TheNFTBay: Fake, but Worth Discussing
clubnft.com
clubnft.com
This is a false statement. The NFT doesn’t make you the owner of ‘the work’. It makes you the owner of the NFT.
> The same way purchasing a painting gives you the right to resell that painting and prove to others that you are the owner, but does not necessarily convey copyright or other rights (unless worked out separately via a contract), purchasing an NFT gives you the right to resell that NFT and prove to others that you are the owner.
I.e, In the same way that if you own a paining, the painting is yours and not the copyright. If you own an NFT, only the NFT is yours and not the artwork.
> Just like a deed conveys ownership of a house at some address, the token conveys ownership of that media.
No it doesn’t.
If you own a house, there are many things you can do with the house that others are legally prohibited from doing.
If you own an NFT, you have no more rights over the media than someone who doesn’t own an NFT.
> Just like you can invite a neighbor over to visit your house, and a car driving by can take a photo of your house, anybody can view the media associated with your NFT.
This is obviously absurd.
If you own a house, it’s illegal for people to visit without being invited. If you own an NFT, an infinite number of people can I air the media without you even knowing, let alone inviting them.
Also, a person driving by your house with a car can’t legally park in your driveway or come in and sleep in your bed, whereas someone with a copy of the media can do anything the owner of the NFT can do, including invite others to look at it.
NFTs seem like blockchain graffiti. You've purchased the right to tag a passing train car, that's all.
It means that the shared ledger (also called blockchain) has a record of that specific NFT belonging to your address.
> Can you even repudiate ownership later if you so chose?
Yes, you send it to a "burn address" which is a address no one has access to.
> Can you remove the record of your ownership of the NFT?
Like remove the history? If so, no, blockchains are (usually) immutable ledgers, it's actually one of the core value propositions for blockchains. You can send the NFT to a "burn address" if you don't want it anymore.
> Can you transfer that ownership outside of the blockchain?
Well, kind of but not really. You question is a bit like if you can transfer the ownership of a .com domain to outside the internet. I guess you could, in some way, but in most practical ways, no.
> NFTs seem like blockchain graffiti. You've purchased the right to tag a passing train car, that's all.
I don't know what to make of this, how is it related to graffiti and tagging trains?
A NFT is a really simple concept if you stop thinking about pictures and other media (since that doesn't really have anything to do with NFTs): A NFT is a cryptocurrency which only has a single token of itself. Like there only was one Bitcoin that was indivisible. You can transfer it to other addresses, but there can only be one at a time. That's all there is to it.
Such a token is inherently worthless. The only value comes from rights that token can confer.
That’s why people are trying to associate them with objects of real-world value.
Do you see data as being inherently worthless as well? Because that's all there is, data. And according to the current market, it's not worthless, just like even if some people consider Bitcoin to be inherently worthless, there is a market that says it isn't.
What's that worth? Data by itself is inherently worthless. It's only worth something if it represents something we care about. This could be something fictional (e.x. a video game world), or real (a warehouse inventory), but on it's own? Worthless.
You say an NFT is a cryptocurrency with a single individual token and... what? It's a piece of data, but what can I do with it or what can I get out of it? I can send it to someone else? Cool, what can they do with it? What benefit is there? That's the big question I've at least yet to seen answered satisfactorily.
I get there's a market for this currently, but once upon a time there was a market for pet rocks (which unlike NFTs can at least be pleasing to look at). Markets can be irrational, and the fact that there is a market price for something does not inherently mean that something has value.
I said: “The only value comes from rights that token can confer.”
Did you not see that?
To be honest, I don't see much value in the current Images-as-NFTs hype either, but again, who am I to judge what people spend their money on? I also thought the same about Bitcoin initially, but after a while saw value in it myself too.
When it comes to NFTs as a concept though, I think they can be applied better than what people are currently doing. SaaS licenses that can be resold for example is one interesting use case.
I mean, ok, if we're going to engage in some form of economic nihilism then I guess we can say anything is valuable. Q-Ray Bracelets, faith healing, and star registries included. Tulip bulbs really can be "worth" a fortune. But that's not a very useful premise for discussion. What people are arguing over is whether or not there is any non-woo value to be associated with these things.
> When it comes to NFTs as a concept though, I think they can be applied better than what people are currently doing.
I'm not convinced. I keep hearing people say this but I have yet to hear even one idea that can't be done better by other, older, non-hyped technologies.
> SaaS licenses that can be resold for example is one interesting use case.
Case in point: we can do this just fine today, but we don't because there's no reason for an SaaS provider to want to do that.
What makes the iTunes MP3 marketplace valuable? What makes the Amazon Kindle text file marketplace valuable? Is there something about the virtual nature of NFTs that gets to you in a way that these intangible marketplaces don't? Why does itunes and Kindle not bother you? Because they have an army of lawyers to enforce copyrights and license agreements behind them? Does the convention and reputation-based open source nature of Web3 disturb you?
The law. Copyright law makes acquiring these works via other means slightly more difficult. Like NFTs they are just a failed attempt to force artificial scarcity into a post-scarcity space.
> Why does itunes and Kindle not bother you?
They do, but they don't have scammers constantly trying to sell their shit as some kind of revolutionary new future you have to get in on before you get left behind!!1!
> Does the convention and reputation-based open source nature of Web3 disturb you?
What disturbs me is the shift from people viewing artificial scarcity as a desperate grasping at straws from people who can't deal with information post-scarcity to people touting artificial scarcity as the glorious technological future.
Copyright law does not exclude someone from releasing on an open source blockchain as opposed to a monopoly app store.
The only reason these marketplaces exist as monopolies is because direct distribution of creative content for profit has traditionally been difficult to manage. That's all.
> They do, but they don't have scammers constantly trying to sell their shit as some kind of revolutionary new future you have to get in on before you get left behind!!1!
Only because the dust has already settled from the same thing that happened during the dot com boom and the consumer electronics boom and the mobile app store boom.
> What disturbs me is the shift from people viewing artificial scarcity as a desperate grasping at straws from people who can't deal with information post-scarcity to people touting artificial scarcity as the glorious technological future.
