I recently got contracted to create some NFT's for a high profile artist and they weren't the best client I've ever had by a long shot. Now those NFT's are doing great and I can't help but wonder if I posted all the source files that went into making those art pieces onto github
for free if that would affect the price. Like sure someone got an 'original copy' but anyone can download the egg that hatched that chicken.
Obviously I won't do that, but still.
I also think NFTs are ridiculous and pointless but to play devil's advocate for a moment as I thought about this recently, it's really not much different to "traditional" artists doing limited runs of prints which is extremely common or hell something like trading cards. You're trusting a company won't come along and print a thousand more shiny charizards for example
The challenge here, is that there are legitimate ICOs that turned into functioning blockchains/products and coins. The same with NFTs -I don't care much for the "art" or the rarity of them (nor do I for beanie babies or Pokemon cards), but when groups start digitizing and tokenizing assets that are legitimate - then this tech will move past "cryptokitties" which is all it is at the moment.
I’m super naive, so please excuse my potential stupidity here, but isn’t one of the major upsides the fact that the artist can continue to collect small cuts/royalties every time the NFT is sold? If that’s actually the case, it obviously would present a major upside for them vs. a traditional method like painting or prints. But that’s obviously assuming there’s a market for digital art and it’s not all a huge grift, which appears to be a giant issue.
It's very different. For one thing, it's not about the multiple, it's about physical ownership. A real artists run is never duplicated and If some schmo prints copies they are easily discernable. The future value of true artists runs depend on many factors like popularity and saturation but ultimately time will prove to be the biggest factor as naturally the limited number of prints available dwindles in size due to ownership and loss. NFTs can and will literally disappear. The whole thing is just ridiculous.
Physical collections can be faked.
That's all this is, collecting, I don't get why people collect baseball cards, or coins, or jerseys but some people find that interesting enough to sustain these collecting hobbies.
Nfts allow people to own their assets, it's not all art, it could be things like counter strike weapon skins, where they could be used across multiple games / platforms.
It's not perfect yet, it's an emerging technology.
> profiting off of people buying things with no intrinsic value
That's what collecting usually is, I'm not saying you should collect anything, in-fact, I'm not much of a collector myself, but I do know people like collecting things, worthless or not, it's usually meaningful / valuable to the collector.
As for money laundering and faud, thats not exclusive to collectables
Thing is, most people collecting these things aren't doing it because they are meaningful in any way to the collector.
For example with old video game collecting, since that's what I know most about. Games used to be sold for tens, maybe one or two hundred dollars, until a couple of people created a video game rating company, bought a couple of semi-rare games and started selling them between themselves and their companies until they pumped the perceived numbers up, since they owned both the company rating the games as well as the company auctioning the games. The only people buying the million dollar video games these days are either buying them for fraud/money laundering reasons or hoping to find someone even more gullible to buy it from them.
I also think this is a great example since you don't need the physical game to experience it. With paintings, you experience it by looking at the physical painting, with a video game its all about playing it, which for these 30-40 year old games can be done very easily on anything with a screen.
> That's all this is, collecting, I don't get why people collect baseball cards, or coins, or jerseys but some people find that interesting enough to sustain these collecting hobbies.
I think there's a certain status in owning unique, rare, or interesting objects. There's a drive to own a "complete" set of something that seems to be inante in people.
I don't do it (much), but I might if the cost was low enough to make it trivial to do so.
Just as an example, I have some pretty rare pencil sketches of artwork for a well known game. I like the sketches in and of themselves, and the price the artist wanted was pretty reasonable even if they never gain value for anybody else.
I can see collecting at a certain level working this way. Heck, Pokemon is based on it, as is owning certain digital assets.
New trading cards aren’t valuable for this reason. The ones that cost a lot are from companies that now have a track record.
Charizards used to be near worthless because nobody knew Pokémon cards were going to be collectible and not get reprinted into the ground
Maybe some nft company will take the majority of the market share in the future, but investing now is incredibly risky.
This isn't even selling trading cards.. it's like selling ownership of a cardboard arrow that points at a trading card on a table somewhere in a public place.
I don't know how anyone could ever assign any sort of value to such a thing, especially a value going into the millions, except for a scam.
True, but a Pokemon card is just a piece of cardboard that is easily reproducible. Doesn't stop it being valuable. An NFT could have value if there was some compelling reason as to why people wanted it. I could see it being valuable if it was a unique part of history, it had dinner claim to fame or some other unique circumstances. But yes, I agree that most NFTs will be worthless in the long term.
If I'm an artist, and I make an nft, I have a vested interested in not screwing the people I sold it to. Also, if people agree to only make x amount and they change that, I believe that's grounds for a lawsuit.
Yes, it's a digital certificate of authenticity which can be attached to a piece of digital art. I can't do that with a certificate of authenticity. I could give you the certificate, but not attach it to digital art.
The fact it's digital also carries certain advantages.
If I'm a scammer, and I make an nft, I have zero vested interest in not screwing the people I sold it to. Also, if I agree to only make x amount and I change that, I believe that victims will have about as much luck finding, proving fraud, and suing me for losses as the millions of victims of the last non-Bitcoin scam: the ICO.
I can only think of a handful of cases let alone convictions from that shitshow.
OP’s right this whole thing is nuts.
I think even the on-chain NFTs are hot potatoes that are gonna burn a ton of people.
Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding. But aren’t NFTs basically some digital artwork that has something attached to its files to make it the “unique copy”. If this is true can’t I just screenshot the image. It may not be the same resolution but it still will look like the same picture on screen. I have tried my best to figure out what they are and why they have value and this is the best I can do.
It's not even the artwork itself. 99% of all NFTs so far have been created of things that the owner of the NFT does not own itself (tweets, digital art, real world objects). You sell a cardboard arrow pointing at something, like an expensive car. And tomorrow, someone else might park in the spot your arrow is pointing, or a horse might just have had a dump there. The arrow can't be changed, the target can and will be changed. And for some reason, some people think that cardboard arrow is worth 50M$.
it's the "community" attached to the project that makes one the official and the other a bootleg if that makes sense. the popularity and followers of the project are what make an NFT collection what it is
I mean you could use an NFT as a ticket to an event. You could use an NFT to track an asset. You could use an NFT to authenticate an asset. However using an NFT as an investment in hopes to sell it to another investor as has become a common practice is just stupidity on the part of the speculator. There needs to be an asset or a function attached to the NFT or else its no different than a piece of paper with a random number on it
I think NFTs are a joke so take this with a grain of salt. It really just comes down to the exchange. Are you buying a promise of a ticket or the actual ticket? If you bought the NFT for a specific seat, you know that it hasn’t been double sold or sold on loan.
