Miramax, Tarantino and a Fight over Bright Shiny Objects
copyrightlately.com
copyrightlately.com
At least the NFT fad has been entertaining, I suppose.
Almost no NFTs are in any way like a historic artwork.
An algorithmically generated cartoon character that is one of thousands, simply isn’t valuable. The fact that you have what amounts to a receipt for paying for one, is more a mark of stupidity than prestige.
But I've thought Facebook was stupid since 2004. Experience has taught me that I'm a weirdo and my aesthetic objections are usually anti-correlated with a project's success. I am the George Costanza of social media. If you're reading about Non-Fungible Tokens on Hacker News, I suspect you are too. These things are here to stay.
Oh god this describes me.
I was about 14-15 when MySpace started catching on and I didn't like the idea of it then, but I did at least see people having fun making their own pages and stuff. A bunch of people I knew played around with themes and such. Not for me, actually it irritated me, but hey people were having fun.
Then FaceBook came and it seemed a lot like MySpace but with less user control. Again core functionality doesn't appeal to me at all.
Twitter came along and I thought it was weird to make a service where people could basically write a public SMS, but thought "hey this kind of makes sense for like businesses and governments such to write announcement type messages that get pushed - "Hey we're doing XX see LINK" type stuff. But people insist on using it and worse on having complicated or long discourse on it. The number of twitter threads I've seen which is a person replying to themselves to get around the character count is huge and I don't even have a twitter account. Simply baffling, and yet it is a huge success. I legitimately can't even comprehend why people use it.
People can now advertise themselves, and present a highly constrcted image of how they want to be seen. The lack of authenticity apparently not problematic, or is a blind spot as they complain about the fakeness in social media on the same platform.
It's the race to the bottom for your attention. Low quality references and expressions, a recursive meme. A new slang for thoughts that have no depth.
Perhaps I just never understood it, and I am the weirdo. Thats what people tell me.
The silver lining, maybe this social platform, HN, has made me feel like Im not the only one. Perhaps thats what this whole thing is about.
Hacker News is the kind of place that strips emoji from your posts, because they're kind of frivolous. I love that. Because I am a weirdo.
If I was a billionaire, I would definitely own some $100K watches and probably have some million dollar artwork.
Why? Because some expensive watches are really nice, and so are some expensive paintings, and why wouldn’t I buy them if I could easily afford them?
I'd hope I'd consider it for barely a half second then elect instead to give that money to charity instead.
I'm regularly in this mind, walking as I do around London and seeing the sheer array of useless crap that monied people spend money on to advertise the fact they have money. Instead, I wonder at how many people's lives could have been eased if instead of that expensive car, they'd bought a car actually suited to this city.
.
As an aside to this, I spent a week working at the house of a Rothschild a few years back. His admittedly fancy pad was utterly laden with artworks. His car, on the other hand, was a crappy small Japanese thing and he dressed about as scrappily as I do. I had a lot of respect for that chap.
Why not just say you are an inverse snob?
Enjoy your watch or whatever other pointless tat it is that you value.
For me, personally I look at the life of someone like Roger Smith, and envy his craftsmanship and dedication to mastery. I see a great deal of similarity between him, and say John Carmack - as dedicated masters of their medium.
I would like to own a Roger Smith watch, partly because it’s beautiful, and partly because I would like to live in a world where more people get to develop their skills, and where skills are passed on, and artistry is encouraged.
Of course it’s terrible that more people don’t have the opportunity to do this, but that doesn’t have anything to do with watches.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_W._Smith
Yes, it’s easier for the rich to possess art than the poor, of course. No, that doesn’t mean art is only about the rich.
However, most people use such baublage to signify success and wealth, appropriately or not.
I don't think it snobbish (inversely or otherwise) for me to think that this is a sad squandering of resource and a more than slightly horrid aspect of the human character.
Do they? Maybe some do, but how do you know they aren’t just buying nicer stuff because they can afford to and it’s you know, nicer?
> I don't think it snobbish (inversely or otherwise) for me to think that this is a sad squandering of resource and a more than slightly horrid aspect of the human character.
I don’t see how people making fine watches is a ‘squandering of resources’. It’s also not obvious why you are attributing this ‘horrid aspect’ only to a stereotypical rich person.
Surely wearing a football shirt, cutting the labels of your clothes, wearing a chairman Mao suit, or a pair of Nike sneakers are all signalling status in one way or another.
Why are these things ok and watches are not? Why are expensive baubles more worthy of sneering than cheap ones?
Maybe NFTs turn out to be a way to redirect that gross status-seeking impulse, to turn it into incentives to create art and income for artists without copyright, DRM, and associated ugliness. That would be a pretty cool hack! There's a decent chance it works.
And a more organised storefront at https://objkt.com/
https://www.fxhash.xyz/ is doing generative art straight on the blockchain.
I have an account on Twitter as @CryptoAntonioni and I share decent art, avoid the trash.