Copyright enforcement over monopolistic marketplaces is a form of artificial scarcity. Come on, you know this. Napster was leaps and bounds ahead of any distribution method for music back in the 90s. Cost of music redistribution has been near zero for over 20 years. It doesn't cost the band anything to have their music copy pasted on a torrent site. The entire scheme of copyright protection is an archaic method of introducing artificial scarcity for items that are cheap to reproduce (yet sometimes capital intensive to produce). NFTs are no different.
Yes, there were scams at the beginning of those booms, but at the same time, there were obvious real world applications that end users benefited from right from the start, and absolutely no sense of doubt that there was value in them.
>The entire scheme of copyright protection is an archaic method of introducing artificial scarcity for items that are cheap to reproduce (yet sometimes capital intensive to produce).
True.
> NFTs are no different.
Obviously false. NFTs don’t have the law preventing you from ignoring them.
The music is good, and it’s harder to get them elsewhere.
> What makes the Amazon Kindle text file marketplace valuable?
The books are good, and it’s harder to get them elsewhere.
> Does the convention and reputation-based open source nature of Web3 disturb you?
Why would anyone be disturbed by this? I see nothing wrong with people trading tokens. What is disturbing are claims that trading these tokens is equivalent to trading in the associated goods.
Nothing.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
My argument is that the system works just fine as a plausibly neutral ledger of account and for establishing provenance of ownership through reputation and convention.
And in fact I very much prefer it to the legions of corporate lawyers enforcing man-made copyright laws and enriching monopolistic centrally distributed platforms such as app stores. I consider it much more sustainable, universal, accessible, and respectful of human rights and expression than the current systems in place.
Where we disagree is our value judgement of that. I just don't see that as being useful per se, imo there's enough ways to move numbers around using computers already, a novel one can't really get me all that excited, especially considering its resource cost.
I have yet to see a good argument for crypto that doesn't boil down to that.
I think it's one of those "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" scenarios. Marketplace volume isn't a good in itself if the markets don't do anything useful and waste a bunch of energy, but to people bought into crypto and capitalism really deeply it seems to be enough to get excited.
False. Just like open source software, the devil is in the details (usually the LICENSE.md file). NFT projects vary dramatically in the rights they convey to holders. To the extent that these meatspace rights are enforceable, some convey commercial use, some convey personal use, some are published as creative commons, and some are ambiguous.
The NFT space is rather immature compared to open source software, however. The ambiguity is a real problem. The space would do well to standardize on licenses and stamp that on the NFT's metadata.
But in the meantime, by convention in Web3, the apps and websites that integrate NFTs respect the ownership and provide verification of ownership for integrations, such as virtual art galleries, exclusive events or areas in Decentraland, profile pic verification on ENS, wallet gallery on OpenSea, avatars in Sandbox, etc.
By convention, web3 marketplaces also respect royalties with original artists on resales.
NFTs are tokens that can be used and verified as arbitrary authentication tokens for anything, whether it be a real life event or product or access to some software or other virtual benefit.
As such, I don't see how NFT "ownership" can (currently) be construed to possess any legal rights whatsoever unless agreed upon externally to the NFT in which case... what value is the NFT adding?
Would love to get a proper legal teardown of this space.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrink_wrap_contract
[2] All this said, I could see a world where an NFT smart contract requires a cryptographically signed _legal_ contract to be hashed into the transfer as a form of legal consent. But for some reason this isn't yet reality.
But if we called NFT's 'certificates,' then less would buy into the Tulip mania.
NFT's are just a digest of certificates, public/private key pairs, and a chain of hashes.
If Lebron James put out a limited run digital model of himself, a set of hashes and schema describing the signatures, and released the certificates for purchase on Nike.com,then all the legal, authorized implementers, such as Fortnite, CS:Go, Roblox, and Halo:Infinite could all render the model, respect the ownership (or lack therof) by validating the account and object's cryptographic digest (comparing against a global ownership ledger), and allow free, unrestricted, cross-domain/platform/Intellectual property boundary transfership and use, aligning with meatspace laws...
...all without calling it an NFT.
> False.
Really? The original poster says:
> Further, I make it clear exactly what rights you and others have over the media, which is basically none.
> NFT projects vary dramatically in the rights they convey to holders. To the extent that these meatspace rights are enforceable
NFT’s don’t convey enforceable meatspace rights.
You just don’t know what’s happening.
I will have my kid draw a picture of a bridge and send you a JPG of it; you can put that on Meta Horizon as many times as you want.
Naturally like all NFT wallets I fully reserve the right to delete the repo at any time for any reason with no warning.
Lmk what you think and I’ll get you my Venmo.
If someone buys an NFT what good is it today, or what problem can it solve in future that can't more simply be solved by something that already exists?
But looking at these, I'm just not seeing the value that NFTs have provided vs already existing methods. For example I'm looking at https://somniumspace.com/parcel/3402?elv=-0.68. I assume the art on the walls here are NFTs no? And I'd have to be the owner of the NFT if I wanted to take it to my own "parcel"? But what prevents me from simply taking the source image and simply minting my own NFT and displaying it? And why would I want to use a space like this instead of something like Second Life or VR Chat where I can go the much more direct route of simply uploading a PNG?
That's the piece that I have yet to see answered clearly. I certainly get it's technically possible to build something based around NFTs, and given that they are currently trending I'm not in the least bit surprised someone has. I just can't see how it's superior either via ease of use or in technical capability to something that already exists.
Because the NFT isn't just a pointer to an image, it's a tuple that also includes which wallet address is granting you that NFT. So, the "real" NFT for a work is the one granted by the original artist or other authority people culturally agree upon as the one that has real social and economic value. (For example, the artist may post the public key somewhere authoritatively that conveys it is the one they've sanctioned.)
It effectively acts as a fully-provable (and scarce) signature by the artist, and eventually if it isn't already, will be displayed visually on the work in these apps to confer legitimacy. Putting up an image that isn't signed by the original artist will be possible, but it won't confer the same status to a person the genuine NFT would, since observers will be able to know it is not the genuine NFT.
