NFTs Are a Pyramid Scheme and People Are Already Losing Money
fstoppers.com
fstoppers.com
Add an unlimited supply of unique things, and how could anyone expect to make money from this?
Particularly the "Number Go Up" section, which shows that the buyer also runs (and owns a majority of) a crypto token called "B20", which curiously enough, Beeple also has a 2% stake in.
It’s like creating a contract that sells the contract itself. Then maybe you stamp a photo of Michael Jordan on the cover and call it a Michael Jordan contract, even though the contract doesn’t give the buyer any rights to anything Michael Jordan related, except the contract itself.
Then you can go out and make more Michael Jordan contracts, because there’s nothing in the first contract stopping you from making more.
So yes, actual ownership must be done with real physical contracts still if you want to enforce things in the real world. NFTs can only enforce things within the NFT itself, which is useless for real-world ownership.
You could potentially create a real-world contract that ties ownership of the real-world asset to whoever holds the NFT, but that would introduce real-world legal issues like voiding the NFT in the event that it was transferred fraudulently and so on.
It seems a lot of people have been misled into believing that NFTs are something they're not. NFTs are like a special URL that points to some other content. You can trade that URL, but the content being pointed to still exists separately.
(And yes, it's just baffling that people pay for these NFTs when they really get nothing out of them.)
More commonly, people are just buying an authenticated digital asset which confers no rights over the source material.
For example, An artist could sell unsigned instances of their digital art as .JPG files, and they could sell authenticated copies as NFT.
In both cases, you get a copy of the art. In neither case are you getting an implicit copyright to the work that would allow you to redistribute the work.
You can buy original animation cells from Disney movies, but try to resell that image commercially and you're probably gonna have a bad time.
AFAICT, NFTs are orthagonal to copyright. But it gets confusing because at least some sellers of NFTs are purposely trying to mislead, by omission if nothing else.
Patents & trademarks?
The interesting facets all come from the legal consequences of ignoring them, not the serial number or whatever.
Could one say the same about tokens?
I’m equivocating if this is the is/ought problem or the Münchhausen trilemma, kinda feels like both.
There's no reason to assume that in other domains what you said should be the case more often than what I said if we both don't know the details of said domains.
That's not what "regulated" means. There is no enforcement, so you can simply copy the work and the "chain/protocol" does nothing.
And there are rules about how the trademarks/patents from one country applies in other countries. (IIRC you must fill some paperwork in every country, but copyright is similar and easier to extend globally.)
Anyway, everyone can create a new chain of NFT, so the same object can be NFTed in many blockchains. Specially because some NFT implementations don't even ask if you are the creator of the digital object.
In any event I can’t see authorities keeping a blind eye on this.
why bother with involving a computer and a hard to modify paper trail?
This is also why every project do to X but with blockchain (like solving counterfeiting/authenticity, copyright, etc) is either stupid or a con using a buzzword to try and solicit investment or media attention.
The reason blockchains work for cryptocurrencies is because the source of truth is the blockchain itself. This breaks down in the real world where the state of the real world is the source of truth and you'd need a trusted, centralized entity to bridge the two worlds, but at this point why use a blockchain instead of a database if you're going to trust a single entity anyway?
Who is hosting this db?
I mean, this gives you all the control, you can charge for all sorts of services and "value adds". There's no reason you, as the maker of this software, would want this available as a block chain.
Unless you also create a token and start having people speculate on your anti-counterfeiting blockchain?
That's what it looks like to me anyway.
Jacob Collier tried to sell an nft that granted lifetime access to his concerts.
The appeal of such an nft is that it can be traded independently of any third party, on the open market.
Of course it depends on Jacob's promise to honor it.
He went back on it when people raised environmental issues.
The arguments about SpicyNFTs is just kind of a distraction. It would be like if I argued against banks by saying, I could hang a shingle, accept deposits, and then just run with the money.
