“The NFT Bay” Shares Multi-Terabyte Archive of ‘Pirated’ NFTs
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
https://gist.github.com/zhuowei/ebd5601f7dd8e5ee186bf302874e...
There was the study yesterday that showed that 70% of crypto trading was wash trading. I.e junk to inflate the appearance of the market. I see this being mostly zeros as effectively the same. It was meant to be found to be junk, to show how stupid it all is.
You don't ask for btc price X on coinbase versus btc price Y on biance? Wouldn't you just care about the price of btc? and if it rises on certain exchanges, then it would arbitrage until it rose on other exchanges as well?
More like the opposite. The fake price rise would be arbitraged away to match the real price.
At some point there has to be a real buyer/seller, otherwise arbitrage doesn't work. And a real buyer/seller is trading at the real price.
Not commenting on the general sentiment.
Specifically, what part of their methodology is not rigorous?
Given that a substantial chunk of the top tier exchanges have been caught and charged with wash trading (Bitmex, Coinbase), I think we already have quite a bit of circumstantial evidence to suggest it is likely an issue.
The former seems pointless, but for the latter, I’m under the assumption that the NFT chain stores the image hashes directly, and those hashes are enforced to be unique — so there should be only one instance of a zero hash? Or I suppose a ton of images with like three bytes set and bunch of nothing for padding
Of course, given enough unreasonably scepticism someone might instead intuit that 18.99 TB of 19TB of data has disappeared.
Although this is totally different, because it’s blockchain.
Thorstein Veblen already in the late 1800s had pointed out that an object's utility as a status signal increases in tandem with its uselessness. The object must then also be recognized among peers as difficult to obtain. For the moon shares analogy to work, being objectively worthless or grossly overvalued is insufficient, it had to have also been exclusive and coveted among the "high class".
Status cannot be manufactured, it spurs naturally due to having rare things such as a big mansion, grammys, academy awards, winning the Super Bowl , winning the NBA title, winning the World Series etc.
All those things are both rare and cannot be copied.
NFTs instead are easily copied idividually (right click) or even in bulk as this torrent file proves.
Second life did a much better job at representing status goods in the digital world than NFTs.
And I know people in here don't want to hear it, but given its history and its budget Zuck's Meta will improve upon what Second Life did and knock it out of the park like it did with social networks.
No, you're copying a piece of media that NFT links to. What you're not copying is a verifiable claim of spending unreasonable amount of ETH to have a record in blockchain pointing to that piece of media.
POF? Proof-of-foolishness?
In the art world, wealthy collectors will overbid on works by artists within their collection to hugely inflate their price. There is also a large amount of pressure on appraisers to overvalue work and for Art houses to turn a blind eye to some known forgeries. The wealthy will donate to museums to lend to an air of prestige to their collections (with tax evasion by charity write offs a nice bonus) and, whenever forgeries are found in collections, lawsuits and bribes are used to silence all but those with rare levels of integrity.
A less exclusive but still grossly over priced example is the recent world of fast fashion product drops. There, mass produced, cheaply manufactured, labor exploited goods are sold for many times their production costs by creating an illusion of scarcity and prestige. This is done by manipulative marketing tricks where social media and celebrity worship are key vehicles.
This, sadly, is the nature of humans. NFTs are in the process of attempting to install themselves as status goods. That is the psychology when denouncing "right clickers".
its closer to tulip mania with a 'distributed' MLM pyramid scheme twist.
There is nonetheless a clear mapping to physical art world collections in terms of owning a rare work by a skilled artist and having it connected to some trusted proof representing a unique transaction with that artist.
Except the blockchain only keeps the url, so the “content” doesn’t get any of the properties of the blockchain
That said, tokens that are not pinned to IPFS are fucking worthless, and it's hard to tell whether an NFT is pinned to IPFS unless you're skilled at navigating Ethereum contacts.
Within the moon share ecosystem, moon shares have the exact same kind of authority.
