Instagram Is Disabling Its NFT Features
nftnow.com
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“Imagine if you gave up on the Internet in 2000”. This again.
This is how distorted people’s perceptions become when they live their whole life in echo chambers.
Leaving the obvious aside, It genuinely seems like a lot of those still pushing this are utterly unaware of the harms their whole mess has caused.
Also, they’ve made it way harder to teach non-techies how to stay safe online in the future by co-opting the term “crypto”. They immediately think any use of the term crypto is related to this stuff. Your Digital ponzi scam != cryptography.
The worst part is how the public now thinks if you’re involved in software you must be a massive believer in cc/NFTs because they keep hearing about it so all techies must think it’s awesome, right!?
It’s exhausting.
I don't think GP was talking about learning modulo arithmetic and prime factorisation.
No mention of crypto required.
Fundamental cryptographic primitives (encryption, signatures,...) don't require any advanced math to understand if you don't go into the concrete instantiations. The technical community should really try to better teach these concepts to the general public as we move further into the digital age.
It's important because for example it makes it clearer why they should still check the url in the address bar (and not get phished) or that the communication with the website itself is not hidden (only the content is), etc.
what do you think you're teaching, then? Just general good practices?
A teen can be told and taught to wear a condom without explanation of the virology and biology behind the things that it helps to avoid -- similarly Grandma can learn the importance behind https without memorizing the cypher suites; it's still an aspect of cryptography.
The important point is that TLS is referred to as crypto in some cases, and I believe that's what the GGP was referring to. Were I writing an expository piece, sure, I might use different language, but that's not really what my reply was about.
The answer is symmetric cryptography, and you can give a layman example of what that is. But the key word is cryptography.
To give another example where this comes up: keeping backups of your data is prudent. Encrypting those backups is a good idea in a lot of cases to protect your data in case of device theft. While most modern systems make this as simple as possible for the casual user it still helps the user to have a basic understanding of what’s actually going on and the implications.
I'd love to see mandatory education in basic cryptography and such, but in reality I'd assume that even that would end up being security theater for the sake of ticking a box on the compliance score sheet.
I think it's about understanding concepts and uses, not the inner workings. As an example, Glenn Greenwald (despite being a reporter handling sensitive topics) didn't know how to use encryption when he was contacted by Snowden, and learned it later. [1]
I think it would be very useful if the general public could use encryption to the same level they drive cars.
[1]: https://theintercept.com/2014/10/28/smuggling-snowden-secret...
It's the same concept but without the baggage of "crypto".
Why should I change? They’re the ones who suck.
And libgcrypt in 2000: https://github.com/gpg/libgcrypt/commit/bf2fc9201cfa96cd70ef...
Totally normal and not cringy at all.
Edit: And on Usenet in 1982: https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=net.misc&mid=dGVr...
Here's a conference from 1981 put on by the IEEE:
And yet you are wrong :)
I have to assume this is sarcasm, right?
That's literally what "crypto" has always meant for decades, cryptography.
The Crypto conference started in 1981 for instance.
What used to be "crypto" is now "cyber".
What used to be "cyber" is now "metaverse".
Most computers are not compromised because of flaws in cryptography or the application thereof, they are compromised because of operational security (opening suspicious email attachments, reusing passwords, running systems with default admin passwords, etc). These things have little to do with cryptography and are much better understood as "cybersecurity".
This used to be the case about a year ago, now I see the trend shifting towards AI.
The people I've found that have embraced NFTs and altcoins are the ones that are much more focused on business and making money rather than the tech under it all.
Do you have a source or some proof for this statement?
There are tons of reasons to use Web3. You typically do so when you want a community to manage some value without trusting a middleman. Here are a lot of examples: https://intercoin.org/applications
If I were Zuck, I might start another crypto project next year and ask for volunteers because it seems like a pretty good way to extract the worst performers into a neat org chart box that can be shut down without breaking anything else.
"I have been pretty actively arguing against every single metaverse effort that we have tried to spin up internally in the company from even pre-acquisition times."
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/10/29/2144232/john-carmac...
- Recruit people to a new project that has a selection bias towards under-performers (or some other characteristic you want to weed-out)
- Let the project rot for a quarter
- Cut the project and all its teammates
More than under-performers, I think these kind of projects tend to attract those with shiny object syndrome or political ambitions.
