Charlie Bit Me NFT sale: Brothers to pay for university with auction money
bbc.com
bbc.com
Not sure I'd spend it on university fees though (fees operate differently here in the UK), seems like a waste.
That said, pre-brexit, I would have considered sending the kids to uni somewhere in Europe for free and save the university fees.
I paid 10k€ for a 3 years degree which is as close as free as it gets for me (it could have been zero if my family made less money or if I lived by myself and were unemployed). I don't think I would pay more than that for a degree, they're mostly overrated.
As a real example, what will increase in value more in those 30 years: the principal on your loans (which in effect costs you double), an Index fund tied to the S&P 500, or a down payment on a house?
But why would you buy it? Are you hoping that it's going to become more valuable in the future? I suppose people collect all sorts of weird stuff, but at least they're normally able to display it or enjoy it in some form.
Currently, NFT is about collecting and speculation, which is currently the exact same use case as many collectibles like baseball cards. I believe the space will evolve to allow NFT holders to have additional rights and utility, such as copyright and ability to earn royalties from licensing the art.
NFT is simply provable ownership of a digital asset. What that asset actually is and what it provides is an experimental and evolving space. I think HNers need to think less narrow about this.
How is this any different from traditional copyright ownership? Assigning the rights for a piece of IP has been commonplace for well over a century.
But blockchain allows the asset to be verified quickly, impossible to counterfeit (the asset itself, not the NFT image), and immediately makes it available to the entire ecosystem of dapps running on the blockchain rails. I believe NFTs will become a larger component of DeFi, enabling their use as collateral.
But a large number of games will also integrate with NFTs and enable a larger ecosystem of assets to move freely between them.
This application of blockchain seems to be only creating a chain of ownership. Which we already sort of have now with many things. It does not seem to bring many better properties with it other than one I can think of. That property is that it makes it harder to forge ownership.
The weird thing is coming from people creating NFT's for things that are basically not worth tracking who owns it. Then others buying that thing at a wildly overinflated price (which many digital easily copied goods fall into).
Count me among the naysayers. I've worked in a field (publishing) with IP as its lifeblood, and I simply don't see the business value NFTs provide over traditional contracts.
Those seem very different to me. In fact even if you wanted to use an NFT to be the address of a piece of digital content, you couldn't easily do that: You would need to build something like DNS on top of NFT's in order to make them human usable in that way.
I think this is an interesting metaphor that goes even further than that. Much like the global DNS system, NFTs only work if people trust and adhere to which (single) system has been used to trade a work/define a domain name. Because I could easily create my own separate DNS and sell "microsoft.com" on it for $100 to anyone, but no-one uses or trusts my DNS.
For example, Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a name service on Ethereum https://ens.domains/ Brave Browser has natively integrated with it, and .eth domains are tied into it. As more browsers and tools integrate with it, the value of it continues organically.
There is no top-down government or organization making this happen - it all happens organically.
Fun fact: within a few days of the auction we beat an hour long DDOS attack peaking at 4.7 million page per minute.
It seems that many "high value" auctions are just grifters paying inflated prices for their own works to try and drive up the popularity of the NFT market.
Do you do anything to combat this sort of fraud?
At Origin Protocol, we are currently doing white-glove auctions for celebrities and top-tier NFTs. The Charlie Bit Me video is a perfect example. This means that the pool of bidders that can pay the prices that these go for is fairly small. I would think that the problems you mention would be much more prevalent among NFT artists who are looking to make a career out of this.
- Identify the characteristics of the attack.
- Block as much as possible, as far forward as possible.
- Cache as much as possible to minimize load.
- Scale the parts of the backend that are the bottlenecks.
Of course it was a lot more exciting than that during the actual event. :)
DDOS attacks for ransoms are a part of life in crypto, so this wasn't our first time dealing with things. We also load test copies of our sites in peacetime until they break in fun ways, to know what and where the failure modes are.
Technically, of course someone could clone it. No value there though, since the clones would lack scarcity, and wouldn't be "authentic".
Legally, no one else can clone this particular NFT, since that would be directly copying someone else's copyrighted work. The family, the owners of the copyright could, but the odds of clones selling for anything would be minimal.
I don't know about cloning an NFT, but creating an NFT is just putting a link, or hash etc, on a blockchain, isn't it? Or thereabouts. Anybody can do that, without owning the copyright. I think it's pretty well established that a link is not copyright infringement. I'm not sure about a hash, but I very much doubt it.
If Damien Hirst sells 1000 sharks, the buyers get the physical sharks themselves, I guess along with some falsifiable and legally meaningful documentation. They really do own the sharks, physically and legally.
The difference is in the copyability of the work itself.
It occurs to me that selling an NFT is like entering an artwork into a copyright registry, then selling the paperwork (without the actual copyright). To be fair I can imagine the original copyright registration docs for eg. Gone With the Wind being worth something to collectors.
Assuming for the sake of argument the simplest case:
* It is not in dispute that Alice created a digital work * It is not in dispute that Alice owned the full copyright at the time of creation * It is not in dispute that Alice only sold/licensed the copyright once * It is not in dispute that said one time happened in the same transaction that the corresponding NFT was transferred, nor that Alice and the recipient intended for the NFT to represent ownership. * The NFT is transferd on-chain several additional times.
Most of these assumptions can easily become the central area of a copyright dispute. However, even assuming these assumptions are accurate, there are more problems:
* Suppose that at some point in time Bob owned the NFT. Charlie claims that Bob either licenced the work to him, or sold him all rights, however the NFT was not transfered. Since Bob owned the copyright, doing so was within his rights. The NFT subsequently gets transferred multiple times, which has no effect on what rights Charlie has. The current owner of the NFT sues Charlie for copyright infringement for using the NFT. * Suppose that at some point in time Bob owned the NFT. It is subsequently transferred several more times. Bob claims that he never sold it, and said transfers are the result of a hack.
To work around these issues, you cannot sell the copyright to the NFT owner, but must license it under fairly restrictive terms, such as:
* All rights under this license are provided exclusivly to any entity that demonstrates current ownership of the NFT, and are revoke when such an entity loses the ability to do so. * Any rights holder under this license may not grant rights to others [0] * The original copyright holder revokes all further rights from themselves.
Additionally, you need this license to track the work (not difficult, many digital works ship with a license nowadays). Further, you need the courts to recognize the terms of the license as valid and interpret them the way you intended.
[0] Any desired ability to grant rights could still be encoded into the NFT system, in which case the license should clarify that
Why do you think so? If you call it ${NFT_NAME}_2, don't you think people who couldn't get ${NFT_NAME} would be at least slightly interested?
What are the pre-NFT means by which one makes £1 million off of a home movie on youtube? Surely not(?) just youtube ad revenue sharing?
> Once the video reached 50 million views, the family began earning cash from YouTube ads and television spots, Mashable wrote.