And of course, the reason you'd want to use this kind of environment is self-referential: you want to use it because you want the status or other benefits that come from being able to put your genuine NFTs on display. For example, it can show how wealthy you are, show that you are willing to patronize artists, cause the original artist to come visit your showroom, etc.
Many different kinds of publicity stunt can achieve these things. NFTs offer no unique benefits.
The idea of artificial scarcity seems central to NFT, but it is unclear if this is really a moat or desirable. Does it really convey exclusivity over a "unique" set of bits?
That NFT is scarce. Too many people do not understand what an NFT represents and what it’s short and longer term expected conferred benefits are, and are hung up on trying to create analogies to existing forms of ownership like physical property rights or copyright.
I.e. they are in-game currency.
People are ‘hung up’ on analogies to physical ownership, because proponents of NFT’s keep claiming they are like deeds of ownership, which is what the linked article strongly asserted before it was amended.
If NFT advocates stopped calling it ownership, I don’t think anyone would be hung up about it.
People within the community are using a meaning that has essentially none of the attributes of the conventional definition while claiming that the meaning is the same.
This isn’t a question of two sides disagreeing over meanings. It’s a question of a deceptive use of a very well established pre-existing term.
The ownership of NFTs is the ability to assert you control the keys of a wallet pointing to a tuple that pairs, for example, a URL to a smart contract. Both of these elements in the tuple then confer certain things by proxy: the URL a proxy to the work, and the smart contract a proxy to an authority. Once that linkage is accepted by a third party, then it serves as a form of semantic ownership with contextual benefits (there are several contemporary realized and theoretical future ones.)
True but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a commonality to the meaning.
We don’t use the term ‘ownership’ to refer to preparing food, or driving a car for example.
And as I have pointed out. The lie is not that people don’t own NFTs. They do.
The lie is that NFTs confer ownership of the media that point to.
> Once that linkage is accepted by a third party, then it serves as a form of semantic ownership with contextual benefits
Only in the sense that owning a movie ticket provides benefits at a particular theater.
You can also keep the ticket stub as a memento or sell it if you like.
NFTs are no different.
You mean NFTs as an in-game currency for Facebook’s VR?
Yes, that’s a reasonable account of what they are good for.
Based on this thread, I would say NFTs are not.
So what exactly is the point of an "alternative form of ownership" that is only considered valid by a small subculture and not society at large? Is it really ownership in any meaningful sense?
iow: "small subcultures".
> There is no “at large” society.
Of course there is. Do you really think USD for example isn't accepted by society at large?
The fact that there are a few socialists tho object is irrelevant.
For other things like copyright and other extra-physical forms of ownership that span society at large, there is no macro set of laws governing these things universally so context matters.
Using the words macro and universally allow your statement to be true in the most literal sense that there are no universal laws, but otherwise, copyright is just as universal as land ownership. I.e. most places have a version of it, but there are many local variations.
Arguably, copyright is probably more universal than land ownership since it is a newer concept and there is less local divergence.
“Copyright laws are standardized somewhat through these international conventions such as the Berne Convention and Universal Copyright Convention. These multilateral treaties have been ratified by nearly all countries, and international organizations such as the European Union or World Trade Organization require their member states to comply with them.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#International_copyri...
Nothing suggests that existing NFTs will be relevant in that world even if the technology is.
It’s also not obvious that a distributed ledger has an advantage over a centralized one.
The value of the distributed ledger is rooted in a theory: that it will be, in the long term, the most durable and agreed upon place to look to for arbitrary third parties to decide whose artist's signature is legitimate.
The thing that suggests the NFTs of the world today will be relevant in that future world is pretty simple: take any piece of art where the artist involved has publicly sanctioned an NFT for it, and ask the question if the signature of that artist on that work will theoretically be something valued by society in the future. (Grounded by the well placed assumption that this is truly non-fungible - the artist can't even reneg on this, since history will record this was the original.) The number of times you can affirm this as a "yes" should increase the weight you put on the hypothesis today's NFTs will be valuable in the future.
It's worth noting: these two hypotheses are decoupled. The blockchain has already been written. So even if the idea of an NFT burns out so much that future artists do not make them anymore, this doesn't necessarily mean the NFTs that exist today will not be valuable or recognized. They are in the public record, and those who control the wallets they are assigned to will always be able to prove they are the owners of them, even if the chains they are on stop adding new blocks in the future.
A signed artwork is more valuable than an unsigned artwork.
However NFTs do not create signed artworks. The artwork remains the same.
The NFT is just a receipt for someone paying money to someone else, who in some cases is linked to the an artist.
Is that valuable? Maybe. I concede that a bill of sale from some point along the chain of ownership of ‘the last supper’ might have value to some kind of collector.
But, an NFT is not equivalent even to the bill of sale.
If you have the bill of sale, you have a unique historical item, whereas the NFT is on the public blockchain where everyone can see it and copy of it, so even that doesn’t have any scarcity.
Both the media and the NFT are infinitely copyable.
A theory which many people disagree with.
> You seem determined to think with analogies.
So do you.
An NFT is not a signature on a piece of art. You are trying to convince us that an NFT is analogous to a signature on a piece of art.
Whether the analogies of the crypto community hold is what is being debated here.
I assume you are aware that NFTs are not actually signatures on physical artworks.
> If my attempt above didn’t help you understand why people are paying tons of money for these things,
I’m sure you wouldn’t be claiming that people never pay money for things that later turn out not to be valuable.
I don't feel compelled to play video games, and I don't feel interested in joining an AR metaverse. That might just be personal shortcoming clouding my expectations of Web3...
Let's rephrase to 'perks'.
The owner of a house now has access to the perks of owning a house: E.g Noone can enter property without permission, can't park on your driveway, can act how you want in your own home etc
People without a house do not have this ability.
The owner of an NFT now has access to the perks of owning that NFT: Access to exlusive discord (training and information, etc), early access to new projects, job opportunities etc
An NFT can offer a lot of different utility which are only received by proving their ownership of the cryptographic token.
> An NFT can offer a lot of different utility which are only received by proving their ownership of the cryptographic token.