Do we really need to enumerate all the possible ways that a new, very limited, technology can be misused? We might be here a while, I'm pretty sure there are infinitely many ways that NFTs can be abused.
In other words, worthless.
It could be tied to an actual contract.
The value prop of an NFT is pretty much limited to just being able to transfer it reliably without relying on a trusted third party.
It's not like it provides a cryptographic guarantee that some contract that exists outside it will be honored.
NFTs are essentially sleek frontend UIs mixed in with a speculative volatile currency less juridicial than dollars. It also helps that blockchain assets led by bitcoin are in a bull run.
The innovation is now a company like Dapper Labs can provide a marketplace like NBA Topshot providing a digital experience with licensed content. This digital experience can be traded using Paypal but using a traditional method comes with tradeoffs. Dapper Labs created an in-house blockchain called Flow. The benefits of a blockchain is it is harder for double spends to occur. Blockchain makes it hard for race conditions to occur when the source of truth is distributed among computers in a network.
It would be easier to make a database of hash values but traditional databases are less transparent than blockchains. Blockchains are too expensive. Some digital experiences are worth it, most probably aren't, enough people care about the frontend.
NBA Topshot would be better served by a DB. The NFT part is there for hype.
People literally burnt a Banksy painting before auctioning its NFT.
If there's anything that's not absolute evil in all that, I fail to see it.
If people want to expend their own resources on NFTs, that's entirely their right to do so, and calling it evil because the process consumed energy is absurd.
If you have a problem with CO2 emission, by all means advocate for laws requiring energy production to not emit CO2 as a by-product. But to single out some non-essential activity that you personally don't like because of the imagined motives of those behind it, while ignoring every other non-essential activity that uses energy, is disingenuous and irresponsible.
I recently saw Twitter thread where a big pusher of NFTs was moaning on about how the real issue is we didn't create enough nuclear power plants and now we're blaming NFTs for this.
It's blatantly obvious that this is all a pyramid scheme capitalizing on people's complete ignorance and optimism with crypto. Enjoy your pyramid scheme and I hope you make out like a bandit and eventually develop a conscience for the people you're grifting.
You're obviously getting overly emotional, and throwing whatever you can at the people involved in cryptocurrency ("they're evil for using energy") to see what sticks.
I reiterate, it's a reckless and disingenuous way to conduct oneself, regardless of whether the underlying grievances motivating the hostility have merit.
I think he or she is saying that "climate change" is a ridiculously hyperbolic attack vector. And they're right. Of all the idiotic aspects there are to NFT's, Ethereum energy consumption may not crack the Top 100.
Not sure if anyone called that evil or idiotic
Nothing was actually destroyed, and the partially shredded artwork was a new artwork in its own right.
I mean aren't works of art exactly NFT in real life. Sometimes they also happen to look pretty to look at seems to be a archiach byproduct.
Look, if it's okay to buy limited edition numbered tins with the feces of an artist for 300k then it means anything goes. I don't understand where all these "Destroyed with Facts and Logic" people are coming from.
Its clown world out there already. Maybe, you're just too old to like the new clowns. Nothing wrong about that.
NFTs are no longer original and so are not art.
Since there’s nothing to own or even point to, what’s stopping a second party from claiming they actually have the original Banksy NFT and selling their own? Just the time stamps on the blockchain?
What a miserable destruction of real art to profit on a trading frenzy.
This can either be a crypto exchange (regulated on conversion to fiat, lest they get shut down by some SEC thing) or on those "vote on the blockchain" or "verified supply chain on the blockchain" things: eventually some non-blockchain entity has to be trusted enough to set state on the blockchain (e.g. "party A did indeed fulfill the contract to party B. please fulfill this smart contract", or "your food ingredient was prepared in accordance to your green/bio label's requirements").
If the owners of the Banksy came out a few days later and claimed that someone else sold a fake Banksy NFT, but they're now going to sell the real NFT, the private keys won't help.
