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Comment by victorvosk | Hacker News Reader

I don't even know where to begin. We are at this stage in the crypto bull market that all the smart people who refuse to believe in it are getting upset and are writing angry articles.

You cannot realistically write an article dumping on NFTs and digital assets unless you also go after 95% of game developers which are making exponentially more money on microtransactions than the entire NFT marketspace.

Underground gambling rings formed around CS:GO skins. People are spending thousands of dollars on ships in Start Citizen. Most of League of Legends business model is in-game skins.

These are all digital assets that the users don't even really own if they read the terms of service. They are nothing more than flex pieces in game that can be taken away at any time. Don't even get me started on mobile games targeting kids.

But for some reason the bridge too far is adults putting jpegs in their twitter profile pictures.

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> But for some reason the bridge too far is adults putting jpegs in their twitter profile pictures.

That's not the bridge too far. It's not about the JPEG, it's about the bullshit shoehorning of 'ownership' around infinitely-copyable bits put in place by a culture that seems to care more about ownership than equality.

Digital economies are a land of plenty, where nobody can own anything and bits copy themselves freely. NFTs shoehorn a scarcity economy on top of that, which suits those with no concept of the reality of the digital world. NFTs and DRM have no place in cyberspace, yet here they are.

The world is a much better place without enforcement of "ownership". NFTs and DRM go against the grain of our digital reality.

I can't find the link right now but I literally just read an article on here (not this one) explaining this far more eloquently than I can; it laments the death of open-source culture (openness, equality, egalitarianism) that underpins nearly everything digital.

NFTs provide proof of ownership of something unique, not enforcment. You are still free to put any jpeg you want on any profile pic you want. Like you can reproduce and hang a multi million dollar painting on your wall without enforcement but that provides no proof you own the original thing.

I do not get the argument that an algorithm for decentralized proof of ownership of an unique token has any moral attribution to it. If anything it enables a future where content creators can get income for their content without the ad industry (youtube, major labels, facebook etc) getting any cut. And that could lead to the erosion of IP laws all together.

We are already seeing experiments with distribution of royalties implemented with NFT smart contracts of today and the tech is still in it's infancy both in implementation and applications.

The reality is that good content, be it art or media, needs revenue for the content creators to produce content. Currently their options are limited to censoring themselves in the name of profit because profits are gatekeeped by the ad industry via the monopolies of google facebook and amazon.

A future where digital economies are decentralized and self sufficient, where anyone can publish and make royalties via the uniqueness of holding the "original" work of content and all future developments in this space is a future I look forward to.

As the article rightly points out NFTs do not provide proof of ownership of the underlying asset just of the NFT itself. And even that’s only true if you choose to view them as bearer instruments. The law governs ownership of the underlying not the chain. Divergence will always settle in favor of the law.

Yes, just like a house ownership contract by itself is just a piece of paper and is independent of the underlying house. And to prove your ownership of your house that contract must be validated by a central authority - a goverment.

A house ownership NFT on the other hand requires no central authority for validation and complete strangers can exchange that house without a central authority being involved in proof of trust, and the buyer can immediatly charge rent based on his new ownership of the house. Thus removing several layers of bureaucracy.

Indeed, enforcment against mallicious misapropiation of ownership still requires a central authority with monopoly on violence.

> That's not the bridge too far. It's not about the JPEG, it's about the bullshit shoehorning of 'ownership' around infinitely-copyable bits put in place by a culture that seems to care more about ownership than equality.

> Digital economies are a land of plenty, where nobody can own anything and bits copy themselves freely. NFTs shoehorn a scarcity economy on top of that, which suits those with no concept of the reality of the digital world. NFTs and DRM have no place in cyberspace, yet here they are.

Wait, I'm confused. In the first part you mock the idea that NFTs amount of 'ownership' since its infinetely copyable. but the next sentence you bemoan how NFTs are introducing artificial scarcity and are like DRM.

Parent's central argument seems to be that creators of digital content do not deserve ownership of or royalties for their work because bits are infintley-copyable...

>it laments the death of open-source culture

Imagine a world where contributors to an open source project earn royalties from, say, FAANG using the open source project based on ownership of their contribution. Is that the death of open source culture or the rennisance?

>The world is a much better place without enforcement of "ownership".

Then you will have no problem if I move in with you, kick you out of the house you own then charge rent on your house?

The differences are:

1. Most of society already agrees that paying for in game assets is stupid, so there's no need to make the argument.

2. People who buy in game assets do it because they actually want the thing they are buying, a large portion of spending on NFTs is people who are just hoping the prices will go up

"How dare people be angry about my favorite scam when other scams exist!"

Seriously

It’s literally impossible for us to try and stop a scam that’s smaller than any other scam.

Yes, it is also kind of silly to spend a lot of money on a skin in a game. But the difference is that video game companies are not claiming that their skins are revolutionizing the world.

>But the difference is that video game companies are not claiming that their skins are revolutionizing the world.

I think Epic is claiming exactly this, and to be honest, I don't think they are wrong.

The difference is that video games have a way to enforce ownership. CS:GO skins are valuable because Valve doesn’t let you just upload your own skins.

I can download any NFT and use it as my own profile picture.