The NFT isn’t offering anything. The business that offers the perks is. If the business changes or goes out of business, the perks disappear.
Not so with your ownership of a house.
Edit: here is one article describing the Swiss framework: https://thelawreviews.co.uk/title/the-virtual-currency-regul...
Doesn't the same logic apply to paintings/prints? If you buy a painting from an artist, is there anything preventing the artist from making a copy/replica? As for as I know, selling a painting does not constitute a transfer/assignment of copyright. The only difference here seems to be that paintings are analog, and take more effort to duplicate than right-clicking.
Yes, the fact that fake paintings are detectable. Prints are not which is which they are cheap.
That depends on the conditions attached to the NFT. For example, the Bored Ape Yacht Club gives full commercial ownership to the owner of each ape for the particular ape they own.
That is not ownership.
The future will probably begin to expand to more than just 'images, audio and video', which those specific NFTs in those categories are absolutely useless.
Similarly, this community has agreed that a contract written in a certain form, with the requisite signatures and registrations, conveys ownership of a piece of art. Subject, again, to caveats and rules and fine print.
If at this point you are trying to argue semantics when most of the community has a pretty intuitive sense of what exactly "owning an NFT" means, it seems a bit pointless.
Except that they simply haven’t.
Try taking someone’s house from them. You’ll find that it’s not just semantics that defines ownership.
Try copying the artwork pointed to by an NFT. You’ll find the NFT doesn’t stop you.
> If at this point you are trying to argue semantics when most of the community has a pretty intuitive sense of what exactly "owning an NFT" means, it seems a bit pointless.
I agree that it’s pointless to argue with people who think “owning an NFT” has any relationship to owning the artwork itself. It’s ok if people want to be part of a community who believe that together.
If you feel secure as a member of that community, don’t let the rest of us perturb you.
Have you considered that most people are not in fact part of that community, and that discussion of this point is quite relevant to anyone who hasn’t already committed themself to this belief?
Wrong.
> I think I make it pretty clear when it gets to more detail that the NFT is the thing you own.
Yes, you contradict yourself.
> Further, I make it clear exactly what rights you and others have over the media, which is basically none.
Yes, which is not what you say in the parts I quoted - let’s remind ourselves:
> Just like a deed conveys ownership of a house at some address, the token conveys ownership of that media.
This is a common pattern in writing about this subject, which is why I point this out. It’s a standard Motte and Bailey technique, which is a dishonest form of persuasive writing.
This is just a lie. The token doesn’t convey ownership of then media. There is no rough understanding by which this is true.
> I make it clear exactly what rights you and others have over the media, which is basically none.
Which you acknowledge here.
This isn’t a matter of exact details that aren’t important to a buyer.
If you tell someone that an NFT conveys ownership of the media, you are lying to them and participating in a con.
The fact that you later contradict that statement, doesn’t change the fact that you lied.
The debate around this is pretty somewhat tiresome. Yes, you have to buy into the believe that the token represents the media, but it's as good a definition as any because all ways we talk colloquially about "owning" a JPEG are simply not the same as owning a chair.
- Copyright is just a set of limited legal rights granted to someone temporarily by certain jurisdictions. It's not the same thing as owning something, which is why we were laughing at the "you wouldn't steal a car" ads in the 2000s.
- Actual ownership means having access to a copy of the bytes, which is not perceived as meaningful, and only valuable to the extend that access is otherwise arbitrarily restricted.
- You can choose to believe in the artificial scarcity of a certificate of ownership.
This is fine. There is no problem with a club of people who choose to play a game in which they agree that a token has a particular meaning.
The rest of us can point out that it doesn’t mean the same thing outside that club of believers.
https://meebits.larvalabs.com/meebits/termsandconditions
And note you don’t own the media and that what owning the NFT means can change.
Not really sure what point you are trying to make. With Meebits, you don’t own anything other than the token itself.
There is no thing that another person can do regarding a piece of art backed by an NFT that you own that will cause state employees with guns to show up to stop them.
For example, I can offer a free milkshake to anyone who parks in my parking lot in a yellow car.
Then yellow car isn’t doing anything in this situation, I am, and if I can always change my mind.
Then same is true with cryptovoxels and NFTs.
The point is if 1M people all agreed to give a free milkshake to people who parked in your parking lot, the parking lot is pretty important.
There are paving stones on which a million people walk each year. They are of no more importance than a parking lot in which a particular trade promotion takes place.
BS. That’s the marketing excuse. The real value is only in the fact that you can potentially sell it to a greater fool who will buy for more so you won’t be the one holding the bag. It’s the new tulip mania!
> Just like a deed conveys ownership of a house at some address, the token conveys ownership of that media.
Again, if you don't like specific wording, I invite you to write a better explanation for regular folks which is simultaneously perfectly accurate in every sense in every phrase and word you use.
Not really. The original document contained an outright lie which have now removed because it was exposed.
If you didn’t accept it was a lie, you wouldn’t have removed it.
This has nothing to do with imperfect accuracy. It has to do with you writing an outright falsehood.
The idea that a lie stops being a lie because of the number of words you say later is obviously absurd.
As I have pointed out this is a motte and Bailey fallacy.
Also, it’s still a completely misleading statement. The change to ‘similar to’ doesn’t make it true. It still isn’t true, only now you have some wiggle room to claim it’s not a lie.
You are still trying to misleading people into thinking that NFTs confer ownership of the media.
NFTs are a useful mechanism for the digital art medium, I hope they come to be seen in that light a bit more and a bit less as valuable in and of themselves because of the mechanism.
Take a painting. You have to stand in front of it to truly appreciate it. A pic won't do it.
So the buyer of the painting has an exclusive asset which produces returns in terms of appreciation but also periodic fees when they lend it to museums.
NFTs have nothing of the sort because the enjoyment is essentially the same between owning it and right clicking it. In order to mimic the real world enjoyment you'd have to find a way to immerse the asset in a virtual world in which avatars pay for the privilege of seeing/using that art content.
The NFT maybe here, but the virtual world , not yet.
When buying an NFT you are essentially betting that society would come around to equate "right-clicking" with stealing.