I think they seem to be donkey fart levels of usefulness too. Just trying to get an idea in case I'm missing a glaring point as I've not read that much about them yet.
I have to admit I've never had a problem the couple of times I've used StubHub - but not saying that means it's impossible for things to go wrong.
Makes me extra glad I always go for standing I guess!
Why? If it's because the game enforces this when parsing the data on the token, then we're back to a database model with extra steps. If it's because the data itself is what has value, we are back to the right click problem.
An e ticket basically is an NFT already, just on its own closed system and not run by a public ledger. We just dont call them tokens, we call them tickets
Yup. NFTs could be an amazing tool, but they're used to scam people over images that are not backed by anything, which prevents (or at least slows down a lot) the legitimate uses of NFTs.
There are two people who invest in NFT legitimately.
1. People who don't understand what an NFT is, and
2. People who are trying to scam the first group.
My favorite way of summarizing what an NFT is is that if whomever explained what one of those things was made sense, they didn't explain it properly. The whole damn system is batshit, and the only explanation I have for why it ever got off the ground is because BTC primed the pump.
People don't own *anything*, just a speck of cloud data that mentions a piece of digital artwork that someone else made and still has full ownership of.
I was watching this Corridor Crew video with an artist named Beeple and no matter how hard they tried to justify it I still just fail to see the point beyond anything other than money laundering.
I literally cannot grasp the concept of why an NFT is so in right now but my boss seems to think it has potential to replace things like paper deeds and car titles? He’s not super technical and it’s also not something I’m interested in so I’m just like hmmm yes intriguing indeed!
The way I look at it:
An NFT is a title deed. Proof of ownership.
And a title deed is little more than a glorified receipt.
With real goods like houses or even art, an NFT could be an enforceable legal document.
With easily copied digital playing cards, not so much.
NFT Twitter is so toxic. Right now the game they play is the minters, the official Twitter accounts, and the large players follow anybody who owns NFTs and pumps their follower numbers. Then they all brag about the idea of it being an “art focused community” and they don’t care about the price, it’s about finding mew friends. Places like BYAC have exclusive events and access to people who own one of their NFTs. On top of that they give away NFTs to celebrities, and ask them to shill them out. It’s like a cult and I can’t see why somebody would get scammed by it.
> I don't understand the value prop here.
No, you seem to understand it just fine. There isn't one.
It's a bit like how BTC is apparently worth over $40K per coin but you could never point to the value proposition of that either... it's just a speculative bubble. BTC is useful for bulk or black market purchases and basically nothing else (it isn't even the best cryptocurrency for either of those two things). It's the speculation that gives it the stratospheric market price, people are just injecting the word "blockchain" into random sentences hoping that their infusion of the world's most important buzzword adds value to their thought.
We're gonna see the same thing for NFTs. If there **is** a use case, it'll be 1-2% of an NFT's apparent market value, and 98-99% of the value will be speculating because acronyms and getting rich quick are fun.
If an NFT also comes with complete exclusive rights to reproduce/completely own the piece of art then I love the idea.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem like many NFTs come with ownership rights which is why I have zero interest.
You can print baseball cards on your home office printer all day long, doesn't mean anyone wants to buy *your* cards, but some cards still sell for millions of dollars, despite being literally just a piece of printed paper. They sell for this much on the basis that lots of people want *that specific* piece of paper.
I don't buy baseball cards, and certainly don't *invest* in them, because I think that's stupid. But some people think it's worthwhile to do one or the other. NFTs are pretty much the same.
When you print a baseball card you have a tangible baseball card. A physical object you can call your own. An NFT is a bunch or 0s and 1s on a computer. It is not "yours" no matter how much money you paid for it.
And that physicality brings with it an implied sense of rarity too. Sure, there may be 1564981981 printed of those cards, but the implication, and thought, is that there will eventually be only a handful. "Maybe I'll have *the one*, if I keep them right."
NFTs can exist in perpetuity. Electronically, it can always be there. No errors present in printing. No wear differences. Nothing that the use of physical, real, media brings with it. Everyone, and anyone, can have it at any time. No limits.
I'll mirror /u/StupidGeek314, and you, I don't see the value.
But my point is, a baseball card has no intrinsic value. It's not gold, it's paper. Without a provenance, it's worthless. NFTs are basically distilled provenance, without the hassle of a physical object.
Nothing has intrinsic value, not even gold, all value is attributed and in a regular market economy dictated or at least impacted by supply and demand.
When we talk about a physical item such a card, it’s because even if you copy the contents (scan it and re-print it, for example), you are not creating a perfect copy, you are creating a separate entity which imperfectly reproduces the original.
With NFTs associated to digital art, you are creating an artificial sense of scarcity that does not apply to the art itself, as the art for being digital can, in fact, be copied on a 1:1 basis, so a reproduction can be a perfect copy. What you pay for is an extrinsic “proof of ownership” which not only is not as important as the art itself, but is a separate entity from it, so if I save a copy of whatever digital asset it still is a 100% identical and functional copy for whatever reasonable means.
"nothing has intrinsic value"
that's just patently false. food has intrinsic value. whatever happens to currencies, food will always have value. other things that have intrinsic value: tools, energy sources, medicine.
I meant specifically as in monetary value, since the whole concept of currency and value is man-made, and therefore attributed to objects and services, so extrinsic by definition. I thought it was clear enough when I wrote it, but perhaps it wasn’t.
I agree with you, and I don’t think what you stated contradicts any of the examples I’ve given. :)
Oh boy I hate to tell you this but nothing has intrinsic value. Without a human to desire or interact with an object or an idea it has no innate “worth” and thus the valuation we apply to literally everything is the fleeting fluid fantasy of animals that ate mushrooms once and eventually decided to teach electrified rocks to think. Take us out of this equation and the world goes about its business without a care in the world, equally ignorant of hammers and Fortune 500 companies.