Only Banksy can mint an NFT for his artwork for it to be of ANY value. The same way that only Banksy can create Banksy art.
Public-private key encryption is how you verify that something was signed by the original author.
There seem to be ... quite a lot of them.
NFTs sold on other chains are akin to copies of the Mona Lisa: worthless
As usual for “like X but with a blockchain” this is a solution in search of a problem. Because despite all the protestations to the contrary the real motivation for crypto is not providing useful goods or services in exchange for reasonable compensation, it is getting rich by being an early adopter.
a) You have the physical card. It is in your possession, and the only way for you to lose it is for something physical to happen to it.
b) You can look at and enjoy the card in its physicality. You can show it to others, and the only reason that is the case is that it is physically in your possession.
Contrast that with NFTs, where all you "own" is the idea of owning a thing. If the thing your particular NFT says you own is a digital image, anyone can still see that image, and it can be deleted from the internet without your permission or any warning. You lose the exclusivity that's the main draw of owning something rare and special, and you don't have any practical control over the thing either.
They're not worthless, they're worth less. I could easily hang up a counterfeit Mona Lisa on my wall and get a kick out of it. And if I stop getting a kick out of it, I can put it on Craigslist for $100 afterwards.
Of course, there's absolutely no history behind the painting as it wasn't painted by the renaissance man. No one would pay to see it because it would be about as significant as a JPEG of the Mona Lisa. However, that doesn't mean that it's worthless. Even that JPEG can make for a good phone wallpaper.
It turns out that when you take stupid and scale it up massively, it becomes even more stupid.
Ownership is based on the ability to have something tangible of a limited supply, but as I established before, digital assets can be freely copied. What are you trying to do? Artificially limiting this? Trying to push through a completely new idea of 'ownership'?
The only thing owning an NFT gives you is bragging rights of a perceived ownership. But if I say "I don't recognize this NFT proving anything", copy your asset, reproduce it and sell it somehow, you can't stop me. You claim to own some bits and claim to be able to prove that, but I can just ignore that completely, since there is zero legal grounds for this.
This is why it is absolutely moronic in my mind to have an 'ownership' idea on digital assets. It's already bad enough in online games to have in-game assets, which is in a walled-garden, under control of the company making the game, so yeah, there they can do this, it adds some perceived value. But to actively introduce this concept in an open digital world sounds absolutely crazy, counter-productive and conceptually against everything my ideal version of the internet would be: open and free as in beer.
Link item: 1909 T206 baseball card
Value: $2 million
Why don't you start printing these baseball cards and sell them?
Ha, but you say the baseball card is a real physical item, and a NFT is not. Well, an NFT is as real as the movie I watch on YouTube, the song I listen to on Spotify, and the numbers my bank shows.
But now you say the baseball card was part of a game, and so it's value is not from the person but from the collection game itself. Well, a lot of NFT's are also part of a collectible game.
Would love to hear the difference between a "physical" item and a "digital" item, or a "physical link to a physical item" or a "digital link to a physical (or digital) item".
Unfortunately getting used to that for crypto topics on HN.
It’s not an issue of realness. Of course an NFT is real, it’s a long number and is just as real as 3 or PI or any other number.[1] The issue is instead ownership. When I own a baseball card I have a physical card no one can take from my house/vault/whatever without the police getting involved. When I own the copyright to a movie I can choose to let other people watch it or not.
When I own an NFT it means there’s a blockchain somewhere that says I own a particular number. As long as the blockchain is still in existence I can prove that the blockchain says I own the number and I can transfer that number to you.
That’s not exactly nothing but it’s pretty darn close. It smells like a scam. You do raise a good point that it smells like a scam in the same way that a lot of consciously created collectibles do. Once comic books, baseball cards, or stamp producing nations started pushing their products as something people should buy because they’d appreciate in value they started to feel a lot scummier (and not conincidently the items in question rarely increased in value the way organic collectibles had.)
