy.
In other words: They have no more rights to sell NFTs for the contents than I do, but they'll be more successful at implying to buyers that they do.
The most interesting thing about NFTs (and most blockchain tech) is the question "is this actually fraud, or is it merely stupid?". It's philosophy about the meaning of "fraud".
I don't know the legal intricacies of this, like to what extent can they sell not the content but the actual physical square piece of the book, under an NFT?
For example, a company called MSCHF sold 999 fake Warhol drawings and 1 real[0], all mixed up so no one knows which one is the real one, for 250$ each... can they do this? Is this legal? At least people were aware of it, so I doubt it's fraud.
Here's the math of it:
- they paid 8,125$ for the original;
- they sold 1000 for 250$ = 250,000$
- they profited 250,000$ - 8,125$ = 241k$
Of course this was also a mix of a PR stunt, still, if you can do PR stunts and profit... I mean... isn't this what Supreme has been doing for years?
So I don't even think the legality of it all is a issue, because has you hinted, people are deliberately rolling into this...stupidity(?).
I think all of these use similar emotional mechanisms of gambling, which if you think about it, most of the current collectibles market nowadays is gambling for everyone, kids included.
Sounds like it was just a raffle. $250 for a 1 in 1,000 chance to win a prize worth ~$8,125. Happens all the time in school fundraisers and other community events. Of course they didn’t need to use a blockchain or cryptocurrency to hold a simple raffle, but here we are.
Also in a raffle they usually just tell you when you’ve won.
Better odds and potential return dollar for dollar than the lottery, though.
Right, it’s a raffle with more steps and dubious legality. Seems unnecessary when a regular raffle would have sufficed, but I suppose that wouldn’t have got attention.
> I don't know the legal intricacies of this, like to what extent can they sell not the content but the actual physical square piece of the book, under an NFT?
I am also not a lawyer, but for the physical piece either you own it or you don't. If you own it then surely there must be some contract where you "lease it out" to the "keeper" of it. Or if you're the one "keeping" it (and owning it), then some contract that you can't sell the NFT to one person and the physical item to another?
But all these have to be legal contracts. And if you have a legal contract with someone about how you're not allowed to sell a physical thing you own, ever, do you truly own it? (not to mention who is on the other side of this contract? Who has legal standing to sue if you violate the contract?)
One thing this reminds me of is Commonhold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonhold), which is a home ownership form in some countries, and some other apartment ownership models. In some models you don't "own" your own apartment, but own a stake in the house, and this stake gives you the full access to a contractually specified apartment number.
That and, of course, its similarity to bearer bonds.
Let's say you own the NFT and legally possess the physical item. Can you retire the NFT, and have it be physical-only from now on? Can you still sell it as an NFT after you sold the physical item? The simple answer to that last part is "of course you can. NFT means nothing".
You can mint an NFT for my house. But good luck trying to kick me out. The police will not be impressed.
The owner of this book needs not to make sure "math" secures transfer of legal ownership, but law. And that's the problem with these blockchain inventions.
> For example, a company called MSCHF sold 999 fake Warhol drawings and 1 real[0], all mixed up so no one knows which one is the real one, for 250$ each... can they do this? Is this legal? At least people were aware of it, so I doubt it's fraud.
Again I'm not a lawyer, but I would think that no it's not fraud, but it's copyright infringement. And if the copyright holder doesn't sue you, then that's their choice.
But good luck buying a Disney movie for $10, and selling 9 copies+original for $1 each. Even without profit the mouse will go after you, and he'll be legally right.
I guess we're all waiting for the first NFT legal dispute, and see how it will roll out and what precedents it will set for the future.
Because until then, they're all playing a make-belief game.
Like the guy who claimed the moon and actually sold plots of land on the moon to people[0]. He was navigating a "loop hole" and no one cared about it, or even took it serious. But if people are putting money upfront, at what point it should be addressed?
I made the mistake of diving a bit deeper into the group who bought it and found a proposal where they are talking about literally burning the book they just bought after digitizing it for … reasons I guess [0]
At this point I just hope its some sort of practical joke or whatever because this just seems a bit much.
> Because the book remains on-chain, the book does not die, but crosses the boundary of physical to digital.
It reminds me of the video game SOMA, where people upload a brain-scan of themselves to live on after some catastrophe, essentially making a digital copy of their consciousness. But because they are also still physically alive, they see the digital version of themselves as a clone, someone else. To "complete the transition", they decide they must end their lives at the exact moment the scan is complete.
SOMA was brilliant. That moment in particular I think was really thrilling, it made me consider some pretty fundamental questions about consciousness in a totally absurd setting. The setting I think helped isolate the core questions really well I felt.
Trying not to spoil it by discussing it, if anyone hasn't yet you really should try it, it's a really unique experience in gaming and that's hard to come by these days.
Yeah it's a bit of a shame that the parent comment spoiled the plot. I definitely enjoyed SOMA's admittedly simplistic take on the teletransportation paradox; however, for me the atmosphere was much more impactful, especially given the story. I think they executed the "last survivor on Earth" trope really well, and it was tough to get through because of that.
It goes back at least 50 years more, to Star Trek transporters.
And the most chilling version I've seen is in Charles Stross' Glasshouse, where some soldiers fight a virus that infects the consciousness of everyone using such a transporter. They "rescue" an infected population by chopping off their heads and throwing them into a transporter hacked to remove the virus. IIRC only the heads because transporting the entire bodies would be slower and the other side is expected to reconstruct a living body anyway.
A few hundred or thousand beheaded people later, they realize that the transporter is broken and would not reconstruct anything.
>It goes back at least 50 years more, to Star Trek transporters.
Personally, I like to trace this stuff back to early Christian theological debates. Here's an illuminating quotation:
Origen's belief that he could be resurrected in a numerically different body is parallel to Derek Parfit's belief that he could enjoy some kind of survival short of identity, if his present body was destroyed, but the information from it was electronically beamed, so as to construct an exactly similar body and brain with exactly similar psychology at a distance, say on the planet Mars (Reasons and Persons, 199-320). Parfit, like Origen, discounts the need for bodily continuity, and discounts the idea we encountered in Philoponus that it matters whether the original body is replaced gradually, or all at once (op. cit., Appendix D).
For me the archetypal story of the genre is Think Like a Dinosaur:
The story postulates a transportation device (supervised by a dinosaur-like race of aliens) which can transmit an exact copy of a person's body to distant planets. The original body is disintegrated once reception at the destination is confirmed. In the story a woman is teleported to an alien planet, but the original is not disintegrated because reception cannot be confirmed at the time. Reception is later confirmed, and the original, not surprisingly, declines to "balance the equation" by re-entering the scanning and disintegrating device. This creates an ethical quandary which is viewed quite differently by the cold-blooded aliens who provided the teleportation technology, and their warm-blooded human associates.
JPEG2000 supports lossless encoding. Even if you scan at higher than print resolution, if you compress too much with lossy compression, the original print resolution date won't be recoverable.
"""Since each page of the book will require many miners (minters), we must decide on what type of NFT each minter gets. I propose the following NFT variations ordered from easiest to most complex:
1. Every minter is rewarded with an identical NFT of the page.
2. Every minter is rewarded with a fraction of the final NFT that contains the page. [...]
3. By leveraging progressive JPEG 7 tech, every minter gets a unique NFT which contains the uploaded image but with different degrees of quality. [...]"""
Holy fucking shit. This could be extremely high quality satire, but they're serious, which makes it even funnier.
> By leveraging progressive JPEG 7 tech, every minter gets a unique NFT which contains the uploaded image but with different degrees of quality.
This is both brilliant and insane at the same time. Next up, I have an MPEG stream to sell you ... where the I-frames are charged at a higher rate than the B-frames!
If you think of them as eager and well intentioned children, the whole thing is kind of sweet, tho also a big fuck up. It is like a kid driver denting a car because something something girlfriend.
What’s tragic is they could just upload the damn thing to internet archive but instead they’re going to use some bizarre storage method that will help ensure the book is actually hard for people to read.