Have you ever tried steelmanning your arguments?
https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=wazirx-closes-nft-marketpla...
Oh my god, these guys were true believers. That’s even more hilarious.
Goodbye and good riddance.
Its a good idea to handle ownership of finite digital assets. Imagine buying a song or video game online, and then being able to sell it or give it to a friend later, without having to go through a central authority (and not be breaking copyright law). Just like with a CD.
Unfortunately, 99% of NFT projects have been essentially penny stock schemes, so now that's what everyone thinks of them as.
That's a nice oxymoron you have there. Digital assets are not "finite" or scarce, that's their biggest strength: that they can be copied and shared infinitely. I know that some people hate that, and would love to change it (see DRM). But to hell with that.
The spec was technically amateurish — basically just URLs in a bit of JSON in a slow database, with barely any connection to the asset. NFTs allowed regular non-IPFS URLs without any checksum, which allowed HTTP servers to change the asset at any time! And they had absolutely no uniqueness checks, allowing automating piracy!
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/14/22726556/signal-founder-...
You could literally copy an image, and make a new token for it, and there was no way to decide which token was the true one for any given image, except maybe if you trusted some central authority, haha.
I don't have to imagine it. That's the reality right now without NFTs in the mix.
Way too complicated, I'll stick with mp3s.
If I made $1M of bitcoin proceeds-of-crime and I put it through a coin tumbler then cash out, it can't be directly linked to the crime - but I also can't explain where the money came from.
On the other hand, if my legitimate account creates some shitty digital art and auctions it, then my proceeds-of-crime account buys it, I get slightly less money (auction fees etc) but a good explanation of where I got the money from: I'm an artist, you don't understand my work because you're a dumbass.
Of course, there are plenty of other ways to launder money - feed the proceeds of crime through a fixed-odds betting terminal and I'm just a lucky gambler. Anonymously buy fine art with a suitcase full of cash, then resell it as something I found in grandpa's attic. Sue my own anonymous tax-haven company, and report a big payment as an out-of-court settlement. And so on.
With NFTs, each one is valued independently and the price is what you and someone-who-definitely-isn't-you-wink-wink traded it for most recently.
When people say "good riddance" they don't expect all NFT code to vanish from existence.
They're just saying that it will be tucked into its own dusty corner of tech history, to be forgotten by the masses and especially by tech professionals.
[0] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc...
- BBC: Twelve-year-old boy makes £290,000 from whale NFTs https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58343062
- Guardian: Rishi Sunak asks Royal Mint to create NFT (note 11 months later, it seems this project has quietly died) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/04/rishi-sun...
It was always screamingly obviously a scam/sham/whatever, yet it was lapped up. Unreal. Critical faculties chucked enthusiastically out of the window, including by people and companies that should've known far better. And I appreciate there was of course some cynical deliberate bandwagon jumping, but still.
"I don't understand the first thing about what's going on with all this but smart people seem excited so what could go wrong" is a horrific basis for anything involving money and possible consequent loss of huge amounts of it!
Ape together strong.
There is nothing funny in seeing retail being abused by fake Shamans telling the way to win was to buy overpriced shares from...
And to this day, some irreductible think they re fighting dtcc (why ??) by direct registering...
That's trillions of $$ transacted and in value. Will put Bitcoin price at $250-$400 Thousands of dollars.
Instead of double entry accounting, where each firm keeps a separate ledger for a project, they can all transact off one record of truth.
That kind of paradigm change won’t happen until oracle and sap etc agree on standards and interoperability. Give it another 40-50 years to displace current databases.
That being said, with NFTs I have never met any truly technologically knowledgeable person who could explain me in detail why it solves the problems it (wrongfully) claimed to solve.
Suppose I'm a small indie game studio. I create a game, and this game has skins for characters, weapons, what have you. I want to build a real money economy around these assets, but don't have the manpower to deal with payment processors, build a marketplace, etc. My company could just represent the skins as ERC721 tokens and instantly have access to the wealth of infrastructure that already supports the ERC721 standard. People can buy and sell on a marketplace of their choosing (Opensea, Blur, etc.), they can manage their assets using a wallet of their choice (Metamask, Rainbow, Frame, Coinbase Wallet, etc.).