So, sure if you can get someone to pay you a lot of money for the “ownership” of some 256 digit number in some blockchain somewhere by claiming it represents the star Vega, as long as you don’t lie I suppose it shouldn’t be a crime. But you can’t expect the rest of us to respect the way you’ve chosen to make a living. You are going to get downvotes because you are promoting a disreputable activity.
[1] Hope you appreciate the effort it took not to make a math joke here.
But it doesn't really.
I learned the other day that NFT standards don't even store a hash of the digital asset.
So, ransomware will wipe out a lot of NFTs one day, because the blockchain smart contracts dont know (have any cryptographic proof) what digital asset they hold.
Herr an article that was posted the other day: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2021/broken-nft-standar...
What is missing is centralization and consensus of validity, db entries linking to the real world is done everyday.
1. Around 1971: a Wang desktop computer. Imagine: a computer that fit on a desk!
2. Visicalc (spreadsheet). Wow! I remember thinking finally, a breakthrough for non-programmers.
3. Relational databases.
4. UUCP - a way to talk to remote computers.
5. HTML/HTTP - we knew from the start that this was big
And then there were many that were hyped but which I rejected as hype. Even when I was wrong, I still felt that there was something intrinsically wrong about this category of things.
These things either vanished, limped along (and still do), or which I rejected out of hand, but actually succeeded. Like Virtual Reality (back in about 1984), Fuzzy Logic, Proving programs correct, and, of course Bitcoin.
The latest in this category are NFTs which my intuition tells me is rubbish on so many levels. However, I think they will have some success, although I will never have anything to do with them (or Bitcoin for that matter).
Even a certificate of authenticity for a painting is still notionally a legal contract between the authenticator and buyers: after all, there will be consequences if they cannot show they could reasonably support the identity they establish for something.
What does an NFT do? Nothing. There are no consequences in the real world. You can make another blockchain with more NFTs. It doesn't even establish an interesting digital history for an item: they're tied to hashes, not data.
Bitcoin is holding pretty strong after 12ish years, you can't deny facts.
You can question the practical applications but technology is often used in other ways than it was originally intended.
In the case of Bitcoin it may prove to be useful only as a cross border digital store of value instead of an every day currency.
Same with NFTs, you can dismiss the hype but that doesn't mean there are no practical applications that people may end up adopting.
There are no constraints on the supply of NFTs.
Bitcoin and NFTs have essentially two (closely related) practical applications: 1) pyramid scheme and 2) gambling / speculation on market volatility.
So long as USD are cheap and regulation is lax, these will remain incredibly compelling use cases.
Name one other store of value with zero use in its class. Even art and magic cards have them. You can look at art, and people play with their non collector’s magic cards.
Bitcoin is a pure faith enterprise. It’s only value is that people believe in it, despite the lack of use case and despite the ever rising waste of energy to power the network which rises inexorably with the market price.
It is a tautological network where people enjoy seeing it run in a distributed way even though it does nothing else. How long can that last as something storing value? As mining costs increase you need an ever increasing supply of new entrants at high prices who are similarly enamoured with the idea of the network.
Speculators have kept money in, but that’s in part because there is no value other than that social consensus, and all of that energy has stayed inside the speculative community. Within far less time the web was transforming unrelated industries (news, investing, shopping, dating, travel, etc.) but if Bitcoin stopped operating tomorrow almost no business outside of the blockchain world would notice because they don’t use it for anything which matters.
But its only uses are criminality.
Pardon my ignorance, but I’m being sincere. I don’t know much about this field.
So the way I imagine it would work, is you tell a programming system which conditions the code it's going to generate should satisfy, and then it generates the code + proofs that it satisfies those conditions.
It might be trickier than I imagine though (e.g. for Chess/Go the reinforcement signal might be more suitable for learning than what you'd find with proofs).
If you want to know more about proofs you might be interested in the series "Software Foundations" (https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/).