If they only they took a step back, they'd realize yes they can scan it, but nothing beats preserving the original book itself physically. These guys need to go out, breathe air, and talk to people outside of their bubble.
You can't really put content on the blockchain, that costs a surprising amount because of all the proof-of-waste. What happens is people put the content on a host and the URL on the blockchain. I suppose in theory it could be kept in IPFS, but few NFTs seem to bother with that.
Well, they won't. All NFTs are hosted on hilariously centralized services like googleusercontent.com and similar.
Browse through https://opensea.io/, the most prominent NFT marketplace at the moment. Digging through the DOM of their website will reveal a lot of links to quite standard content storage solutions. They usually go through a bit of trouble to prevent people from simply clicking "view image in new tab" to reveal the actual location, but it's not difficult to get around.
Did you actually read the post? They propose to put it on-chain, and even say
> [O]ur NFT collection could very possibly become the largest on-chain collection ever in the history of Ethereum. Time would only be on our side because as gas becomes more expensive, the window of opportunity to bypass our on-chain NFT collection would fade away.
Remember that this is from the people that believe buying a book gives them the IP rights to the work (should have bought a Harry Potter book). They may not have thought it all the way through.
To give an idea of the storage costs associated, I dug up this old stackexchange-answer about storage costs on Ethereum [0], which estimates that it costs about 76.000 USD / GB stored. Note that this is 5 year old answer, so the price will probably have multiplied like the price of ETH since then.
Edit: Here's [1] a newer, updated price estimate that takes current prices into account : 309.9 Million / GB. LoL!
Almost all NFTs are hosted on IPFS. Opensea shows a CACHED version of the image, because pulling them directly from IPFS puts unnecessary strain on the network and is comparatively slow.
The contract for the NFT generally just points to an IPFS identifier (a sha256 hash of the content), and it's up to the viewer (a website like opensea) to decide what ipfs gateway to use. Even if the ipfs network died you could still use other p2p methods to find the content, as long as someone was still hosting it.
The amount of artwork NFTs that has "Metadata: Centralized" in their details appear very high, although it's difficult to get any exact numbers. As far as I can tell, OpenSea doesn't provide an option to filter based on this field.
Some high value collections like BAYC have frozen metadata, so it can never be changed. I do know some other big collections serve images from AWS or their own domains, this happens because it's extremely expensive at current gas prices to do partial reveals or any kind of metadata changes on-chain
It's a problem, it used to be the grand majority of collections were fully decentralised and frozen but nowadays it's a mixed bag – I think it will change once the gas problem is solved, but it's also partly because the audience has changed and newcomers into NFTs don't care so much about their tokens being fully decentralised.
> Here's what happens when you add a file to IPFS — whether you're storing that file on your own local node or one operated by a pinning service or IPFS-enabled app.
Notice that wording: “Add a file to IPFS”.
It’s likewise fine to say, then, that you “put something on ipfs”.
That's odd, since the TP in HTTP stands for transfer protocol, but the FS in IPFS stands for file system. You'd expect to be able to store data on a file system. That's what I use my file system for anyway.
What blockchain? Some newer ones are not expensive (but also are not decentralized enough yet). They dismiss ipfs straight away in the responses already for it and actually say they will put the actual imagine on the blockchain. This will cost something (possibly a lot) depending on which chain, but they have $4m+ left to burn on ‘the good cause’. This all stinks but I must agree, if you want something for eternity (well, in their minds), putting the content on a big (btc/eth) chain would be the only way; seems the rest is far more brittle.
Jikes, that's even worse than I thought. So then they will probably just go for another coin and store it there. Not sure how else. Or maybe they'll raise a few billion after this victory /s
Unfortunately, things like that actually happen even though everyone here would consider it a joke.
A handful of words can be copyrightable. The idea of copyrighted content being stored on a blockchain that thousands of nodes duplicate and offer freely is an interesting conundrum that your reply entirely sidesteps. I’m guessing it has happened already but I too am interested in the legal implications of this.
Legally it's not complicated: is it a copy? Is it permitted by the copyright owner? No? Then it's an infringing copy.
Actually doing something about it is a problem, as shown throughout the post-Napster era, but every node that serves an infringing copy is potentially liable.
* Is the material copyrightable? A novel is copyrightable, but a recipe is not. The layout format of a telephone book is copyrightable, but the contents of it are not.
* Is the copyright still in effect? Unfortunately, this is a less relevant question now, as anything written within living memory is under copyright, but it is still a required step.
* Is permission from the copyright holder required? If I am sold a copy of a computer program, I'm allowed to make whatever copies are necessary (e.g. copying from the hard drive to RAM) that are necessary to execute the program, without the permission of the copyright holder.
* What is being done with the copy? If I buy a work, the copyright owner has no right to prevent me from selling it, nor are they entitled to any portion of the proceeds. Re-sale of authorized copies, regardless of permission, are not infringements.
The idea that people put the URL in the blockchain is misleading and people keep repeating it as a mantra.
Yes, you put a URL on the blockchain but it's almost always a URL to the ipfs protocol e.g. ipfs://QmVc6zuAneKJzicnJpfrqCH9gSy6bz54JhcypfJYhGUFQu
This identifier is a base58 encoding of a sha256 hash that points to the content. It doesn't actually tell you what host to use to find the content, that's completely left to the client app; so you could use an ipfs gateway like cloudflare-ipfs.com or ipfs.io or you could, imagining a future in which ipfs is not used anymore, use any other kind of p2p network to find the content.
Just like gnutella, or torrents, as long as someone out there is hosting the content it's usually possible to find it.
Except ipfs content disappears if no one is pinning it. And you can find IPs of hosts which are pinning it. Yes there is FileCoin but there are minimum and maximum file size and contract duration limits. So someone has to periodically check pins, contracts and keep purchasing new FileCoin contracts to keep it online.
Yes, true, I don't think ipfs is meant to be censorship-resistant though, so finding the IP of hosts doesn't seem like a big deal for the project goals.
My point was more that the NFT metadata itself could still be usable x years in the future when another protocol has replaced ipfs – it would just have to make the files findable by the existing hash.
The biggest potential risk would be if sha256 becomes broken and finding collisions is trivial.
Oddly enough - the process in a library for digitising a copy of a book can be fairly destructive, as far as I understood from those doing it (at CUDL). The spine is chopped off, to make it easier to put it into a machine for scanning all the pages.
Nice. I suppose it also depends on how rare the item being scanned is. For a recent printed work, with multiple copies it's less important, while scanning a fragment from a Genizah or a notebook is much more careful process.
The first time I encountered a digital facsimile was when I studied medieval literature in Germany.
There is the great "Codex Manesse" [1] (I once had the opportunity to see the real one in an exhibition) that is one of a kind.
It is irreplaceable and there are but a selected few people who are even allowed to touch it (with gloves). It could not be damaged, but was digitized without harm nonetheless [2].
So I actually never thought of digitalisation as a destructive process.
Well ideally digitisation would not be destructive, I suppose. With any preservation or analysis of historical artefacts there is some risk/reward calculation. Like some books are so delicate that there is an approach to scan them while still closed:
> Oddly enough - the process in a library for digitising a copy of a book can be fairly destructive, as far as I understood from those doing it (at CUDL). The spine is chopped off, to make it easier to put it into a machine for scanning all the pages.
The general consensus among modern librarians came around on that subject, and now this kind of destructive processes is rare and generally frowned upon. A librarian friend once explained to me there was always two "schools" among librarians:
1. Those who only value the content of books. For those, copying/digitalizing a rare book is all that is needed in order to preserve said book.
2. Those who also value the physical object of the book as a historical artifact. For those keeping rare books in good condition is also necessary for preservation.
In the middle 1900s with the mass adoption of the microfilm, the first school gained the upper hand, and many libraries conducted mass projects of microfilming and destroying historical archives. Those were mostly motivated by a false belief that books were super fragile and wouldn't last anyway (I mean, if you believe the book will fall apart on its own, then you would be less reticent about using destructive methods to make the best copy possible).