This is just one example, but can be applied to literally any non-fungible asset that be represented digitally. And although the application I mentioned is primarily a financial one (because Ethereum is the internet of finance), there are certainly non-financial use cases for having a fully interoperable, decentralized representation of a digital good.
It's important to understand that NFTs didn't invent digital scarcity. This is an idea that's existed for a long time. Downloading a song I have to pay for, League of Legends issuing a limited edition skin, even the notion of a privileged role on a website (e.g. moderator) implies some sort of digital scarcity. People value having status, people value having scarce things, NFTs didn't invent that idea, they just make it much easier to represent these things in a very standard way and plug into mechanisms that allow for price discovery of these things (which I repeat, already are deemed to have value, but have extremely high friction to trade).
Maybe you don't understand because you aren't a digital native. I grew up playing World of Warcraft, and even from a young age I understood the power of having something other people didn't have. When I saw other players with their Naxxramas gear and I'm sitting there in normal Uncommons, it implied a difference of status. There was value in getting this gear because it made you feel special and important, or part of a certain community. The entire premise of the game revolves around the idea of scarcity (people have to work to get the best gear). If people had the best gear from the start, they wouldn't show up to raid every week, they wouldn't spend hours and hours farming materials or gold. That's digital scarcity, it's always existed.
It's not a real money economy when you're asking your customers to first convert their money to crypto magic beans. Dealing with crypto exchanges has been shown to be a great way to put your money into scammers' pockets. Customers will blame you when that happens.
If you want to sell skins, why not let customers pay with real money via Stripe or another payment API? It's certainly a much easier integration task than reconciling your game database with the Ethereum state of those assets, and the end-user UX is lightyears better so you'll probably sell a lot more skins.
This Instagram NFT shutdown demonstrates again that the mainstream has no appetite for crypto despite the breathless claims of the past ten years.
Because stripe takes a massive cut?
"the end-user UX is lightyears better so you'll probably sell a lot more skins"
for now
"This Instagram NFT shutdown demonstrates again that the mainstream has no appetite for crypto despite the breathless claims of the past ten years."
Everybody in the community already knew this. Like you've said, the UX isn't there yet. That's obvious to anyone that is in the space. Nobody was sitting here applauding Meta for their obvious bandwagoning onto the latest thing. Maybe if they actually wanted people to adopt NFTs they should work on improving the UX or build some fucking infrastructure instead of just leeching off the community trying to make a buck. If you want people to display their art as NFTs on instagram, then create an Oculus App that's a virtual art gallery, allow people to display their instagram NFTs in that gallery. Interface with other technologies that already exist in the space. Use your billions and billions of dollars to make the experience better for everyone. They didn't even fucking attempt to build anything.
With crypto prices trending down, your game skin business is probably going to lose more money just to the crypto exchange rate than they'd pay out to Stripe... And meanwhile you didn't get any of the convenience of using Stripe, so your revenue is probably a lot smaller because your players just aren't using the feature.
2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction, sure, but after that you have actual fiat money that you can use to pay salaries and suppliers.
Ethereum isn't free, either. You gas fees, withdrawal fees, and the volatility in selling. Probably comes out to a little less in total, but is a 0.5% saving worth adding all that attrition to your sales process?
People want to pay in their local currency with their local bank account not jump through shady hoops. I want to play videogames not chat with little girls in the Philippines.
NFT seems only useful if there is a zero trust situation and irreversibility is wanted, but I see nearly no situation where this is the case.
The ability to say this with a straight face and realise nothing is amazing.
Or a database on the game server…
People keep trying to shoehorn blockchain whatever into places where a simple database would suffice and already exists.
Nobody is going to save in game character state in a Account Abstraction and Application Specific Rollup.
One look at this line and all further delusional house of cards falls down. There are no technical possibilities for NFTs to represent anything, it is technically impossible for current chains. There are only two exceptions - punk pixel art because they live fully on chain, and ENS records which are somewhat useful but only inside tokenbro industry.
But doing all the work to integrate ERC721 into your game might take the same time (or more) than a simple centralized payment system (not to mention that transacting these ERCshits is costly, more than 5USD per trade most of the time). So why bother?
