For reference: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
Edit: I was loosely involved in some of the conversation around smart contract and token implementation on a top 10 chain and there’s actually a lot of interesting issues with on chain data, such as if child pornography is added suddenly in some countries hosting a node can be seen as distributing CP (so only allowing URLs and then having filters to remove that at a community level is an easy solution).
I currently only like NFTs as representations of digital licenses or tickets etc anyway, so simple hashes work for me.
For example, if I buy an NFT ticket to a concert and the venue doesn't let me in, what was the point of the decentralization?
It's interesting because I can, for example, resell my Woodstock ticket on an open market.
Why is that interesting, exactly?
Edit All that is marked as "interesting" in crypto is inevitably "how can I profit/get rich quick off something".
Scalping is only an issue if the sales price of products is artificially depressed.
Silly me.
(I don't think that the capitalist ideal matches reality. But you should at least get the idea if you're gonna disagree.)
Free market as imagined by libertarians can only exist in the presence of unlimited resources and magic.
Markets exist because of scarcity, not because of abundance. If something is available in unlimited abundance, there's no need of a market for it.
The only free market where this is possible is a magical place where there are unlimited resources and ability to create new Woodstocks at the snap of a finger.
You are interpreting the original comment as uncharitably as possible.
"Additional Woodstocks" can be easily interpreted as "additional concerts similar to Woodstock" without changing the meaning of the comment.
Also, you don't need unlimited resources to create new concerts, and you don't need the "snap of a finger", you simply need people who are motivated to do so by virtue of the profit motive (as well as their love for music and live shows) incentivized through the price mechanism.
Yes. Because all of their notions of "one true free market" require unlimited resources and ability to immediately create anything from scratch.
> can be easily interpreted as "additional concerts similar to Woodstock"
Same thing, different attempt to argue semantics.
> Also, you don't need unlimited resources to create new concerts, and you don't need the "snap of a finger", you simply need people who are motivated to do so by virtue of the profit motive
I'll repeat this again for the fourth-fifth time in this thread. Literally thousands of concerts exist, "simply" driven by "people who are motivated to do so by virtue of the profit motive". And yet, Woodstock is Woodstock. And Sziget is Sziget etc. I wonder why.
The same applies to concerts.
Woodstock, due to various factors is able to charge a premium, but that doesn't mean you can't go to other concerts.
As more and more concerts are held, the premium that Woodstock can command is held in check, because people have other options.
The analogy is incorrect when what was claimed was: "So if the free-market price of the ticket is higher than the sales price, people should be producing additional Woodstocks until the prices match"
> As more and more concerts are held, the premium that Woodstock can command is held in check, because people have other options.
- 6-day festival pass to Sziget is 315 EUR (~$346).
- Glastonbury (5 days) tickets are ~$365.
So, in check, according to you. And then...
- Coachella $449 and up
- Burning Man (which is not even a concert per se) is $525 and up (some tickets are sold at $2500)
And then...
- Justin Bieber can easily ask for 1000 dollars per ticket and more.
And so on.
Even though, according to you and @FeepingCreature, it's enough to just create another Sziget/Glastonbury/Coachella/Bieber for the prices to go down to an equilibrium.
Oh and there will be no scalpers.
Even though already, now, no one is stopping you from creating thousands of concerts.... and yet the price for those discussed doesn't go down, and scalpers exist.
Same for any sporting events etc.
Scalpers' motive is to gain profit off of a limited resource. It doesn't matter if the tickets cost even less than the concert costs to produce.
By the way, who determines the "actual worth" of tickets?
> That is not a libertarian fantasy or anything close to it
That is not what I was responding to.
If ticket booths charged exactly what scalpers charge would that change anything for you?
Indeed
> Do people sell tickets for less than the concert costs to produce where you live?
No, they don't, at it's not what I said.
> If ticket booths charged exactly what scalpers charge would that change anything for you?
Ni idea why you're asking me this question
No offense, but you do not understand art.
Yes, there are a lot of bands that could sell higher priced tickets but don't because they want to be accessable to everyone, not just people with money to burn.
Right now they're not accessible to everyone, they're accessible to rich people and a lottery of poor people.
When prices of a good or service goes up, it incentivises other manufacturers or service providers to produce more of that good or service, which increases supply and puts downward pressure on prices.
So to answer your question, higher priced tickets increases supply, which causes lower priced tickets, which benefits poor people.
Eventually prices reach a level where supply and demand match and (for example) concerts are as cheap as they can be given their cost and the demand in the market for them (including the demand from poor people).