In the last few decades the tides changed, librarians realized that books are not that fragile, and can be kept pretty much indefinitely if closed and protected from humidity (and fire). Also they realized that microfilm is crap, and that copying/digitizing is a error prone process, so a lot of stuff was lost because someone skipped a page, or the film was damaged, and the original was destroyed. So the movement to keep originals grew in strength, being almost a consensus now a days, and modern digitizing processes/machines are specially designed to be gentle and non destructive.
>Oddly enough - the process in a library for digitising a copy of a book can be fairly destructive
Not that long ago, there was a very destructive push to convert old books to microfilm. I worry that not enough lessons were learned. Here's an interesting review of a book about the subject:
> Oddly enough - the process in a library for digitising a copy of a book can be fairly destructive, as far as I understood from those doing it (at CUDL). The spine is chopped off, to make it easier to put it into a machine for scanning all the pages.
I don't think it necessarily has to be that way. I recall seeing a photo or video of a book-scanner that would project laser grid-lines onto the book, to non-destructively correct for the deformations caused by the binding in software.
Let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and pretend everything worked as they say, in what world is giving access to the book to the few people that pay for the nft, “democratising”?
Kinda missing the point of NFTs there, it's a collector's item and I can't spend $2.6m to buy the actual physical book, but I could spend $2.6k to buy an NFT with 1000 editions which was minted by the owner of the physical book. I don't care about Jorodowsky's Dune, but if I was a fan I could then show off my NFT on twitter, or <<the metaverse>> or just print it out and frame it.
FAQS
- Can't someone else just download the image and pretend they own it? Yes, just as someone can buy a fake LV bag and show it off. Other collectors will still know, and don't care about the fakes. As the tech becomes more mainstream, sites like twitter will show whether you actually own the NFT you claim to.
- Can't someone else mint their own NFT? Yes, but like with real collectors items, provenance matters. Just like one can forge a perfect Picasso but without any plausible proof of origin it would not be worth much.
- Can't they decide to mint more "fragments" after the fact, therefore diluting the price of each of the 1000 editions. No, the smart contract that governs the NFT can't be changed.
- Won't the link inside my NFT die? No, the link is usually just a SHA256 hash of the content; with the content being hosted on IPFS. It's all p2p so as long as a host somewhere in the world has a copy, you can always find the content by hash, even if the underlying technology changes with time.
So NFT's are just a way to introduce artificial scarcity for what is otherwise a reproducible digital good? A way for people to flex money on things that don't exist? They're like DLC skins in a video game - worth nothing, other than showing off that you spent $x dollars?
Kinda? Most things are reproducible. Limited edition sneakers are reproducible, and yet scarcity makes them worth thousands of dollars.
Is it stupid to pay $10k for some hard to find sneakers? maybe, but people do it because they have the money and they're collectors, or they want to flex. Is it more real because there's a physical item which costs maybe $20 to manufacture?
It's not like your example with the DLC skins, DLC skins are not limited in any way, the game company can create more and more of them. An NFT collection is limited, there will never be more than the amount the contract specifies (unless the contract leaves that open-ended intentionally). The creator can't simply sell new ones, because using a new contract would make the new ones lose all inherent value.
It's exactly the same as how certain sneakers are worth $10k and others that are from the same brand, same designers, same materials are worth $100 – provenance matters, and knowing it was released in an extremely limited way makes something more valuable.
> The little prince was still not satisfied. "If I own a scarf, I can tie it around my neck and take it away. If I own a flower, I can pick it and take it away. But you can't pick the stars!" "No, but I can put them in the bank." "What does that mean?" "That means that I write the number of my stars on a slip of paper. And then I lock that slip of paper in a drawer." "And that's all?" "That's enough!"
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry satirized NFTs 70 years before they were invented!
Forget the idea that owning the token represents something. Buying an NFT just means you bought the NFT itself; it does not mean you bought the image, have access to the image, bought any rights to the image. It just means you bought the NFT.
As far as I understand it, NFTs usually represent the title for the copyright, etc for the piece of art or whatever other non fungible item it is supposed to represent. Honestly NFTs should be pointing to a legal document showing that it's acting that way in addition to a copy of the image asset. 2 urls. Maybe NFTs do or should have an addendum part for transactions, so you can add URL or hash updates as hosting goes down.
When you transfer an NFT from one address to another, you have transferred title to whoever owns the private keys for it.
You’d need a separate legal contract that was valid in whatever jurisdiction saying the owner of an NFT owned the copyright. At which point the NFT is basically superfluous, because the contract is doing all the work and at that point you may as well just have the contract itself.
An NFT is more like an autographed photocopy of something. Except apparently a lot of NFTs on popular platforms are created from stolen digital art, so you get the fun of not even being completely sure if the autograph is actually by the creator of the art (but it’s verifiable that is is by the creator of the token).
The dude in the linked forum post goes on to say this:
> Here is where we make the dreams of the Harkonnen become true. [...]
I'm finding it really very difficult to imagine that someone's read/watched Dune and come away thinking the the Harkonnen are the good guys. So I can't imagine that intellectual honesty is one of their strong points.
[Q] Do we really want to be perceived as book burners?
[A] Tbh I don’t care too much what a bunch of normies that
probably didn’t even know the book existed think. The book
would still exist but digitized and in the blockchain.
[Q] Why not just use Arweave, IPFS, and a variety of other
long-term digital preservation strategies? All of them are
less expensive and resource-intensive.
IPFS is not permanent. If it stops being hosted it
disappears. Arweave cannot compare to something like
Ethereum which is a truly decentralized network. But
upmost I would say that cost of uploading is a feat, not a
problem. It would make our collection even more special.
These are a bunch of seriously sociopathic, inconsiderate and reckless thugs. I'm happy to see them fleecing each other.
Sure but ipfs hosting etc rely on one or a few hosts; if you use a blockchain like btc, at least it is vast and that means someone will be hosting at least until btc reaches $0.
not necessarily. BTC has UTXO (unspent transaction output), whereas ETH has proper accounts and the money is a property of the account.
so if any of these chains only want to focus on sending/storing money (or simply address the evergrowing size of the chain), then they can start purging the old transactions from the ledger.
(yes, ETH has smart contracts, but it's not impossible to imagine that ETH will start charging gas for upkeep of that data, and when the smart contract runs out of upkeep it gets deleted.)
Yes, but most other way of storage are even easier to purge. Also these people are not exactly sane, so I can see them spend millions on ‘securing the documents on chain’.
The founders of this DAO are paying themselves >$30,000/month [0] out of the pool to look after an old book and to commission an animated TV series [0] from a company that does music videos and commercials [1].
That's still an absurd amount of money, since everything they're proposing to do, they can't legally do. They don't have any actual work to do, and are being paid $90k a year each to do nothing.
My favorite part of this story is that they DAO has actually raised ~$8m, spent $3m on the book (10x the expected auction price), then the "core team" has started paying themselves ~$30k a month[0]. Also, how is this "decentralised" when one person owns over 50% of the voting token?
For the sake of accuracy, it appears to me that it is $30k per month total for the core team not each. There is a total maximum operating budget of $50k per month including a maximum of $30k for the core team. When the core team has 4. That is about $8k per month each.
8K seems plenty when you can do your "work" from anywhere in the world (and probably have a good reason to not be too easy to find by your scam victims)
> the "core team" has started paying themselves ~$30k a month each
But don't forget this team has the Q1 deliverable of presenting "a film treatment and budget by Roble Ridge Productions for the original animated limited series inspired by the book for a community vote on Snapshot" - which one can only assume will be a lot of work... :)
> Salvador Dalí was set to play the Emperor and claimed he wanted to be the highest-paid actor in Hollywood history. He asked for $100,000 per hour to act in the movie. Jodorowsky accepted, but then reduced the Emperor’s scenes so that Dalí would be needed for no more than one hour with the rest of his lines spoken by a robotic lookalike. Dalí accepted on condition that the plastic lookalike was donated to his museum, and that his throne was to be a toilet made up of two intersected dolphins.