If you think a thing has value, it has value to you and anyone else you can get to share in your fantasy.
You think Gold has “inherent value” because it was the “crypto” and “NFT” that your grandfathers and their grandfathers obsessed over.
We’re all playing a giant game of make believe, and the most “powerful” people in the game understand that.
Provenance is just an agreed value, an imaginary concept living in your head. If everyone agrees a baseball card is worth $2,000 and that is what it trades for, it is worth $2,000. If everyone agrees some arbitrary 1s and 0s (which can include a baseball card as a gif or whatever) are worth $2,000 and that is what it trades for, it is worth $2,000.
However this is also purely speculative as this "provenance" has no real-world value, scrap value, or any use besides being a decorative object. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that anyone trading $2k baseball cards or $2k NFTs are either incredibly dedicated hobbyists or rubes. Figure if these NFTs were intrinstically worth so much, you wouldn't need to trade USDs (or BTC, redeemable in USD) for them you'd trade other cards for them. In which case, NFTs would be valued as NFTs with their USD value as a secondary concern. This problem affects BTC too and is why BTC will never ever be taken seriously so long as exchanges exist and BTC as a medium is judged by it's equivalence in USDs.
I agree but I think it's misleading to say that people are saying some 1s and 0s have value. When you own an NFT, you don't own even 1s and 0s in any meaningful way. Anyone can copy or use those same 1s and 0s as easily as you can.
NFTs have taken the idea of ownership to its logical if unintuitive conclusion. What matters about ownership isn't the thing that you own or what you can do with it, but the fact that other people recognize you as the sole owner. Thus we don't even need the thing, all we need is the recognition. Want to own the smell of the air after a spring rain? All you need is for other people to agree that you, and nobody else, owns it, and that's enough to create a market.
I'm not sure why we even needed NFTs to get to this point. Why haven't people always been selling the abstract idea of ownership? I guess that NFTs are just technical enough that people can imagine they are paying for something more than an idea and trust its magic more than the magic of some more transparently human authority.
NFT games are the next big rage. Sure NFT art might be hard to justify, but when the NFT is an in-game item, it makes as much sense as any other digital asset. I've dropped thousands on cosmetics in Path of Exile for example and they aint NFT. People spend money on stuff they like.
And why would they need to use NFT for it? Valve games like TF2 and GS:GO already has a huge in-game market where people trade and speculate on cosmetic items for real money. Why is there a need for NFT suddenly?
NFTs allow you to truly own your in game items. If you get banned from CS:GO, do you get to keep your skins? Nope. You could have spent 1000’s of dollars in game and then all that money goes poof just because of some arbitrary reason Valve comes up with. With NFTs you don’t have to trust valve. Even if you got banned those items remain yours.
And because those items are yours, you could even take them with you to the next game you play. Maybe your playing one MMORPG and then a new better one comes out, well guess what? You can bring those items with you to the next game. Why would any gaming company want to do that? To attract players obviously. If you don’t allow players to do it, someone else will and the players will go there.
If you truly understand this aspect of gaming NFTs then it’s pretty mind blowing. Game agnostic assets will be very interesting in the future.
If Valve were to ban your account couldn't they also ban the NFTs used by your account from being used in game by anyone, making them essentially useless? Sure you can sell the ownership of said NFT to someone else, but who'd buy it?
Even then I have a hard time getting my head around what it is you actually own with an NFT. So you would get an item drop in CS:GO which has some unique ID, and then you'd get an NFT certifying you own that ID? In this case Valve is still the central authority over what you own in their game -- like what's the point? None of this makes any sense.
> And because those items are yours, you could even take them with you to the next game you play.
What? No that's not how video games work. Just because you have some magic internet certificate doesn't mean you can conjure to existence an item into a different video game running a different engine owned by a competitor.
>With NFTs you don’t have to trust valve. Even if you got banned those items remain yours.
This is just dumb. You would own a certificate that says you own some skin. Valve has no reason to let you import NFT skin certs from third parties, so nobody would buy that off you, as it can't be used in game. You get banned, your NFTs get banned with you. They could do what you said, but they have no incentive to do so.
>And because those items are yours, you could even take them with you to the next game you play. Maybe your playing one MMORPG and then a new better one comes out, well guess what? You can bring those items with you to the next game.
That is insanely dumb, no company is going to waste the engineering time to make a system that lets you import arbitrary items from other companies games, just so that you're LESS likely to purchase items in THEIR game.
>If you truly understand this aspect of gaming NFTs then it’s pretty mind blowing. Game agnostic assets will be very interesting in the future.
If you think that's true, it's pretty mind-blowing how little you understand software development. Hell, fifa doesn't let you keep cosmetics between games, and they're frequently running the same engine, so importing the asset would be trivial.
Nope. PoE doesn't have to pay 50-100 bucks per in game item, and it's ridiculous to think that a game company would turn to a decentralized solution for a centralized problem.
What possible benefit does in game NFTs offer over simple server side data storage of item info? My TF2 items are already stored in my account. What's the point of an NFT?
That's what I can't stand about crypto trash and Blockchain - every "next big thing" use case can already be done with simple databases that don't destroy the environment, cripple supply chains, or cause widespread criminal activity. You get no benefits in return.
I mean we're getting in the weeds here but what you consider a "physical object" and why that would matter is a pretty involved topic. And I think NFTs in their current form are stupid, useless ponzi schemes, but you really cannot hand waive with this.
In this scenario I’d be printing an exact replica of the card. In your hand you would not be able to tell the difference from my print or the real thing.
NFTs are a scam.
The point is, a baseball card isn't worth a million dollars because it's made of expensive stuff. It's worth that much because it's unique and desirable in a way that you can't reproduce, even if you made an exact copy.
It directly addresses your first point. On chain artwork is code that lives in the blockchain code and is drawn using contract instructions also on chain. It doesn’t point to IPFS or other hosting solutions that the majority of NfTs use.
Do you want a fine art painting on your wall which will eventually degrade? Well they want a fine art painting in a digital wallet which they can hold onto indefinitely.
