The lack of imagination and "get off my lawn" around here is absurd.
Two productive choices are: (1) take up the cross of patiently and respectfully explaining what you believe to be the better information; or (2) chalk it up to people being wrong on the internet and just don't post.
Artists can also mint on ImmutableX without paying any fee at all.
> no legal ownership
the market is moving towards licensing the image to the nft owner or dispensing with restrictive licenses altogether
> artists will lose money
opensea's lazy minting means that you don't have to pay until you sell
> investors will lose money
it's not a zero-sum system
This is wrong. I can see why you think it, but it is wrong.
The URL in the JSON file is free, as is the artwork that it points to. It's very hard to restrict the copying of digital artworks anyway, so why bother trying to?
The person buying the NFT is not "buying a URL". This phrase doesn't even mean anything! What they are buying is control of a record on the blockchain, which (with some slight hand-waving) contains a list of the signatures of the previous owners, including the original creator or their agent. While it is trivial to copy a JPEG, it is not at all trivial to copy the list of signatures from one part of a blockchain to another, unless you happen to have the private keys of all of the previous owners.
As such, the JPEG is abundant but the record is scarce. This mirrors the physical world, in which Picasso prints are abundant but signed originals are rare and hard to copy. What you're paying for is the uniqueness of the signature, not the ability to look at the content of the artwork, which you can probably already do for free on the internet.
"No legal ownership of anything" is not really true. You do legally own the blockchain record! You can decide whether to sell it or keep it, and you can generally dispose of it as you would with any other property. You don't legally own the copyright of the artwork, but as we've already established, that copyright probably isn't worth very much.
Your other statements may be perfectly accurate - I can't imagine 20M artists on OpenSea all turning a profit, and I imagine that a lot of the investors are likely to lose some money too. I just don't think that this has anything to do with faulty assumptions about how NFTs work.
No you don't. In fact, I don't think NFT ownership has been litigated in any court of law (yet). The deed/title analogy is pretty good. But what makes a deed a deed is that it has the force of the law behind it. NFTs do not.
The crypto space does have an unfortunate history with a kind of legal mysticism, in which people ignore legal practice in favour of attempts to re-derive everything from half-remembered Locke, or something from Nick Szabo's blog, or some weird way of doing things that turns out to be an elaborate attempt to evade securities law rather than any actual legal requirement for sale of property. The term "smart contract" takes this tendency and multiplies it. Ignore this stuff and focus on simple principles: party A paid party B for something that party A was indeed able to transfer to party B in return for the agreed payment. Unless there was an agreement specifying otherwise, B has just acquired some property from A.
"Buying a URL" (a pointer to a thing) means more than "buying a blockchain record" (a pointer to a pointer to a thing).
What is the value of a blockchain record whose URL no longer works, or has been changed to point to something worth nothing?
"Buying a URL" doesn't make sense because there's no transfer of rights. I already have the URL! There's no meaningful mechanism by which I can take control of the URL, and there are no rights over the URL that anyone can sell to me. The reason people mock the idea of "buying a URL" is because they rightly observe that it doesn't make sense.
The value of the record is not directly related to the URL. The value of the record is that it has the artist's signature on it (or the signature of someone I believe to be the artist, or the artist's designated agent; fraud is definitely possible here!). Notably, the URL does not have the artist's signature on it (how could it? This also does not make sense as an idea). The artwork pointed to by the URL might or might not have the artist's signature on it, but if it does then the signature is easily copyable, because the image itself is easily copyable.
The thing that is not easily copyable is the blockchain record. This is because it contains an encrypted transaction signed by the artist's key, and I can't make a duplicate of this unless I have the artist's private key.
If I'm buying an NFT, I'm doing it because I think the artwork is going to be popular or important in some way. If this is true, there are going to be many copies of it. I don't really care about what happens to any single copy, even if it's the copy that was presented as the reference copy at the time I bought the NFT. If I'm truly concerned that the image might disappear entirely, I will download a copy to my laptop and save some backups. If it turns out that the thing I bought was so unpopular and unimportant that months later nobody anywhere saved a copy of it, then I suppose that sucks for me.
Do we need crypto to enable those transactions? If micropayments made sense, why haven't they caught on already with the payment infrastructure 99% of people already have? Micropayments via crypto are just payment with extra steps.
I'm not for/against either one. I'd just like to see a coherent argument against the idea that crypto is a solution looking for a problem.
With the pre-pay model, you may even end up with each site dictating it’s own payment terms, which would naturally create opportunities for scammy terms that users don’t understand until their money is gone.
A tipping model incentivized quality content and keeps funds under the user’s control.
In this specific case, it looks like some Strike-related company will have custody of funds, which does defeat the purpose of using a decentralized payment method.
Basically all major payment networks are facilitated by a middleman of some sort, and that middleman entity usually has operational costs that disincentivize them from offering micropayments.
Your point about a "balance" lands though - nothing stops NYT from making one "big" charge and then deducting from it other than consumer psychology (paying $10 up front can feel different than paying $0.05 at a time, for example).
Actually, there is already a massive platform that does this sort of thing with what really are microtransactions too and even in local currencies, namely Steam.
Seems like a cryptocurrency fits nicely into “abstract credits with a consistent rate across currencies”.
(edit: spelling)
When an NFT is sold a unit of data stored on a digital ledger is transferred. When a D3 item was sold a unit of data stored on in the database was transferred. Why are those meaningfully different?
Mostly what's interesting about it is why it hasn't happened. I've noticed that actors in public blockchain ecosystems VERY strongly seek 'incentive wells' i.e. locally maximized extraction mechanisms. This might be a property of certain general public-ledger economic systems, because it sure comes up a lot. Basically the law is: as long as a blockchain/Dapp/pattern makes money, the people writing it won't improvements to it outside the core extractive mechanic; at least not without some rare external inputs, which inputs are surprisingly rare in practice.
So if your application is on an incentive hill from this perspective, you know it will never get written.
The Diablo 3 Dapp won't get written by Blizzard because it lies on an incentive hill from blizzard's perspective, simply because: assets would (1) increase item prices due to fees and (2) Blizzard would be cut out as a middleman for at least some transactions.
Only once you find public-ledger tech that fixes those incentives (and probably other incentives I've missed) will you start to see interesting and complex distributed applications
My only "get off my lawn" take on it
Also it all seems to be digitally drawn portrait templates with different accessories on (eg robot heads). I have no idea if they sell but someone's giving Twitter a bunch of money to shove those in my face haha. I'll put that one down to not getting it, I never got into pokemon cards etc either