Qualifications listed for their team include "Bitcoin Class of 2013", not sure if a joke or not? The impression is that this is a bunch of 13 year olds who suddenly got a windfall...
"They worked as Product Manager on StarChant and Project Manager of PegzDAO; consulted with POAP on their communications strategy and Raid Guild DAO on business development. DeFi trader, yield farmer and liquidity provider on DEXs. Bitcoin Class of 2013."
You weren't kidding, this sounds like an application for a World of Warcraft Guild I applied to in 2008 or something. I have no idea what any of this means
No idea why the other comment is dead. It's obvious the entire thing is a way for them to con some suckers into giving them what is basically a golden ticket to a life without any worries. They don't take themselves seriously. They're laughing all the way to the bank.
It’s entirely possible that that’s exactly what happened. The space is awash with people that got lucky in the initial boom and have convinced themselves (and a few others) that they’re investing geniuses and not just lucky fools. Come to think of it, this phenomenon isn’t limited to bitcoin, although the signaling behavior is quite different than a VC that’s gotten lucky once.
The language and behaviour is consistent with the cant generally spoken by the crypto community. It's a similar idea to /r/wsb/ and does the job of identifying insiders while keeping outsiders out.
Not supporting crypto one way or another. But EVERY technical industry is full of jargon.
"Did you verify that the RVSM system was talking to the FMS after completing the JIC during the RON?" - Aviation
"Are you sure the packets are flowing on UDP? Can someone check the CAT6?" - Simple networking
Etc. So I wouldn't say the jargon is constructed solely to keep outsiders out.
I was referring specifically to the example above, or at least the jargon I've seen used. And EVERY community is going to have specific language or "Slang".
I mean, even the specific resume example above simply translates to "Worked as a Product Manager on moderately successful project, worked as a Project Manager on random project, consulted with highly successful marketing firm and extremely successfully and profitable co-operative consulting firm on business development. Likes to trade high-risk stocks, puts money into high-risk interest bearing accounts and likes to give random unsecured loans to strangers"
I understand there's a ton of bashing of crypto, but I think that looking at a unknown sub-cultures language and assuming that they are purposely using jargon antagonistic to outsiders is rather closed minded. As someone who dipped their toe in, but still doesn't understand, they have been extremely helpful in explaining the concepts even when I argue against them.
Crypto Watchwords:= seemingly slang, but conveys only group membership. Group membership revoked if you try to define any of those watchwords at a first principles level (which is precisely why a group of young people raised on NFT's doesn't understand the possession/copyright ownership split)
Will be interesting to see how this, as in the whole DAO space, works out. Part of the problem with the ICO craze in 2017* is that the founders got all the money up front without having any obligation to do anything, so the tiny minority of well intentioned ones ended up simply enjoying the money rather than doing something hard like actual work. Seems like this is still a risk here - the founder can string people along for a few months or years until they lose interest, all the while drawing down the money and living rather comfortably.
* The other problem with the ICO craze is of course that the combination of money up-front and no obligations and anonymity meant almost all were simply out-and-out scams.
Which is why there are rules and layers of checks to actually IPO - another term misappropriated to ICO like currency was misappropriated for cryptocurrency to mislead; stock markets would lose all trust and credibility if they didn't curate and require due diligence.
From my understanding may also be taking advantage of the money the government's currently printing - at the externalized cost of general society, an additional wealth transfer? I haven't looked read too much into SPACs yet, though they certainly did start to pop out of nowhere and in huge sums as "special purpose vehicles;" I'd sure love to raise a quick $1 billion SPAC though to fund my endless projects.
That's not how SPACs work. You can only use the funding raised as basically a dowry for a merger with a private company. It's low risk to investors because they simply get their money back if 2 years pass without a merger, and the people who run the SPAC lose everything they spent on getting their SPAC to the stock market. Right now, the market is saturated with SPACs, but there are only so many private companies looking to go public.
The filings are pretty much the same. The biggest difference, as far as I know, is there's no roadshow to get institutional investors onboard. But this isn't technically a requirement of an IPO. And a direct listing also skips that.
I think what the previous poster was referring to is that the filings for the SPAC (acquisition company) are the same as any other IPO, but there's nothing in the SPAC (just money and a management team). For the company that gets acquired by the SPAC, however, it's a different story. That company does not have to go through the IPO process itself, so it goes public with a lot less regulatory scrutiny than it would have had had it pursued an IPO itself.
That's not really true though. The SPAC needs to file an S-4 before the deSPAC (the merger), which informs investors in minute detail about the target company and the merger deal. I don't know exactly how it compares to an S-1, but it's extremely comprehensive.
The biggest difference I can see is that a traditional IPO can't succeed without getting institutional investors onboard, and there are strict guidelines about what can be pitched to them. The negotiations between a SPAC and its target company are much less constrained.
I'm not an expert in this, so I'm probably wrong on some of the details, but my company is undergoing a SPAC merger, so I've tried to inform myself on how it works.
There are laws for ICOs as well when they are marketed in US: they are securities. The SEC knows this perfectly, they just don't do anything for some reason.
I’m reminded somewhat of cases where VCs like A16Z push DAOs as the future, and we’re supposed to just pretend that they’re not going to buy up as many tokens as possible so that they can extract maximal profits like usual. It seems like exactly the same scam as ICOs with another level of indirection.
This is my question. If so, then not only do they suck at Intellectual property, but they suck at getting a good deal at an auction. Hopefully their screen writing skills are better?
With it there are 4 Dune "movies" out: the 1984 Lynch version, the 2000 Sci-Fi Channel one (a 3 part mini series, nearly a movie), the aforementioned 2013 one, and of course the 2021 Villeneuve one.
In the fourth or fifth reply in the Twitter thread this post links to, it links to the DAO forum where they describe their plans to convert the book to JPEG NFTs and then burn the original.
I do not buy the premise that they thought that they were doing something for public good. I'm glad to mock them, and all the other cryptocurrency/NFT morons.
Everyone's favourite Gary Brannon appearing on HN is a pleasant surprise :-) if you're not already familiar with "Citation Needed" or "Two of these people are lying" take a look at their YouTube series
This is, obviously, silly. There are a lot of silly cryptostuff.
Silliness aside though, this highlights a point to me. Methods of organising are (1) very important (2) relatively undiverse (3) hard to create out of whole cloth.
The creation/ascendance of "modern" joint stock companies circa 1600 was (arguably) responsible for some serious revolution. The 90s produced some very interesting examples: GNU, Linux, Wikipedia, WWW... These are "organisations" organised in unconventional ways and they produced results that a conventional non profit, commercial or government organisation could not have produced.
New ways of organising are potentially very powerful.
CryptoBro naivety isn't necessarily terrible for this end. It'll produce a lot of stupid moves, but stupidity and creativity are often neighbors. CryptoBros' typically mercenary and/or ideological tendencies might be more of a hurdle.
Besides laws, norms & regulatory structure, what's the difference between a DAU and a joint stock company?
That seems to be true in movies, but in the real world new advancements are created by experts that know the basics. Serendipity is part of that, but you need to have the basic knowledge.
I will concede, thou, that ideas to be rich can come from anywhere as the only metric is to convince investors, to produce something useful is not required.
I'll not argue that "who" matters. The sense in which stupidity and creativity are neighbors is the difference between expertise and qualifications. I didn't mean that stupid people are more creative. Where unqualified and uncredentialed people can play, you'll find a bunch of clueless morons but also uncredentialed geniuses. Where only the credentialed and qualified can play, say traditional finance, you'll find mostly regular bankers and financiers.
I certainly wouldn't have elected to create the current blaze of cryptmadness, but the fact that most of what it produces is scams and bullshit doesn't mean nothing else can come out of it.
