I'm hearing this a lot, but why do you think NFTs are a scam?
https://www.wired.com/2001/12/buy-a-star-but-its-not-yours/
But good news! You can also get your star registered on the blockchain now. Whether that's any better than the ISR's legacy offering (a certificate and an entry in their own ledger) is up to you.
https://nftevening.com/star-naming-registry-gets-an-nft-twis...
Really, both products are just selling a story- a physical ledger in a vault in Geneva in the first instance, now updated to be an entry on a distributed ledger. These blockchain NFTs just make it easier for people who don't have the infrastructure of a company like the ISR to share one big ledger and dump whatever they want on there and call it an NFT.
The equivalent of email here is the blockchain ledger technology, the equivalent of Nigerian email scams are NFTs.
I suppose there might be some genuinely useful or interesting non-fungible blockchain tokens, but entries on a ledger that say you own a jpeg or whatever are not any more interesting than entries in ISR's Genevan vault.
Like, imagine if JWTs were 99% part of an MLM scheme and 1% used for authentication. People would be skeptical!
Tell that to Uniswap: https://uniswap.org/blog/uniswap-v3/
It's when people started hyping up NFTs as their own thing that stuff got weird and stupid. Like, phone numbers are useful, but vanity phone numbers definitely aren't solving any problems other than proving you have one:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/world/wp/2018/02/13/feat...
NFTs are a technical detail, but they're exciting. I'm also excited about webrtc and webauthn. These technologies enable new businesses to exist, like Uniswap.
> phone numbers are useful, but vanity phone numbers definitely aren't solving any problems other than proving you have one
Vanity phone numbers aren't a terrible comparison to the current NFT art craze.
But also, vanity phone numbers have been popular for as long as I can remember, in every location around the world. This has been true since the invention of the telephone.
It used to be that having a 212 area code number was very prestigious. That was true because it created the appearance of doing business in NYC, which meant you must be important. After all, your business exists in NYC!
Also every possible analog of vanity phone numbers that I can think of has been wildly successful. Squatting domain names comes to mind, but also registering your nickname first on whatever the next hot tech service is. If your Twitter username is <4 characters, you're probably somewhat important, because at the very least it means you were early to Twitter.
The article you linked about phone numbers is exactly the reason why art NFTs are working and will continue to grow.
> “This number gives the impression that I am distinguished, which helps me get business, especially among officials in the state ministries who I am dealing with,” he said. “If I call them from a regular number, they wouldn’t answer my call, but when they see this number, they can’t ignore it because they know a VIP is calling them.”
> “It helps me with marketing the company,” he said. “After getting one for $100, it’s helped my business grow.”
> “He cherishes it,” Mohsen said. “Just like wine, the older it gets the more valuable it becomes.”
This all seems like very normal human stuff to me.
I would encourage you to try turning on no clip or “god mode” for a game and see how much fun you have and for how long.
It was my experience that it’s fun at first but then gets boring real quick. There is value in constraints as it gives you something you can work at and achieve.
I’m of the opinion that tokens when applied to digital art typically aren’t providing much value, aside from say bragging rights / social status since digital art can be copied and viewed without owning the token. One might argue that these tokens help pay artists but 1) if that’s all one cares about then donating to them directly will give them more money since transaction fees are cheaper and 2), I haven’t looked into this directly, but it would seem token resale fees given to artists are not enforceable since they could be worked around by having a holding contract that gets traded instead. It just doesn’t seem like digital art tokens are providing much value. Now if they start to be used in some enforceable way such as in a DRMd display then this would be a form of underlying value but why not use a non DRMd display? If it’s anything like movies and music then the answer probably revolves around convenience and risk.
Then there is the more general trend of treating tokens like these as investments where the value gets driven up and, appears to me, detached from any sense of underlying value. So the only way for the sale value of these tokens to hold is to have some one else willing to buy it. But if there is no underlying value then it’s not clear to me how this can continue indefinitely.
But if a token is providing some underlying value like when it is exchangeable for a service or currency and the token’s value is close to it’s underlying value then I don’t think they are scams or at least less likely to be so.
What are your thoughts on this yrral?
For context: I was initially quite interested in the whole distributed ledger stuff from a technical perspective but stopped keeping up with it for the past couple of years or so.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/Mona_Lis...
This is a pretty high resolution copy of the Mona Lisa. If I went to see it at the Louvre in person, I wouldn't be able to see this level of detail.
I've never even seen the thing with my own eyes, but I know it's a pretty big flex by the French that they own it.
The most common reaction I've heard from people that have seen it is that it's surprisingly small.