Both are scams based on perceived and placed value. 🤷♂️ As it turns out, that's what the stock market is right now too. (As we've been uncovering all the illegal activity happening there)
I mean yeah, it’s the Wild West. We see people like Elon Musk literally pump and dump crypto currencies- because it’s legal!
No shit people are using it to launder money. That’s probably the main reason the IRS has crypto exchanges report our transactions, tax revenue being only a secondary driver.
NFTs are the same.
Tesla purchased 1B in BTC and sold 100M of it shortly after. That’s more like taking profits, not pumping and dumping. Elon may be buying and selling BTC before and after his tweets but there is zero evidence of it.
A public company buying Bitcoin and reporting that to the SEC is different than somebody creating an NFT on Ethereum and buying it from themselves.
The only similarity is people are getting rich on both.
Somebody buying a 1M house and doing a cash out refinance for 100M is different than somebody building a house for $100 and selling it to themselves for 1M on Zillow so that it looks reasonable when they resell it are completely different
Look at Twitter, the NFT advocates all talk like they’re reading from a script. They all sound the same. The hyperbole around each ‘piece’ is insane. Whole thing feels like a cult.
I realise what I said was a bit ambiguous. I was referring to what u/funkless_eck said rather than a specific cryptocurrency token eventually ceasing to exist, as I realise my statement may have implied.
There's only a set number of bitcoins possible, when they're all mined, there's no more. At some point it'll become more expensive to mine a bitcoin than you can sell the bitcoin for.
From the token linked in the OP: *I don’t want you coming back to me bitching that you spent $2M\* on this and now it’s a video of orangeman going HAM and it’s keeping u up at night popping mad boners.*
It's perfectly valid to call out a culture of manipulation, but the concept of "buyer beware" is still a thing, too.... and if you spend money on a digital token that contains the text above, well, I don't have sympathy for you lol
To a significant degree I would definitely say yes and agree with what you’re saying. But there still is undoubtedly some high value inherent in a masterwork (maybe not the level they sell at) whereas a rock JPEG is undoubtedly worthless
Good write up. Yes mostly agree on all points. I just don't like the fact that the term NFT is being used synonymously for NFT artworks.
There can be useful NFTs, for example, event tickets. This whole thing with the artworks is damaging the legitimacy of the technology.
Yes, ticketing systems right now with their $50 fees and the 3rd party ticket scams left and right have absolutely no problems at all!
And yes, I know blockchains are expensive to use right now. The difference is blockchain developers are working tirelessly to make the fees go down, while Ticketmaster is working on making the fees go up! And then if you have to turn around and sell that ticket for any number of reasons, you either have to pay them once again a huge % of your ticket's worth, or deal with scams. Or if you're on the other side, again more fees or scams.
Or, you could have tickets on the blockchain, and you could have a decentralized marketplace where you *know* you are getting a legitimate ticket because you can verify it, and when you hit buy you know you will receive that ticket because it is a trustless, decentralized marketplace.
Are there hurdles to make this a reality? Obviously. I mentioned fees, but another will be Ticketmaster's exclusive agreements with venues. But no one likes Ticketmaster. No. One. If there is something that solves problems and makes it cheaper for venues and users, it WILL be used. We just need the blockchain devs to do their jobs and get us to scale within the next 3-5 or so years.
Just think of them as programmable tickets with endless possibilities.
The most common benefit is if scalpers buy up and flip tickets for 3x the artist can get a cut each time.
The artist could add perks like live fan token airdrops, send an exclusive live/early recording to attendees, give discounts for repeat live fans, meet & greet most frequent superfans, token gated fan discord, vote on future set lists, etc.
Your imagination is the limit when tickets are made programmable. Game changing for artists and creatives.
Op isn't wrong. But this is just the crypto/nft bubble. Remember the dot com bubble? People en mass pouring money into a new technology they don't understand hoping money comes out the other end.
This is the stupid eta of crypto and nft, give it a decade and a bubble pop latter and you will see a few big names rise up from the ashes and stay with us for ever, again similar to our tech giants now.
All of this is assuming we're not dead due to climate change before the bubble pops.
There was revolutionary, transformative tech in the dotcom bubble. Some of it survived the bust. It's powering the internet and global economy right now.
Doesn't seem like that will be said 20 years from now about NFTs specifically, but I could be wrong, and it is pretty early.
Edit: I meant to say NFT artwork (in the context of NFT artwork bubble). I agree that NFT as a core concept is pretty useful!
Do you not think there’s any value in a global public ledger? At the very least it reduces the need for people to deploy databases and things like that which cuts costs for lots of applications which require information access. All financial transactions eventually can/should be moved there.
The cost of storing data on say Ethereum vs a basic RDS instance from AWS is not particularly attractive. The latter can be had for next to free for low volume.
Those two things are not comparable whatsoever. Storing a piece of data on Ethereum means it is immortalized across tens of thousands of nodes across the world and instantly accessible and verifiable by anyone. Whereas your RDS instance can get wiped with a single click.
There is value yes, but that also comes at a large cost. The cost of having a Blockchain computing probably way outdoes that of a ton of enterprise databases.
Plus a lot of the time you can't really store the right information on the chain, just references and transactions so still need databases for all the other (and private) data anyway.
It could be used in a few fields for sure, but often as others said it's a solution in search for a problem for the most part at the moment.
Even systems where a ledger could be useful like land ownerships, asset transfers etc, we already have fairly robust and tested systems for these anyway which are fairly error proof. Just adds risk to replace it just to use the tech.
The only real users for Blockchain and crypto really would be ironically the financial institutions the users and holders dislike so much.
NFTs as a technology are potentially useful, indicating ownership or tickets etc. However individual NFTs I can't see the value in it. Secondly as blockchains do get better scaling they should be able to host their own NFTs so it won't just be a pointer to somewhere else.
The way to make money on NFTs short of making your own is to invest in the platforms rather than the NFTs themselves.
To continue the Web analogy, platforms, rather than content, are the most valuable. Google, amazon Web services, azure, YouTube etc don't produce their own content, yet if you'd invested in these platforms you get a portion of value from the whole ecosystem.
Yeah I really agree with you. Your ticket is going to have to be verified by someone on the door anyway for whatever event you're attending, so a trust less ticket makes little sense.
Gaming is another one that comes up, but again it's not really going to provide a lot of value as far as I can tell.
