NFT Canon
a16z.com
a16z.com
But no one's really trying to solve the problem of digital ownership, provenance, chain of custody, or original verifiability, they're just trying to get rich.
NFT's are their manufactured attempt to build a Crypto V2 market they think they can control. 90% of the stories you read about in the press about NFT's are placed there by these same VC investors. They are desperately trying to viral market fomo response for their useless tokens....sorry their authentic original JPG's....
Its really quite sad.
Of course there are. Scams wouldn't work if everyone involved was in on it.
What's interesting about NFTs to me is that an org like the NBA is one of the most successful - but I guess that makes sense because, as others have posted, they generate all the NFTs and can validate them. So it seems to me that it can be successful in the case where you have a single, centralized owner. Where it breaks down for me is when that ownership is some random person on the interwebs.
NBA Top Shot is also interesting because the number of buyers/sellers seems fair stable/flat - that would indicate to me that it is a relatively small number of people trading with each other because I think the number of buyers/sellers would increase if the overall market was growing - but I could be wrong about that.
Postgres also works great when you have a single, centralized owner
Aren't you too rich or too poor... Developing really something for getting rich is a reason worth enough. The real problem is long-term courage.
Their volume for the past 24 hours has consisted of 73 trades[1]. In what world is that successful?
> [...] trading for thousands (some tens of tbousands) of dollars.
This is extremely misleading, no one's putting in 10 grand from their paycheck to buy a kitty; it's all in-ecosystem crypto "money" that's being sloshed around.
[1] https://nonfungible.com/market/history/cryptokitties?filter=...
Some trading cards are extremely rare and valuable. Most are not. Vast majority of kitties fit in this category.
Unless there is some strong KYC on opensea that prevents this (I honestly don't know, having never used the platform), it seems almost inevitable. There's not really an objective way to value most of this stuff, so buyers are going to look at the price history to guesstimate what they might be able to resell an NFT for. But how much of that price history is bogus wash trades?
And even CryptoKitties is still around. Early generation CryptoKitties are still considered collectibles, but of course there's an infinite supply of Kitties, so the rarity is less than say, CryptoPunks (which pre-date Kitties) of which only 10K were minted:
https://opensea.io/assets/cryptopunks?search[sortAscending]=...
There's actually an entire ecosystem of hundreds of thousands of creators, fans, developers, etc working on everything you dismiss. A16Z is investing in many of those projects. Some are happening organically. NFTs will change more than you know.
Today, eBay is around, but not Beanie Babies, at least not in any significant sense.
I think NFT will be the same. Eventually we might put real estate on it and do something useful, just as eBay has become much more than a place to trade Beanie Babies.
Anyways, there will be hits and misses with regards to digital collectibles on the blockchain, but the value of the space as a whole will grow tremendously (multiple hundreds of billions).
But that copy of Pac-Man that I have on my raspberry pi is worth exactly nothing.
And an NFT of it should be worth the same unless it gives me other rights (like copyrights, or something else of value).
It's not all that different from what rich people do with vaulted art and registries. Just more available to regular people.
Art vaults/registries have similar issues and work fine for much more valuable items, so Mattereum isn't breaking completely new ground here. They just have a more convenient way to transfer ownership.
Besides that, I think an immutable public record of ownership is worthwhile. It's something you can use as evidence in court. If it were just their database and they changed it, what recourse would you have?
[1] https://mattereum.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/mattereum-s...
We trust online brokerages to maintain our ownership on securities with databases alone, but those are heavily regulated. The government isn't likely to enact regulation on baseball cards and action figures either.
So for safety we're pretty much down to paper documentation and a cumbersome sale process. That's slow and expensive, which is why rich people do it and regular people don't. Until now.
I don't see why people think blockchains have to exclusively do new and unprecedented things. It's productive to do old things more efficiently.
Why?
> _There's nothing of value here_
Objectively there is, as people are spending money on it.
But I understand your meaning, which is to say "there will be no value to these given time". I'm interested to hear what you would consider to be failure conditions (and thus for this not to appear on r/agedlikemilk). Despite what you say Cryptokitties are still being actively traded despite the fact "no one remembers them" and they had recognition that was orders of magnitude less than NFTs now, but yet you consider it a failure.
They change hands constantly:
https://opensea.io/assets/cryptokitties?search[sortAscending...