Value's always worth what someone will pay, sure. But blockchain authority isn't more special than any other database. It has some fancy properties, but they don't affect the authority.
Contrast with a token in your wallet on the blockchain. As long as your private keys are secure, nobody else but you can transfer that token anywhere else. Nobody else can convincingly represent that they are the owner of it. The blockchain proves irrefutably that you own it. The blockchain, as represented by the consensus of thousands of nodes, is the ultimate authority of who owns what on that blockchain.
In what sense does a Token give you any ownership over any part of the image? If someone does a copy&paste operation and starts selling "your" image on a t-shirt, does your NFT give you any way to stop them?
I can go to the Louvre and take a picture of the Mona Lisa. That doesn't mean I own the Mona Lisa.
Let's say you go to Sotheby's and you buy Van Gogh's Starry Night at auction. Along with the actual painting, you'd get a certificate of authenticity showing the provenance of the work. Basically, a record showing everyone who owned it before you and certifying that this is, in fact, the real Starry Night that Van Gogh painted. The real value of the painting is not in the painting itself, but in that certificate proving that it's the real original. If you tried to sell the painting without it, you wouldn't get many buyers. There's lots of people who could paint an exact replica of Starry Night, but there's still only one real Starry Night. Likewise, anyone can make a copy of a piece of digital art, but there's only one NFT, and if you don't have the NFT in your crypto wallet, you don't actually own it.
So, think of it as a certificate of authenticity for digital artworks, although it can be used to represent ownership of other things as well, if people agreed to it. It can also do neat things like transfer a portion of the sale price back to the original artist every time it's sold, which isn't currently done with regular artworks.
Not true. Banksy sold a painting for $1.4 million and it shredded itself right after the auction ended. Three years later the shredded remains (presumably with the certificate of authenticity) sold for $25.4 million[1]. So, no, the value is not in an intact painting.
Forgers can artificially age paintings. It's amazing the lengths they go to. Maybe something like Starry Night has been analyzed enough that it could be verified, but other works are not. It's not really known how many works of art on the market are forgeries.
> No one would want to buy the certificate from you but let you keep the painting in your vaults
Actually people do this all the time. They pay millions upon millions of dollars for a work of art and it gets loaned to a museum and possibly sent all over the world. They still own it though. There's also freeports[2] around the world with warehouses full of art. You can buy an artwork and it never moves from the warehouse, just the record of who owns it changes.
[1] https://nypost.com/2021/10/14/shredded-banksy-artwork-could-...
The value of art is art. If we disagree then you are admitting that both the art world and crypto are heavily used for money laundering.
Neither of those are necessary for the blockchain because nobody can assert ownership of the blockchain tokens without the private keys to your wallet.
Authority within the moon share ecosystem is validated only by the people who own the company.
But the potential authority over the actual moon is the same under both systems.
Right.
And a blockchain only solves a tiny percentage of ownership issues. It solves those issues with powerful mathematical certainty, and if you could live inside a blockchain your problems would be solved*, but don't confuse that sliver with the full set of real-world ownership issues that exist with or without a blockchain being involved.
* if there are no bugs or hacks
But whatever, think whatever you want. Just know that you're the guy in 1995 ranting about how this silly Internet fad is just something nerds waste time with.
In 1995 most of the uses of the internet were stupid. Eventually, they became useful. Hopefully the same happens with crypto
https://nftmoon.space/en/home/
How anyone thinks all this isn’t a bubble is beyond me…
As an investment asset? Almost certainly. Nobody is going to want your CSGO skins in 20 years time when it doesn't have any players anymore, and we don't often hear about $50k second life purchases anymore when they were a weekly news item in the noughties.
If you buy one because you want to play with it? Fine, that's not a bubble. Enjoy!
If you are just buying one just because you think the value will go up, and the asset doesn't generate any returns other than the price people are willing to pay for it, and other people primarily want it because they think the price is going to go up - you are probably in a bubble.
