Ask HN: What's so bad about NFTs?
Honestly not sure how I feel about them.
In need of some wisdom / perspective / reminders from the dev community.
The real problem is that all these cryptocurrency enthusiasts think that you can just simulate everything digitally and live in some VR bubble where digital enforcement of contracts does not involve living beings.
As soon as you have some service being provided in meatspace people just use regular databases because they are more convenient even if they are less secure and less decentralized.
This. It's a modern variation on tulips.
Estimates that Etherum alone is responsible for a couple of coal power plants.
Proof-of-waste is the worst invention since leaded petrol and CFCs.
It’s so obvious on seeing it that proof of work is just not an accurate term to describe what is going on.
I fail to see how this is different than any speculative asset?
To drive home the point from pjc50's sibling post, NFTs are "empty" speculative assets.
If you speculate with company stock, housing, or whatever else — there's generally at least some material value that could be liquidated. Even during a bubble when it's overvalued, it's generally not zero. And the cases where it can become zero (companies going completely bankrupt), there's warning signs and possibly even fraud.
NFTs just have no backing. Even "fiat money" (frequently said to "only have value because people back it", after gold standards went away) is different since it's backed by some country. NFTs? Nope. Just nothing.
Populated with real, physical resources, and real, physical people, who will take real, physical action to secure themselves, their resources, and their ideas.
Who is defending my unique set of bits? How are they defended? What is gained from defending them? What is lost if they're not defended?
- as an artist when I sell an NFT it's the equivalent of selling conceptual art, the recipient basically buys the "certificate of authenticity" that states that this work, together with the certificate of ownership constitutes the original work. This isn't too different from a certificate of authenticity often issued with a print or painting, just suitably modified to the digital space. I mean, there are a million Van Gogh reproductions, some even eerily well forged, but only the painting with its certificate is the original work. Doesn't mean the rest of the world can't enjoy the reproductions.
- It helps me make ends meet as an artist and is a way for collectors to support that, especially important for digital artists whose works traditionally have suffered form being turned into static prints, for example.
- the POW issue re: sustainability is an ugly one, thankfully there alternatives with POS, but it's important to remember not everyone can afford to be too principled, sometimes you have to go where people are offering what you need to pay this months rent, not where you'd like to go.
- NFTs are massively hyped and have yet to be a better alternative to anything, that said they have helped a lot of artists survive the pandemic, they aren't a way of getting rich quick, or at least for 99% they aren't heh (but that's no different form the traditional art world).
As a salesman who’s been able to survive the pandemic thanks to selling multilevel marketing schemes, honestly nothing is bad about them per say.
I don’t understand why it is that people have this inherent attitude that “it’s good when artists get money, no matter what”. I mean fair enough if you sell some art, but that’s not what NFTs are, they are risky investments bought because of the investment aspect. And while yes, as they say “in an up market there are no losers” it still might be the case that the losers will show if it collapses just like any Ponzi scheme or pyramid organization, and that will leave all the “suckers” at a loss. And I can’t agree that this is all ok simply because the snake oil salesmen where also artists this time around and not just selling certificates allowing others to sell water filters.
I don't want this to be the narrative but I've been consistently reminded of the small number of people I've known / worked with in the past with who get into buying lottery tickets and / or scratchers. It's never people who are in a position to burn money and it seems like it turns into a long-term commitment / compulsion that is really hard to understand but also not something that seems like it should be judged too harshly either.
What has made NFTs interesting to me, who as a digital artist has to "give away" their work daily just to stay visible in social media, is that it allows for also the non-physical manifestation of the work to have "value". That is to say I don't have to go through all the complexity and expense of producing a physical print in order for the jpeg to be considered "worth collecting".
But yeah, it's not a get-rich-quick deal, it's still just as tricky as the old-school art market..
I've heard a bit about Solana nft's having much lower transaction fee's. Have you see anything going on in the Solana NFT space? Seems like that might be better for making them if you were a creator.
Also any recommendations for crypto/nft aggregators or communities?
It's important to have realistic expectations. When I first started out as an artist I made physical prints ... and nothing sold for, like, two years and I had to do commercial gigs I disliked to make ends meet. If then was now and instead I minted NFTs ... I expect the same would happen. Basically nobody apart from my family and a couple of friends even saw I had prints available because no-one knew I existed. As such NFTs are the same as the old art market, you need to be visible and have a proper community before they can be relied upon as a revenue source (a lot of "traditional" artists can rely on sales of paintings/prints as they produce them).
I'm not personally familiar with Solana, but I've good experiences with tezos (POS (way more eco friendly), very low minting fees) platforms like hicetnunc.
> they have helped a lot of artists survive the pandemic
Not an attempt to call-out or anything but just curious roughly how many artists you personally know that fall into this category.
No-one's gotten rich, heh, but they've managed to keep paying rent and keep making art, which is what I think is the most important for them (and for those who love their work).
As I mentioned in another comment in this thread, there are platforms where minting fees are a lot lower, the crucial bit that rarely gets talked about is that minting into the void without a community and visibility will most likely not get you very far. Building a community around your art is the key bit, then naturally some people will want to collect or support you if you offer different ways to do so. NFTs are by themselves no solution to anything if the same bits you need to survive in the traditional art market aren't there at all either.
The problem becomes when you imply the NFT has a value it doesn't have like ownership of a work of art. Buying an NFT of digital art doesn't give you any real ownership rights. It only gives you the right to say "you own that NFT", which is the thing on the block chain and not the art, and potentially to sell that NFT in the future. That is where the scam feeling comes in because no or very few "certificates of authenticity" are worth a lot of money. So the idea that NFTs are inflated assets that will quickly lose value is very real. That said, we have stuff like that happen all of the time such as tulips or more recently Beanie Babies.
I see them as transferrable autographs, and would be down to own even small shares of my favourite artists' work, but their energy usage is untenable.
Nothing. But they are not for me thanks (in current form).
Why? None of the arguments really make them inherently bad. Bubble, yes, so if they were free / 0.0001c would NFTs be good? People make / lose money? Hype? Legal ownership / non ownership? By that metric everything is bad, especially in the tech space.
The internet economy is in a very interesting place at the moment. Donation / patronage / support things are everywhere, and for the most part, NFTs are in this space for me. The whole space is something I am yet to properly form a mental model of.
Donations to streamers, patreon, onlyfans, substack, most of kickstarter all in a similar bucket.
NBA Topshot would be functionally as good or better if it were handled by a centralized DB owned and managed by the NBA.
The only reason it's an NFT is to pump prices due to crypto hype.
My problems with NFTs are (1) it's a bubble (or fraud) being pitched as a good investment and (2) NFTs are pitched as offering "ownership" but none of them do.
this can be useful if you buy 1000 spots ("tickets"), and I guess it makes sense for artist to make limited edition prints... but with digital art is pointless.
This problem was solved by centralized databases in 1617. https://www.ros.gov.uk/our-registers/general-register-of-sas...
you can read their arguments against NFT : https://pastel.wiki/en/home (ownership, data storage, centralization, ethereum, permissions, duplication of content, smart contracts, cost etc.)
But I wouldn't call it bad, once in a lifetime cash grab opportunity where you can create "scarcity" from you home, with a story of why people should own, no need to really produce anything.
To my knowledge, a lot of the issues arise from reckless resource allocation from retail investors/traders.
But NFTs themselves are great. It’s like game skins etc but for lots of things.
Kind of like getting your name written on a list of sponsors. Maybe.