And that would employ the same social and technological resources to prevent right-clickers to do their bidding as it does today to prevent thief from stealing paintings from museums.
Let's be real. AP, AFP, Reuters and Getty try to protect their images by charging for the full resolution pics .
People will gladly use the 580x830 instead of the pricy 5800x8300.
Brands which have been fighting this fight since the 90s such as Ray-Ban, LVMH, Gucci...they all fail to block counterfit physical products from being shipped from China.
What chances does one have to have IP laws be enforced on the internet....
Fraudulently minted NFTs have been taken down (at least from marketplaces) as well.
Stealing the painting = hacking the wallet/private key to transfer the NFT
Taking a picture of the painting = right clicking
Absolutely not.
A pic won't ever provide you the same satisfaction as standing in front of a painting, that's an innate characteristic of paintings.
Right clicking a JPG , saving it on your laptop and looking at whenever you want gives you the exact same satisfaction as paying 100k USD for the work of art.
Matter of fact it gives you way more satisfaction, because you got for free what a fool paid 100K to obtain.
The real world equivalent would be finding a perfectly conserved Banksy in an abandoned barn, keeping it for a while and then selling it.
You get to enjoy it for free and the buyer has to pay you 6 figures.
Thing is you don't have to be extremely lucky to right click, you only have to know how to use your thumb.
In conclusion I'd point out that even without NFTs , there is no market for JPG pictures, exactly because they can be replicated very easily and potentially an infinite amount of times.
The most famous JPG ever is "the Afghan girl" by McCurry. The original sold for 62,000 EUR.
https://tvpworld.com/50367201/iconic-afghan-girl-photo-sold-...
Nobody sane pays for JPGs because they are very easy to replicate.
Paintings , on the other hand are not.
That seems a bit handwavy to me. Apparently some museums don't even put originals on display, only a replica (due to conservation/vandalism concerns). Maybe that means that the "satisfaction" you get is purely placebo? In other words, it's the same painting for all intents and purposes (to your amateur eye), and the "satisfaction" you're getting is some vague notion that this particular painting is the original. Does this start sounding like NFTs to you?
Say a museum has one original and 4 copies of a painting. That's 1:4.
With JPG it can potentially be 1:∞
In other words you have to go to that particular museum to see the painting , and everybody knows that you have to go there, there is a bottleneck in the both the quantity and quality of copies of the original, and it's very tight, matter of fact social, logistical and common sense factors limit the capability of copying the painting in 1:1 fashion just to the museum . That's in order to protect from vandalism and theft.
And the beauty of the physical world is that the copy is never 1:1
It's 1:0,9999999999999 and maybe cannot be picked up, but again: common sense.
As a matter of common sense everybody knows that the physical world can NEVER be exactly replicated in a 1:1 fashion.
With JPG pictures instead everybody knows that they can be copied at will, there is no bottleneck and also for pics (unlike painting) it makes no difference if they are visualized on screens or printed.
Finally everybody can make their 1:1 copy and it's identical . And the whole process can be repeated an infinite amount of times and it will ALWAYS be exactly as the original.
That sounds like a lot of words to justify why viewing that particular painting has value, even though you can see a replica and probably wouldn't notice the difference. All the value of viewing the original in the museum comes from the social clout that you get from being a cultured person that can afford an european vacation to visit the louvre. That sounds a lot like NFTs. Here's a quote from another NFT article:
>“This is a great example of right-clicker mentality,” Midwit Milhouse said on Twitter. “Sure, you can make your own gold-coated steak for 65GBP, but then you don’t have the satisfaction, flex, clout that comes from having eaten at Salt Bae’s restaurant. The value is not in the cost of the steak. Go ahead, make yourself a gold-coated steak at home. Post a picture of it on Instagram. See how much clout it gets you. Salt Bae’s dish costs around 1500GBP because people want to pay 1500 GBP to show off that they can afford to pay that much. It’s all about the flex.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgzed/what-the-hell-is-righ...
>It's 1:0,9999999999999 and maybe cannot be picked up, but again: common sense.
>As a matter of common sense everybody knows that the physical world can NEVER be exactly replicated in a 1:1 fashion.
Sounds like you're trying to hide behind the 0.00000000001%. In other words, the replica might be 0.99999999999% similar, but people are apparently willing to pay millions for the remaining 0.00000000001%. To me, that's as irrational as placing value in the remaining 0% that NFTs represent.
This is wrong. People (as in regular people) aren't willing to pay millions, they are willing however to spend 20/50/100 dollars to go an see it in person at the museum vs. googling an image of it. All for that 0.0000000000001%
Consumers decided that for some pieces of art it is worth to spend some amount of dollars to go and see it once, in person and get that final 10th decimal place.
This is what in turn gives the painting value , and then wealthy individuals and institutions are willing to pay millions, because the painting produces revenues for the museum.
Sometimes it's owned directly by the museum, while sometimes it has a private owner who lends it to the museum and takes a cut.
"regular people" aren't paying hundreds of thousands for NFTs either.
>they are willing however to spend 20/50/100 dollars to go an see it in person at the museum vs. googling an image of it. All for that 0.0000000000001%
>Consumers decided that for some pieces of art it is worth to spend some amount of dollars to go and see it once, in person and get that final 10th decimal place.
Are they really ascribing value to the remaining 0.0000000000001%, or just to the vague notion that the painting in the museum is the original? I alluded to this before, but the alternate explanation is that they're not going to the museum because it offers the best fidelity, they're doing so for other reasons (eg. social clout). See also: people going to concerts, even though listening at home has superior fidelity (for one, there aren't hundreds of people screaming in the crowd).
>This is what in turn gives the painting value , and then wealthy individuals and institutions are willing to pay millions, because the painting produces revenues for the museum.
This totally fails to explain paintings that are in private collections. Why do rich people pay millions for original paintings, just to hang inside their house?
What % of social media posts are museum oriented? We are talking 0 percent.... it's only a matter of seeing what's the first decimal point.
Regardless, it seems to me that there is a lack of common sense among the NFT crowd, and you seem to be somehow on the same wavelenght.