In that regard, its kind of centralized. There can be multiple NFTs that claim to be tweets. There's no naturally definitive "twitter" token, unless it's managed by Twitter itself. But you're relying on the issuer of the coin to say "I am the NFT coin" and everyone to agree.
Real world NFTs (e.g. art and collectibles) are unique in that there is no dispute about what the original is. The art was created by the artist or its a forgery. In that regard NFTs rely on some issuing entity that bestows upon itself an arbitrary form of ownership. I can make my own Twitter token and if I get someone to buy a coin for an absurd amount (insider dealing?), and convince reports to write about it, I can be "the twitter nft"
Or am I thinking of this incorrectly?
This can be merely social convention, e.g. an artist announcing that this is his Ethereum address, or an auction house acting as an intermediary. But it could also be a network effect based on software, e.g., a game, or something in between like the original CryptoKitties.
Overall I'm very bullish on crypto as digital gold, less so on Ethereum style apps and even less so on NFTs. It's an interesting litmus test. I see a lot of crypto enthusiasts speak highly about NFTs which I find odd. They generally have very well thought out and reasoned arguments for Bitcoin as a digital store of wealth, but then they go into NFTs and talk about scarcity. But the scarcity of Bitcoin is only valuable because it is the defacto digital currency, due to it's survival up to this point. It has dealt with governance issues, was built of strong cryptographic principals and most importantly stood the test of time (lindy effect). Then they speak about NFTs in a vague way as though they're naturally authoritative without pointing out the obvious: you don't actually own the digital asset you're buying. If it actually had some real concept of ownership (e.g. owning a tweet allows me to delete the tweet), then it would be a different story. But as it stands now I don't see the value.
The cheer leading from the crypto community is odd and makes me question their principals. I'd be happy to be proven wrong and have someone steelman the argument for NFTs without relying on "its a scarce asset and people want to own scarce assets". It's also very early days in NFTs, so ten years from now if the Twitter tokens are still selling for millions, I'd be more willing to agree as it would have Lindy effect by that point.
I've seen the opposite - most crypto enthusiasts I have spoken to don't seem to understand NFTs at all / why they are considered valuable by other people. I fit into that camp.
> Overall I'm very bullish on crypto as digital gold, less so on Ethereum style apps and even less so on NFTs.
I'm quite bullish on Ethereum style "defi" apps - once we finally have decent layer 2 options and software deployed on layer 2, I think interest rates on stablecoins will be a large incentive for folks to start onboarding. The big remaining piece then is convincing people to spend their stable coins at stores - I would expect some level of "rewards" paid by the store would be sufficient. Essentially, an app that you can deposit funds into, earn interest that is well above what your bank account pays, and earns rewards that are competitive (or ideally beat) with credit cards.
That would be fantastic! Give me 10% interest on my wallet, and 10% "cashback" for my purchases with crypto, and I'll switch my whole financial life to crypto.
Long term, if merchants were smart, they'd make their own reward systems on top of this to encourage usage.
The interest rate is determined by the market, and since its pretty early on in defi world, the owners of the crypto demand a higher interest rate to make it worth their while. Also, the more volatile the asset the more valuable it is in terms of derivatives.
NFTs themselves are just a cryptographic representation of something unique. It can be a token that says “you own this image”, but it can also be an in-game virtual item, a software license, a digital trading card, etc...
There is some level of centralization in many cases. For example, a trading card game will likely own the contract that can mint cards and own the art for the cards. Other services can read that contract to see what cards you own and use that data inside their own game logic (though probably not the images due to legal reasons).
This would already be useful for something like Magic the Gathering where unofficial online services exist to play by whatever rules you want. The last time I used one, you just put your deck list in so everyone used the rarest cards. They may have evolved now to check your Magic Online account, but you can’t do that as easily in Magic Arena.
Assuming the creators don’t limit your freedom in their smart contract, you can also buy, sell, or trade the NFT to whoever and for whatever you want unlike a centralized service which wouldn’t enable access to an open market outside of the game’s ecosystem.
EDIT even something like a domain name - which is arguably a better example as only one of such a thing can actually exist in that only one owner can derive the value from it.
Honestly, I don’t know.
Maybe it’s because the blockchain is immutable? Like, I could change that txt record because I’m evil or something. That makes sense to me, in terms of technology.
