I made $50K in three days with NFTs
paulstamatiou.com
paulstamatiou.com
The only real world analogy we kind of have is if we could freely “duplicate” physical goods with the press of a button. Would the Mona Lisa be valuable if DaVinci could have made 1000s of EXACT copies? I’m gonna say no, but that’s exactly where we are. It’s cute someone says they own something like an NFT, or that it’s the original, but it’s nothing more than an illusion of uniqueness.
Edited: slight wording tweak for clarity.
If they were atomically identical copies, they would be literally the same. Any idea of “difference” would be completely false. That’s the difference here, these (NFTs) are by all means atomic copies. They aren’t close to the same, they ARE the same.
If we could make atomic copies of the Mona Lisa it would surely drop in value… scarcity is what causes works like the Mona Lisa to be valuable. With an NFT there is no scarcity because unlimited duplicates, each as real as the original, can be produced for nearly free.
The works are identical if bits don't have color (re linked essay above). We know they don't, but in the eyes of the law they definitely do, so an exact copy is still a copy in the eyes of the law.
This is something that we always miss with art - even on a digital screen you’re always only looking at a reproduction.
But it makes sense that, like with paintings, NFT’s could gain or lose value with the story of who it belongs to and when and how it was purchased. It makes perfect sense for celebrities to be purchasing these things.
Overall this might even be preferable to unique art works. Lowers the barrier of access for one.
Munch made four versions of The Scream.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream#Versions
Paul Cézanne made several variations of many of the same motifs, for example with his drawings and paintings of the skulls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_C%C3%A9zanne
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_of_Skulls
https://www.kesslerramirez.com/blog/art-history-101-pyramid-...
And then there is Andy Warhol with his Campbell's Soup Cans and other works of art.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_Soup_Cans
Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans were produced by a screen printing process and he made 32 canvases.
There is nothing that physically could have stopped Warhol from printing thousands of Campbell's Soup Cans instead of the 32.
And in the same way, a digital artist can choose to mint any number of NFTs for a work of art or variations of a work of art. If a digital artist chooses to mint a limited number of NFTs on the blockchain and this run of NFTs gains traction then it's a similar situation to the Campbell's Soup Cans in my opinion. In both cases, the artist could choose to print more physical Campbell's Soup Cans after the fact or mint more NFTs after the fact, but the initial run will forever be the "original" run, and they will remain special because of this. Simply because we assign special meaning to that.
So is the Mona Lisa. So is a manuscript of The Tales of Beedle the Bard.
The notion of NFTs is embedded in the idea of immutability. If unique strings of bits hold no value for you, that's your preference and nothing more.
If you can only be sentimental about oil and canvas, or handwritten ink on leather bound paper, that's your preference and nothing more.
I can destroy the wallet key somehow. I can destroy the book. I can destroy the painting.
It's not an illusion of uniqueness at all, you just seem to be unwilling or unable to comprehend patronage.
What do you think patronage is?
As is pretty much every tech blog post on “I’ve made <significant amount of money> in <short amount of time>”. Most fail to mention step zero of having an established audience.
I wonder what percentage is disingenuous (trick you into thinking anyone can do it, to hook new followers) versus delusional (honestly don’t realise the prior audience is what made the difference). Maybe the perception flips after a given number of followers.
edit: looks like the submission got flagged/removed from the feed on HN. sigh
As sold now, nearly all NFTs will end up being a poor investment. A write-off. Some people hope to get rich quick and will punt on pretty much anything.
Longer term, and several rebrands later there's potential here.
The digital economy as it curently stands is a shit-show. Just attention grabbing for money. A race to the bottom. But it needn't be so.
A digital economy based on assets rather than attention could eventually emerge.
Asset licencing may be sub-1 cent per copy. That'd be fine, when the necessary payment infrastructure is in place. High volume, high efficiency, low cost.
Put your money on the infrastructure. Get rich slow.
My only guess is that the people buying these things already have large amounts of theoretical money in Ethereum anyway and thus spending a small fraction of it on some sort of very poor glowing Mondrian-esque art is little more than an amusing distraction that seems cool?
Like gee maybe people are really into mini Jpegs now. Or wow I guess if people really like spending buy-a-house money on a Twitter avatar this will be a thriving sector of the economy.
I mean people really like gambling.
Actually they fucking love it. Like they’ll build an entire city in the middle of an uninhabitable desert just to do it. They’ll give up their kids future for it. People making $7.25 an hour will spend hundreds of dollars a week on scratch off lottery tickets in order to participate in it.
An endless demand for new ways to gamble is the least fucking confusing cultural development to ever happen.
Put people in a prison and they’ll do it with cigarettes. Give a bunch of construction workers a lunch break and they’ll bet on which pigeon is gonna to take off first. Hand a group of people a round ball or a deck of cards and they’ll figure out how to do it.
Beanie babies, little ceramic figures, baseball cards, coins. The desire for people to speculate on synthetically created scarcity is boundless, spanning generations.
Speculation is common to every culture in every era of human history.
NFT’s are a gambling fad, an extension of the more general crypto gambling fad. People will do it until it’s banned, matures, or gets replaced by the next gambling craze.
https://moretothat.com/how-money-forever-changed-us/
Specifically, the discussion of the "pogs" craze in elementary schools in the US in the 90s. "Basically, a nice little gambling ring was growing amongst us starry-eyed 2nd graders."