The vast majority of people who right-click an NFT image have subsequently no desire to acquire said NFT. And if a museum were to start charging for an NFT collections, people would not pay to get in.
The vast majority of people who right-click an image of the Mona Lisa do have a desire to one day go out and see the painting in person as they think it would be a cool thing to do and would pay for it.
There is a clear difference, at least for people who have common sense.
Given that museums have existed for hundreds of years and have generated trillions of dollars in revenues, the burden of the proof is on NFTs, not the other way around.
When NFTs museums (either virtual or real) will open up then it will be possible to make a comparison.
I don't go on social media so I can't really comment on that. That said, I do see a lot of people taking pictures of paintings (mostly famous ones) at museums. What gives? If they wanted the best fidelity recreation of the picture, they'd be better off going to wikimedia commons and getting something that a professional photographer took. Maybe they're after the sentimental value, in both the case of going to the museum in person, and taking the picture. It's definitely not for the remaining 0.0000000000001%, especially when you consider that you need x-rays or radiocarbon dating to tell a fake from the original.
>Regardless, it seems to me that there is a lack of common sense among the NFT crowd, and you seem to be somehow on the same wavelenght.
What's your point? That because I'm "somehow on the same wavelenght" as "the NFT crowd", that I have "lack of common sense" by association?
>The vast majority of people who right-click an image of the Mona Lisa do have a desire to one day go out and see the painting in person as they think it would be a cool thing to do and would pay for it.
>There is a clear difference, at least for people who have common sense.
>Given that museums have existed for hundreds of years and have generated trillions of dollars in revenues, the burden of the proof is on NFTs, not the other way around.
So your point is... that NFTs are a bad investment if you plan to start a museum and charge patrons? I don't think that's really controversial, or anywhere close to what we were discussing. Are you trying to use "can charge people to see it" as a proxy for "has value"? While I do agree that's one way to objectively value works of art, it isn't hard to see that's not the only source of value. Like I mentioned before, private collections goes totally against this.
No. I said "wavelenght", not "same as".
It seems to me you are looking at the price action of some NFTs, the price action of the ETH token and the volumes on the auctions houses built on top of Ethereum, plus the social hype being generated. And using those as your starting point you are trying to walk your way backwards towards pointing at some sort of underlying value.
I honestly don't think you'd be trying to find value in NFTs if not for the price action and volumes going amber red to bring the phenomenon to your attention.
It's FOMO-lite, the same that had Stanley Druckenmiller buy the very top of the Nasdaq in 1999, back when he was running Soros' Quantum Fund.
Sometimes no matter how hard you look there is no underlying value beneath the price action, there is no reason or rhyme as to why people become maniac about stuff, and feel like they MUST have it.
Tulips, beanie babies, NASDAQ in 1999, NIKKEI in 1997, Real Estate in 2007...
...like people paying millions for an original painting rather than getting a replica made for $100k (or whatever) for their private collection? My point isn't that NFTs have underlying value (whatever that means), just that they're valuable in approximately the same way that original paintings have value over replicas. I'll quote an earlier comment here:
>But you still paid a few million more for the original painting, even though it's virtually indistinguishable from a replica. It's more helpful to think of an original painting as a bundle of two things:
>Original painting = thing that looks like a painting + bragging rights
>An NFT is just the "bragging rights" part of the original painting, and the JPG that anyone can access is the "thing that looks like a painting ".
The official art market action amounts to 50B/yr. Of the aforementioned figure the vast majority of that is then sent on loan to museums and thus produces revenues for the museum and passive income for the owner.
Let's say 5B is the amount that people pay yearly for paintings they intend to keep in their private collection.
Let's further say the average amount that a collector spends in a year to enrich their private collection is 5M.
5B/5M = 1000 individuals.
Of course we are 8 billion humans, you'll always find 1000 individuals who behave in a way that you cannot explain logically or whose actions leave you scratching your head.
> Original painting = thing that looks like a painting + bragging rights
> An NFT is just the "bragging rights" part of the original painting, and the JPG that anyone can access is the "thing that looks like a painting "
A person with common sense would not even think about splitting the experience and the bragging rights, or even re-arrange something as self evident and self-explanatory as watching a painting in a museum.
You are trying to come up with this explanation in order to justify NFTs and their price action, pretending to know what goes on in the minds of people who buy them, to further reverse-engineer the value that they see in them.
NFTs buyers not only aren't doing all the above reasoning, but they hardly know why they buy them.
In conclusion, there are some things that are just self evident, and need not to be explained. Even in the case of a person spending millions for paintings which will never be sent to museums.
If a common sense person is invited to some rich person mansion and are shown a private collection of real paintings worth millions the thought that come up is inevitably: "A hard working rich person who likes expensive stuff and is not afraid to spend to enjoy life"
If on the other hand a common sense person is invited to some crypto-rich person mansion and are shown a collection of hashes and blockchain transactions pointing to a JPG on twitter or imgur....the thought that comes up is inevitably: "A stoner cryptobro who won the lottery and now is wasting away their money paying 6 figures for some monkeys JPGs"
Source? Moreover, considering that museums need donations/government subsidies to stay afloat, I doubt "making money" is the primary reason people/institutions buy art.
>5B/5M = 1000 individuals.
>Of course we are 8 billion humans, you'll always find 1000 individuals who behave in a way that you cannot explain logically or whose actions leave you scratching your head.
So your point of contention is that NFTs have too many people relative to the amount of people buying expensive original art?
>A person with common sense would not even think about splitting the experience and the bragging rights, or even re-arrange something as self evident and self-explanatory as watching a painting in a museum.
I'm seeing a lot of words devoted to dismissing my comment, but many words being devoted to explaining why my comment is incorrect. Declaring "self evident and self-explanatory" does not make for an argument. I don't see how "a person with common sense" would buy your explanation of people paying millions for the imperceptible 0.000000001%, so they can enjoy it more.
>In conclusion, there are some things that are just self evident, and need not to be explained. Even in the case of a person spending millions for paintings which will never be sent to museums.
