The NFT Bay is the galaxy's most resilient NFT BitTorrent site!
thenftbay.org
thenftbay.org
And I was also reading this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29270444 and started thinking about how many of the technologies we ascribe to human inventors had to have been invented millions of years ago by some alien somewhere.
And then I deleted the bit I wrote about corporations being paperclip optimizers, because it wasn’t funny, but unfocused. Kill your darlings; keep comedy to the point. And of course, I let my mind wander — comedy is found in the gaps between expectation and reality.
NFTs can basically act as identity tokens that prove community membership. They can optionally have art as part of that (like BAYC), but they can also allow access to systems (like the Urbit network).
This opens up a lot of potential interesting things, if you can have ID ownership that's on a public ledger that you can then rely on for access to different systems that'd be pretty interesting.
I think they're pretty cool and while I was initially skeptical of the art stuff, it's interesting to see artists get money from creating things (even via resale royalties) - the best ones are leveraging that to build communities around their NFTs (events, more art, etc.) - like a club.
Ownership and value are weird things anyway - especially around art. Partly tied to scarcity, partly status, social value etc. People can sneer and dismiss NFT art, but a lot of value outside of NFTs is determined by shared perception and artificial scarcity/status anyway.
As far as deeds to important things; you can lose the title to your house in the current system too. It's why you pay for title insurance.
Would I like my home dependent on me never loosing a 128-bit key? Probably not. I'm fine with Ticketmaster and the paper title to my house. But my examples are at least a million times better than the hosted JPEG stuff, which I think was the only bar I had to cross. :D
With possibilities ranging from they didn’t actually own the house, to they were mentally competent to make the decision, to the house was incorrectly registered in the gov systems.
You would still need this in a title-in-NFT world, because an NFT is just supplanting the government title office, which is actually the final source of truth on ownership (not the literal paper title).
And like the government office, which is really acting as a convoluted database (which is all the NFT chain is doing as well), you still have all the problems of dealing with fallible humans.
It’s basically a case of the naive rewrite — the current solution is too complex, so we’ll scrap it and start over… without realizing some of the complexity was accidental, but it was largely essential from dealing with all the edge cases.
With NFTs you'd need title insurance in the exact opposite direction. You'd need to insure your title to make sure that a fraudulent and irreversible NFT transaction didn't irrevocably transfer ownership of your house and leave you boned.
And also, the bar I set was "better than a database" not "better than a poorly drawn JPEG".
I still genuinely think lower value things like concert tickets are better in a shared database rather than a private one, especially since I trust the owner of the private database (Ticketmaster) exactly as far as I can throw them.
It's like buying the receipt for an expensive purchase except you don't really get anything and it still costs a lot. As far as I can tell, the entire thing is hyped by people making lots of money off it and bought by people looking for attention.
[1]https://hedera.com/users/acoer
[2]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/09/if-data-is-the-new-oi...
"Approximately 44% of health care and pharmaceutical organizations experienced a data breach caused by a third party within the last year, according to a report from critical access management firm SecureLink and Ponemon Institute.[7] “Despite this threat, just 41% of healthcare and pharmaceutical organizations have a comprehensive inventory of all third parties with access to their network,” the report said. Sixty percent agreed that managing third-party permissions and remote access to their network can be overwhelming and a drain on resources, and only 44% of these organizations know the level of access and permissions that both internal and external users hold, the report said."[1] Storage as NFTs could potentially be used to store records in a more secure and interoperable manner.[2][3]
[1]https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/report-on-patient-privacy-...
[2]https://fortune.com/2021/01/19/hospital-uk-blockchain-vaccin...
[3]https://hedera.com/learning/what-is-a-non-fungible-token-nft
https://twitter.com/beijingdou/status/1456311471613349896?re...
There used to be a number of free, online places to play Magic with people but because digital Magic cards weren’t owned outside of Wizard’s database, everyone who played got to use any cards they wanted and so they all sued the best decks with the most expensive cards - it made those places terrible to play in.