Since this occurs on the blockchain, it’s trivially easy for someone to create two wallets and then “sell” an NFT to themself for whatever amount of money they have.
If you have $10K in ETH, you can buy a $1 NFT and then trade it among your own wallets for increasing amounts of ETH up to $10K. Now your $1 NFT is “worth” $10K and you only spent as much money as the gas costs at the time.
Use that momentum to flip the NFT to an unsuspecting buyer who sees the value skyrocketing, and you’ve made a huge return by selling nothing at all. Or simply show your friends that you have an expensive NFT as a way to flex. Or talk to a reporter who wants to write a story on how people are getting rich with NFTs. Amazing.
Contrast this with something like eBay where the buyer would lose 10-20% on each sham transaction, limiting the profits. With NFTs, the transaction costs (gas) are fixed so the more money you wash trade, the lower percentage you lose. Some NFTs are designed to kick money back to the artist with each transaction, but curiously those aren’t trading at exorbitant prices in most cases. Of course, there’s nothing stopping the artist themself from using this scheme to pump up the price of their own artwork.
Yeah, any asset that can artificially propped up. Cryptocurrencies doesn't make this harder nor easier, they simply make it possible to do without a central authority. We still have laws people need to follow in their countries, and up to government to act against people who break the law.
If anything, blockchains makes it easier for local governments to spot things like this, because the centralized exchanges need to corporate, and all the transactions are stored forever. So if you have a IT department with even a small amount of IT knowledge, it'll be easy to setup a system to spot things like this and tie the data to actual individuals via the exchanges.
Rest assure, the arm of the law is long and slow working, but eventually people breaking the law (especially in blockchain-land) will feel the effects of it, sooner or later.
As I said before, blockchains makes it easier for law enforcement, not harder, unless you're using cryptocurrencies like zcash, but they are not widely used currently.
Disclaimer: I'm myself not into NFTs because it mostly seems like hype at this point, I own zero NFTs myself and have no interest in buying. But I also care about accuracy.
The evidence is the fact that these pixelated faces are being "sold" for a nice car's worth of money every hour.
And no, that's no evidence. Just like apartments being sold for millions of dollars is not evidence of money laundering.
Cryptocurrencies and NFTs absolutely make this easier.
If I want to inflate the price of my product on eBay, I have to go through with a lot of expensive eBay transactions to register a lot of fake sales. At 10-20% cost each time (eBay fees + taxes) that gets expensive quickly, and eBay is going to catch on if I'm buying and selling from the same shipping addresses.
With crypto, none of that applies. I can create as many crypto wallets as I want from home. I can move funds around for the price of gas. I can buy my own stuff from my own wallets and shuffle the money around through exchanges so that no one can tell.
> If anything, blockchains makes it easier for local governments to spot things like this, because the centralized exchanges need to corporate
Obviously the scammers aren't going to prefer their local exchanges for criminal activity. They're going to use a foreign exchange or just use a distributed exchange protocol.
The trick with cryptocurrency (not cryptography) is that everything is always tracked. Creating addresses (not wallets) to spread out value you had in one address? That's tracked, logged and stored forever. Using a distributed exchange protocol? All those transactions are also tracked, logged and stored forever.
The only way you can avoid being tracked is by using centralized exchanges, and then you're only protected by the owner/employees of that business.
So no, cryptocurrency doesn't change anything here. In fact it makes it easier to track, as I said before. If you think it makes it harder, please look into how the technology you're talking about now actually works.
But with NFT.... You don't have to spend any money at all. You can just download the item. Why would you pay any money at all. If Van Gough painted two "starry night" painting and sold the 1st for $10MM but offered me the 2nd one for free, I'd take the free one. Why would anyone pay money for something that you can get for free?
I think its because we're in a time of massive inflation of assets, probably brought on my the Fed's policies. We've inflated housing with low interest rates, stocks with QE and salaries for the lucky few in certain industries have risen much faster than the rest. This has lead to a group of people with excess cash chasing return. Once all the low hanging fruit has become out of reach in terms of value (ie: TLSA), money is seeking any other place to get returns - Crypto, penny stocks, SPAC's and now NFTs.