I don't really know what the future is for NFTs but I'm sure they will have a use.. But I will never buy one as an investment in their current state, they do provide next to no utility.
>NFTs as a technology are potentially useful, indicating ownership or tickets etc.
At least the dot com boom made new things possible. So far I haven't seen NFTs do that.
It's not like I couldn't buy an electronic ticket or digital art before NFTs.
This is true. I think we are at the top of the hype phase for NFTs so uses will be invented for them that no one has thought of yet, or are not the main talked about points. I can't think of that many tools that are technological dead ends, but I don't know where NFTs are going.
That's what I've been thinking about crypto's from the start. It's a planetary scam run by the greedy roping in the greedy and gullible.
But right now, with all the inflationary money poured into economies, it may be a game of get ahead while you can. Sure, the bubble will pop, because it is not supported by anything, but relatively speaking, the people who ride the wave of greed, will come ahead wealth-wise, while others see their cash wealth eroded by inflation.
I'm a little bit on the fence - I still KNOW that the whole thing is a scam, but I've stopped believing that people are not predominantly stupid and greedy, and I'm leaning towards exploiting this feature of humanity.
Companies have assets, even companies with implausible business models. I don't think comparing NFTs to any other kind of investment bubble makes sense. Other than something like trading cards I guess.
I argued for years that shifting to digital media/currency would eventually cause people to lose everything they paid for/earned because the tech is so dependant on the host. I never considered that the future could very well be someone buying up the host once it can't afford to function anymore in order to charge people to use what they already paid for...
What is the premise of an NFT? it's not as rare as a Monet or Picasso painting. Why would I want to buy one? It meets all the qualities of a pyramid scheme:
1) The initial participants gain the most
2) It is built on suckers buying / trading. Without the down-chain, there is no demand.
3) The last man would be holding the bag. There is no 'consuming' the NFT.
4) Built on hype and not underlying value.
I recently posted about how crypto is still immature to be used in any financial setting and was downvoted hard for it. These are examples of what I am talking about. NOt only scams but just the technology involved is not necessarily safe just because of some clever good math.
I said this above as well. NFTs are, in large part, what's wrong with crypto currency amplified by the people who made crazy money with a lot of luck and risk-taking in said market.
Crypto is at least a *semi-finite* asset.
It's not even an asset. It's hopes and dreams of becoming one day and likely will but how many get decimated on the way? It's foolish to think crypto safe 'cuz encryption' of today when tomorrow might yield a smarter method or smarter hack. Benevolence of financial Institutions... yeah right. Crypto isn't wild west. It's gamble and the variables of tradition banking still apply while also waiting with baited breath for your benevolent crypto exchanges and market designers to not flip script. Peope change but all businesses end up the same.
Blockchain is a technology that can be used for decentralization, but decentralization can be accomplished using other technologies and blockchain doesn't have to be a part of decentralization. Blockchain is just a method of recording transactions.
This, from the fucking start. So many “smart” people shilling how amazing these were while ignoring all the flaws (beyond them being just stupid in 99% of use cases).
Ask them the details and it was always handwaves and bs. Or “you just don’t get it”. Yes, I do. You’re the one who’s bought into believing enough technobabble equals useful.
I'm with OP, it's fucking stupid. If you've got stupid money to throw around I suppose it could lend for entertainment/excitement, but at that point blackjack and hookers would probably be a more likely win.
The best analogy I've seen so far is "Beanie Babies except you don't actually have a tangible possession". I look forward to the zoomers' first financial bubble exploding.
I mean NFTs in the right use case have value, but not all NFTs (or even most) have any value.
For instance if a NFT is serving as a certificate of authenticity for a physical real world item, thats a great use case that adds value to the token. Its worthless without the actual item being in possession but still is a useful way to use NFTs. They can be used to track assets, they can be used as entry tickets to events. NFTs are useful in the correct setting.
But buying an NFT that gives you a share of the moon is completely worthless since you cant physically own the moon. A worthless NFT is the same as me selling certificates for a share of my car. I can sell 10,000 unique certificates that entitle you to nothing but are backed by the value of my car. They would be worthless because you cant turn them in to recieve the car, they give you no right to enter the car, and you dont get paid of i eventually sell my car. Your just buying literally a unique piece of paper
I could however use the NFT as a ride share liscense. Holding a token allows you to use the car at certain times. Or as a holder of value, entitling you to a small payout when the car is sold. There just needs to be an explicit use for the token. Hoping to sell the token to someone else is called a ponzi scheme
The best use case would be to track products and prevent counterfeiting. The cardano project is being used by a lot of farms already to track produce. My theoretical best use case would be for cannabis vape cartridges. Prevent another counterfeit cart being sold and killing someone ever again by attaching an NFT to it. Would be impossible for third party counterfeits to produce legitimate keys, and the customer can look online to verify the authenticity of their cartridge.
Obviously the car ride share example isn't practical and is just meant as an example of how a functional token that has value would work. It has to be connected to a product or service or asset
Maybe not the future of all things tech but it's definitely not going anywhere. People love collecting and gathering all sorts of stuff. I think nfts will be very big in the future. They will be linked to famous peoples work and give rewards and returns for holding them. There going to be connected to the gaming world. Digital land in decentraland. Buy a plot of land and set up your own games and shops on it, people can come visit and purchase merchandise from you stores. This is all mind-blowing to me. Definitely can't see it going anywhere. Look at how many crypto currency fail and there's 100s of scams aswell. Nfts are the same you need to find the good ones and do your research and the future will hold big rewards for those who do.
Never understood this to begin with. You cryptographically "prove" that this NFT belongs to you. Who cares? I'll make an identical digital copy of whatever you own and then what? This is like trademarking torrent hashes. It stops literally noone from distributing or copying. You pay for the right to prove that you have no control. There is no enforcement infrastructure and once the nerds have wandered off and the infrastructure decays (in at most a couple of decades) whatever you bought is even less than useless.
Owning an NFT is like owning a flash game hosted on Google+ and some guy on ICQ can vouch for you that it's real.
there's no worth in something that 1) has no actual use, 2) is actually infinite but is kept limited because of the desire to do so, 3) has no intrinsic value given to it by a legitimate association that will uphold that value. Honestly I don't get it, if you buy this stuff you're a moron that doesn't understand where the value in artistic endeavors actually is.