If the cards were NFTs, we could have those systems know what cards we own even if MTGO shuts down (which it basically has with how few games it supports).
I don’t want to invest time/money into digital assets that are only valid for as long as a company chooses to run their servers. I’d rather have an open economy and open access to these items which other developers can use in their games that either recreate the experience of the original, or are completely new ideas.
Even using MGTO as an example, there are game variants for Magic the Gathering that the official clients don’t support but independent clients can.
> IF YOU LIKE THESE NFTS, PLEASE BUY IT.
> THE ARTISTS PARTICIPATING IN FRAUD DESERVE SUPPORT! (c)
Did you know not all NFTs are just a hyperlink to an image?
Did you know that NFTs can give a % of every sale to the original artist in perpetuity? Without relying on a company that can deplatform you or change the rules at any time. Imagine this use case with other things too, like music. On web2 music artists only get 18% of the revenue. Spotify gets 33%. The music industry takes 49%. Web3 flips the script. Artists get 95%, the rest are fees.
Did you know that NFTs have other use cases than art? e.g. https://ens.domains
Did you know that technologies tend to get more efficient over time? Did you know many NFTs are on Solana which is already energy efficient? Ethereum is slated to be there next summer. <insert delay joke here>
People constantly devalue the real work that these "middlemen" are doing, pretending that the artist is doing it all. The label provides marketing, mixing, advice, etc which all boost the final profits of the music. Spotify provides technology, marketing, consumers, billing, distribution, etc which all boost the reach of the music.
But there is nothing stopping you from making music with no label, and putting it on bandcamp to sell directly.
There is also something off about about the "it's a url" obsession, as if the storage location of the bytes makes a conceptual difference. As if storing bytes on the blockchain (as some NFTs do) would suddenly make critics go "oh, one of copies of the JPEG is stored on the blockchain, now owning arbitrary ledger entries makes total sense".
And has produced some lovely art, too!
It would be silly to say otherwise.
Disappearing URLs is a real problem with NFTs today, regardless of how much of the concept makes sense. https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/25/22349242/nft-metadata-exp...
If NFT is stupid, it's way stupider in its current state.
If the NFT is just a URL, and there's nothing within the NFT itself that provably links it to a specific work of media, and ideally a signature from the original artist, then there's no way to be absolutely certain that the piece of media currently vended by the URL is in fact the same piece of media vended 10 years ago when it was minted. You could have a situation where people mint NFTs as "shell art" that they trade back and forth to create some kind of established history of value, and then stick in some new piece of art at a later date with a false history of value. Or the URL host could go under or get corrupted by bad actors and start vending the wrong data, and still, you'd have no way to prove what the original digital media was.
That's honestly a blocker for me.
Now, if the NFT actually included a hash of the media AND a digital signature of the artist that could be externally verified, then I might be interested.
If you see someone with a monkey profile picture, you aren't going to download some specialized software and finding it in the blockchain, verifying that the twitter user is in control of the wallet holding the token and finding the artists keys to check the signature is valid and then auditing other chains and other tokens to check that the same picture was not sold multiple times which would involve scraping the URLs and doing image comparisons.
All to verify that this twitter user actually did spend this money for a monkey picture.
Most arguments against NFTs could be levied just as effectively against the premium value of original physical art.
Or do you hold the view that art as an asset in general is a scam?
Just like physical art, the vast majority that ever gets produced is garbage that won't be preserved.
It takes decades and centuries to really weed out the truly valuable gems from the chaff. That's why "investing" in NFTs (or any art for that matter) is a sucker's game or a game for rich people who have the time and resources to promote their favorite patronized artist and keep their work elevated in our collective consciousness.
What I can't understand is why anyone with a soul thinks this is a world we should move toward.
Isn't it ironic that this one joke site actually helps solve one of the most commonly quoted issues people have with NFTs, i.e. that "you only own an URL which can be taken down at any time", by providing means of wide-scale decentralized P2P storage?
Is there something more to it that I'm not seeing?