The problem is that these signatures cannot be traded anymore, since no one is tracking who owns which editions. I can sell my signature to you, and then sell it to someone else tomorrow. The artist intended to mint 100 "prints", but suddenly 1000 people claim to own one.
A token off the blockchain controlled by a centralized group could transfer ownership without a key at all. They could issue the same one to more than one party and duplicate it. Someone else could claim to own the record and they could decide you don't anymore, they get to decide who it is sold to. Or prohibit you from transferring it at all.
For fuckery, there are still cracks.
I think of NFTs as a fancy system of determining provenance: X bought hash Y from seller Z. Whether other people assign meaning/value to that transaction is subject to the usual whims of human nature.
Still though, the value of collectible goes up if you have extensive documentation proving it is the original, vs it just merely being the original, or worse, it being the original and someone else having extensive documentation convincingly making the case that their counterfeit is actually the original.
For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, a simulacrum is a copy of something that has itself become hyper-real and usurped the reality of the original. The canonical example is Disney World, which is a copy of Disneyland, which is itself a copy of many elements of Americana (Louisiana Bayou, the frontier West, Main Street USA, etc.) Disney World has eclipsed Disneyland in visitors, which itself has eclipsed visits to various small town main streets or the Louisiana bayous. You plan a family vacation to Disney World, you don't plan a trip to Bumfuck, Wyoming. Even though it's a copy of a copy (and a poor one at that), its reality has eclipsed that of the original, just because the original is hard to get to and kind of boring.
Similar with NFTs. Yes, you can make an NFT of the Mona Lisa and claim that you have the only one. Yes, you're a lying swindler and probably a bad person. But your copy is much easier to trade, move around, and store than the actual Mona Lisa. And just as there's only one original Mona Lisa, there's only one original NFT of the Mona Lisa, so your copy still has the same scarcity. As more capital comes onto the blockchain, your NFT is likely to acquire its own hyper-reality and become the Mona Lisa, and the original painting will be hidden away in a museum somewhere and disappear from trading.
I apologize if I'm misunderstanding, but can't you create as many NFTs of the Mona Lisa as you want? What's to stop someone from just creating a second one, even the original owner of the Mona Lisa? You can't copy the Mona Lisa (at least not in such a way as to call it the original), but you can make another NFT of the real Mona Lisa and...as far as I can tell it's just as good.
I realize you can't copy the chain that's already descended from the first NFT, but why does that matter? You can still say this is a genuine NFT for the real Mona Lisa, and the problem is you can make as many of those as you want. Or at least that's how I understand it.
Copying something digital is very different from copying something molecular. A digital copy is as good as the original. A molecular copy is almost certainly possible to distinguish, and if you can't you may as well not have an original.
It's sort of like the forking problem for cryptocurrencies in general. Anyone can fork the Bitcoin code and say they made a new cryptocurrency, and many people have done exactly that (Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, Bitcoin ABC). In practice, the fork tends to die out, because much of a cryptocurrency's value is in who agrees that it's valuable, and there's a big first-mover advantage there.
I've never heard that before. Can someone confirm this is true? Is it solving for a hash of the original digitization of the work or something?
Very happy to be corrected if this is incorrect.
And it's not like Monet making more paintings, because each painting is unique. This is an identical digital copy from the same person, with no guarantee of its longevity.
- An NFT can (should) include a hash of the work
- Multiple NFTs can exist pointing to the same hash.
However:
> And it's not like Monet making more paintings, because each painting is unique.
Each NFT is also unique in the sense that each NFT itself has an address and its own history. They are distinguishable. They are orderable.
> This is an identical digital copy from the same person, with no guarantee of its longevity.
The record has a guaranteed longevity - the longevity of the underlying blockchain. The object it points to obviously does not.
However that's not really important. Building records in the city clerk office have a guaranteed longevity that is far greater than the buildings themselves.
So for example, if Jack minted multiple NFTs for the same tweet it would be clear to everyone which one was first. Only the first one would presumably be considered valuable.
If Jack attached IP rights to those NFTs, courts would presumably only consider the first valid.
I personally find NFTs that lack actual legal property rights to be silly and valueless, but I wanted to address confusion about how they actually work.
That's not how I see it at all. Once Jack has been shown to be willing to oversell himself just to make a quick buck, it will immediately devalue everything associated with him, including the original NFT. You're buying into the quality/credibility/longevity of the creator here, and once it's shown he's a shill there's not much reason to value any of his original "work" highly.