Almost right. Yes, the ones that wanted to own Bitcoin badly enough have Bitcoins by now. The ones that want Bitcoin but not badly enough don't. The ones that don't want to have Bitcoins don't have Bitcoins. The error in your statement is within "those that don't want to spend $60k on a coin dont" because you don't need to spend $60k minimum to buy Bitcoin, that's the price of a full Bitcoin, which you don't need to buy.
> But with NFT.... You don't have to spend any money at all. You can just download the item.
That's not how NFTs work. Yeah, sure, you can download the NFT metadata, or the multimedia that the NFT links to, but that's not "ownership" as defined by blockchains, where the owner is the one the blockchain consensus has said is the owner.
A bit like saying is the same to own the hosting of a SaaS landing page if you download the HTML file. Sure, now you have a copy of it, but that's the limit of your ownership there.
Disclaimer: I'm myself not into NFTs because it mostly seems like hype at this point, I own zero NFTs myself and have no interest in buying. But I also care about accuracy.
For the SaaS example you give, you're paying for the back-end service the SaaS company provides. That's real value. If all the SasS system did was download a Javascript file that did all the work locally, I think you'd see a lot of people download that item and run it locally, bypassing the SasS payment.
Of course, neither do I. I'm trying to help you to see the perspective of others though, where "ownership on blockchain" is valuable for them. I myself don't see the value in that, but obviously there is people who do.
And yeah, you're getting real close to getting it, a bit more thinking and I think you got it :)
It doesn't matter if they disagree; a pyramid scheme is a pyramid scheme no matter how successful. And if it somehow still ends up as the world reserve “currency”, then it'll have made a lot of profoundly incompetent, undeserving, and shady people rich. We'd be no better off, even worse off than before. Bitcoin fuels the fire it was set out to extinguish: greed induced financial crime. https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html
If millions find joy in having BTC in their digital wallet then I’d say there’s plenty of use for them.
The only reason diamond prices haven't cratered is because of a company propping them up.
The real reason diamonds haven't cratered is because they're a commodity that's always in demand - as long as people want to buy them they won't crater.
DeBeers was essentially a cartel, serving in a role kind of like a central bank. They manipulated the supply to keep prices high and reasonably stable and also manufactured the demand out of thin air. Their power has waned some; diamonds aren't worth much second hand anymore, but they're still overpriced at retail and there's still the legacy of marriage conventions requiring a diamond, now with the additional caveat that it must be natural.
The idea of DeBeers is anathema to the ideals of crypto currency, even if the reality of it is far from perfect.
I don't even know why I bother learning new frameworks and languages anymore.
the other part of me is a bit intrigued/excited because there seems to be some amount of wealth transfer happening here. whether it is from richer to rich or rich to poor or poor to poorer is the primary question for me and what will define this movement to be dangerous (i.e poor to rich) or the start of something new and great
I had similar feelings. An acquiantance told me he didn't mind missing out on Bitcoin: he has all he needs, and he's happy to earn his money by solving people's problems. Actually, so do I! Perhaps there isn't much to be jealous of...
> there seems to be some amount of wealth transfer happening here
Yes, from poor artists to the people operating the NFT marketplaces? I'm generally for people losing money on their dumb decisions, as it's the best way to learn, but I can't help feeling sorry for them.
He advertised his NFT experiment on a forum [1] (a French equivalent of 4chan) and it went viral there. Some people bought it as a joke (knowing it was worthless). Nothing prove he didn't buy the tokens himself to hype it.
[0] https://opensea.io/collection/cyberalienz [1] https://www.jeuxvideo.com/forums/0-3011927-0-1-0-1-0-finance...