The fact that cryptocurrency schemes like DAOs allow people to raise vast sums of money in very short spaces of time with no evidence of anyone involved having the ability, skills or even intention of delivering anything, seems to be fundamentally flawed to me. It seems that you are only going to attract dreamers who want to be able to get rich really quickly without having to do anything much, and I wouldn't have thought those would include the sorts of people who would be most likely to put in the time and effort and attention to detail and hard work required to build things that are truly worthwhile and which will stand the test of time.
OTOH, I think cryptocynicism may be blinding us to the possibility of doing exactly what this hapless bunch did, but actually ending up owning the copyright to something... as they intended. The road from there to something noteworthy is still long, but I don't think it's inconceivable.
As I said, silliness is prevalent. That doesn't mean something useful can't emerge. But obviously, yes, most of most of the stuff happening is a comical blend of mercenary, hapless and foolish... guided by the smell of riches.
> The road from there to something noteworthy is still long, but I don't think it's inconceivable.
That already happens. People who know what they are doing (i.e. professionals) already buy scripts and book rights and make movies out of them. It works pretty well already.
> Besides laws, norms & regulatory structure, what's the difference between a DAU and a joint stock company?
This might have been a rhetorical question but I'll give an answer anyway - this article [0] makes the same comparison and discusses that exact analogy
It seems to me that the primary mechanism for organising here - as with most crypto projects - is Discord, not crpyto itself. Crypto is just the vehicle for the fanaticism that drives people to Discord
Good grief, they are SO going to get sued if they try to do any of their proposed uses!
(They no more own the rights to "Dune" than you would if you bought a DVD in a second hand shop and decided to start selling copies of it.)
It'd have been a lot cheaper to ignore the NFT nonsense entirely, engage a motion picture rights agency, and pitch direct to Jodorowski and the Herbert estate for permission to use the IP.
397 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 294 ms ] threadIt is not really the "Dune" book, but rather its storyboard, more details and a few photos here:
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20211122-doomed-dune-s...
I see nothing perplexing about it because this was not an ordinary auction, but an auction with one member being a public DAO, where the amount of money the DAO will bid is thus public.
Let's say the DAO bids $100, but they have $200 in contributions. Someone can then safely bid $190, knowing that the DAO will raise to $200. It's in the agreement for the DAO more or less, and because it's on the blockchain and organized in a public-ish discord server, their cap is absolutely public.
So, who has the motivation to make these known-bad bids? Anyone who profits off the sale being more, and anyone who just doesn't like crypto-techbros and wants them to lose more money than they would otherwise.
I think the use of DAOs for auctions is quite funny for this reason. A private company that kept the total contribution amount private until just after the auction ended would end up with a much more favorable dynamic than this "the amount we can bid is on the blockchain, you already know our move when you bid".
Disclaimer: I know nothing about this specific auction, and may be missing some key detail. This is simply an observation and speculation from a naive bystander
Sorry, but how do you know it was a DAO (whatever it is)?
From what I could find:
https://www.capital.fr/economie-politique/dune-le-storyboard...
>Les enchères se sont rapidement envolées et ont donné lieu au final à une rude bataille entre deux enchérisseurs étrangers, au téléphone. L'enchérisseur gagnant est américain.
it was a normal auction with two bidders (on the telephone).
EDIT: Ok, found some more info: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dune...
the winning bidder was a guy for TheSpiceDAO, but who was the other bidder?
Googling finds this website: https://dune.foundation/, and some info about the etherium they raised here https://juicebox.money/#/p/spicedao
Maybe this is some sorta elaborate hoax, but it looks like it's real eth, so unless juicebox is also in on it, it seems like a hard hoax to pull.
In real time you are either on the auction in person or at the telephone, and there is someone else on a telephone connection.
How do you know who that someone else is?
All you know is the auction firm personnel on that phone line raises against your bid and conversely all the someone else knows is that someone (you in this hypothetical case) is offering and counter-raising.
To go from 25,000 to 2,500,000 (100x) two bidders are needed, and the question remains, given that one of the two is some crazy[1] guy backed by a DAO, who is the other one (almost as crazy as the first one).
[1] as seen by a "normie"
You could go to this page the day of the auction, before it started: https://juicebox.money/#/p/spicedao
From that page, you could tell how much money they had raised in etherium, and you could guess their cap from that.
I also give it better than even odds that the person bidding on behalf of the DAO was in discord, bragging about how much money they had to bid, right up until they won.
If you were interested in this auction selling for a large amount, would you not google a bit and find the spice DAO? Would you, perhaps, join their discord server, get on the auction call, and bid it up a bit?
This seems like something that quite reasonably could happen.
That's what I was suggesting above. One bidder is the DAO guy, the other bidder is someone who knows how much the DAO will bid, since it's public, and so raises it up to near that price for some ulterior motive, whether it's because they get a profit off of a high sell, or because they want the idiots who put money into the DAO to lose it. I have no doubt there are many people in both camps who were aware of the DAO before the auction started.
I don't know how exactly offerers are "checked" or "validated" by Christie's in these kind of auctions, but there should be some process of some kind - particularly for telephone bidders - of checking identity and financial capabilities.
Or anyone can offer crazy amounts of money and then retire the offer without consequences?
Although I assume, like everything crypto, there’s some centralized SPOF; in this case, the one guy from the “team” making the actual bids, who could stop things from getting truly out of hand.
2. And what luck the runner-up must feel. (Who may now perhaps offer the winner 40k for the book.)
Where did the 2.6 million come from?
How many other bidders were there?
What was the auction model used?
How are they going to recover the investment now? And if they won't how will they deal with the write-off?
So many questions...
I'll add one: why does the thread mention "cryptobros" about buyers when the auction was nothing related to crypto in any way?
Is it just becoming a generic insult to dumb people or am I missing something?
Because the group who won it crowdfunded the money via cryptocurrency, wants to turn the book into NFTs and is organized in a DAO, if I looked into this a bit more I am sure I would find something about web3 and metaverse and whatever else fits in the bullshit bingo of current discourse around the whole crypto scene. If this does not count as „cryptobros“ then I imagine nothing does.
Yep, cryptobros it is.
Crypto gains (scammy or otherwise), NFT sales, etc. The phrase 'cryptobros' is used to refer to people who got rich off of crypto shenanigans.
"NFT stands for non-fungible token, which basically means that it’s a one-of-a-kind digital asset that belongs to you and you only." https://fortune.com/2021/12/18/nft-making-selling/
Fortune, e.g., misinterpretes it in that same way. Anyone can make copies of an NFT backed asset unless you use other legal or technical methods to limit copies.
These "investments" are all backed up by some fantasy that works in their "realm" - like buying an avatar that will be used in "the metaverse", being the metaverse a collective fantasy and illusion.
Just like these fellows are so emotionally invested in this fantasy that they were already selling the rights of a TV Show to a streaming service... and I bet that if you go to them now they have the narrative that this will be sold to some yet to exist streaming service of the metaverse based on NFTs.
https://www.chron.com/life/article/Barry-Tate-s-taste-in-art...
I wouldn't really say that it makes up much of the art market, though they always get a lot of news attention when they appear.
Seems like NFT logic in reverse, lol
Let's not pretend some low quality jpegs in a Google Photos album is an acceptable archive for this work.
"VAT at the rate of 5.5% will be due on the total of the hammer price and fees charged to the buyer."
https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6345488
1. This was a normal auction and not an NFT one. How is a DAO enforced in this case? What happens if the nominated bidder decides to go rogue and bid more or less than the decided cap? What happens if the price of Ethereum drops to the point that the DAO is no longer able to find the 2.6M they need?
2. If this is an auction then there has to be another bidder (I doubt even the people in this DAO are dumb enough to make their initial bid 2.6M). Who was bidding 2.5M against them?
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dune...
It doesn't matter how decentralized your blockchain or "DAO" is, ultimately all interactions outside the blockchain will rely on one or more trusted parties that can go rogue or be coerced... at which point you may as well not have a blockchain and just trust these people directly.
To make this easier to understand, substitute "Dune book" with "Gutenberg Bible" or, even better, "historic, ultrarare, pre-medieval parchment of a Bible translation".