I am open to being wrong, but it still boggles my mind anybody could think NFTs are anything other than a scam. At least bitcoin had lots of legitimate theory to be used as an alternative to currency, even if it only ended up being an investment alternative for gold. An NFT is like trying to sell art without actually having to create art.
An NFT of a tweet maybe. But actually artists do create art and sell it as NFTs.
And call me crazy, but the kind of people selling NFTs don't strike me as trustworthy.
Here's Beeple's $69 million artwork in full resolution (warning: 300 megs!):
https://ipfsgateway.makersplace.com/ipfs/QmXkxpwAHCtDXbbZHUw...
The metadata for the IPFS: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmPAg1mjxcEQPPtqsLoEcauVedaeMH81WXDPvPx...
Because a token is public we can all see the contents. Now, you could theoretically just put the hash in there without the content existing on the IPFS (or elsewhere), and then give the owner the content after the sale via a separate channel. But now you've got the problem of how to verify what you're buying is the real deal. Furthermore, it complicates resale (not that IPFS will save you there, IIRC if you're the one storing content on IPFS and the only one, then it's possible you just stop hosting it and the data vanishes).
It all leads back to the question of why we value the original in the first place. People have all kinds of answers to this - why it's different for "real" art - but those points usually don't hold up to scrutiny.
There is something about physical things that a digital image is lacking, for sure. But most of the value we ascribe to things, even to the Mona Lisa, is totally arbitrary, a collective illusion.
To be clear I don't personally see any value at all in an NFT that doesn't have legal IP rights attached. I think we agree that far.
However:
> it will immediately devalue everything associated with him, including the original NFT
It might. Kind of hard to theorize as to what the result would be. The reason I'm hesitant to jump to that conclusion is because of the timestampy nature of blockchains. It's not as if the market is suddenly flooded with forgeries and nobody can tell what's real. It's baked into the blockchain which one was first. In fact you might argue it would not be possible (economically) for Jack to do this in the first place since nobody would buy the second instance.
If the value of a signed copy is mostly performative, then NFTs alone maybe should not have value (because nobody can really see that you own one). If the value of a signed copy is personal, then maybe it does.
I don't personally see any value in owning an NFT, but it's not cut and dry to me that nobody else will or should.
Recognition for previous work creates expectations for new work, even if the work itself is lost. Art has always operated that way.
But there are details that need sorting out. A proprietary URL link - or an IPFS link only hosted by one node - is too flimsy for long-term collectables. Use value is sorely needed to really flesh out the function of the tokens. Again, as it is, we have tech demos with some eyewatering valuations.
This is totally fine, but keep in mind someone could deploy an identical contract to a different address, which also has a 123456 in it, which is also owned by 0xabcdef. You'd have to be careful when you're checking the ownership that you're checking everything. I could imagine an unscrupulous person saying "Look, I sent you 123456, it's in your address, see?" and then absconding.
Rollercoasters and Mickey Mouse make pastiches of common things more interesting; creating an inferior copy of a famous thing and trying to compensate for its inferiority and inauthenticity with a cryptographic string has the opposite effect.
You've got it, more or less. The "surely I must be missing something" reaction is actually indicative of the correct understanding: the emperor has no clothes.
NFT: No Fscking Thing
As of right now NFTs are basically donations to the artist with more steps and about 1000x the carbon footprint.
But suppose you ripped that jersey into a thousand pieces, and sold each separately. People might still buy it, because those pieces as a whole were in fact a Michael Jordan jersey at some point. A piece of that history is cheaper to own than the entire thing.
Now suppose you rip it into 100 million pieces and create non-fungible tokens where each tiny piece could be scanned with a phone, identified, and associated with an arbitrary blob of data.
Now it's a race of a savvy PR team against the public's hazy and soon-to-be waning interest in what-- if anything-- is the value of one of those microscopic jersey specs. "Something something Michael Jordan," got you to distract a captive audience from Candy Crush for five seconds. What happens next has absolutely nothing to do with Michael Jordan, and everything to do with P.T. Barnum.
Edit: clarification
"See this database entry? It's yours. In order to change it, you need this little JSON file and a password. Got it? Great. That will be $69 million please."
"A man who is rich but ignorant he[Diogenes] called a sheep with golden fleece."
I wouldn't pay 60 million for a barcode.
This is great stuff to read other people discuss and curate on the internet now 10 or 11 years in.