As for fxhash, I don’t see that being much more than a ‘because we can’. Nothing on there strikes me as worth money, since there is an infinite supply of art like that and there is no distinguishing character to it. The point of a Non-Fungible token goes away if the art itself is fungible.
I'd recommend you read this text, or skim it, to see what happened with NFTs https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
Basically sociopaths have taken over the space and they are promoting absolute crap.
BUT There is real art and artists in the space if you take your time to look for it.
Look at - https://www.fxhash.xyz/ - you'll see a remarkable thing: real innovation, Generative Art being placed right onto the blockchain. Something that would be very hard to monetize only 2 years ago is now a liquid permissionless marketplace for Generative Artists to experiment. It's like shadertoy has become an art market. You can now spend your days experimenting with shader art and make real money. That's incredible to me.
The blockchain itself has no legal authority. It's just a transaction log. You could buy a link to an image that seller doesn't own. Then what? Now the transaction log assigns ownership to someone with no rights to it. If it ever came to it, the courts would override it. Then what happens to the block chain "asserting" that ownership?
I think it's possible that the NFTs of today will be the progenitor of something that does make sense longer term. But even for that, I'm a bit skeptical.
They'll be A LOT more interesting when AR/XR become commonplace. I can imagine people having NFT AI companions, NFT XR art that's only distributed to token holders. Digital Fashion will also become a "Real" thing when XR becomes commonplace.
If enough systems integrate with the blockchains to allow transfer of ownership, maybe it will take hold. I think central authorities with interop would be a better solution.
The problem with both of those solutions is how much incentive systems have for interop. I get that some people see NFTs as a way to break from the tyranny of the tech monoliths. I'm just skeptical that we'll get there. It's kinda like "Linux on the Desktop."
The incentives on central authorities is always to abuse their power. That's how we got Facebook.
Blockchain is not a promise of an utopia, but the incentives are radically different. And in some ways, "central authorities with interop" is a description of blockchain where not everyone is running a full node.
Since everything was open source, and the JPEGs/art were hosted on IPFS, the commnity quite simply rebuilt the website frontend and nothing was lost.
You can read more about this here:
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2021/11/18/what-hic-et-nuncs-r...
This is the strength of having a decentralised open source blockchain - suddenly digital asset ownership can be "established" even if their utility for now is close to nil. But that's allowed a vibrant digital art market to explode.
That's the risk you take when using fully permissionless markets, but I'd say if you are a collector, you take 5 minutes to check whether the artist exists. I don't buy anything unless the artist is on Twitter/instagram linked to his profile. There are ways to verify identities on both Tezos and Ethereum blockchains which is usually how I look into and make sure the artist is legit.
I myself own an Ethereum Name Service and Tezos domain (.eth and .tez). For a few dollars the owner of one of the main tezos scan websites also creates verified identities using Twitter profiles. Takes a bit of effort but it is worth it.
Having an active twitter account is also a big thing in the NFT space, it helps enforce a minimum level of difficulty to art stealing.
Hence I can't understand NFT's either.
It only becomes "special" because the author signed it. NFT's are basically digital autographs on something that's even cheaper (free) to copy than a book.
People now pay thousands of dollars for algorithmically generated images. How many of buyers pay for the "access to the community" and how many are speculators that just want to sell them later? Most of these communities that are created around NTFs will become inactive soon and with a nearly infinite supply of new NFT series, the resale values will drop by 90%+. A limited number of communities will remain active, and maybe their NFTs will increase in value (since they offer some exclusivity).
Same with people who now support graphic artists and photographers by paying $5,000 for NFT of some photo. Why people who have never commissioned anything now are paying so much for NFTs, and will they keep supporting artists when they realize that they can't make a profit anymore?
I'm curious what will happen, as I believe we're entering the "Peak of inflated expectations" stage [0]
How many of buyers pay for the "access to the community" and how many are speculators that just want to sell them later? Lots of speculators for sure.
will they keep supporting artists when they realize that they can't make a profit anymore? 90% will leave. Speculation is a part of any market tho, including the art market. Look no further than the Mad Men episode where the agency owner bought a Rothko "because the price will double in 6 months".
"Peak of inflated expectations" Yes. This seems like a good description.
I think as a concept they might stay and find some use. Every concept of how to make NFTs more useful is actively being worked on. So yes they will stay/become more useful.
If you want something more organised, like OpenSea, again OBJKT on Tezos is great. https://objkt.com/
I would say they might become useful in an XR world, where XR assets might include companions/digital clothing acessories. Enforcing NFT rights in XR would be more feasible.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/94/Ga...
Digital artists never had a liquid global permissionless marketplace. It's creating some incredible art.
On long term value I have no idea. But as far as supporting digital artists, it's a novel way to do it and really cool. Lives are being changed by NFTs atm.
Basically running a 51% attack would fundamentally devalue the entire blockchain due to loss of trust, so I don't think anyone has committed one on a blockchain with good valuation and decent number of nodes.
It's cryptoeconomics/game theory - what use is there to rob a bank if it then leads to hyperinflation? So it hasn't happened, to my knowledge, in any major chain.