This EconTalk episode on price gouging during a natural disaster was very interesting, and somewhat related to this topic: https://www.econtalk.org/munger-on-price-gouging/
Guess why people still go to Sziget or Woodstock.
Also guess why it's impossible to just click your fingers and pull an unlimited number of Woodstocks out of thin air.
The fact that there is a limited number of Woodstocks is irrelevant.
There are other organizers and bands who can also offer concerts, and at a reduced price compared to the premium that something like Woodstock would demand. That's competition, and it puts downward pressure on concert prices in general, thereby helping people on a tight budget.
Why do you think that is?
Hundreds of shitty ape pictures that anyone has access to view has not changed the price of entry to the Louvre.
You do not reduce the price for one form of art by having other artists available. They are all different, and people will want to see one and not another.
So your "proper market" criteria doesn't really exist for anything but digital or virtual goods.
That being said, it could reduce the need for new products/versions being created every other week. However, there would need to be a somewhat centralized 'marketplace' that facilities the second hand sales which is where Walmart could step in with some perks for selling with them.
(Just like houses that come with less ongoing taxes or other burdens go for more money.)
Nevermind the society or the environment. If money can be made, money shall be made, no matter how shady a business /s
But yeah, everyone involved likes to say that they hate scalpers. So no one will do anything to help them.
Woodstock was a legendary event.
The tickets would now be considered collectors items.
Remember, it's trivially easy to follow transactions on the block chain. So the ticket seller can see whether an NFT has been resold, and can just refuse to honour it. Or only honour the first wallet it was in, regardless of whether it is still there or not.
How does blockchain make it interesting?
That is not going to happen, for the same reasons why most people don't dig their own wells, learn carpentry to make their own furniture, or weave their own cloth and learn how to tailor clothes.
Every complex enough system will always have centralized points, aka. gatekeepers. That is how human society self-organises.
>Every complex enough system will always have centralized points, aka. gatekeepers. That's where the problem is. 3rd partys have been introduced for security reasons but are nowadays far from it and that's what some people are actually fighting for. An autonomous system where the only pseudo 3rd party is an impartial public registry
Again: Most people will not use a more complex solution when a simpler one exists, regardless of whether the simpler solution requires a central authority. Example: People used to use IRC, which is a really easy to use system. Then along came chatrooms, and then centralized messenger systems. Sure, some people still use IRC, but they are not the majority.
> That's where the problem is. 3rd partys have been introduced for security reasons but are nowadays far from it and that's what some people are actually fighting for.
Which systems are "far from it"? The financial system? I get my paycheck every month, all payment processes work fine. The government systems? Elections in my country work flawlessly, tallied and protected by central authorities. The power grid? I haven't had an outage in 4 years, and the last one lasted all of 10 minutes. Public Transport in my country is affordable, well maintained and usually on time.
So it seems to me that centralized systems work just fine in the vast majority of cases.
That is an advantage if you're going to engage in behavior any reasonable person would despise you for.
> the absolute lack of need of a third party
If you're scalping tickets, you are the third party.
I don't really get the part on how selling something you own p2p makes you a third party and I don't care about the 2nd hand tickets market, I'm only intrested in a safe decentralized p2p market
> I don't really get the part on how selling something you own p2p makes you a third party and I don't care about the 2nd hand tickets market, I'm only intrested in a safe decentralized p2p market
The peers in this transaction are the event organizer and the person who ends up with a ticket. The ticket scalper is third party that "facilitates" the transaction at a cost. Essentially a broker that no one asked for.
If they don't, then the name of the original buyer is likely part of the hashed information, and anyone else trying to use the ticket is out of luck.
NFTs still require recognition by the authority actually controlling the goods/services in question.
I had this conversation not too long ago, see my comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29282931
Back in my days, a Ticket was just a piece of paper. Without any name on it. The only information it had for what concert it was and what seat you had if there was the option. I could give it to anybody and he/she could go to the concert without any extra fee or a middleman.
But we don't need NFTs & Blorkchains for that. Just a simple digital signature is enough. Take all the info of the ticket, hash it, sign it with your private key, put the result into a Matrix Code for convenience and done.
So it's even worse than you say, they are selling a sign pointing to a very cheap house, but not for the price of the house but by overvaluing the sign's value.
2002-2008 internet (before Facebook) was more Web3 in spirit probably then this Web3 bamboozle.
I wish them all the best, but I'm not optimistic yet.
