Keanu Reeves Thinks NFTs Are a Joke
forbes.com
forbes.com
Sadly we seem to a very, very long way from that obvious truth. Being famous is vastly more important than knowing something through hard work when it comes to your thoughts being heard. Especially given most famous hollywood people are famous for being attractive to look at and if they have any skill at all other than having luckily failed upwards that skill is to lie, convincingly enough so you believe it even when you know it is pure fantasy, the thing becomes clear. There has been many such people opining on NFTs.
From TFA: Hence, it’s incredibly refreshing to see Reeves react so honestly - most celebrities have embraced the technology with alarming enthusiasm; beloved figures such as Snoop Dogg, William Shatner, Doja Cat, Tony Hawk, Eminem, and Grimes have all endorsed NFTs. Reese Witherspoon even tried putting a pseudo-feminist spin on the fad (because equality means women should be participating in pyramid schemes too!).
I don't know how to counter it. I strongly think that any agreement concerning the content of an interview (no questions about X, if my PR client movie star looks bad you never get another interview from anyone I represent etc.) in the media should be the opening paragraph but there are so many ways around it. Maybe if a few reputable news organisations had a charter they followed saying they will never agree to a no-go area to secure an interview and were willing to fire any employee who does it in disgrace, celebrities might have their luster reduced compared with people who should be interviewed. Also the transcript of any interview should be published in full as there has been a lot of BS from the media where the pretend to do an interview then report "impressions" from it rather than its content which have clearly been very misleading at times.
As to the why, it's probably related to social status. In the old days people paid attention and listened to the people with status (who usually became leaders), nowadays with celebrity culture it's somehow inverted, a good looking person who can act or sing gets put on stage, and they get the attention (for singing, acting, or looking good), and they gain status.
You don't need to know how to program smart contracts to have an opinion on NFTs, and the guy has been around and knows what fads and trends look like, and probably has dealt with these types of concepts from the whole Matrix culture around it.
Plus we all know NFTs survive on hype, and he knows how hype works.
Does this make him an opinion leader?
I don't think so, but he does have an opinion apparently and thinks people shouldn't take these NFTs seriously.
When a celebrity in this situation doesn't it draws the attention of people.
The more people taking about what "crypto" really is, the better. It's nice to have bit of balance when so many teams and other celebrities have been so quick to cash in here.
A PSA isn't news, but is everything that isn't news just noise?
In general famous people opinions aren’t worth more. Though most people especially HN give far too much credence to appealing to authority with experts. Famous people is low hanging fruit
There is a multi-billion dollar celebrity endorsement industry that would absolutely disagree with you, and I suspect they've done the research to justify it.
I’m indifferent to what Keanu has to say. Good or bad. He’s welcome to have opinions and share them in a public forum. But the fact that an editor has elevated this opinion as newsworthy feels motivated purely by the need for engagement. It feels gossipy. These types of shallow reporting are less about informing or educating and more of a way for the readership to have an emotional response in a way that benefits the publication.
But if you're a normal everyday Joe like me, it's like trading baseball cards... I don't know s*it about baseball, so I better not buy and trade them, and nothing I've got in my pocket has any value in that game. :\
Moreover, ETH transactions often run in the $100+ range now, mind-bogglingly expensive and inefficient. Those fees pay miners to waste electricity, hoard silicon, and scorch the earth. Ethereum has been switching to proof of stake "any day now" since it's inception 6 years ago. And even if they actually pull it off I don't see why staking $20k of crypto to participate is somehow better or more fair than spinning up a $4/month cloud VM to manage a 1000x more efficient, fast, and effective supply chain database with digital signatures.
There's a lot of utopian handwavey BS around crypto, but it seems to be turning out like other magic utopian solutions in human history (gurus, communism, etc.). Wish people would divert this time and energy into things that actually benefit society.
I don't think ZKP or blockchains are going to save you though. Say Cardano actually gets past their "Byron" ICO pump-and-dump phase and implements smart contracts, or Polkadot gets off the ground.