The DX can continue to get better, but that’s not what is holding game devs back from choosing an L2.
If another, which one? Take in account that L2s are based on a network of channels. You can only transfer value atomically among a network of channels if the tokens being transferred across the channels are fungible, otherwise what you transfer from Alice to Bob is not the same than what you transfer from Bob to Carol.
Many times while playing the game, I changed my main character, but had skins for other characters I no longer played (maybe they got nerfed or something). It would be great if I could exchange those skins for other skins of equal value for the character I switched to.
Yes, the company itself could implement all these different features, but at that point you're re-inventing the wheel. We have a set of standards regarding digital assets, and the technology already exists to do the things I mentioned seamlessly. The only thing the company needs to do is implement their assets as part of that (ERC721) standard.
I hope you understand that for the same reason, Riot does not want you to be able to sell your skins?
The game publisher still has the final authority on whether a skin is displayed in game or not, and no blockchain is going to change that.
The reason Riot doesn't do this is that it would reduce profits. If they would make more money otherwise, they would be doing that already.
Why do some people insist that if others disagree with their opinion, it has to be because those others don't understand?
To make it clear, this doesn't mean that these companies are actually _making_ money.
It is now dead in the water in any app, unfortunately. Apple charges 30% fee on all in-app NFT sales, and on top of that Apple ToS strictly prohibits any “functional” use of NFT tech in their apps.[1] As you’d expect, NFT markets have moved to web in general, outside of app space.
[1] https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1584609845570768897?s=2...
You'd think a market place like https://bandcamp.com/ would make this a trivial event: create the release, set the release date, let people pay, once the release date hits everyone downloads a ZIP with some FLAC files and a JPEG cover.
Instead, this was an "NFT" release: took 15 tries (and several credit card charges) to "reserve" my spot. My purchase is now on some confusing website with random ID's all over the place, and I need to "mint" a "ticket" to log into it.
If ever there was a solution in search of a problem, NFT's are it.
What makes them have "NFT features"? (except some tags and the obvious "NFTish" art style)
I don't use Instagram either but a Google image search shows a "digital collectible" checkmark in the bottom left corner. I hope this wasn't the whole thing as I don't see what would stop you from putting this checkmark into the image.
And yes it says "Digital Collectible" and the image animates back and forth in a partial spin before settling into place.
And in the end, people care about reality a lot more than they do about blockchain data.
Oh, and many of the people involved are going to stay anonymous, and attempting to prove the authenticity of one of these things by deferring to off-chain authorities goes against the intended spirit of the entire thing.
Utterly baffling.
I'm not sure anyone at any point thought they were legit, it was crypto chuds hyping their next scam, and the media willing to join in for extra clicks. The real losers were the the ones who bought in thinking they would find a greater fool to off load their magic beans to later.
If you believe that ownership of a hash of the brooklyn bridge in a ledger is the same as the real thing. Well i have the brooklyn bridge to sell you.
It's not about copying the pixels, it's about showing provenance.
I can paint something right now and show provenance for it, but that won't make my childish scrawl valuable.
The problem with electronic art is that there's nothing special about the original over copies in this sense. You can't hold it and know that you're holding the very thing that the artist was working on.
What they cannot do is forge your signature.
This is how asymmetric crypto works.
I worked for a company that made NFT character skins for their games; of course when the game checked your wallet for game skins, it only looked for NFTs that were signed by the game company. As you said, impossible to clone or forge.
Of course anyone could (and did) clone the ARTWORK associated with the NFT and create fake/pirate NFTs; but they had no in-game value. That's still a problem for players who might get duped by the fakes though.
In the end, though, using the blockchain didn't enable any functionality for the users that couldn't have been accomplished using a plain database of ownership. In theory the blockchain would grant some permanence to the asset, but once the game company shut down the market value of the asset cratered anyway.
NFT's I think potentially had SOME initial interesting tech (mainly the early talk about being able to track photo copyright for photographers for example) but quickly evolved into the crypto BS investment crap.
Same was said for the user-generated content that lived in the community forums on the fringes of the web back in 2000s. Big sites and 6-figure columnists even suggested that these were 'littering' the Internet.