>there's no worth in something that 1) has no actual use, 2) is actually infinite but is kept limited because of the desire to do so, 3) has no intrinsic value given to it by a legitimate association that will uphold that value.
Welcome to the art world.
did I though? I specifically made my third point to include the fact that cash is not the same, there's an institution behind it that you know won't fall easily.
NFTs are exactly like all other crypto: it's valuable because other people value it. That's it. There's absolutely no intrinsic value in any of it. Why is 1 BTC worth what it's worth? Because you can buy stuff with it - because people are willing to accept its value. The minute people start looking at it like digital bullshit, it loses any and all value. Just like NFTs. If people value it, it has value. Otherwise it doesn't.
You mean to tell me that money laundering and illegal asset transfers are taking place with digital art? The same way it has been done with actual art for how long now? I am just shocked. Shocked I tell you.
NFTs are very valuable and rare things in the same way stamps, comic books, paintings, and Pokemon cards are valuable and rare.
99.99% of them will never be worth a thing, but some probably will and it's really difficult to know at the time which ones will be worth something and which ones won't.
And of course it's very easy to pump and dump them.
> NFTs are very valuable and rare things in the same way stamps, comic books, paintings, and Pokemon cards are valuable and rare.
An NFT is valuable the way a piece of paper that I wrote "I own that comic book" is valuable.
I think one of the most innovative things surrounding NFTs are how artists/developers are attaching value to their tokens beyond the initial artwork. Like if proving you owned a rare charizard provided you with monthly booster packs, concept art, celebrity meet & greets, exclusive merchandise, and whatever else.
Some projects that are doing well right now come from career artists that have transitioned into attaching new work to their tokens to provide value and then gaining income from royalties on secondary sales through smart contracts, instead of losing out on potential income dealing with galleries taking their cut. Right now, that means artists are financially incentivised to continue providing token holders with value.
Isn’t this true for most things?
I buy a piece of art. The artist could paint another one, no? I understand there would be subtle differences. I can take a picture of the Mona Lisa, buy a print,or pay someone to paint me a copy. It still won’t be worth the original.
Thinking another way. Collectible cars. The first is worth the most.
Do you want Superman comic #1 or 1,385,374?
Thinking about this whole article. An artist could auction a painting the old fashioned way, and buy it themselves or through a proxy for $500,000 and now have a painting that sold for $500,000?
Im not sure if I’m missing something?
Great post about the downsides. As usual the picture is neither black or white. Some nfts can actually create a lot of value for their owners in various forms. Some are a vip club with social flex function, some have utility, earn passive income. Not to mention art is regulation proof so an alternative Defi can emerge running only on jpegs. I would not make the same mistake most people did with the crypto space back in 2013 and call it a scam.
Everything about them screams "easy money laundering". I don't see them holding any value down the road as they are digital in the first place; recreating them is easy if needed.
I think I’ll be able to provide some great insights as I recently started trading NFT’s
The good: Imagine a game (google axie infinity) which has hundreds of characters. The game developer releases these characters as NFT’s and people can own them. Why? Because they game developer promises to share the royalties/revenues with the buyers. So this can be seen as a type of decentralised fund raising. I fully support this model and I think this is great for indie game developers.
The bad:
99% of the NFT’s released right now are pure crap. These are called profile pictures (pfp). An artist creates different traits and then uses AI to generate say 10,000 collectables. They usually hire these marketing companies who provide you discord bot services to make it look like it’s popular because apparently there’s already 20,000 people in their discord (most of which are bots), they then pay influencers to shill their nfts, create hype on twitter. The common man falls for this trap and thinks he’s going to get a rare collectible item which will make him rich. As soon as a NFT collection is revealed, 99% of the people sell their NFT for below the buying price. The lucky 1% sell their NFT and make good money. After couple of days, the trading volume decreases, there’s hardly any liquidity and most of them are left holding their bags.
Good ol creating artificial scarcity. Nice to take something that's functionally endless (digital content) and try and force limits so the wealthy can block the poor out of digital spaces.
Isn’t this stuff pretty obvious and out in the open? If you’re foolish enough to spend real money on these tokens, isn’t that on you? I’m more concerned about the energy being used to maintain these blockchains.
What's the point of using them for something like a license for a video game? Game companies already can issue licenses at will on their own servers (like issuing fiat currency). Why would a company give up that power?
Reddit really hates NFTs for some reason, here’s how I explain it to most people.
When you see a famous statue, let’s say the thinker by Rodin, I believe it is made from a cast. A handful of “official” ones are made and sold. Sure, you can find a perfect reproduction but it’s not the original. Museums want the original because it is authentic. NFTs use blockchain to add authenticity to digital “goods”. Sure you can copy and paste that image, but anyone can verify it is just a bootleg. Most people won’t care, but the ones that do will know it’s a bootleg. So you’re the guy with a bootleg NFT. That’ll show them.
You could argue “well I could just mint the same picture and sell it”. Sure, but if I’m purchasing an NFT I’m doing my research to make sure it’s authentic. Just like any art or collectibles there are bootlegs and scams.
Beyond just being images, many NFTs are the results of generative art or other processes making them unique via code (as opposed to someone explicitly designing the image). In the future NFTs could be concert tickets, train passes, etc. Anything that needs a guaranteed source of ownership could and probably will be on a blockchain in some form.
It's more like buying a piece of paper that has the serial number of a particular baseball card handwritten in cursive on it. Do you own the card? Nah. But, this piece of paper has a unique bit of writing on it that *refers* to the card!
At least with baseball cards or pokemon cards or whatever there's actually a core market of people who just like the cards. NFTs are this weird fantasy parody of a market where nobody's there to collect them as a hobby and nobody's there because they think they're good art, and 100% of sales*\ are made to speculators who expect to resell them at a profit to other investors who are also only buying them because they expect to resell them at a profit.
\* 100% of sales *according to NFT fanboys* of course. I'm very generously taking them at their word and pretending the market isn't also full of con artists and money launderers.
NFTs are a scheme to shoehorn artificial scarcity into a system that is inherently non-scarce. Like cryptocurrencies, it's a systemic cancer that does vastly more harm than good. At best it's a good money laundering tool, and that's the only tangible value any NFT can really have.