If I understand NFTs correctly, anyone can verify who owns the NFT. No one is claiming the NFT is literally just the bytes of the profile picture. The NFT is the control of the token on the blockchain. Likewise, anyone could download the bytes of a 3D model of a weapon or hat in a video game. The only difference is that Valve’s software will check the canonical source of ownership, which isn’t much different than if Twitter or any other social network writes code to verify the ownership of an NFT representing some profile picture.

The latter only works if Twitter stops you uploading any old image. Hence trying to find some way to differentiate regular profile pictures from NFT profiles. But the latter still only works if the general population of Twitter thinks it’s cool. Otherwise you’re marking yourself out as a rube. Whereas skins and other DLC are broadly accepted in games if only from the perspective that most people don’t care what skin you use. That and most games with DLC charge a fixed rate and offer it to everyone rather than making individual items scare.

> The latter only works if Twitter stops you uploading any old image.

Sure, or if they check the images you upload (YouTube does this on a massive scale). Or if they show a checkmark on verified images. Or if they prevent uploading unverified profile images at all (presumably this is how Valve games work, so that everyone can't just download a copy of the expensive item and use it online).

> But the latter still only works if the general population of Twitter thinks it’s cool.

Yes, of course, but as you explain, that's no different than with video games, especially if the items are purely cosmetic.

I don’t think you can just snip all the context out of what I said and pretend I agree. I explain in the post you quote what the meaningful differences are.

I believe I can take a BAYC, mint my own NFT of it, upload it and still get the check mark haha.

Indeed, unless Twitter were to check each profile picture against some database of known images. That would be silly, of course, but precisely as silly as YouTube checking 100s of hours of video footage every minute against known copyrighted footage.

The more attention the BAYC receives, the more it increases its value. Having people so desperate to own one that they would counterfeit it, that's enormous social proof. Will your personal version ever have monetary value? The blockchain ensures that it won't, as detecting a counterfeit is simple.

Who's desperate? Anyone can have the image whenever they want. The receipts, who cares? I don't want some crappy monkey profile pic haha. I was just speculating about the check mark.

Sure, but It won’t be minted with the same BAYC contract and hence won’t have same provenance. Twitter could easily add visual or text (e.g: logo name of author / collection) provenance info that yours won’t have.

I think it's safe to assume that you would only get the check mark if your NFT is minted from the original contract. This is an issue for brand new collections (and you see this happen on OpenSea where people fork new a new popular collection). But it's really easy to just whitelist the original BAYC contract address

Twitter is using verified OpenSea sets. Your copy paste NFT can't be used on your Twitter profile.

Sounds pretty not decentralized.

Twitter has never been decentralized.

If an app wanted to do this in a decentralized way then they'd likely have Kleros curate a list of known NFT sets or use a standard like TokenLists where a user can subscribe to whatever curated list of known NFTs they wanted.

Yeah but why would Twitter do that?

Sure, and that benefits the NFT owner, by increasing attention and exposure to the NFT he/she owns. If you'd like to use an NFT I own as your profile pic, you have my express permission. I'll help you do it!

> I can download any NFT and use it as my own profile picture.

You cannot, unless you have a vastly different understanding of what an NFT is than what it actually is. A NFT is not a picture, it's a cryptocurrency that only has one item. You could download the data representing a NFT (it's just ascii data), but not sure what you'd get out of that.

That's the use for it though. If Valve hypothetically minted NFTs for each unique individual CSGO skin variation, it'd be valued and would create a secondary market free of Valve's constant rent seeking. I see that as a very legitimate use of the technology.

You're mentioning a lot of unrelated problems.

Not a single one solved by NFT.

I think your sentiment is phrased in the first sentence. "We are entering a crypto bull market", which is just greed. As usual.

> You're mentioning a lot of unrelated problems.

I agree, but I would say that the OP is not even point out multiple problems, or any problem at all. The OP just points to in-game microtransactions, and hopes that if it's possible to make them sound extremely absurd and irrational, the absurdity and irrationality of NFTs can sound less bad.

It's possible to think both are bad, but if we're comparing them, NFTs are exponentially worse than game items because:

1. game items don't generally imply worth will appreciate/speculation, while NFTs do

2. crypto consumes the electricity of a mid-sized country

I don't think this makes sense. Microtransaction cosmetics have value beyond just the concept of ownership. You get to show your friends in game the new skin or whatever.

You can't do that with NFTs other than just showing people the image you paid for.

Gaming skins aren't assets, they're licensing/service agreements. Even if you have the option to resell, you're trading your rights not your "assets".

From a purely pragmatic ownership perspective, NFTs would only matter if ownership gives the owner exclusive rights to the property. Owning a physical Picasso is always going to be more valuable than owning a unique digital copy of anything (bcs it can only be unique based on a version in a specific network).

Microtransactions, but they use a million times more energy. Now we're cookin'

Hi, commenting here because there's no private messages: I saw your comment about having a browser that still supports TabMixPlus/multirow tabs. If you check the readme on https://github.com/onemen/TabMixPlus, you'll find steps to patch TMP into current Firefox versions. Note that this may impact your security.

> Underground gambling rings formed around CS:GO skins. People are spending thousands of dollars on ships in Start Citizen. Most of League of Legends business model is in-game skins.

In 100 years, these will bo to 0. Same for NFTs and most probably most current cryptocurrencies. The stock market will be still there.

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