>If a common sense person is invited to some rich person mansion and are shown a private collection of real paintings worth millions the thought that come up is inevitably: "A hard working rich person who likes expensive stuff and is not afraid to spend to enjoy life"
>If on the other hand a common sense person is invited to some crypto-rich person mansion and are shown a collection of hashes and blockchain transactions pointing to a JPG on twitter or imgur....the thought that comes up is inevitably: "A stoner cryptobro who won the lottery and now is wasting away their money paying 6 figures for some monkeys JPGs"
The thing that ties both of them is spending money on a non-productive asset, which serves as a costly signal[1] of your wealth. Old paintings definitely have more awareness than NFTs, I'm not going to dispute that. However, all that means is that old paintings are more mature than NFTs, not that paintings are valuable and NFTs are completely worthless. Before archeology was a thing, ancient artifacts probably had zero value beyond scrap, but nowadays there's a thriving market for it. Maybe NFTs will turn out to be like beanie babies, but maybe they'll turn out to be like artifacts?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory#Human_honest...
For a common sense person only an expensive painting serves as tool to signal one's wealth.
An expensive NFT is a tool to signal one's foolishness. For all practical purposes it's like paying 6 figures for some bottled air sampled in Times Square and trying to use it as a way to impress people.
You'd get a huge minus both in your wallet as well as your social status. You could be living in Versailles but if you get to the last room and show people your collection of hashes....then you throw all the other 1000 gold plated rooms straight into the bin and your guests will laugh at you.
That is of course unless you preselect people who hang out in /r/NFTs and only ever invite them over. There's only 237k of them.
Let's say 25% would endorse spending 6 figures for an NFT and still think highly of you. So that's 60k people.
You have to preselect among 60k people on the planet, whereas the expensive paintings would get you the admiration of each and every of the 8.2 billion people. No preselection needed.
Again: Common sense.
People who collect them can explain to you what they see in them, and you can agree that you also see it or you don't.
There's little to no point in continuing beyond that.
The physical world simply cannot be replicated 1:1 .
It can be 1:0,99999999999 but it cannot ever be 1:1
Also it very costly to replicate a painting, whereas saving a JPG is essentially free and can be done infinite amount of times.
I put together a collection that is both art + access to an interactive service that relies on ownership of a token. The right-click download picture is completely meaningless as the true power is simply proof of ownership of the piece, having a copy of the image means nothing if you don't own the token and you will be denied access to the service. I guess it's a completely new concept in a lot of ways and not many people have yet implemented this to scale but it's a fascinating concept to me personally.
Sure, fine. Why do I care? I can use said copy on any other service I want. If your argument is "ah yes, but someone out there believes that's not as valuable because it ignores their 'ownership'", and you can't see why that isn't persuasive, then I really am not sure we share enough of the same reality to discuss this rationally.
I have a program, think of it as a traditional web app, that has a backend that validates whether you own the asset prior to granting access.
You can't use any copy of the png to interact with other services, since there is only *one* service that allows for the interactive capabilities, and it requires ownership of the token to access. Hell, you could even take it a step further, take the png and make a forge of a token from my collection. You still won't be able to access the service with a forged token with the exact same metadata and image, because it will easily be able to detect it is not part of my collection.
All you would have is a PNG. Not access to the actual services that are only possible via ownership. I could extend my project and create a plethora of services that are only accessible to people who own one of the NFTs from my collection, and that is what I intend to do.
This makes no sense. Given any possible interaction you could have with a PNG some other service can replicate it. They could choose to do so with alternative NFTs pointing to the same PNGs, or just let you use any PNG at your leisure.
Let's give the benefit of the doubt and say your service is utterly unique. That you have somehow invented some kind of super-magic software that does something super incredible with PNGs that no one else can manage, and you've decided that NFTs are the way to determine who can and cannot use the service. What exactly is your reasoning to use NFTs in this way instead of traditional authentication mechanisms? Because the only one I can think of is capitalizing off the NFT hype.
Please, convince me that NFTs as a technology have some inherent value instead of all their value being derived from a collective delusion and FOMO. I'm aching to hear a good, concrete usecase for the technology that simply cannot be done better without it.
If I was to implement this with traditional web infrastructure, it would increase the scope of my project by likely 2-3 times. I am a single developer, and yeah I may have like a decade of experience at this point, but utilizing this instead of integrating traditional payment and authentication services, as well as traditional database services, dramatically decreases the scope of my project. Seriously, it would probably not be a feasible project for me alone if I stuck to traditional infra. It is empowering me, as a solo developer, to create something unique that I hope people find some enjoyment out of.
Let me be very straightforward here - I have spent the past 4 months working full time creating interactive generative art, that I 100% absolutely never would do so, unless there are economic incentives. This is an independent venture, I'm running it as my first business venture outside of the traditional corporate world, and I want to create something unique. I am planning on charging a very fair price for mint, basically only enough that if my full collection is minted and I do nothing else, then I would extend the amount of time I have until I have to go back to the corporate grind from about 6 months from now to about a year. I'm not creating a collection and charging like $500 per piece, I am targetting like $20.
Just because there is a ton of hype in the technology and people are making get quick rich schemes left and right with really low effort collections, please don't rule out the tech entirely.
People keep saying this, but I'm pretty sure I know what it is. But what I'm asking is: what in god's name is it actually good for, other than scams?
> Just because there is a ton of hype in the technology and people are making get quick rich schemes left and right with really low effort collections, please don't rule out the tech entirely.
But this is precisely what you're doing with it too! Your service is just creating generative art and minting an NFT for it, from what I can tell, with the sole intention of convincing people to pay for the NFT so you can make money. From the sounds of it, the NFT is just the authentication token, perhaps signing some set of parameters that determine the "unique" generative algorithm that the user "bought". Sure, fine, whatever, but you could have done that with boring old certificates and a database. What value, other than NFT hype, did putting it on a decentralized trustless blockchain do for you?
People keep trying to sell this as some revolutionary technology and I just don't see it.
This is the fundamental difference between what my project can do and what a static image does. My service does not interact with the PNG, it interacts with the space that my program generated, and took a picture of. The user can connect their wallet, select their art, and explore the "room" generated with it.
