Twitter Rolls Out NFT Profile Pictures | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Rolls Out NFT Profile Pictures

twitter.com

52 pointsjbegley41 comments

Kudos to Twitter for marking crypto enthusiasts in a machine-readable way so they can be automatically dealt with

https://twitter.com/BetterTDeck/status/1484233899920150529

haha i think that's funny, but i also have concerns of elitism in which entire groups of people are being muted just because of their interests/appearance and not the content of their tweets.

this is coming from someone who doesn't see NFTs potentially being art, but i might be interested in it for decentralized concert ticket sales

In my experience interest in crypto and content of Tweets are strongly correlated - the bulk of their Tweets will be shilling for whichever crypto projects they're trying to pump.

"Crypto Twitter" as a whole is just a cacophony of grifters shouting over each other trying to get noticed. There's precious little of value to be lost by filtering that out.

yeah i could see how that can be annoying. maybe muting accounts with in their posts would help

sorry, i don't think emojis appear. i meant to include rocket ship and diamond hands emojis

ticket sales makes sense, as all NFTs really are are receipts.

What a dystopian future. Humanity is finally maybe glimpsing a scarcity free society and people literally fall over themselves to reinvent scarcity out of nothing.

Without scarcity trading cards aren't as fun, same with rare loot in video games. This is that but for Twitter profile pictures. Can't really hate people for having fun with social media's Black Lotus card.

Scarcity free sounds nice for the digital goods, but people who make digital content still need to find a way to get paid too afford all those scare physical goods.

Up until now no one who made digital content: art, games, ebooks, newsletters, 3D assets, etc, ever made a single cent?

If it wasn't for NFTs no digital goods would be monetized?

Digital artists already get paid, primarily via paypal and patreon. (including internationally)

I know this because I pay my digital artists already, primarily via paypal and patreon. (including internationally)

I also know this because I have friends who are digital artists who receive payments for goods and services, primarily via paypal and patreon. (including internationally)

It's an outsider view that artists have any serious payment problem outside of a tendency to set their prices too low out of modesty/imposter syndrome. (which is a common problem for many kinds of independent contractors)

We've never not had scarcity for digital goods, you just have to look at it at the level of the producer rather than a specific digital goods. You can have unlimited copies of the same jpeg once it exists, but there has always been a scarcity of human beings to produce new original art. Enforcing scarcity of the former is just a trick to deal with scarcity of the latter.

So basically billions of dollars invested in NFTs solve the problem of not having enough profile pic jpegs to choose from?

There is no such thing as a scarcity-free society of humans.

Who gets to be king? Who mates with who? Who is friends with who?

Who is the Biggest Fan of <celebrity>?

Social graphs have scarcity built-in. Time, attention, and influence are permanently scarce and valuable.

Digital scarcity seems like a fundamental concept also in the digital realm. Consider games: if you only have a certain number of weapons, lives, or limited time, isn't that digital scarcity? If you play capture the flag, the fact that there is only one flag, and only one team can "own" it at any one time, isn't that digital scarcity? Aren't the points you get from sweating arbitrarily "scarce"? Or isn't the first position a ranking "scarce"? It seems to me that scarcity is at the heart of many fundamental social mechanics, be they physical or digital.

It's shiny Pokemons cards, but worse somehow.

I can make an pseudo-NFT for about $1.20... print a digital image on a piece of paper, making sure to include the Serial Number of a US Dollar Note in the image. Staple the real US dollar note with that Serial Number to the print of the image.

The paper/dollar object is now not fungible, and is a token. ;-)

I real NFT is the same thing, but with a tiny bit of cryptocurrency instead of the US dollar.

[Edit] - A did it, and made a blog post about it - https://mikewarot.blogspot.com/2022/01/whats-all-this-nft-st...

Non-fungible physical items have existed forever, the whole point of NFTs is (attempting) to do this digitally. The Mona Lisa is not fungible.

None of the normies understand what it is, so I provided an explanatory illustration. It clears up a lot of the mystery.

Why anyone would pay for an NFT of a digital photo is beyond me. It conveys no actual value other that the small chunk of Ethereum, bitcoin, whatever, it is anchored to.

I, for one, am very happy for people with money to burn to waste it on crypto nonsense and NFT's rather than real estate.

So that people make more crypto and NFTs instead of developing more housing?

So they can push up the price of crypto and NFT's instead of pushing up the price of housing. Real estate is a zero-sum game since there is a finite amount of land and it's controlled by the government. Many many people wish they could develop more housing, but they can't.

Development of land increases living space …

More lucrative apartment prices ensure more profitable development …

yes, but more profitable development does not ensure more affordable developments

It is not a zero sum game. There are just finite resources, but that is nothing unusual. In the grand scheme of things there are finite resources in every physical system.

In most places the housing bottleneck has nothing to do with house prices, it's planning and consent restrictions, and a lack of skilled labour availability.

What stops people from putting a screenshot of the NFT as their profile picture?

Hopefully their dignity.

Why is it dignified?

The only thing more undignified than being a hexagon is pretending to be a hexagon.

They're hexagonal in shape so I guess it wouldn't be possible to make it look right on all colour schemes.

You could copy the jpg and mint yourself an NFT with it. It wouldn't have the same provenance, so obviously people could manually check, but it would probably fool the majority of people on Twitter.

On Twitter, NFTs show as an hexagon and you can find the provenance on the user profile (collection, associated contract…)

One can indeed copy the art and re-mint a new NFT but a single click on the user profile will reveal it’s not the authentic one.

e.g:

Click / Tap on the profile picture to see NFT provenance info

https://twitter.com/jrartspace_nft

>will reveal it’s not the authentic one

you think there is a central authority deciding authenticity?

There is! Even though crypto is supposed to be decentralized, OpenSeas has taken up the task of marking fraudulent/fake NFTs on their website. They are usually still purchasable on the blockchain, but the websites through which you view the NFTs show it as suspicious, stolen, or fraudulent.

Makes you wonder if they should have just used a centralized ledger in the first place if this was going to be how things are run.

Opensea indeed helps reduce the noise but you can also do it yourself. If you show me a fake BAYC NFT(Bored Ape Yacht Club) I can tell you if it’s authentic just by looking at the blockchain (smart contract address and transaction history for instance)

You can see the wallet that setup the smart contract, when it happened, and also see all the transaction history of NFTs in the collection.

That’s one of the advantages of a public ledger. Anyone can run the forensics. No need of a central authority.

Apparently you can do one better: mint an NFT of that screenshot on whatever collection you want, set it as your profile picture, and Twitter will show it as a valid NFT (because it is).

The fact that NFTs are decentralized make the scheme completely useless even though it is the only selling point. Amazing.

I'm sure the internet accepts the new normal in a week and starts defending it religiously, now that their social media platform overlord has decided on what's normal.

Based on the verified checkmark, I'd assume there's some minimum ad spend to retain ownership of the nft?

New way thing to bully NFTards over just dropped.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com