The new owners of that Bible probably do not think (and do not intend to promote the idea) that they now own the property rights for "the" Bible, or for all Bibles, or for any Bible - except for that particular instance of the Bible.
Rather they now own that parchment, with all its decorated pages, handwriting, scripts, gemstones, peculiar translations, and compilation of Gospels and Letters.
These content, drawings and illustrations inside that Bible are really unique, unless the monks decided to draw everything ( or even more often.)
This content could indeed be monetized, or shared with the world, for the greater good.
And as the sibling comment said, this is not the only copy (but seeing elsewhere in the thread that they’ve talked about burning it, perhaps they thought so, too. That’s honestly not an impressive amount of due diligence in that case, to put it mildly).
I suggest you read the rest of the discussion. No, it can't be shared, and it can't be monetized. You said it yourself - they do not own the intellectual property rights. They own a printed version of that content that does not include any rights for digital reproduction, derivative work or anything of the sort. Like any other book (!).
Yes, by the IP owner. Not by the owner of the book.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amansethi/spicedao-dune...
I don't know what they're doing, but it seems that they are at least a bit aware that they don't own the rights.
Who exactly are they trying to convince, and about what? I mean they don't just need the rights to the art in the book itself, but they also need to get the movie/TV rights for Dune itself.
Is this really spending €2.6M just to get a foot in the door, to be able to spend, what, another $200M for the actual rights?
But even then, why do they think this DAO is the best way to execute this vision?
They could just go "oh, people are interested in Dune? Ok, let's make a movie, but without involving these DAO people". Oh wait, there already is a Dune series of movies currently being made/in theaters.
But also: The contents have been on the internet for years, apparently: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNGBuasYa_WETf7sF6Q9W3S... (from the twitter thread)
Now it will be hosted on some other server as well (THE REAL DECENTRALIZED SERVER) but wrapped into some NFT, where they will sell each page - or even better - each square of the storyboard, coated into some fucked up story like:
"You can own a piece of a future TV Show based on this story board!"
And they will probably come out profiting because people will buy this illusion.
Edit: From a quick Google search there's around 3000 drawings, so 3000 NFTs at some absurd price that people will want for a piece of the pipe dream. They didn't even had to pay an artist or create a story this time around...
Beeple sold 5000 renders for 69 million.
They can't, of course, sell the images themselves; they don't hold the copyright. But they can sell URLs referring to the content.
That's pretty clever. I mean it's super dumb, but it's clever.
By that I mean that an NFT whose content is an URL to an image you don't own, is dumb. But it's clever to "mint" these, and you'll find more fools to buy the NFTs if you give the appearance of legitimacy.
In other words: They have no more rights to sell NFTs for the contents than I do, but they'll be more successful at implying to buyers that they do.
The most interesting thing about NFTs (and most blockchain tech) is the question "is this actually fraud, or is it merely stupid?". It's philosophy about the meaning of "fraud".
For example, a company called MSCHF sold 999 fake Warhol drawings and 1 real[0], all mixed up so no one knows which one is the real one, for 250$ each... can they do this? Is this legal? At least people were aware of it, so I doubt it's fraud.
Here's the math of it:
- they paid 8,125$ for the original;
- they sold 1000 for 250$ = 250,000$
- they profited 250,000$ - 8,125$ = 241k$
Of course this was also a mix of a PR stunt, still, if you can do PR stunts and profit... I mean... isn't this what Supreme has been doing for years?
So I don't even think the legality of it all is a issue, because has you hinted, people are deliberately rolling into this...stupidity(?).
I think all of these use similar emotional mechanisms of gambling, which if you think about it, most of the current collectibles market nowadays is gambling for everyone, kids included.
[0]https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/art-pranksters-sel...
Also in a raffle they usually just tell you when you’ve won.
Better odds and potential return dollar for dollar than the lottery, though.
You can't make a bunch of copies of a Disney movie but with the ending cut off, and have them be the "losing" consolation prizes.
I am also not a lawyer, but for the physical piece either you own it or you don't. If you own it then surely there must be some contract where you "lease it out" to the "keeper" of it. Or if you're the one "keeping" it (and owning it), then some contract that you can't sell the NFT to one person and the physical item to another?
But all these have to be legal contracts. And if you have a legal contract with someone about how you're not allowed to sell a physical thing you own, ever, do you truly own it? (not to mention who is on the other side of this contract? Who has legal standing to sue if you violate the contract?)
One thing this reminds me of is Commonhold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonhold), which is a home ownership form in some countries, and some other apartment ownership models. In some models you don't "own" your own apartment, but own a stake in the house, and this stake gives you the full access to a contractually specified apartment number.
That and, of course, its similarity to bearer bonds.
Let's say you own the NFT and legally possess the physical item. Can you retire the NFT, and have it be physical-only from now on? Can you still sell it as an NFT after you sold the physical item? The simple answer to that last part is "of course you can. NFT means nothing".
You can mint an NFT for my house. But good luck trying to kick me out. The police will not be impressed.
The owner of this book needs not to make sure "math" secures transfer of legal ownership, but law. And that's the problem with these blockchain inventions.
> For example, a company called MSCHF sold 999 fake Warhol drawings and 1 real[0], all mixed up so no one knows which one is the real one, for 250$ each... can they do this? Is this legal? At least people were aware of it, so I doubt it's fraud.
Again I'm not a lawyer, but I would think that no it's not fraud, but it's copyright infringement. And if the copyright holder doesn't sue you, then that's their choice.
But good luck buying a Disney movie for $10, and selling 9 copies+original for $1 each. Even without profit the mouse will go after you, and he'll be legally right.
Because until then, they're all playing a make-belief game.
Like the guy who claimed the moon and actually sold plots of land on the moon to people[0]. He was navigating a "loop hole" and no one cared about it, or even took it serious. But if people are putting money upfront, at what point it should be addressed?
[0]https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/03/25/meet-the-man...
At this point I just hope its some sort of practical joke or whatever because this just seems a bit much.
[0] https://forum.spicedao.xyz/t/nft-of-the-book-w-proof-of-jpeg...
It reminds me of the video game SOMA, where people upload a brain-scan of themselves to live on after some catastrophe, essentially making a digital copy of their consciousness. But because they are also still physically alive, they see the digital version of themselves as a clone, someone else. To "complete the transition", they decide they must end their lives at the exact moment the scan is complete.
Trying not to spoil it by discussing it, if anyone hasn't yet you really should try it, it's a really unique experience in gaming and that's hard to come by these days.
And the most chilling version I've seen is in Charles Stross' Glasshouse, where some soldiers fight a virus that infects the consciousness of everyone using such a transporter. They "rescue" an infected population by chopping off their heads and throwing them into a transporter hacked to remove the virus. IIRC only the heads because transporting the entire bodies would be slower and the other side is expected to reconstruct a living body anyway.
A few hundred or thousand beheaded people later, they realize that the transporter is broken and would not reconstruct anything.
Personally, I like to trace this stuff back to early Christian theological debates. Here's an illuminating quotation:
Origen's belief that he could be resurrected in a numerically different body is parallel to Derek Parfit's belief that he could enjoy some kind of survival short of identity, if his present body was destroyed, but the information from it was electronically beamed, so as to construct an exactly similar body and brain with exactly similar psychology at a distance, say on the planet Mars (Reasons and Persons, 199-320). Parfit, like Origen, discounts the need for bodily continuity, and discounts the idea we encountered in Philoponus that it matters whether the original body is replaced gradually, or all at once (op. cit., Appendix D).
The story postulates a transportation device (supervised by a dinosaur-like race of aliens) which can transmit an exact copy of a person's body to distant planets. The original body is disintegrated once reception at the destination is confirmed. In the story a woman is teleported to an alien planet, but the original is not disintegrated because reception cannot be confirmed at the time. Reception is later confirmed, and the original, not surprisingly, declines to "balance the equation" by re-entering the scanning and disintegrating device. This creates an ethical quandary which is viewed quite differently by the cold-blooded aliens who provided the teleportation technology, and their warm-blooded human associates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Like_a_Dinosaur
Transmission protocol errors, eh.