15 years later, content is user-generated, and now there is even something that is called the 'creator economy'. And even those 6-figure, out-of-touch elite columnists who derided it are jumping on the bandwagon.
...
Crypto is a technology. It does things. We observe that it is able to do things and it works. Its just missing a widescale use-case. The moment someone finds that use-case, it will explode like how the actual web exploded back then. Solely the DAO concept is revolutionary by itself, enabling large-scale, democratic economic organization for the masses, which was not possible or difficult and totally non-transparent before. That a few people here and there used it for dumb reasons or failed in accomplishing various objectives like buying the constitution etc does not change what potential DAOs provide.
Of course, there is also the problem of crypto space and all the features and applications within them being WAY too out of the average user's league in terms of user friendliness. Just like how it required knowing what a 'forum' was, knowing how to 'register', and then even knowing the right people who could refer you to the forum so that the administration would approve your membership back in early 2000s.
True, but it's entirely possible that such a use case will never materialize. People haven't even been able think of plausible theoretical ones except in niche applications. That's not to say none are possible, but they're hiding pretty well.
My personal hypothesis is that the interesting tech in crypto will eventually find a real, solid use -- but it won't be one resembling what anyone thinks, and won't be sexy.
Hard disagree. DAOs already exist, for example, and they are widely used even if the phenomenon is unknown to who doesnt have an interest in it or who is not technical enough. They are still way too technical for the average user, and even solely this use case could easily explode the moment everything is simplified and presented to the users with an intuitive and easy to use interface by a new service.
A lot also depends on the infrastructure improving - IPFS is great, for example. But its not as fast as a server, forcing you to store very little data using it. For the moment, any use case that will involve IPFS must fit into those narrow confines. Actually, same goes for most of crypto - Ethereum is a framework that you can literally, actually program on. But you wont be compiling any complex modern app code and serving it from there. One reason why the use cases still revolve around financial things, NFTs and other things that are built on the ledger functionality.
> but it won't be one resembling what anyone thinks
That's entirely possible.
> and won't be sexy.
And that totally depends. Anything that gets mass adoption ends up 'sexy'...
They're also a pretty niche application. And I'm not convinced they're something that requires blockchain to accomplish anyway.
> Anything that gets mass adoption ends up 'sexy'
Not if it ends up being an invisible piece of machinery, which I think is the most likely result. Different bits of the more interesting tech will get incorporated into larger systems to support their goals. The larger systems may (or may not) be sexy, but the bits of crypto they incorporate will just be background players to that.
But then, the surest way to be wrong is to predict the future. Who knows what will really happen?
To be honest even an example of a DAO that only votes on token allocations but has spent them on something more useful than a book about Dune would be interesting.
So not only were they bandwagoning, they were slow too.
I feel like the general sentiment is that cryptocoins have mostly been used to scam people out of money. The field seems full of manipulative tactics all for the purpose of feeding the early investors.
Blockchains are not a magic technology, they will probably have a niche use somewhere, but cryptocoins seem like a dead end.
So it might be like e-mail spam, it'll stick around as long as there are suckers born every minute.
But I'm hoping it will fade away from the mainstream at least.
Is this true? Are NFT’s / crypto done? You know some people that are involved in it and they still seem to be hard into that world, so I was surprised to read all of this.
Check out this article for what I think is a good perspective on how blockchain tech is not useful: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2022/11/19/AWS-Block...
https://trends.google.co.uk/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&...
I think you'll find it's more the case the people here are a) educated on how the technology literally works b) educated on how product as it applies adoption literally works c) able to think abstractly about market need.
NFT as a technology and product... use case is... incredibly small.
Just because there are some people around the world doing similar things to you doesn't mean it's a community. I feel like people crave so much this feeling of "being a part of a community" that they try to apply this to everything, up to a point where the term is becoming meaningless.
Struggled to ever see the point of NFT's - at least as anything beyond 'trading cards' (which granted have their place).
No problem with the hype moving on. Leaves a cleaner space behind for more compelling innovations to gain some limelight.
The fact that they've mostly been made to create bored apes and all that was a bit mind boggling unimaginative :')
They solve a real world problem of ownership of digital assets in an interesting way. We need a solution here and NFTs proposed an "open" one. I wish we keep exploring this space.