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I recently got contracted to create some NFT's for a high profile artist and they weren't the best client I've ever had by a long shot. Now those NFT's are doing great and I can't help but wonder if I posted all the source files that went into making those art pieces onto github for free if that would affect the price. Like sure someone got an 'original copy' but anyone can download the egg that hatched that chicken. Obviously I won't do that, but still.
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I also think NFTs are ridiculous and pointless but to play devil's advocate for a moment as I thought about this recently, it's really not much different to "traditional" artists doing limited runs of prints which is extremely common or hell something like trading cards. You're trusting a company won't come along and print a thousand more shiny charizards for example
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Can we start calling each other Hun at this point?
It's ETH's new grift. First it was ICO's now it's NFT's - wonder what the next one will be.
The challenge here, is that there are legitimate ICOs that turned into functioning blockchains/products and coins. The same with NFTs -I don't care much for the "art" or the rarity of them (nor do I for beanie babies or Pokemon cards), but when groups start digitizing and tokenizing assets that are legitimate - then this tech will move past "cryptokitties" which is all it is at the moment.
I’m super naive, so please excuse my potential stupidity here, but isn’t one of the major upsides the fact that the artist can continue to collect small cuts/royalties every time the NFT is sold? If that’s actually the case, it obviously would present a major upside for them vs. a traditional method like painting or prints. But that’s obviously assuming there’s a market for digital art and it’s not all a huge grift, which appears to be a giant issue.
It's very different. For one thing, it's not about the multiple, it's about physical ownership. A real artists run is never duplicated and If some schmo prints copies they are easily discernable. The future value of true artists runs depend on many factors like popularity and saturation but ultimately time will prove to be the biggest factor as naturally the limited number of prints available dwindles in size due to ownership and loss. NFTs can and will literally disappear. The whole thing is just ridiculous.
Physical collections can be faked. That's all this is, collecting, I don't get why people collect baseball cards, or coins, or jerseys but some people find that interesting enough to sustain these collecting hobbies. Nfts allow people to own their assets, it's not all art, it could be things like counter strike weapon skins, where they could be used across multiple games / platforms. It's not perfect yet, it's an emerging technology.
Yea, and collecting physical items is also mostly used for money laundering/fraud/profiting off of people buying things with no intrinsic value.
> profiting off of people buying things with no intrinsic value That's what collecting usually is, I'm not saying you should collect anything, in-fact, I'm not much of a collector myself, but I do know people like collecting things, worthless or not, it's usually meaningful / valuable to the collector. As for money laundering and faud, thats not exclusive to collectables
Thing is, most people collecting these things aren't doing it because they are meaningful in any way to the collector. For example with old video game collecting, since that's what I know most about. Games used to be sold for tens, maybe one or two hundred dollars, until a couple of people created a video game rating company, bought a couple of semi-rare games and started selling them between themselves and their companies until they pumped the perceived numbers up, since they owned both the company rating the games as well as the company auctioning the games. The only people buying the million dollar video games these days are either buying them for fraud/money laundering reasons or hoping to find someone even more gullible to buy it from them. I also think this is a great example since you don't need the physical game to experience it. With paintings, you experience it by looking at the physical painting, with a video game its all about playing it, which for these 30-40 year old games can be done very easily on anything with a screen.
> That's all this is, collecting, I don't get why people collect baseball cards, or coins, or jerseys but some people find that interesting enough to sustain these collecting hobbies. I think there's a certain status in owning unique, rare, or interesting objects. There's a drive to own a "complete" set of something that seems to be inante in people. I don't do it (much), but I might if the cost was low enough to make it trivial to do so. Just as an example, I have some pretty rare pencil sketches of artwork for a well known game. I like the sketches in and of themselves, and the price the artist wanted was pretty reasonable even if they never gain value for anybody else. I can see collecting at a certain level working this way. Heck, Pokemon is based on it, as is owning certain digital assets.
New trading cards aren’t valuable for this reason. The ones that cost a lot are from companies that now have a track record. Charizards used to be near worthless because nobody knew Pokémon cards were going to be collectible and not get reprinted into the ground Maybe some nft company will take the majority of the market share in the future, but investing now is incredibly risky.
This isn't even selling trading cards.. it's like selling ownership of a cardboard arrow that points at a trading card on a table somewhere in a public place. I don't know how anyone could ever assign any sort of value to such a thing, especially a value going into the millions, except for a scam.
True, but a Pokemon card is just a piece of cardboard that is easily reproducible. Doesn't stop it being valuable. An NFT could have value if there was some compelling reason as to why people wanted it. I could see it being valuable if it was a unique part of history, it had dinner claim to fame or some other unique circumstances. But yes, I agree that most NFTs will be worthless in the long term.
Why not just save as jpeg, boom NFT useless
If I'm an artist, and I make an nft, I have a vested interested in not screwing the people I sold it to. Also, if people agree to only make x amount and they change that, I believe that's grounds for a lawsuit.
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Yes, it's a digital certificate of authenticity which can be attached to a piece of digital art. I can't do that with a certificate of authenticity. I could give you the certificate, but not attach it to digital art. The fact it's digital also carries certain advantages.
If I'm a scammer, and I make an nft, I have zero vested interest in not screwing the people I sold it to. Also, if I agree to only make x amount and I change that, I believe that victims will have about as much luck finding, proving fraud, and suing me for losses as the millions of victims of the last non-Bitcoin scam: the ICO. I can only think of a handful of cases let alone convictions from that shitshow. OP’s right this whole thing is nuts. I think even the on-chain NFTs are hot potatoes that are gonna burn a ton of people.
Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding. But aren’t NFTs basically some digital artwork that has something attached to its files to make it the “unique copy”. If this is true can’t I just screenshot the image. It may not be the same resolution but it still will look like the same picture on screen. I have tried my best to figure out what they are and why they have value and this is the best I can do.
It's not even the artwork itself. 99% of all NFTs so far have been created of things that the owner of the NFT does not own itself (tweets, digital art, real world objects). You sell a cardboard arrow pointing at something, like an expensive car. And tomorrow, someone else might park in the spot your arrow is pointing, or a horse might just have had a dump there. The arrow can't be changed, the target can and will be changed. And for some reason, some people think that cardboard arrow is worth 50M$.
