What's Up with the NFT Hate?
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But it doesn't. Unless that NFT includes a legal sales agreement or contract transferring ownership, you don't 'own' anything. If I'm an artist and sell you a NFT for a digital copy of my art I still 'own' that art. I am still the copyright holder. You are not legally entitled to anything and the NFT legally confers nothing to the buyer. You're not 'buying' anything. You're just making a non-deductible donation.
You are buying something in that you will be able to sell it later, which I think is the main point.
- buyers not knowing exactly what they buy is something that happens all the time in the real world. That doesn't make it right, of course, but that doesn't make all those sales "non-deductible donations".
- artists already use a lot the same kind of mechanism used for NFTs. For example, limited editions of a reproduction of a piece of art. You won't own the original piece, but you will have a copy, with a certificate that proves its authenticity. Part of the price is usually a high quality reproduction, but an often significant part is the certificate and the scarcity of the item.
I think my point is that "limited" NFTs as in "multiple NFTs for one piece of art" are something already natural and established in the art world. I agree with you that "unique" NFTs as in "one NFT for one piece of art" are more confusing and already somewhat existed before in the form of copyright holding. One difference that I can think of is that with NFTs artists can keep the copyright and thus control over how their art is used, while still allowing people to "own" and speculate on the art itself.
All of that is just about the NFT concept by itself. There is also the implementation part (crypto), how it's used, and arguments like "is it even a good idea to do artificial scarcity in the first place?". I don't know enough about those subjects to have an opinion on them.
Edit: Missed to not. I assume it still was clear
And now multiply this for all the chains you want to use/support... And with BTC you aren't even paid for this service...
I can sell you (and a dozen other people) a photo of the deed to my house, and it's very nice that you own this photo, but I don't understand why you would pay me real dollars to buy it.
Unless your plan consists of selling it to a bigger fool.
Fraudulently inventing proof is a serious crime. None of this required any blockchains or decentralisation. In fact it was never centralised to begin with.
NFTs serve absolutely no purpose that wasn’t already solved in better ways.
the problem is that these rights must be linked to a physical real person, and not just a public key pair. in the real world if I want to acquire the rights to a piece of media I have to contact the author or some kind of middleman and specify exactly who I am and sometimes even how I'm planning to use the asset. instead if ownership is linked to an anonymous private key then I could simply share the same key with some of my friends and they could all use the piece of media in their works and present some proof that they have the private key with them in case of questioning.
so even if in theory NFTs could in fact be used to automatically make a public record of whoever has bought the rights to something, then we would need a public record that links real people's identities with their private keys (so a good old public keyring) but that would destroy any semblance of privacy and we're back to square one.
That's why I always thought comparing crypto to currency, financial investments or gold is the wrong analogy. To me it is more akin to the art market.
The usage of NFTs in games. Using them to let the player "own" their character customizations and ingame items in order to resell them and carry them over to other games. This is presented under the banner of decentralization with the result that no one could take away these ingame items from the buyer ever again.
This example is a gross misreprentation of how game transactions and game assets work:
1. The only thing an NFT would enable is the ability to show that you own an item in a game. The only change is that the necessary bit sits on a blockchain instead of the server of the game company you bought it from.
2. Ingame assets need to be created by the developer of the game in order to be in the game...there is no inherent compatibility between two different games, especially if the games are from two different companies. And the NFT does not contain the asset itself, that is: The 3D model, its texture, its game logic attached to it (the things the asset is supposed to do).
3. Because of 1. and 2., the only authority over wether you get to use an ingame purchase is the game developer/publisher of the game in which you wish to use the asset. The fact that you can show your ownership does not change anything about that at all. If Company A decides to ignore your ownership bit (in the end you still play on their servers) they are free to do so at any point, the player does not have the slightest bit of additional "power".
4. If you show your ownership bit of an ingame asset that you bought from Company A to Company B, they have to build it into their game (model, textures, logic, basically copy these things from Company A) and give you the ability to use it. In order for this whole NFT dream to work as advertised Company B has to perform this work for free if you ever want to use it there.
> I am flat out convinced that most people who buy into the NFT hype are gullibe at best, and a fraud at worst.
The aspects I described above are immediately obvious if you remotely know how game development works. That is the reason I can only come the conclusion that the people pushing this NFT narrative are either really clueless about technology, very gullible, or intentionally trying to deceive others to inflate the prices of this scheme.
In short: I agree.