I consider it more like a certificate. Some cool architect made an incredible house. Lots of people live in that exact same house. But there is one who can say he bought the certificate straight from the architect himself. It doesn't give him anything extra legally.
You can indeed argue what extra value this 'certificate' really has, except for some bragging rights. But I think that is the point of it: bragging rights.
Nobody is under any illusions here. Except the media and their gullible audience; the media is in on it and the people behind it have a financial interest in it, and the gullible audience is easily impressed with techno-jargon, the potential of getting rich overnight, and FOMO.
Are you claiming that this NFT, which everybody knows passed the hands of Shaq, will be worthless in the future?
Bored Ape is kind of like the art of Andy Warhol. Yes, the creators of bored ape made a lot of money, but so did Andy Warhol. Is there anything wrong with that?
If you want to call that all a scam, that's fine. But somehow calling Bored Ape a scam and Warhol art not, is weird. Warhol also had plenty of critics.
If you don't like NFT's that fine, no problem with that. But maybe you could at least try to understand why some people want to spend money on that. And not "because they are a gullible audience".
That's very likely, yes. It's just some digital trading card that he once owned. It's nothing in comparison to an artifact like a shirt from a game or even an autograph. And what are those worth? Much much less than what this URL was passed around for between rich crypto wash pumping bros.
In this case, absolutely. https://checkmynft.com/?address=0x60e4d786628fea6478f785a6d7... ("Asset Strength: Poor")
The NFT is a simple link to an URL hosted at boredapeyachtclub.com. Even if the owner backs up the image on IPFS, the NFT won't point to the IPFS backup; the NFT will always immutably point to BAYC's website.
Inevitably, BAYC will go down, and when it does, the NFT will be a receipt pointing to nothing.
("But it's a receipt to nothing that Shaq once held!" … yeahhh, sure.)
Not if you, the owner, or someone else, stores a copy. Even if the URL associated with the URL is broken, it doesn't change the fact that it still represents the thing people want it to represent.
NFTs are not a backup system for your data.
Don’t get me wrong, I get that it’s not meant to be a data backup and it can be totally disassociated from the ‘thing’ - but setting that concept up and just being a bit more aware of what you are actually getting might make some people a bit more hesitant to buy a digital receipt with a url that may or may not 404 in the future. Great, you’ve got a receipt - for something that potentially millions of people also have a copy of. What makes your receipt at that point, if/when the underlying disappears, worth anything?
They are more like "Digital trading links-to-assets-you-have-no-control-over"?
NFTs are promoted with those images, and if that's unimportant, then what's the difference between an NFT and some random coin transaction?
In fact, the file is itself only one if many representation of thr artwork. Reencode the jpeg, you get a different file, but we still think it and the NFT are linked.
There are only so many monkeys you can attract.
NFT is a solution to this problem: You promise a high return of investment for additional monkeys to invest.
This keeps on going until the whole thing crashes down burning. Those who invested first and really care already pulled out their share. The monkeys will suffer though.
I used some of my profits to send Ukraine some ETH, so did many other people I see.
So monkeys invest in crypto. What do you call those that keep fiat? Fiat like the Turkish lira or Ruble.
What about a Russian who bought some stablecoins right before the war, is that also a monkey?
* NFTs are explained, they sound kind of pointless
* but there is so much money involved!
* so much money involved brings lots of smart folks
* there are lots of smart folks working in NFTs space, they cannot all be wrong
* hence, there must be a there there, and we're are not smart enough to understand it
intense post-truth world vibes here
(One way the scammers promote the Ponzi scheme is by saying "these trading cards are so much more than trading cards," in deliberately confusing ways. That's why "people can't wrap their heads around the simple concept." The scammers are trying to conceal it.)
But NFTs are way worse than trading cards, because every time you transfer one, it wastes more electricity than an ordinary person uses in a year. So this Ponzi scheme is damaging the planet, too.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 "Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C"
A market for digital, digital picture frames currently exists and it has high margins. That is the extent of my thought on the what people are buying.
They aren't advertised that way though and the transaction receipt of purchasing the digital, digital picture frame can be a valuable asset.
Regarding where the images being viewed are stored, many are not following best practices and should be scrutinized for that, but that is separate from the concept of digital digital picture frames, as many do leverage the sales pitch of the technology pretty well and store the entire image onchain or pin them on another censorship resistant storage system.
But I think people overthink it. Who cares that people are buying digital digital picture frames? Just sell digital digital picture frames!