The author appears to be comparing it to a pyramid scheme because artists are being encouraged to buy other artists' NFTs, so earlier entrants into the scheme are being paid by more recent ones.
It doesn't matter who said it but if you look back at the time period when it could've been said by the person it was initially attributed to, PT Barnum, then you have an approximate period between 1835 when he began his sideshow of oddities tour and 1850 when he shifted focus to theaters and a new audience.
If during that time period it was true that there was a sucker born every minute, then today it is probably reasonable to expect that the number of suckers born every minute is firmly in the double digits and maybe higher when the difference between the number of women of child-bearing age available then versus now is considered.
I guess it's always "the other person" that is the sucker, as long as you can convince yourself of this fact.
If I wanted to be real clever, I'd buy Elon Musk's or Jack's NFT, and sell it for more because hey "it's made by someone popular" so its more credible.
That's one explanation I have for the crazy amount of money moving around NFTs. Sure there are naive people, or some genuine traders, swapping NFT but those are a small percentage, and as the quote goes: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?". Literally 90% of the coins and NFT's i dug into have no application and look at least dodgy if not outright scammy.
I have no proof other than my observations, just adding my thoughts to the conversation. The "it's rare" and "non fungible" arguments don't really stand in my view. There is a ton of rare stuff out in the real world that's simply useless.
If NFTs remain a thing after all the hype & fake demand fades then I am sure regulation for NFT purchases will come into effect to combat such practices.
[1] https://www.ledgerinsights.com/anti-money-laundering-has-les...
Seeing as NFTs are in the same space, I can imagine similar regulations will get enforced for NFC market places.
As for the effectiveness of such measures, well, that is another discussion for another time!
So sorry, there will be no warrantless mass-surveillance/KYC of NFT transactions that unmasks the parties to the transactions.
Hell, buying "worthless" NFTs right now is probably moving some big crime bucks: pay someone a grand for a thing, the wait a week and claim "mania" coz it's now suddenly bring bought for 20 grand.
https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1372163423446917122 for more context.
That seemed like a not terrible use case for an nft.
He changed his mind when people pointed out the environmental impact of cryptocurrency.
People can see the value created by a concert: the socializing, the experience. And they can take steps to mitigate the impact.
How do you mitigate the environmental impact of a proof of work blockchain?
Heard about the 1970's gas crisis, that there was a move to ban auto racing, because of the "obvious waste" of racing cars circling tracka at <5miles/gallon, and stadiums full of people.
Some studies were done. It turns out that auto racing didn't even make the charts in terms of fuel usage. What had the greatest environmental/fuel impact?
Bowling. Yup, bowling. Competition leagues meeting daily in every micro-town and neighborhood, all the driving to & from the lanes... A couple dozen cars driving several hundred miles at 5mpg, once in the nation each week for the top series, even with 10K cars, doesn't make a dent.
I'd expect concert tours, with a few big concerts per week, compared to constant heat generation of ETH miners is similarly gnat-on-an-elephant scale.
He didn't make the comparison, but his figures would put his entire touring history at ~2000 token transfers worth of emissions.
Leaving aside, you know, the cost of performing -- this involves creating and transferring a lot more than 2000 'tokens' which grant people access to those performances. Thankfully venues just handle those with a database.
The baffling part is that people are willing to pay thousands or even millions of dollars for these things.
One of his examples was that you can now go to an electronic dance festival, record it, and sell that as an NFT.
The fact that his NFT was sold to a business partner, this seems like a classic pump and dump. Hyping anything and everything NFT to pump blockchain tokens.
For NFTs to become more than a Ponzi, they have to be bound to legal contracts.
AFAIK, you buy a pointer to an URL, not to a file. I imagine a lot of these NFTs are going to be pointing to a bunch of 404s in the upcoming years.
It's a bot that tweets whenever someone "buys" a cryptopunk, which is apparently a pixel artwork of a face.
These have supposedly been being sold at a rate of around one per hour, for around 20 ETH each ($35k).