It was insured in 2021 for $870M.
> 1) if that’s all one cares about then donating to them directly will give them more money since transaction fees are cheaper
It's not about donating to the artist directly, exactly. It's about putting a value on their work, which is likely more valuable to the artist than a direction donation.
> 2), I haven’t looked into this directly, but it would seem token resale fees given to artists are not enforceable since they could be worked around by having a holding contract that gets traded instead.
Maybe, but if you ever need to "really" own the piece for some reason, you'd have to reconcile to mainnet anyway, and the artist would get paid then. Everything else is just a promise.
For example, even today, you may need a previous NFT by an artist to get in on a new drop from that artist.
> Now if they start to be used in some enforceable way such as in a DRMd display then this would be a form of underlying value but why not use a non DRMd display?
Actually, most artists want their work to be widely seen. This creates a virtuous cycle. You buy an artist's work, which increases the value of that work, which increase the artist's exposure, which increase the artist's perceived value, which increases the value of the work you purchased, which leads to more sales for the artist, etc.
Instead of a one-time donation, the fan becomes quite literally invested in the artist.
It's the same reason a musician might want to trend on TikTok by giving away 60 seconds of their song "for free" in the hopes to make it up on streaming, merch, ticket sales, and influence later.
> Then there is the more general trend of treating tokens like these as investments where the value gets driven up and, appears to me, detached from any sense of underlying value. So the only way for the sale value of these tokens to hold is to have some one else willing to buy it. But if there is no underlying value then it’s not clear to me how this can continue indefinitely.
I remember being much younger and seeing people buy toys, instruments, and curiosities "as an investment". Most of these didn't work out, but occasionally I see something from my childhood on ebay and think "oh, well, obviously that was going to be important, i should have bought a couple of those and put it away".
Time causes some things to crystalize and other things to fade into obscurity. I suspect the same will happen with these "original" era NFTs.
> I've never even seen the thing with my own eyes, but I know it's a pretty big flex by the French that they own it.
> It was insured in 2021 for $870M.
That's fair but I would argue that physical ownership of it is different than digital ownership in that physical ownership inherently has some fundamental copy protections built in (at least to a point). Also I do think that the art market in general is a bit special in that it's kind of hard to assign an underlying value to the asset given that art is so subjective from both a personal and cultural perspective.
Some in this HN discussion have made the comparison to star registries and that seems apt as theoretically anyone can start their own star registry and naming a star in there largely has no effect outside of that [1][2][3][4]. If you want to pay a few bucks to "name" a star in some one's personal record of account then fair enough; I can see how that could make a fun gift, especially for a child. But if now you were to spend a couple thousand or millions of dollars then I'd really start to question the intent of the registry.
Maybe I misunderstood your point though.
> It's not about donating to the artist directly, exactly. It's about putting a value on their work, which is likely more valuable to the artist than a direction donation.
Also a fair point.
> Maybe, but if you ever need to "really" own the piece for some reason, you'd have to reconcile to mainnet anyway, and the artist would get paid then.
If the royalty fee is percentage of the resale value, which I believe is common [5], then ownership can still be had without paying the fee by any party by selling the token to the contract for free, trading the contract for some amount, and then triggering the sale from the contract to the contract holder for free. Since the amount the token is ever sold for in this scenario is 0 then no fees are ever owed.
Now if a fixed amount royalty fee were used then one party would have to pay the fee to put the token in the holding contract and then the final party would have to pay a fee to take it out but in between the contract could be traded fee free.
> Actually, most artists want their work to be widely seen. This creates a virtuous cycle. You buy an artist's work, which increases the value of that work, which increase the artist's exposure, which increase the artist's perceived value, which increases the value of the work you purchased, which leads to more sales for the artist, etc.
So artists want their work to be widely seen to increase its popularity and desire and narrowly owned so that value can be assigned and transferred.
I'm not sure how NFTs on their own accomplish this for digital assets. It seems to me the inherent fungibility of the digital art sets it apart from physical art or objects. Just because the token is non fungible doesn't make the asset it intends to represent non fungible. One would need some way to enforceably and meaningfully bind the two fully or partially (say with a limited view count per individual, restricted use, etc) to accomplish this. Without any restrictions on the digital art then all you have left is social perception as an enforcement mechanism.
Now that I think about it I think that's the crux of the argument.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_designations_and_names...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Star_Registry#Fa...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Star_Registrar
4: https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=b&k1=-1&kam=osm&kak=-1&kax=-1&ka...
5: https://www.nft-innovation.com/post/how-do-nft-royalties-wor...