To do this in web2 infra, like I said, is a much more complicated problem and would involve probably non-user friendly DRM. It's simply a different technology, and really if you don't understand it I hope there are more projects out there that come out in the next year that change your mind.
You can write off my project as a get rich quick scheme, but that is from a point of ignorance from someone that probably hasn't tried to create something on their own and market it. I'm creating a project, charging a very reasonable price, for interactive art. I don't really care about your opinion on if you think I'm trying to make money for providing a product.
You already said this, and as I mentioned you do not need, nor can I see why anyone would want, a decentralized trustless blockchain-backed token for this.
> To do this in web2 infra, like I said, is a much more complicated problem and would involve probably non-user friendly DRM.
No it wouldn't, it just requires certificates and maybe accounts if you want a backup in case people lose their certificates. Or you could use the accounts without the certificates. Millions and millions of services provide "access to a virtual room" or the equivalent already today without ever touching a blockchain.
Besides which, what are you describing if not Digital Rights Management? Don't pretend that NFTs aren't the same damn artificial scarcity nonsense in a hip new garb.
> You can write off my project as a get rich quick scheme, but that is from a point of ignorance from someone that probably hasn't tried to create something on their own and market it.
I have, and I wasn't any good at it, but that's irrelevant. The point is that the only reason you seem to want to use an NFT is so you can get paid for it, presumably because NFTs are hip and sexy and traditional infrastructure doing the same thing for millions of online services isn't. You're praying on people falling for the hype.
You have not explained specifically in what ways an NFT gives you a better ability to do what you're doing than traditional solutions, other than to simply assert that it does.
> I don't really care about your opinion on if you think I'm trying to make money for providing a product.
I don't bemoan people trying to make money on a product. But I do, in fact, look down on people trying to take advantage of a hype bubble and push FOMO by pretending like it is some kind of revolution.
Please, just believe me when I say that I'm an engineer that is exploring the space to try and do something independent and something I personally find cool. If I wanted to make money quick, I would have made a shitty PFP apes collection 3 months ago and charged half an ETH per mint. I decided to try and create a unique product, and also explore an emerging space.
How would NFT access work for a service which requires monthly or usage based billing? (As this seems like a one time payment currently)
Edit - For the other cases you added to your original post, I've thought about the subscription problem some and have ideas but it's outside of the scope of my current project, but I think it is a solvable problem with some underlying changes to token mechanics.
How does this work if a person makes a unique wallet for this NFT and then shares the private key? Does that essentially break the exclusivity mechanics?
And sure, a user could create a shared wallet and let others see the interactive capabilities of the art in that wallet. Personally I wouldn't mind if someone wanted to do this, my collection will have X number of unique pieces, each of them are a completely different generative piece. So, yeah, you could buy a piece, put it in a shared wallet, and share it with your friends. Up to the purchasers of the piece to do what they want with it :)
However, interestingly if you leverage the token ownership for access, in my collection's case, even if the static image is wiped for whatever reason, they could still access the interactive service and see their art, and interact with it.
This of course has the assumption that I'm continuing to host my service indefinitely, which I know is a problem with my current implementation. I am planning to recreate my APIs as onchain programs, and migrate my app to be hosted on arweave. If it works the way I think it does and arweave doesn't fail as a project (which I don't think they will), then I'm hoping that I can have a service that is permanently accessible. I have yet to test that hypothesis of course.
If the original creator can even delete the artwork, the owner is never sure.
I don't quite know the extent of power that I could leverage as a creator over data on arweave. It's not ever crossed my mind as to why I'd possibly want to alter that.
At the end of the day you have to have some degree of trust with most services you interact with, and I think this would be no different. Maybe I as a creator could eliminate this ability to update anything on arweave after the initial upload by changing the update authority to a wallet that is programmatically created from an onchain program, and off of the Ed25519 curve. If I am able to do something like that, then it would be impossible to access the wallet since it doesn't have a valid private key, and maybe then it's truly immutable?
It's a problem I actually haven't thought of until now. But there's probably something I could do along those lines.
Honestly if something like that works then it might be a generalizable solution to the problem you're suggesting.
Bought source is available for download as soon as I buy something. So i have it in my possession on my drive when eg. Envato deletes the assets because of copyright infringement.
Also, i frequently visit https://rekt.news/ and trust seems to be far-fetched. Even the auditors sometimes keep the 0-days to themselves.
I think it would be possible, and likely, that there could be a marketplace / service specifically for high-end art, that could have built in functionality that explicitly makes their pieces immutable.
But really I do think it kind of comes with the territory in some ways, when it comes to refunds. I think for instance I could create a service that allows for refunds on the initial sale from me as a provider, however if you buy something from the secondhand market, you wouldn't be able to receive a refund from me as a producer, you'd have to work with the secondhand market / user you bought it from personally.
It's possible to create trustworthy products and platforms I think. But yeah, right now there exists no easy mechanism to get a chargeback, nor do I think there likely will ever be such a thing on most chains, as chargebacks rely on centralization (banks) to transfer funds to your account.
Also thanks for sharing that link, I've never heard of the site and it's pretty interesting.
Is this for real? Why would they do it this way? I can buy 20TB of storage for less than $1000 (in New Zealand, no doubt far far cheaper in USA). Using one fifth of my residential gigabit bandwidth that would take just over a day to download.
Why on Earth would someone spend $20k and a month to achieve what can be done for one twentieth the cost in one thirtieth the time? Only to have the files on a remote AWS instance where you would still need to download them if you wanted to access them?
Crypto.com did not buy the Staples Center, and doesn’t have the right to charge admission. They bought (leased, really) the right to have their name associated with it. Some of that has the force of law, but a lot of it is social convention too. Here in Chicago, the Willis Group owns the legal naming rights to a large building downtown, the building itself is owned by Blackstone, and locals actually call it the Sears Tower.
Easiest explanation is that a NFT is like a new cryptocurrency, except it only exists one token of that cryptocurrency, and it's indivisible.
What determines that NFT "A" is the canonical NFT of artwork "X"?