[0] https://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~schiff/Net/t26.jpg
Compression artifacts are irrelevant if your scan resolution is significantly higher than the print resolution.
1. Every minter is rewarded with an identical NFT of the page.
2. Every minter is rewarded with a fraction of the final NFT that contains the page. [...]
3. By leveraging progressive JPEG 7 tech, every minter gets a unique NFT which contains the uploaded image but with different degrees of quality. [...]"""
Holy fucking shit. This could be extremely high quality satire, but they're serious, which makes it even funnier.
This is both brilliant and insane at the same time. Next up, I have an MPEG stream to sell you ... where the I-frames are charged at a higher rate than the B-frames!
Browse through https://opensea.io/, the most prominent NFT marketplace at the moment. Digging through the DOM of their website will reveal a lot of links to quite standard content storage solutions. They usually go through a bit of trouble to prevent people from simply clicking "view image in new tab" to reveal the actual location, but it's not difficult to get around.
> [O]ur NFT collection could very possibly become the largest on-chain collection ever in the history of Ethereum. Time would only be on our side because as gas becomes more expensive, the window of opportunity to bypass our on-chain NFT collection would fade away.
To give an idea of the storage costs associated, I dug up this old stackexchange-answer about storage costs on Ethereum [0], which estimates that it costs about 76.000 USD / GB stored. Note that this is 5 year old answer, so the price will probably have multiplied like the price of ETH since then.
Edit: Here's [1] a newer, updated price estimate that takes current prices into account : 309.9 Million / GB. LoL!
[0] https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/872/what-is-the...
[1] https://proderivatives.com/blog/2019/5/10/minimizing-data-st...
The contract for the NFT generally just points to an IPFS identifier (a sha256 hash of the content), and it's up to the viewer (a website like opensea) to decide what ipfs gateway to use. Even if the ipfs network died you could still use other p2p methods to find the content, as long as someone was still hosting it.
It's a problem, it used to be the grand majority of collections were fully decentralised and frozen but nowadays it's a mixed bag – I think it will change once the gas problem is solved, but it's also partly because the audience has changed and newcomers into NFTs don't care so much about their tokens being fully decentralised.
> Here's what happens when you add a file to IPFS — whether you're storing that file on your own local node or one operated by a pinning service or IPFS-enabled app.
Notice that wording: “Add a file to IPFS”.
It’s likewise fine to say, then, that you “put something on ipfs”.
The filing cabinet is the storage, the way I organize files in the cabinet is the filing system.
This is false. Popular content is cached temporarily. Pinning persists the data until unpinned; the ipfs daemon does not automatically pin anything.
Unfortunately, things like that actually happen even though everyone here would consider it a joke.
Actually doing something about it is a problem, as shown throughout the post-Napster era, but every node that serves an infringing copy is potentially liable.
Wonder if they will be or have been subject to copyright complaints / lawsuits.
* Is the material copyrightable? A novel is copyrightable, but a recipe is not. The layout format of a telephone book is copyrightable, but the contents of it are not.
* Is the copyright still in effect? Unfortunately, this is a less relevant question now, as anything written within living memory is under copyright, but it is still a required step.
* Is permission from the copyright holder required? If I am sold a copy of a computer program, I'm allowed to make whatever copies are necessary (e.g. copying from the hard drive to RAM) that are necessary to execute the program, without the permission of the copyright holder.
* What is being done with the copy? If I buy a work, the copyright owner has no right to prevent me from selling it, nor are they entitled to any portion of the proceeds. Re-sale of authorized copies, regardless of permission, are not infringements.
Yes, you put a URL on the blockchain but it's almost always a URL to the ipfs protocol e.g. ipfs://QmVc6zuAneKJzicnJpfrqCH9gSy6bz54JhcypfJYhGUFQu
This identifier is a base58 encoding of a sha256 hash that points to the content. It doesn't actually tell you what host to use to find the content, that's completely left to the client app; so you could use an ipfs gateway like cloudflare-ipfs.com or ipfs.io or you could, imagining a future in which ipfs is not used anymore, use any other kind of p2p network to find the content.
Just like gnutella, or torrents, as long as someone out there is hosting the content it's usually possible to find it.
My point was more that the NFT metadata itself could still be usable x years in the future when another protocol has replaced ipfs – it would just have to make the files findable by the existing hash.
The biggest potential risk would be if sha256 becomes broken and finding collisions is trivial.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/03/illegal-conte...
The answer seems to be that 'nothing much happens, yet'.
Oddly enough - the process in a library for digitising a copy of a book can be fairly destructive, as far as I understood from those doing it (at CUDL). The spine is chopped off, to make it easier to put it into a machine for scanning all the pages.
The digital images can (should?) then be stored in a format that allows zooming, for example : https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-03967/1
http://blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/meet-eliza-zhang-book-sca...
There is the great "Codex Manesse" [1] (I once had the opportunity to see the real one in an exhibition) that is one of a kind.
It is irreplaceable and there are but a selected few people who are even allowed to touch it (with gloves). It could not be damaged, but was digitized without harm nonetheless [2].
So I actually never thought of digitalisation as a destructive process.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Manesse?wprov=sfla1
[2]: https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg848
https://news.mit.edu/2016/computational-imaging-method-reads...
not sure how much that is used, though (not my area :) )
The general consensus among modern librarians came around on that subject, and now this kind of destructive processes is rare and generally frowned upon. A librarian friend once explained to me there was always two "schools" among librarians:
1. Those who only value the content of books. For those, copying/digitalizing a rare book is all that is needed in order to preserve said book.
2. Those who also value the physical object of the book as a historical artifact. For those keeping rare books in good condition is also necessary for preservation.
In the middle 1900s with the mass adoption of the microfilm, the first school gained the upper hand, and many libraries conducted mass projects of microfilming and destroying historical archives. Those were mostly motivated by a false belief that books were super fragile and wouldn't last anyway (I mean, if you believe the book will fall apart on its own, then you would be less reticent about using destructive methods to make the best copy possible).
In the last few decades the tides changed, librarians realized that books are not that fragile, and can be kept pretty much indefinitely if closed and protected from humidity (and fire). Also they realized that microfilm is crap, and that copying/digitizing is a error prone process, so a lot of stuff was lost because someone skipped a page, or the film was damaged, and the original was destroyed. So the movement to keep originals grew in strength, being almost a consensus now a days, and modern digitizing processes/machines are specially designed to be gentle and non destructive.
For example, many Xerox scanners "switch" numbers when scanning:
https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
Those who used them to digitize, e.g, accounting documents, and then destroyed the originals, are proper screwed.
Not that long ago, there was a very destructive push to convert old books to microfilm. I worry that not enough lessons were learned. Here's an interesting review of a book about the subject:
https://thefateofbooks.wordpress.com/2021/11/29/a-classic-tu...
I don't think it necessarily has to be that way. I recall seeing a photo or video of a book-scanner that would project laser grid-lines onto the book, to non-destructively correct for the deformations caused by the binding in software.
Edit: not sure if this is the one, but it shows the concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03ccxwNssmo
FAQS
- Can't someone else just download the image and pretend they own it? Yes, just as someone can buy a fake LV bag and show it off. Other collectors will still know, and don't care about the fakes. As the tech becomes more mainstream, sites like twitter will show whether you actually own the NFT you claim to.
- Can't someone else mint their own NFT? Yes, but like with real collectors items, provenance matters. Just like one can forge a perfect Picasso but without any plausible proof of origin it would not be worth much.
- Can't they decide to mint more "fragments" after the fact, therefore diluting the price of each of the 1000 editions. No, the smart contract that governs the NFT can't be changed.
- Won't the link inside my NFT die? No, the link is usually just a SHA256 hash of the content; with the content being hosted on IPFS. It's all p2p so as long as a host somewhere in the world has a copy, you can always find the content by hash, even if the underlying technology changes with time.