Video game cosmetics derive their appeal from people using them while they actually play the game, not from showing off the database flag that activates it for the account. With NFTs, the whole game part of the game cosmetics analogy is missing.
So then you have to move to a whitelist system where someone centralized (or a DAO) has to manually act as a copyright system, whitelisting hashes, duplicating the work of the existing copyright and legal system.
Who is going to pay a studio to develop the models, artwork and code required to have a ‘NFT skin’ in a game? Money is made by selling a skin multiple times to return effort.
And what if I want that skin in League, rather than GTA? The whole concept is a nonsense.
Influencers + shady finance have collided to *create a climate melting scam.
Edit: spelling and errant word
A physical world example is the combination of social media marketing, fast fashion and product drops. Items are sold for many multiples of their production cost due to a manufactured air of exclusivity and scarcity. As the items are mass produced from exploited labor, a bottleneck from time consuming highly skilled craftwork cannot be the cause of high prices.
There are many examples of conspicuous over consumption and status goods, all of them defying common sense to most. Remember the "I AM RICH" app? The NFT version is the same principle, merely on a different type of datastore.
Particularly relevant to NFTs is the art world of artificially inflated prices, donations to manufacture prestige and where fakes are hard to tell to the untrained eye and wealthy buyers bring lawsuits or otherwise buy the silence of those who can prove forgeries.
The artifact or artwork is not the goal, instead the ability to take something useless or mundane but somehow demonstrable as unique, prove provenance and flaunt wealth to some peer group considered high status is the goal. I suspect NFTs are currently in a gold rush stage and comparatively more open. When the loose flow of money is over, I expect it will decay back to gated elitism typical of the existing art world.
Underlying something like an Ethereum linked IPFS hash artifact are interesting consensus algorithms for persistent data-structures on open distributed networks. That they're being used in this manner is not surprising. It's reflective of humans, not something inherent to the utility of the tech.
>And what if I want that skin in League, rather than GTA?
Too bad. Most games are not going to put in work to support other game's cosmetics.
In what way, specifically?
From your original comment: "imagine something like steam profile avatars/pictures etc. tied to your identity that you can use on any page that implements it."
That sounds 100% like Gravatar. We already have exactly that, without any of the problematic aspects of being tied to NFTs or blockchain.
While true, the only one deciding whether you are granted the ingame usage is still the developer/publisher, so in that scenario you basically just did exactly the same thing as before: a database lookup to check if a player "owns" a particular item. Only this time with a much slower and more inefficient database. Nothing about it being a NFT grants any advantages in that case, the developer can still take it away, ban your account, remove the item from the game etc. because they are still the ones controlling everything. You just decentralized the database entry.
Digital “jurisdictions” like Twitter are starting to support displaying “verified” NFTs though: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bragging-rights-twitter-previ...
The next step in the chain is OpenSea, which sounds like they will enforce real world copyrights: https://support.opensea.io/hc/en-us/articles/4404423595667-H...
So basically Twitter is outsourcing copyright enforcement via NFTs. Which actually doesn’t sound totally useless, but could also be done without a blockchain.
Now, when many content displayers (websites, games, multiverses, etc) outsource their copyright enforcement to multiple copyright-enforcers maybe using the blockchain starts making more sense.
Blockchain only makes “sense” because it's hype. (And regarding Twitter, it's mostly because @Jack is a total crypto believer).
I think a blockchain can still be useful in federated systems.
How so? As soon as you have to trust someone, you've lost the only benefit of blockchains and using one would only give the terrible performance characteristic of those for no benefit.
Each trusted enforcer having its own database is a way better architecture.
Tying a copyright license (at least non exclusive) to the NFT transfer sounds not that far fetched. It would be a little bit tricky to make that work globally but you could probably do that as well.
The question is would courts accept it as a valid contacts and how to enforce them. How would NFT prevent infringement (aka mme creating the latest bansky NFT)?
It's indeed what some artists and some of the NFT marketplaces do.