OK, so we have a fast, non-world-destroying blockchain computing platform and can freely write programs to exchange PolkaDots or Adas or whatever. So what? Now anyone and their brother can set up a futures exchange via smart contracts, and we can all trade PolkaDots for corn futures. Whose brother's exchange do we use? If a de-facto standard one arises, who enforces quality and resolves disputes if the produce isn't up to snuff? Blockchains tend to be immutable no-refund situations, and discourage the use of "oracles" from outside for human factors like the corn being moldy. Who regulates the exchange to prevent abuses on both sides? And couldn't MonopoliCorp still use its connections and infrastructure and reach to corner the market? You still need trucks, refrigeration, deals with grocery purchasers, etc. That's the actual important substance of the whole enterprise, not the system coordinating it. Couldn't you do all this on a non-blockchain computing platform, say with digital signatures, if you just got people to agree on one?
Not to mention the questionably-solvable problems of massive volatility in PolkaDots, unforseen smart contract bugs enabling and encouraging theft opportunities, constant hack attempts, potential that the whole platform could collapse if the currency collapses and nobody cares to stake it anymore.
Talking about price volatility. Costs for producers and prices for consumers are increasing dramatically because central banks in the western world decided to print massive amounts of currency and buying zombie companies on the stock exchange. How are these currencies considered stable in any way? Look what is happening in is happening in Turkey or Lebanon. Even worse what the US is doing to the people of afghanistan.
An apt comment down below:
>Carrie-Ann Moss is every parent listening to their child talk about their cool new hobby.
https://twitter.com/NetOpWibby/status/1466524102009577475
On the topic of NFTs, most naysayers don’t like how much energy it takes to mint just one on the most popular blockchain for NFTs right now, Ethereum.
With blockchains like Tezos and Solana, the energy output from minting an NFT collection of let’s say a few thousand, is equivalent to using an in-window AC unit for eight hours…drastically better than Ethereum but like we’ve established, most people aren’t looking past the surface with their complaints/distaste.
Mining is pointless, waste of power and resources, So I agree it is the technologies fault, it has yet to have something to seemingly implement its usage in a way that is useful.
On the other hand, the main advantage we should consider with blockchain is decentralised computation. Decentralised computation can possibly be managed and regulated by a cryptocurrency which itself is tied to the value of decentralised computation and as such does not exist as some imaginary token of value from artificial scarcity. The ability for a system to exist all over the world and to communicate and compute everywhere can be important to many applications. Communication, fintech, serverless services, license management, ownership management, the very idea of smart contracts etc.
That's where the real meat of the system lies, and not in online artificial scarcity tokens distributing a soulless, valueless illustration procedurally generated like millions like it based off a bunch of templates drawn in paint over about an hour.
Because the answer crytpocurrency provides to "how much are you willing to pay to never have to trust anyone" is "one hell of a lot" via work-factor.
A fundamental characteristic of all exchange systems is trust. That may not be institutional trust, but there is trust in something: mineral scarcity and assayability, counterparty, commodity-currency acceptability by others, pricing and exchange systems, recourse options, etc.
In economics, there's a long observation that high-trust markets and the societies in which they exist perform vastly better than low-trust ones. And interestingly, cryptocurrency fairly neatly segregates markets into those who do have fundamental trust in institutions and practices, and those who do not.
The transaction fees and excruciatingly small transaction throughout make on-chain transactions impractical for ordinary transactions, so now you’re back to running transactions through centralized exchanges, which undermines the security of the trust model.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/12/malaysian-artists-...
There is always a buck to be made by pleasing the mind.
I think religion is a joke, who cares?
What is value anyway?
Unfortunately even more than that they lend themselves to raising funds for vaporware, and I don't think there was a single ICO that actually resulted in a real-world product.
NFTs are essentially a reboot of ICO, except instead of a million tokens each representing a small percentage of ownership, you sell a single token representing 100% ownership. I think they could still be used to fund artists (I think of them more as patronage than trading cards), but very few artists are actually raising funds this way, the market is almost entirely trash being wash traded and plots of land in metaverses that don't exist yet.
I think they will suffer the same fate I see in crypto over and over again, any legitimate use case is totally overwhelmed by the number of scams, makes the whole thing wholly unattractive to participate in.
I'm aware there's thousands of dApps and DAOs but I don't know what any of them actually do besides pay early participants with funds derived from later participants.