The OP would certainly read differently if he wrote, "How I won $50K in 3 days with NFTs", rather than saying how he "made" $50K.
Also the Gordon Gekko quote from "Wall Street":
"Money itself isn’t lost or made, it’s simply transferred –- from one perception to another. ... I create nothing. I own."[1]
[1]: https://amontalenti.com/2011/12/16/wall-street-the-movie-25-...
That’s profound, thanks for the link
Well said
I agree with you to the fullest, very well summarized.
The issue around crypto at the moment is that because it is poorly understood by both the masses and the evngelists (the tech, the economics, and often both) you have a lot of people who don't want to be left out of the "next big thing" and so they've pivoted their careers to convincing people that crypto and related assets are part of a healthy portfolio. This may or may not be true in the long run, but nobody walks around thinking scratchoffs are part of a good portfolio allocation. The same is not true for these other assets, and we've seen in each cycle when people get hosed and lose it all, they are genuinely shocked because they don't view it as gambling.
So many people think gambling is the preferred investment that they’ll not only use all their own available cash and assets, they’ll surreptitiously make use of the cash and assets of their family and friends.
This comment is meant to be only mildly humorous, unfortunately.
The author writes about it here:
> There's a bit of nuance to how OpenSea does things. They do so-called lazy minting. While you may need to pay an initial gas fee to list a new collection, each NFT listing does not require any fees. This works because the NFT is not actually minted yet. It gets officially minted once the buyer pays the gas fees to mint the artwork on the blockchain.
The deceptive kind, follow?
It doesn't matter wether there is the possibility of a 'perfect' copy. You just have to convince your connoisseurs, buyers, believers that art is a process and a story/history not a product.
Et voilà que.
There is your uniqueness! And/or you license it and go mass market, see Dafen in China.
https://www.dafenvillageonline.com/
Okay, they copy it without license, but hey, they're Chinese so that comes naturally.
By the way,the art game is rigged since decades. The moment the Saatchis of this planet decided NFT's were a thing, they were a thing.
Of course it's an illusion, but some sell it and a lot buy it. They agreed on it. That's its value.
As they started to sell I noticed people quickly listing
theirs for sale at much higher prices so I experimented
with increasing my prices.
This is morally wrong.
Everyone else will be celebrated, and can pat themselves on the back, for having the foresight to time the market.
I also think that anything that further solidifies IP enforcement is going to kill the future.
Consider that one of these days, we might progress enough to be able to build something approaching a replicator from Star Trek. The utopian society of the show is built on "too cheap to meter" energy that allows replicators to meet everyone's basic needs (and even fancy whims) for free. But even if we reach a similar level of scientific and technological advancement, we won't be able to realize the utopia part if designs for every replicable goods are owned by a small group of people/companies extracting rent, with technology and law preventing circumvention.
No more having to manage a half dozen plus streaming subscriptions. One company could go out and start building a comprehensive library of NFTs for every film and series.
When you want to watch something you check out the NFT from the library. When you’re done you return it. For very hot items, there may be a waiting list, but you’ll get it eventually. No more being stuck in a content ghetto like with modern streaming services.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/k78kay/mila-kunis-stoner-cat...
I'd rather have more ways to restore the First Sale Doctrine for digital goods, rather than debasing it further.
1) Remittance is easily implemented in a smart contract.
2) This aligns long term interests between the project creator and the NFT holder (and one can imagine different incentive structures can be implemented for different projects).
1) Remittances for resale imply that ownership was not fully transferred. The item isn't mine, but is some weird mix of being mine, but still having some link back to the person who made it. This is already a problem with digital goods, where I cannot lend an ebook to a friend in the same way that I would lend a physical book.
2) The long-term interests are already aligned due to the existence of a second-hand market, and do not need additional technological protections. Somebody who buys cars new and sells them after 5 years still cares about the maintenance costs of a 15-year-old car, because those impact the sale price at 5 years.
2a) The siphoning of money from a re-sale discourages a second-hand market. If the original maker of an object absconds with 20% of the re-sale price, that gives me less of an incentive to sell it, rather than just throwing it away. This is both from an economic standpoint, because there's a decreased profit motive, and from an emotional standpoint, because somebody is laying claim to my efforts in securing a resale without having a valid reason to do so.
Consider the positive sum view: the creator is encouraged to do activities (marketing? Community management?) to drive the price of the sold items higher and resold more frequently.
Manufacturers are not to be trusted with a tool that can assert ownership over something that they have previously sold.
NFTs won't work with DRM, because with DRM you need to encrypt the content and then decrypt it to view it. But you cannot put the decryption key in the NFT, because everything on the blockchain is public. If you put the decryption key with the NFT, everyone will have it.
So you will still need some kind of centralized system where you will issue the decryption keys to your viewers, and probably the easiest way to track subscriptions and keys is to use a database like MySQL.
(Btw, I do not like DRM at all)
Using NFTs or other cryptographic DRM would be hugely beneficial to consumers, but what's the point of helping the consumers? It'll only cut into costs because NFTs require some kind of cryptocoin network to do a bunch of calculations, which is expensive to run and wastes enormous amounts of electricity.
A simple RSA signature could be used to license a file to your computer and some DRM comes pretty close to that. If the industry wanted to give you ownership, they already could've done it before the NFT speculators set up the current hype.