I dont think its a great idea, largely because making the ledger operate in a zero trust environment isnt a great value add for video game tokens, but it's important to judge things on their merits and in this case you could build a system as described.
This use-case always broke down for me when I realized you inherently can't have a secondary market when you still rely on the first market (the owners/operators of WoW) to maintain the integration(s) with token<->game.
If I sell an owned mount token to a friend but the ownership of that mount doesn't actually transfer in-game, the entire system breaks down. Ergo, the livelihood of any secondary market relies entirely on Blizzard maintaining whatever in-game functionality uses the tokens, rather than solidifying a promise of any real decentralized ownership.
I don't know why you started your sentence with "No". What you describe is exactly the same as buying the name of a star, except it's on blockchain instead of some kind of database.
If you like, you can write code to associate the ownership of that star (by access whichever star registry institution you like) to some game feature. Or you can let the player submit a "star ownership certfication. It's just the same except the data source is decentralized.
Maybe eventually we'll put things like deeds on-chain as NFTs. This would have the benefit of decentralizing the record-keeping power, so we wouldn't have to worry about failure of some central authority in this regard.
Enforcement of these ownership rights will probably depend on some centralized power, but if the deeper record-keeping layer becomes decentralized, is that not a win?
I can print a copy of the Mona Lisa, but that doesn't devalue the original painting.
For now, you’ll have to settle for a court system and copyright law.
All the digital ownership stuff is whack funny money low rates bullshit. That usecase for it is a concession that the copyright industry got it right, which is obviously not the case. NFTs just don't have the muscle to prop themselves up like Copyright does.
Do we, though?
/shrug
NFTs were always daft, but the fiction, as fiction often does, spoke to a real need.
It's also easier than ever now for an independent artist to make money. Patreon, Fanbox, Skeb have vastly simplified the logistics of getting money for your work. Promotion through social media is free, though time-consuming.
The problem is the same as it always was: artists want to focus on creating art, and not running a business. If I told you I was going to make a software company, with the expectation of a livable salary, but spend $0 on sales, marketing, or customer support, you'd call me an idiot, because there's a lot more to a software business than churning out code. Similarly, there's a lot more to making a living as an artist than drawing pictures or creating music.
Ironically, NFTs were most successful with people who already understood all this. Unscrupulous people like Steve Aoki aggressively marketed their own NFTs using their existing brand power and made a hefty sum, while your dime-a-dozen 10k Twitter follower artist got nothing.
Very condescending and, at the same time, not true at all. Many existing artists did much better in revenue than ever in the way of getting paid for their craft during the rise of NFTs, there were many spaces where artists would brag about their success and help onboard others into the space, often paying their transaction fees.
For many of the small audience artists it's very sad the momentum faded, and the spring of generative AI doesn't help them either.
Again, my concern is for the artists who were briefly given hope, however false.
For context, this book is helpful: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Artist-Creators-Struggling-Bill...
It literally describes an effort by Meta to put NFTs to use for artists.
Again, decay.
Of course no one was going to pay $1000 for landscape_digital_painting.png which you can get a dime a million on dall-e.
This is hardly a new phenomenon. Artists today have more ways of getting paid than ever, but it is still a buyers market.
If DALL-E emerged before NFTs, I don't think we would have seen them gain any traction _at all_.
NFTs and the guys pushing them were only out to hurt artists and exploit them, and nothing else. If they weren't out to scam them, they were out there just stealing the art.
It was not "a nice idea" and the fact that people still try to tie them to "but what about the artists" narrative is a disgrace. I'm sorry, but there is no "but" here.
Yes something for artists would be nice, everyone agrees. NFTs were never that, not even a little bit. It was not "an attempt to provide artists with revenue", it was an attempt to use artists for revenue.
You make a difference between what you say, and the people cheering for NFTs, but the whole "yeah but what if it works" or "yeah but wouldn't it be nice if..." angle is exactly the type of crowbar all the cryptocurrency/NFT scammers used and still use to stay relevant.
This is dead in the water in any app, anyways. Apple charges 30% fee on all in-app NFT sales, and on top of that Apple ToS prohibits any “functional” use of NFT tech in their apps. [1]
[1] https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1584609845570768897?s=2...