I don't understand this analogy. A digital picture frame lets me look at pictures. What on earth is a digital digital picture frame?
(As opposed to a physical frame for a digital picture?)
A digital digital picture frame is a set of classes that lets you look at preconfigured digital pictures. There is typically a mechanism for changing the image, you purchased the set of classes, typically following one of the NFT standards.
Those are the ways at which they are similar.
I have as much need for a specialised digital digital picture frame as I have for a digital paperweight.
this is a thread about selling them and not asking why people are willing to pay for them. so what you or I need isn't relevant, if you don't want to buy one then don't buy one. if you want to make money, sell one. unless there was some point you were trying to make, in which case there are plenty of sister threads to make that point in.
neuro-typical people got it
I'm probably too thick to understand it. But please keep repeating your bullshit analogy.
NFTs can in-fact store complete binary data and complete vector data. There are some examples and some production projects doing both of those things. But more commonly they typically load a URL to an image, and people prefer that instead of a URL that its on an IPFS URI, but people accept an IPFS proxy URL.
In all scenarios, a separate technology/viewer/website is used to access the standard method which returns the data to be interpreted. Which is where things are dissimilar. Analogies don't compare aspects that are dissimilar [0]. Any one similarity satisfies the criteria for an analogy.
That's why the mona lisa framed in the museum is worth more than a replica picture. It's not even the frame, it's the fact that there's a public broadcast of a form of ownership.
> That's why the mona lisa framed in the museum is worth more than a replica picture.
The Mona Lisa in the Louvre is worth more than a replica because the Louvre owns it? That's an original take, I'll give you that.
Is that is the case, why does the Louvre own the original and not a replica?
so if somebody claimed that they owned the original mona lisa, and that the louvre actually has a replica, would you consider that replica to be more valuable?
Who's to say what is the replica then? Suppose the replica was perfect?
It sounds weird, but the fact that the Louvre is displaying the mona lisa is what makes it valuable. The fact that most people is unable to know (nor care tbh) whether what they see in that glass box is actually the original or a really good replica.
So what makes NFT any different in this sense? It's not a technological thing, but a social thing.
EDIT: The actual power does not reside in the book. It resides in the mindshare this specific book has. Anyone can put anything in a book but only some people control the book that people pay attention to. Similar it is with fiat, cryptos and nfts. The power is not in the technology itself but in the mindshare they occupy. It is more about social engineering than software engineering.
eminent domain.
Buying an NFT just to have an NFT is like paying for an entry in a book with no further meaning. You just get to say that’s your entry.
Oh and the entry is an http url, so there’s a good chance it’ll 404 eventually (if you even get a status code back)
The legal edifice maintaining property rights also requires maintenance.
There isn't really the problem of acquiring a 100% perfect copy of an asset in the real world. You can approximate an item, but you can't literally get the same exact thing down to the molecular composition. On the internet, this is absolutely possible (replace molecules with bytecode), and is I'd argue, one of the defining features of it.
The true secret sauce behind modern property rights is the enforcement through legal authority. In the event of a dispute, courts have potentially a few hundred years' worth of precedence. Following that, there are proven legal procedures to remove a person from unlawful possession of another's property, which hold penalties ranging from monetary fines to loss of freedom.
And the driving force behind that is social consensus, but on a case by case basis. There will be no such thing with NFT's. It's simply impossible to build it in.
Hey, just want to point something out here. The quoted sentence is really important. Civil society doesn't just happen, we all (or at least most of us) have a vested interest in maintaining the legal edifice.
So tomorrow, be nice to someone in traffic. And show good grace and community when faced with one of the social frictions (like waiting in line).
But that may be a good thing to libertarians. NFT may be an early attempt to move past more violence-enabled business models for “intellectual property”, including the mode dominated by VCs for startups, and Music and Movie studios for artists
If you own an NFT you can't print the image on a t-shirt and sell it, because the artist has the copyright, not you.
If only that were true
There is only value because many people think there is value.
Most people are only paying some x for an NFT because they think it is possible to flip it at y >x.
Isn't an NFT basically such a text file embedded into a decentralized marketplace? It's real if you can find a court that says it's real.
The piece of paper is real, but it doesn’t matter if there is the address of a house written on it or whatever - the only think you own is the piece of paper.
That seems a better description of most NFTs which have no contract meaning at all.
If the legal system says you don't own the land, but the NFT says you do, the legal system wins.