That is one result, the bigger picture is that the strategies centralized owners of those items use to make profits at the expense of each user would go away.
You are correct that an issue exists between completely hard-coded ownership on the blockchain and subjective creation of items in a game, but perhaps ruminate over some roadblocks. If a 'set' of items represented by NFTs is valued by a large group of users, then developers which do not integrate those items fairly enough will suffer users.
In this case it will not be the game developers controlling the items, it will be artists who sell the raw NFT which becomes integrated. This leads to all sorts of other little issues that aren't as fun to dunk on, but you should at least steel-man the concept.
Furthermore, your example of cosmetic items is the weakest example. Items which offer in-game functionality first and foremost, and are released according to semi-predictable mechanisms are the stronger case. Just like Bitcoin prevents unwanted malicious activity from allowing forks, so to must the game(s) which use these items. I'm not convinced it's so impossible to have an open source game built around the items rather than the other way around. An extremely simple RPG is a MVP.
Of course the visible community around NFT's today is completely ill-fitted for such a project, but like all things crypto on HackerNews, detractors often mistake the loudest sales-pitch for the best possible outcome. If you want to make a strong case against the merits of crypto, focus less on projects who spend their effort on marketing and more who spend their effort on development.
It's the opposite. No real game developer would ever make assets tied to NFTs that have already been sold because they can't make any profit from that. The only thing the NFT provides is transferability, which most game developers also wouldn't want to support. The company makes more money if all consumers have to buy the same items separately. They build in scarcity by removing transferability.
Some companies might use NFTs to sell things no one would buy otherwise (like Disney selling pictures of R2D2), but that's pretty much the only use case for them.
As for your other points they were already addressed. Did you read my whole comment before finishing yours?
In your point you are basically leaving out many steps:
> If a 'set' of items represented by NFTs is valued by a large group of users
Good thing you mention this, we don't have to speak hypothetically to evaluate this. Highly valued assets on a gaming marketplace already exist with Steam Marketplace, where you can buy and sell virtual items from games that exist on Valves Steam Platform (Steam offers an API for this and developers can support the feature if they choose to do so). Items for e.g. Dota 2 have been sold between players for >2000$ on the Steam Marketplace, I believe this deserves being called highly valued by a large group of users.
The Steam API offers the ability to check a users inventory [1], so any game that is on steam could verify your ownership of a marketplace item and do something using that knowledge. Steam is a huge platform, so huge in fact that for many players Steam is PC Gaming, right now it sits at ~23 million active players (that is only players that are currently playing any game they own via steam).
Now let's go back to NFTs. What would they change? Basically connecting them to games somehow would be just the same thing, which is verifying ownership of items outside of Steam.
"Outside of steam" is not all that many players and it is very hard to get them away from there, just look at the struggle of Epic to pull users away from Steam: they have now been giving away >250 games (including many AAA titles) for free since 2018 [2]. And Valve has made its stance on NFT/Crypto pretty clear for now [3].
I believe that this puts into perspective how realistic the NFT gaming revolution is.
> Items which offer in-game functionality first and foremost, and are released according to semi-predictable mechanisms are the stronger case.
Those, in my opinion, would be even harder to carry across games because they are even further embedded inside the engine and programming and logic.
> In this case it will not be the game developers controlling the items, it will be artists who sell the raw NFT which becomes integrated.
So if I understand you correctly you believe in a market of NFT driven games that explicitly form around NFTs, rather than NFTs finding their way into the existing gaming market?
[1]: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/api/ISteamInventory#GetAl...
[2]: https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-games-store-free-games-list/
[3]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/15/22728425/valve-steam-blo...
The issue of course is that Valve has no reason to do this, and this is important, because a huge part of the reason in game items have dollar value is that they have aesthetic value in popular, well crafted games. Anyone who makes a quality video game will seek to monetize their in game items, not liberate them through NFTs. For this reason I am indeed saying that NFTs and their properties have to be a selling point.
This means that game developers make their money up front on the initial minting or selling of the NFTs (hoping that the real promise of a forever more decentralized market adds a premium - this should also include a promise of no future releases or algorithmic/predictable future releases), or the NFTs existed before the game and were valued enough that integrating them into a game after the fact is somehow profitable. Its certainly an interesting space (will be a lot more interesting when volume flows across cheaper chains than PoW Ethereum).
It doesn’t help when people (still pyramid investors) sound like the worst software managers we ever had. We as technical people absolutely hate it when people misrepresent what’s technically possible.