ICO's are a scam because they are essentially unregulated securities.
If all securities were unregulated, then they would all be scams.
The moment you strongly regulate ICO's, then they don't get their pop, they lose their allure, and they make no sense.
There's no material or commercial advantage to Crypto or NFT's, or rather, any advantages they might offer are outweighed by the drawbacks.
And so the big remaining advantage is for scammers, which is why they take advantage of it.
I keep thinking that all the use-cases for NFT's can be replaced with current digital certificate signing. Transferring something only needs signing with the private key, right?
What are the real-world use-cases for NFT that simple and existing PGP signing won't work for?
You can't do that with PGP. You'd need to run a bank to get most of that and some of that is illegal on a global level so even as a bank you'd have to dip outside the law. These are the real uses of NFTs, not artificial scarcity magic internet tokens associated with procedurally generated soulless art from templates made in paint over 5 minutes.
Can you end the license before expiry? Because if you cannot, then it isn't useful. License holders like to know that they can revoke the license if terms are not met.
> You can create a token which pays royalties to an artist with every sale.
Can you end the royalties? Who gets the royalty when a dispute arises is frequently decided by the courts.
> You can create smart financial instruments which are technically NFTs and which skip the regulation put on the financial industry to perform more risky investments, and even automate functions like profit sharing or paying off a bond.
So, enable one to skip the laws? That doesn't sound very much like something society wants.
> You'd need to run a bank to get most of that and some of that is illegal on a global level so even as a bank you'd have to dip outside the law.
Using a tool or instrument to do something illegal doesn't make it okay to do that thing.
Of course you can, you just need to specify terms. Terms that can be in some reliable way observed by the blockchain, of course, so you'd need a trustworthy oracle or whatever to actually observe activities outside the state.
> Can you end the royalties? Who gets the royalty when a dispute arises is frequently decided by the courts.
If that's part of the contract, then yes. A smart contract is not necessarily a legally binding contract, it's a computer program which can be or represent some actual legal instrument. Once a contract is written, it cannot be revoked, unless it itself contains code that allows for one or both parties to make it not function. At the moment it is created, it becomes just an entity on the blockchain, linked to the parties by nothing but the fact that under certain conditions it will perform certain actions, which can relate to certain accounts.
> So, enable one to skip the laws?
Yes, this is a fundamental belief that can't really be separated from blockchain technology. All data and all things of value are equal before the law and you can sell illegal bonds as easily as a kid can sell him ms paint art. For several reasons, you can imagine the most reprehensible type of data or instrument one could sell online, and blockchain tech would declare that it deserves to be traded on a public market like any other commodity.
> Using a tool or instrument to do something illegal doesn't make it okay to do that thing.
Something being illegal doesn't mean it's not okay to do. Using a method which makes a law impossible to actually enforce makes that thing effectively not a law, and to do or enable that is to declare to the world that this thing should not be illegal. Fundamental, again, I cannot see a way of separating this from blockchains with arbitrary smart contracts.
Actual contracts have some very good properties: they must be legal, and they are open to (some) interpretation in case they aren’t perfectly written. And we have a process for resolving disputes that doesn’t involve forking the entire blockchain.
That the technology is sound is not hugely relevant.
The commercial notion of NFT's is nonsensical.
I will cast a hail of stones on the concept of copyright gone (even more) batshit insane with absolutely no hesitation.
I dislike DRM as much as the next guy, but DRM had pirates, and NFTs have right-clickers. The problem with DRM, particularly on games, is that it restricted access. Most NFTs are still just images and basic media and don't have any impediments to distribution. I think someone getting sued because they used someone's NFT as a twitter DP will probably happen. What comes of that will be interesting to say the least.
edit: oxymoron correction
The NFT backers are placing their bets that intellectual property will be more rigidly enforced in the future. Basically conferring "First-sale Doctrine" to digital assets. The right-clickers think nothing will change and that platforms without "Right click -> Save As" will fail to catch on.
Maybe NFTs have a future, but as Richard says in Silicon Valley S03E09, "being too early is the same as being wrong"
It's everything wrong with late stage capitalism consolidated into one and we all know that the people with power will salivate at the prospect of more money for less tangible value.