Is it stupid to pay $10k for some hard to find sneakers? maybe, but people do it because they have the money and they're collectors, or they want to flex. Is it more real because there's a physical item which costs maybe $20 to manufacture?
It's not like your example with the DLC skins, DLC skins are not limited in any way, the game company can create more and more of them. An NFT collection is limited, there will never be more than the amount the contract specifies (unless the contract leaves that open-ended intentionally). The creator can't simply sell new ones, because using a new contract would make the new ones lose all inherent value.
It's exactly the same as how certain sneakers are worth $10k and others that are from the same brand, same designers, same materials are worth $100 – provenance matters, and knowing it was released in an extremely limited way makes something more valuable.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry satirized NFTs 70 years before they were invented!
When you transfer an NFT from one address to another, you have transferred title to whoever owns the private keys for it.
You don't understand it. This is false. NFTs do not represent copyrights of any kind, either in theory or in common practice.
An NFT is more like an autographed photocopy of something. Except apparently a lot of NFTs on popular platforms are created from stolen digital art, so you get the fun of not even being completely sure if the autograph is actually by the creator of the art (but it’s verifiable that is is by the creator of the token).
> Here is where we make the dreams of the Harkonnen become true. [...]
I'm finding it really very difficult to imagine that someone's read/watched Dune and come away thinking the the Harkonnen are the good guys. So I can't imagine that intellectual honesty is one of their strong points.
[A] Tbh I don’t care too much what a bunch of normies that probably didn’t even know the book existed think. The book would still exist but digitized and in the blockchain.
[Q] Why not just use Arweave, IPFS, and a variety of other long-term digital preservation strategies? All of them are less expensive and resource-intensive.
IPFS is not permanent. If it stops being hosted it disappears. Arweave cannot compare to something like Ethereum which is a truly decentralized network. But upmost I would say that cost of uploading is a feat, not a problem. It would make our collection even more special.
These are a bunch of seriously sociopathic, inconsiderate and reckless thugs. I'm happy to see them fleecing each other.
The same thing applies to blockchains. If no one is hosting it, you can't download it.
so if any of these chains only want to focus on sending/storing money (or simply address the evergrowing size of the chain), then they can start purging the old transactions from the ledger.
(yes, ETH has smart contracts, but it's not impossible to imagine that ETH will start charging gas for upkeep of that data, and when the smart contract runs out of upkeep it gets deleted.)
A crude back of the envelope calculation after some googling would put the storage price on Ethereum at around 3.5eth per mb.
So that would be around 10k€ per mb. Certainly doable if they like burning money, but likely not at archival quality.
[0] https://snapshot.org/#/dunedao.eth/proposal/0x2038fc240d0e85... [1] https://robleridgeproductions.com/about/
[0] https://snapshot.org/#/dunedao.eth/proposal/0x2038fc240d0e85...
But don't forget this team has the Q1 deliverable of presenting "a film treatment and budget by Roble Ridge Productions for the original animated limited series inspired by the book for a community vote on Snapshot" - which one can only assume will be a lot of work... :)
I'm sorry for the confusion, but my post was supposed to be humorous.
On reflection I think there's nothing that can actually be said about this auction that can possibly be as funny/sad as the original situation.
They could release a series about overpaying for a copy of dune at auction and technically fulfill their mission
Absolutely incredible.
https://twitter.com/YOJIMBO_KING/media
Qualifications listed for their team include "Bitcoin Class of 2013", not sure if a joke or not? The impression is that this is a bunch of 13 year olds who suddenly got a windfall...
You weren't kidding, this sounds like an application for a World of Warcraft Guild I applied to in 2008 or something. I have no idea what any of this means
"Did you verify that the RVSM system was talking to the FMS after completing the JIC during the RON?" - Aviation "Are you sure the packets are flowing on UDP? Can someone check the CAT6?" - Simple networking
Etc. So I wouldn't say the jargon is constructed solely to keep outsiders out.
I mean, even the specific resume example above simply translates to "Worked as a Product Manager on moderately successful project, worked as a Project Manager on random project, consulted with highly successful marketing firm and extremely successfully and profitable co-operative consulting firm on business development. Likes to trade high-risk stocks, puts money into high-risk interest bearing accounts and likes to give random unsecured loans to strangers"
I understand there's a ton of bashing of crypto, but I think that looking at a unknown sub-cultures language and assuming that they are purposely using jargon antagonistic to outsiders is rather closed minded. As someone who dipped their toe in, but still doesn't understand, they have been extremely helpful in explaining the concepts even when I argue against them.
Watchwords:= seemingly slang, but conveys only group membership
* The other problem with the ICO craze is of course that the combination of money up-front and no obligations and anonymity meant almost all were simply out-and-out scams.
SPACs have gotten rid of much of the diligence traditionally part of the IPO process.
The biggest difference I can see is that a traditional IPO can't succeed without getting institutional investors onboard, and there are strict guidelines about what can be pitched to them. The negotiations between a SPAC and its target company are much less constrained.
I'm not an expert in this, so I'm probably wrong on some of the details, but my company is undergoing a SPAC merger, so I've tried to inform myself on how it works.
A professional definitive edition exit scam, waiting to happen. It is ConstitutionDAO all over again, but this time without the refunds.
Almost all positions are "not to exceed X/month" for X~=7000 USD. So, not too shabby!
Funny how it could be either.
Has anyone checked if the seller is legit?
Maybe the profit was meant to be split once the item "sold".
With it there are 4 Dune "movies" out: the 1984 Lynch version, the 2000 Sci-Fi Channel one (a 3 part mini series, nearly a movie), the aforementioned 2013 one, and of course the 2021 Villeneuve one.
If that's true, then they deserve to be ridiculed and more.
I first thought this was some elitist meme, but their following is taking it seriously.
https://nitter.net/TheSpiceDAO/status/1482404318347153413
Silliness aside though, this highlights a point to me. Methods of organising are (1) very important (2) relatively undiverse (3) hard to create out of whole cloth.
The creation/ascendance of "modern" joint stock companies circa 1600 was (arguably) responsible for some serious revolution. The 90s produced some very interesting examples: GNU, Linux, Wikipedia, WWW... These are "organisations" organised in unconventional ways and they produced results that a conventional non profit, commercial or government organisation could not have produced.
New ways of organising are potentially very powerful.
CryptoBro naivety isn't necessarily terrible for this end. It'll produce a lot of stupid moves, but stupidity and creativity are often neighbors. CryptoBros' typically mercenary and/or ideological tendencies might be more of a hurdle.
Besides laws, norms & regulatory structure, what's the difference between a DAU and a joint stock company?
That seems to be true in movies, but in the real world new advancements are created by experts that know the basics. Serendipity is part of that, but you need to have the basic knowledge.
I will concede, thou, that ideas to be rich can come from anywhere as the only metric is to convince investors, to produce something useful is not required.
I certainly wouldn't have elected to create the current blaze of cryptmadness, but the fact that most of what it produces is scams and bullshit doesn't mean nothing else can come out of it.
OTOH, I think cryptocynicism may be blinding us to the possibility of doing exactly what this hapless bunch did, but actually ending up owning the copyright to something... as they intended. The road from there to something noteworthy is still long, but I don't think it's inconceivable.
As I said, silliness is prevalent. That doesn't mean something useful can't emerge. But obviously, yes, most of most of the stuff happening is a comical blend of mercenary, hapless and foolish... guided by the smell of riches.
That already happens. People who know what they are doing (i.e. professionals) already buy scripts and book rights and make movies out of them. It works pretty well already.
This might have been a rhetorical question but I'll give an answer anyway - this article [0] makes the same comparison and discusses that exact analogy
[0] https://www.readthegeneralist.com/briefing/dao
(They no more own the rights to "Dune" than you would if you bought a DVD in a second hand shop and decided to start selling copies of it.)
It'd have been a lot cheaper to ignore the NFT nonsense entirely, engage a motion picture rights agency, and pitch direct to Jodorowski and the Herbert estate for permission to use the IP.
Cryptobro logic.