All of the things you've mentioned already exist, with a lot less effort. Copyright law is well established on digital goods. Contract/IP law is well established.
If NFTs have utility, beyond greater fool theory, then surely it will exist beyond having to go replicate all of these web2/tradfi/whatever concepts. Otherwise, what's the point?
There is more value in being the owner of the thing everyone has, than the thing no one has.
Keep right clicking, we love it.
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/85/156418/my-collectible-ass/
Everybody has a Yankees logo on hat or on a cup or a scarf somewhere.
Small detail is that everybody who does has to pay royalties to the Yankees and as a consequene to Yankees' owners : the Steinbrenner family.
What you claim the NFT crowd is enthusiast about is basically what Gucci, Ray-Ban, LVHM and all the other luxury brands have been fighting for ages now.
Chinese copies not paying any royalties selling on the street for 5$ whereas the original sells for 5000$.
Luxury brands fight it with lawsuits and holograms, whereas the NFT crowd aims to fight it with blockchain.
But images are images and outside the lunatics of the NFT community if I right click a cool piece of art and show it to somebody, they'd reply that it's cool and would not ask for proof of ownership. The thing being on my computer or on my wall is all the proof of ownership they need before complimenting me . Very much like people would compliment my 5$ Ray-Ban shades and my GF 25$ LV handbag and nobody is going to check the hologram on either
A lot of people think that, but I would consider that more of a requirement than the purpose.
The point of NFTs is to allow the original artist to share some of the financial rewards that the art dealers and collectors get each time they resell a piece of artwork in the future. The goal is to help restore some balance and fairness to the financial side of the art trade, particularly for new artists, who often can't earn a living wage on the original sales alone. And of course, being able to verify "ownership" of the "original" work is necessary to get the artist a piece of the pie whenever that NFT is sold.
Yes, you're right about access to the work... as an observer, anyone can enjoy looking at the art just the same as the person who owns the rights to it. Just like any other image on the internet, making a copy of it doesn't give you the rights to that image. So, I don't understand the point of this archive unless it's truly just to archive the data incase the blockchain goes down.
> At any rate, copyright licenses cannot be enforced with smart contracts
Wasn't claimed either. Why do people keep inventing claims to then criticize them? (I'm not even into NFTs, don't own any and don't plan to, but a lot of the reaction is just bizarre. No, they don't magically enforce copyright. No, they also aren't supposed to.)
Is it recognized by the law? Can people sue those who fail to comply with it?
You can do all the circular reasoning you want but at the end of the day everything is backed by violence and coercitive power.
That's why nations have army/navy , to make other countries know that what they say carries weight because they can back it up with bullets and bombs, not just words.
You can't.
Besides, NFT enthusiasts have the illusion that the graphic art market is big. It's not.
Just think about how many people you know that have a painting in their home. And no, the IKEA type paintings do not count. I mean a genuine painting.
Yep, same as any other licensed thing. Because copyright law is still just copyright law. NFTs don't magically add universal enforcement, and aren't supposed to.
> NFT enthusiasts have the illusion that the graphic art market is big. It's not.
Yes, there is a lot of crazy hype and over-expectations around, and sadly getting most of the attention.
In the US, anyway, doing that would not be a copyright violation.
If there wasn't a fun speculative element, then most of the artists would have trouble getting anyone to download their stuff even for free (just like most game devs struggle to get anyone to play their games - even when they're pretty good).
So really, if this art project does succeed it could be an interesting new distribution channel!
[1] - https://mattdesl.substack.com/p/hicetnunc-and-the-merits-of-...
But it's a very meta "art" piece as described by the article, especially if it also serves as an NFT asset itself. Will be interesting to see how how far this layer cake will go.
It's like DocuSign + APIs + banking + decentralized security and governance all rolled into one, and I think societal and economic changes will catch up to make this new system of transactions much more valuable.
What makes you think that? When I see that the people that are the most invested aren't bothering to tie any real rights to the NFTs, that's a really bad sign.
Blockchains are also pretty bad at banking in general.