The NFT appears useful only when it happens to do exactly what the legal system would already do, and is useless when it disagrees with the legal system. As a result, minting and transferring was a giant waste of electricity; you should have just registered your deed at the county recorder's office, the old fashioned way.
Edit: in short, I would love to talk to a proponent of blockchain who has a more compelling story than 'transfer value'. I mean; I see the case for transferring money to and from warzones etc; if your gov does not allow you to use your money or doesn't allow you to buy a more stable currency than your country has, then this is a means, if kept on chain, for you to have liquidity.
I doubt a court would consider such a vague definition of content as "real".
Well, without the cryptographic hash, sure, and without any particular rights either...
Yea... 45% of NFTs have their hash on chain https://yournfts.org/#stats. It isn't great but it isn't none.
> For example, OpenSea serves most of the NFTs they mint over HTTP. If the OpenSea ever collapses, ~8% of NFTs vanish.
If your metaphor is correct, it remains correct even with a hash being stored on-chain. Frankly, most NFT critiques seem just as thinly thought through as yours.
The NFT is a ledger entry that says you own an edition of a piece of digital art. People coalesce around this believe, because the edition was released by whoever owns the actual copyright (ideally the artist).
The link is conceptually irrelevant. Cryptopunks never had one. As long as the community of collectors remembers and agrees on what each ledger entry represents, there is no problem. A hash can help with this, which is why almost all high-value fine art NFTs have one (in their IPFS-url). No, moxie could not be more wrong when he thinks IPFS should be enforced; the NFT never represents a set of bytes, it always represents an idea. The NFT may link to a 4K render of the artist's 3D scene, but it also represents the 8K render.
The first tweet will always be the first tweet, in the same way as the first transatlantic flight has no physical presence. If Jack sells the first tweet as an NFT, it is no requirement that Twitter stay online for ever. It is merely strongly preferred that someone will archive it so it doesn't disappear from our collective memory, but that need not be the job of the NFT. The job of the NFT is simply to record your ownership of the concept. And you need a blockchain for this, to give it the credible neutrality needed for it to be considered something equivalent to real ownership; you can't have it be at the mercy of a single entity.
If you think paying money for database entries is stupid now, imagine how stupdi it would be if they were in Google Art, a product that will shut down in 3 years, and where Google will delete all your art when your country attacks a neighbour.
It's all well and good to say you are selling some deed, but that doesn't provide you ownership in any meaningful way. Any of these knock off websites making bank off of "NFT" assets would be better served by dropping the NFT nonsense and just straight up selling links to your logged in account.
Congrats, you have rediscovered online token stores. We already paid too much money for world of warcraft gold, now we get to kill trees doing it.
Honestly, the idiots these days...
No, you don't, and yes, you can. And in fact, you yourself say that this is still the case just a few paragraphs earlier:
> People coalesce around this believe, because the edition was released by whoever owns the actual copyright (ideally the artist).
I certainly encourage you to buy NFTs on on those centralized websites. Nevertheless, paying for ledger entries representing art didn't really gain popularity before blockchains, so there is that.
NFTs have zero value and are yet another non-example for the usefulness of blockchains.
For reference: https://skerritt.blog/response-to-moxie/
> This is a lie.
Whenever somebody writes this, I immediately stop reading.
A lie is a statement of fact which is incorrect and the one stating it knew that it's incorrect. Claiming that a statement is a lie is an extraordinary claim that needs strong evidence, i.e., that the statement is indeed incorrect and that the author of it was aware of that at the time of writing. Neither is such evidence provided nor is it even attempted.
As you say what actually matters is proof that the signing party is the real one. And this is where the social contract matters. What gives it value is that artist X says they own wallet Y and that you can see that NFT Z was minted by wallet Y. It's just a fugazi but it can't be fixed by adding stuff to the NFT object.
See the spec as it were: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721
> The pair (contract address, uint256 tokenId) will then be a globally unique and fully-qualified identifier for a specific asset on an Ethereum chain.
And while the code of that smart contract is immutable, it's still code and the outputs of any given function can change even when given the same inputs. The code can of course poison itself by observing other state or even delegating to other contracts, allowing forms of mutability of the contract itself.
Which, reminder, you don't own in an NFT. So hope you really really like the uint256 you bought. Also hope you have a good grasp of solidarity & really did an analysis of that smart contract first. That's a totally reasonable thing to expect people to do, right?
Sometimes knowing the technical layer and low level implementation details too well impedes in understanding / utilization of the actual abstracted task imo