The fact that I have not met a single knowledgable person who managed to convince me that NFTs are a good technology that solves problems that need solving in elegant ways doesn't speak about me, it speaks about the topic at hand.
To me NFTs look like this: Somebody was like "how can we make money off the internet if people just can copy everything? We need to limit the supply somehow!" and then they tried to market it to artists "you will earn money this way". I don't even agree that copyability of data is a problem, and the argument of "we can make money by owning and not putting in a lot of work" attracts exactly the kind of bad actor you talked about.
Any technology doesn't live in isolation from society, especially not something like NFTs that makes the extraordinary claim to introduce something as fundamental as ownership within a system that has been built on free copying of data. That means bad actors need to be factored in, especially if you're marketing the thing in the style of a get rich quick scheme.
Maybe you can explain why this is something we want and why this is the technology that solves it?
Some benefits of NFTs in the property deed example would be:
- The elimination of the need for municipalities to maintain proprietary databases to hold property deeds
- 24/7 globally accessible property information. (No downtime)
- Standardized and globally interoperable property records across municipalities and potentially countries
- Easy to prove and verify ownership of properties, which could be used to grant access to third party services for homeowners. (e.g. HELOCs)
- Dapps could allow property owners to post the NFT deed as collateral and automate the loan application process to reduce processing costs.Now some potential scenarios:
1. A sells deed to B. So now they do in on chain and NFT is sold from wallet X to Y. All of that is registered in the CDB and confirmed with paper documents, contracts and stuff. Maaaybe that can work, but as we see NFTs are useless fifth leg in a horse here.
2. Inheritance. Deed is inherited by law by person C (with or wihtout wallet Z), but chain doesn't know about it and thinks wallet X still owns NFT. CDB has actual data and overrides "wallet X" line, so that chain now useless and outdated.
3. Law enforces deed transfer from A to B. Again, NFT is not sold and chain is not updated.
The list of situations can go on and on.
And last note - these so called "dapps", which are neither smart nor contracts, are the most stupidly delusional thing you can introduce into a valuable commodities market. Only people not familiar with the scale and rate of exploits caused by usage of these dumb and badly designed programs can suggest it. Or the one profiteering from this. Phishing is over the top and even experienced users at r/CC are regularly losing everything due to a single click mistakes. This is not how housing market worked and will work. Not how any market works actually.
>Dapps could allow property owners to post the NFT deed as collateral and automate the loan application process to reduce processing costs. Do you not see how this is a bad idea? What value is the NFT deed? The house has the value - what's the NFT worth? If you have the NFT deed, are you the house owner? Bruh.
What value is the property deed? The house has the value - what's the property deed worth? If you have the property deed, are you the house owner?
A blockchain solves the specific problem of how to track ownership of some piece of data in a decentralized fashion where multiple parties do not trust each other.
This, however is not the hard problem when we talk about ownership databases. The hard problem is ensuring the data entered into that database represents actual real world ownership and having the database universally recognized by everybody as a representation of ownership.
What purpose does a database like that serve, when the actual place where the rubber of ownership hits the road is somwhere else?
Agreed. The parties that are interacting must agree on which blockchain to interact on first. More likely an industry, trade association, or government would say this chain is going to be the system of record of where transactions take place and then individuals and businesses are forced to abide by that. Then once that is decided, any transfer of ownership on that chain would expect to be honored by the transferring party. If not, then consequences would be enforced by the governing industry, trade association, government. etc.
> A blockchain solves the specific problem of how to track ownership of some piece of data in a decentralized fashion where multiple parties do not trust each other.
> This, however is not the hard problem when we talk about ownership databases. The hard problem is ensuring the data entered into that database represents actual real world ownership and having the database universally recognized by everybody as a representation of ownership.
> What purpose does a database like that serve, when the actual place where the rubber of ownership hits the road is somwhere else?
Yes, there is sort of a bootstrapping problem around how do you get people onboarded onto a particular blockchain. For that I think you need some novel use case(s). For Bitcoin it was being the first alternative monetary system. For Ethereum it was the ability to create on-chain programs. Zcash it was private transactions. etc. Once people are onboarded though, then you can use that system to agree on where ownership entry and change of ownership transactions take place. Then you can use the publicly auditable history to prove ownership. For a physical good, then that becomes evidence that can be presented to a third party presiding entity who settles disputes.