Which is what makes art NFTs particularly mockworthy.
The platform providers would still need to agree that a specific blockchain / NFT is actually the source of truth, and so it's not really trustless. But the internet itself isn't perfectly decentralized either. I could see a future where developers could enable web3 support in their games/apps and allow importing assets, identities etc. between platforms, which would be nice.
Why would an asset designed for one game make sense or look good or feel at home in a completely different one?
Why would companies make one of them and sell it for a million bucks instead of trying to convince more players to buy it in a shop for two bucks?
Is the mechanic of a weapon gonna adjust to the new game when you import it or stay the same? If it stays the same, it's gonna be exploit galore. If it changes, well then, what's the point? Gonna be the same AK-47 as everyone else's, but this tiny sticker on it that nobody's gonna pay attention to is unique!
Even if we pretend this is somehow a promising field, why even use NFTs and make each one a couple of pixels different instead of making a common one, selling it for like $50, buyers get a file in whichever format is agreed upon, and import them in the settings?
Eg if I have a red hat nft you could have that as 2d sprite art or a 3d model or just a buff to some other stat or just ignore it.
Why wouldn’t they sell it for a couple of bucks? It doesn’t have to be expensive because it’s an nft, plenty of them are sold for pennies. erc1155 is designed with lots of varying items being created on the same contract.
Why nfts? Because it’s easy to do today and has been getting more and more popular over the past three years. It seems people like them.
People don’t want to download files and import them into programs. Having one login(wallet) that you connect to anything you want and it takes your data and belongings with you seems pretty neat to me.
Just think about the things you buy online, be it movies, artwork, music, in app upgrades etc. Today we trust each individual app developer to honour the purchase agreement, eg. if the Amazon disappears or changes their license agreement, all your purchases are gone.
Tomorrow we might be able to purchase a license to the asset, registered on a public blockchain, and use that to prove ownership within an application. You could actually own some of things you currently “buy” online.
This is a huge net win for end users.
How? Why does it matter that it's on some blockchain?
We’d need some kind of way to trust a public database among untrusted participants- which is what a blockchain basically does.
Are NFTs likely to do that? No. Why would game/platform creators do a ton of work so they could make less money? And even if they wanted to, which they won't, why would they bless some specific blockchain with that power? If that is at all viable, somebody like Steam or Amazon will want it to be their own digital assets registry that wins. For that, they don't need a blockchain, just a database.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/15/22728425/valve-steam-blo...
I know, right? Or to look at another similar situation: why would Verizon, China Mobile, T-Mobile, and AT&T all make their voice/data networks interoperable?
Obviously, they wouldn't chose to do that.
And the analogy is terrible because the whole purpose of telephones is interconnection; the value is in the size of the network. But from the consumer perspective, portability for music purchases or game assets is at best a secondary concern.
NFTs along with all non money crypto feel like a solution in search of a problem. And all of these solutions are things already possible and easier without crypto.
One day, it might not be a normal business practice.
Is this something that players desire to do?
Other than the mystery and the joke what's the meaning of a NFT for the URL of a deleted tweet?
Well, I suppose separating speculators from their money is another answer.
I wouldn’t even be mad if you kept the money.
Gotta love this logic.So if i don't right-click your precious NFT I don't pirate it, how about if i get it from my browser's image cache?Am i pirating it then or not?(I'm not going into copying and selling, which is more nuanced, but even then one could argue in the same manner).
To me these questions are extremely rhetorical, especially if one believes in the concept of property. If you don't want to freely give people copies of your precious hard work,don't put it on the internet, period, not even under a protected information system. I would further argue on this principle about computer security aswell, but that actually requires understanding how computers work, which the vast majority doesn't know.
By putting your work publicly available you already explicitly give permission on people to copy your bits into their computers(a.k.a viewing).I guess people think machines are like humans and automatically "forget" what they see, thus enforcing the value of copyright.
Thanks for backing up all the art dude. Much appreciated.