I could see a rich person buying one of these out of boredom. But it seems certain that insiders must be buying these to create a false sense of demand.
It's probably time for some sort of awareness campaign (which this article is doing).
I hate this idea of people telling other people what to do or what’s good for them.
You have to put up with what other people do with it.
People piss away plenty going to casinos or clubs or amusement parks. So buy in with your for-fun budget, not your savings. Quit when it stops being fun
What if that's what I want to do?
Take a look at the "criticism" section of the linked wikipedia source.
Besides that: I think that some form of laws and regulation is necessary to prevent bad actors from taking advantage of people.
In that sense, I strongly disagree with your approach.
To advance as a human species, there needs to be an environment of equal opportunities (not equal outcomes) where everyone can lead a fruitful and satisfying life, devoid of pyramid schemes preying on the hopes of someday making it. In that sense, cryptocurrencies are not helping but exacerbating the problem.
In that scenario perhaps. Then again even in that scenario blockchains are unnecessary.
What I don't get is the insane amount of money people are willing to pay. $5 here or there I could understand but thousands??
Makes you wonder if Facebook would have been worse under these two.
It’s one of my favorite pieces because the niche and how I acquired it, directly from the artist.
This NFT stuff... whooooosh
[0] https://twitter.com/memotv/status/1369594107488829441?s=19
Consider this: We have 2 generations who are digital native. They have digital relationships. They buy digital. They consume digital. The missing part has been to earn and spend digital.
No that digital natives have been handed $$$ in govt handouts which has caused an explosion of economic activity in crypto.
Now they can and will speculate in markets with digital. And do it with provable scarcity
They are discovering scarcity
People using these terms incorrectly to describe "bad investment they don't like" gets old quick.
Eth2.0 is actually filed under things_that_are_very_hard_to_research_develop_and_deploy_to_production_as_they_are_currently_supporting_a_200_billion_market.txt
Excerpts from the comment thread [0]:
> Ethereum hopes to do away with mining by early 2017.
> They're switching to proof of stake. Early PoS designs have some issues, like the infamous "nothing at stake" problem, but theirs addresses those.
NFT offers several advantages in this respect.
1) Ronaldo's identity is verified by the NFT site, and blockchain ensures authenticity for eternity. Let's remember, how many famous pieces of art turned out to be fakes. Can't happen with NFT. And no need to pay astronomical amounts to art experts for that.
2) Ronaldo must promise that he will sign only a limited amount of digital balls. Yes, the buyers should just trust Ronaldo on this, but Ronaldo has an incentive to keep his promise, because NFT contracts usually include "royalties": every time in the future, when the digital ball is resold, original issuer receives 10-20% of the price increase. So he is interested in objects retaining value.
Oh and let's not forget about the Ethereum fees and how shitty the tech is.
This really reminds me on how everybody perceived internet in early noughties, when everybody was telling me it's shit and it will never ammount to anything.
Man they were right, there was literally no value, just like there couldn't be value in standardized mode of exchange for digital goods - it doesn't have to be Pepe GIFs only.
The NFT Art market as it is seems to be about equivalent to the real world autograph market. It is likely vastly overvalued and the current sales are just people buying and hoping they can sell for more later like a Beanie Baby
Not at all clear that's true with much NFT.
That's about the worst example of people paying more for something than it is intrinsically worth that you could have come up with! People pay lots for wedding photographs because they want good photos, you're paying for an entire day of a skilled person's time - actually more because they usually edit the photos and produce some kind of photo book - and because there's high demand for wedding photographers.
People don't pay lots because of price speculation for their wedding photos!
A better example would be modern art, or maybe MTG cards.
So that they can, uh, have photos of their wedding?
> given that a wedding might end up divorce
Why do anything, then? Why have a child, they might die? etc.
Most NFTs don't have much intrinsic value to anyone specifically apart from the belief that it has value to others and thus it can be sold (i.e. converted back to money).