And I would say that the idea of skins portable between games being controlled by an NFT is absolutely technically possible, it's actually the business side that isn't probable - why would a company spend a bunch of money to make those skins work in their game if they aren't getting paid for it? It's possible to imagine incentive structures that could make it happen, but the reason we don't have it at the moment isn't because NFTs haven't been around, it's because those incentive structures don't exist, or don't exist to the right extent.
If the business side was probable, why would you need NFTs to implement that?
And if you're on ethereum, you probably can use a 'different' coin easily, because it'll be wrapped or more likely implemented as a token, and you didn't have to do anything to get the benefit of that aspect of the ethereum ecosystem.
Correcting/fixing wrong transactions is a fun one, but it's not impossible depending on how you set up your smart contract.
NFT promoters push all of this stuff about what you could do in the future with NFTs and it always looks like some dystopian hell where we take something that was free and charge money for it.
Totally not a pyramid scheme.
> it's actually the business side that isn't probable
Oh absolutely. But once you have that, there is literally no one who knows why you'd need the NFT bits. There are people who think that NFTs will magically make NFTs of player hats portable between one game and another, because something something blockchains. The fact that IF someone made such an interop then NFTs wouldn't be necessary, or that the "ownership" of items would STILL be exactly as shaky and fungible as it would be without NFTs is handwaved. Because something blockchains.
> [...] the reason we don't have it at the moment isn't because NFTs haven't been around, it's because those incentive structures don't exist, or don't exist to the right extent.
Exactly right, or if I can paraphrase somewhat ironically "We haven't yet found the right problem for our solution".
The people in the pyramid are making a lot of money...
(sarcasm if it isn't clear).
Sure, you just spent $x on a certificate that says you "own" a grid reference on the moon, but don't for one second think you actually own that piece of the moon.
[0]: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
PS just yesterday I witnessed a discussion on the topic in chat of unrelated Twitch channel and someone characterized NFT as "bunch of smart techies scamming clueless rich people". I don't want to be held responsible for this when the bubble bursts, even indirectly.
And FB will continue to spy on you and create shadow accounts for you in case you should sign on again. Big tech has become a loose cannon and needs to be reined in. Hard.
Besides, I always get a feeling of hypocrisy when this is being discussed because the argument people make is that FB is scum of the earth that will destroy democracy and society but the same people wouldn't delete their account because then they will miss the posts of their knitting group or something. So for me it seems that either people who are making the argument actually don't consider FB as much of a threat, or they value democracy and civic society less then their knitting group.
Anyway, let's not derail NFT discussion into typical HN big-tech-hate flamewar. Sorry I brought up the subject.
Same goes with NFTs that are bought to flip them... Ofc, in that market selling them initially by mass automatic generation makes sense. After all that non-fungible part is tad hard... But really doesn't matter once you automate generation.
you dont hate non fungible tokens, you hate the abusive financial system that we all live under.
the funny thing is that p2p programmable money databases and things like nfts could offer us something different. it does seem that a lot of attention (and vc money) goes to people rebuilding existing things 'but on blockchain'. but there is a lot of interesting anti-speculation crypto protocols/standards being built too -> things like circles ubi.
"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. That tension will not go away." - Stuart Brand
Some NFT haters also seem to misunderstand them, however, so let me throw yet another explanation attempt into the ring.
Anyone can make an NFT for anything. I can make an NFT for the Mona Lisa or whatever the hell I want. What do you get when you buy it? Absolutely nothing. I can make infinitely many too.
NFTs get all of their value from where they come from, a bit like autograph cards.
One from some rando on the web? Worthless. One from Eminem? Hmmm, maybe more interesting.
I do think NFTs can have some value for artists and art collectors. But always remember that an NFT's value comes from its creator and what they do, say and commit to. One possible option would be that an NFT entitles you to listen to ("own") a piece of music (my favorite use case because I love buying things on Bandcamp, but would like to be able to resell stuff at some point).
That's an interesting use case, but nothing close to what NFT zealots dream of.
I think the hate carried over from crypto currencies and other blockchain projects. The top reply mentions:
> NFTs are driven by hype, making NFT investers/scammers super outspoken and obnoxious. This is why the tone of the conversation around NFTs is so resentful of them, people are sick of being forced to interact with NFT hypebeasts.
I think this is what makes blockchain projects so polarized. I've yet to see something interesting come out from blockchain technologies. If those projects exist, they're drowned in the middle of people and companies who have no clue what they're talking about and are trying to bank on the hype.