Of course it doesn't eliminate the need. Who's going to enter those records and enforce them?
> Standardized and globally interoperable property records across municipalities and potentially countries
Just because it's on blockchain doesn't mean it's standardised, or interoperable.
> Easy to prove and verify ownership of properties, which could be used to grant access to third party services for homeowners.
Yup. Until a corrupt government official puts his friend as the owner of your house and evicts you. Look, the proof is in the blockchain, and it's irrefutable, and cannot be amended.
> Dapps could allow property owners to post the NFT deed as collateral and automate the loan application process to reduce processing costs.
This is just a string off made-up terms that make no sense
The staff still does what they do today, but they no longer need to maintain their own database and IT application.
> Just because it's on blockchain doesn't mean it's standardised, or interoperable.
Once it is on a blockchain it is conforming to a published standard for NFTs for that particular blockchain and others can interact with it and build additional systems that interoperate more easily.
> Yup. Until a corrupt government official puts his friend as the owner of your house and evicts you. Look, the proof is in the blockchain, and it's irrefutable, and cannot be amended.
Because corrupt government officials have never doctored official records that weren't on the blockchain?
> This is just a string off made-up terms that make no sense
No, it's not. A Dapp stands for a "decentralized application" and posting property deeds as collateral is a real thing. Further, being able to do that digitally will likely lower processing costs.
It doesn’t say anything about the correct answer to the question and all about your analysis process. Keep looking, good luck!
For example:
> The fact that I have not met a single knowledgable person who managed to convince me that eating poop is a good idea that solves problems that need solving in elegant ways doesn't speak about me, it speaks about the topic at hand.
Do we conclude that eating poop is a great idea, and that more looking is what's needed? Or can we conclude that there's probably a reason folks struggle to justify the concept?
It doesn't necessarily say something about the correct answer to the question. That however doesn't automatically mean it never says something about the correct answer to the question.
I decided in this case, that it does.
We can do an experiment here - you can describe what you think is an NFT and I can reply why is that technically impossible (because we have heard this broken record for a thousand times already) :)
Zuck announced that they're pivoting to AI, shuttering Reality Labs, and moving Oculus to a pure gaming platform. They have no ambitions for the metaverse any more.
She says that like it would’ve been a bad thing.
Really? Will nftnow.com be sending their helicopter to the Meta headquarters?
“I can open up devtools and change the words on this page. HTTPS has no value.“
“I can photoshop you digitally signing a different document. Digital signatures have no value.”
I fairly obviously disagree with those statements but if you do too - you may wish to put your pitchfork down for a moment and think deeper about the value of digitally signed artwork.
1. For the majority (perhaps even vast majority) it was never pointing to ipfs, but to some server running somewhere.
2. On ipfs files will disappear eventually if there's no one to pay for their storage
metaplex defaults to arweave for uploads.
NFTs make more sense when representing ownership of digital assets that grant some utility.
I am a believer in the idea that in-game assets will become NFTs. Playing video games professsionally is like being a tradesperson, and just like a carpenter doesn't need to use a different hammer for each job, a gamer shouldn't need to get new stats or weapons for each game they play.
Just like a famous musician might, a gamer should be able to sell the gun they used professionally to a fan and that fan can have that represented in any game (using that game's native assets).
I see a lot of value in an open registry of digital items I own, each with a cryptographic proof of provenance, and which doesnt require a centralized entity to control and decide which games can and can't participate. This can be done without a blockchain, but then there's no central proof of who owns what (I can own the item, sell it, but still submit old proofs to a game to keep using the item).
I may think this way because I own a lot of digital goods that are stored in private databases which will someday shutdown. At that point, I'll loose all of those items.
- If they want money, NFTs are directly competing with microtransactions/loot boxes. Any NFT imported is money the developer isn't making off their own content.
- If they want a good game, allowing users to import random items from other games is going to be impossible to balance.
- If they want a free for all, they can already implement mods and steam workshop without the crypto aspects.
As an aside, if the goal is simply trading items between players, that's better done with a traditional market. Allowing real money to enter the game tends to incentivise all the worst player behaviors and ruin the experience, as Blizzard discovered with the Diablo auction house.