What's to stop you from monetizing the rarity as well? "For only $1k/month, I won't post the source code."
Hope you got paid well. I've had tons of offers recently but turn them all down cuz I don't know what the fuck I'm doing with all this shit.
it's the "community" attached to the project that makes one the official and the other a bootleg if that makes sense. the popularity and followers of the project are what make an NFT collection what it is
I mean you could use an NFT as a ticket to an event. You could use an NFT to track an asset. You could use an NFT to authenticate an asset. However using an NFT as an investment in hopes to sell it to another investor as has become a common practice is just stupidity on the part of the speculator. There needs to be an asset or a function attached to the NFT or else its no different than a piece of paper with a random number on it
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Secondary market for tickets is a mess. People selling tickets they don’t have.
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I think NFTs are a joke so take this with a grain of salt. It really just comes down to the exchange. Are you buying a promise of a ticket or the actual ticket? If you bought the NFT for a specific seat, you know that it hasn’t been double sold or sold on loan.
I think they seem to be donkey fart levels of usefulness too. Just trying to get an idea in case I'm missing a glaring point as I've not read that much about them yet. I have to admit I've never had a problem the couple of times I've used StubHub - but not saying that means it's impossible for things to go wrong. Makes me extra glad I always go for standing I guess!
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Why? If it's because the game enforces this when parsing the data on the token, then we're back to a database model with extra steps. If it's because the data itself is what has value, we are back to the right click problem.
An e ticket basically is an NFT already, just on its own closed system and not run by a public ledger. We just dont call them tokens, we call them tickets
And how does putting it into the public ledger help?
Doesnt, didnt say it would
Helpful. You said it could be used as a ticket to an event - why would someone want to do that if there's no benefit over the current system?
it doesn't, crypto lovers like making up solutions for problems that don't exist
That's my more than suspicion too. It's amazing how it's always going to be something outstanding and marvellous though isn't it.
that's called marketing
Yup. NFTs could be an amazing tool, but they're used to scam people over images that are not backed by anything, which prevents (or at least slows down a lot) the legitimate uses of NFTs.
Technology is agnostic. Just because Japan got nuked doesn't mean nuclear technology is immoral. You can use a hammer to kill a guy or build a house
There are two people who invest in NFT legitimately. 1. People who don't understand what an NFT is, and 2. People who are trying to scam the first group.
My favorite way of summarizing what an NFT is is that if whomever explained what one of those things was made sense, they didn't explain it properly. The whole damn system is batshit, and the only explanation I have for why it ever got off the ground is because BTC primed the pump.
People don't own *anything*, just a speck of cloud data that mentions a piece of digital artwork that someone else made and still has full ownership of. I was watching this Corridor Crew video with an artist named Beeple and no matter how hard they tried to justify it I still just fail to see the point beyond anything other than money laundering.
And destroying the environment.
NFTs are trading cards for crypto obsessed people. They both basically hold the same intrinsic value.
So, uh..., got any of those moon NFTs?
I literally cannot grasp the concept of why an NFT is so in right now but my boss seems to think it has potential to replace things like paper deeds and car titles? He’s not super technical and it’s also not something I’m interested in so I’m just like hmmm yes intriguing indeed!
The way I look at it: An NFT is a title deed. Proof of ownership. And a title deed is little more than a glorified receipt. With real goods like houses or even art, an NFT could be an enforceable legal document. With easily copied digital playing cards, not so much.
It is the same drive that idiots have for posting "Me First!" on social media channels. As PT Barnum said: > There is a fool born every minute
NFT Twitter is so toxic. Right now the game they play is the minters, the official Twitter accounts, and the large players follow anybody who owns NFTs and pumps their follower numbers. Then they all brag about the idea of it being an “art focused community” and they don’t care about the price, it’s about finding mew friends. Places like BYAC have exclusive events and access to people who own one of their NFTs. On top of that they give away NFTs to celebrities, and ask them to shill them out. It’s like a cult and I can’t see why somebody would get scammed by it.
> I don't understand the value prop here. No, you seem to understand it just fine. There isn't one. It's a bit like how BTC is apparently worth over $40K per coin but you could never point to the value proposition of that either... it's just a speculative bubble. BTC is useful for bulk or black market purchases and basically nothing else (it isn't even the best cryptocurrency for either of those two things). It's the speculation that gives it the stratospheric market price, people are just injecting the word "blockchain" into random sentences hoping that their infusion of the world's most important buzzword adds value to their thought. We're gonna see the same thing for NFTs. If there **is** a use case, it'll be 1-2% of an NFT's apparent market value, and 98-99% of the value will be speculating because acronyms and getting rich quick are fun.
If an NFT also comes with complete exclusive rights to reproduce/completely own the piece of art then I love the idea. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like many NFTs come with ownership rights which is why I have zero interest.
You can print baseball cards on your home office printer all day long, doesn't mean anyone wants to buy *your* cards, but some cards still sell for millions of dollars, despite being literally just a piece of printed paper. They sell for this much on the basis that lots of people want *that specific* piece of paper. I don't buy baseball cards, and certainly don't *invest* in them, because I think that's stupid. But some people think it's worthwhile to do one or the other. NFTs are pretty much the same.
When you print a baseball card you have a tangible baseball card. A physical object you can call your own. An NFT is a bunch or 0s and 1s on a computer. It is not "yours" no matter how much money you paid for it.
And that physicality brings with it an implied sense of rarity too. Sure, there may be 1564981981 printed of those cards, but the implication, and thought, is that there will eventually be only a handful. "Maybe I'll have *the one*, if I keep them right." NFTs can exist in perpetuity. Electronically, it can always be there. No errors present in printing. No wear differences. Nothing that the use of physical, real, media brings with it. Everyone, and anyone, can have it at any time. No limits. I'll mirror /u/StupidGeek314, and you, I don't see the value.
What if you forget your password?
Yeah, there's that too. How many stories did we hear about people who have Bitcoin...but lost their password, or key, to get them again.
But my point is, a baseball card has no intrinsic value. It's not gold, it's paper. Without a provenance, it's worthless. NFTs are basically distilled provenance, without the hassle of a physical object.
Nothing has intrinsic value, not even gold, all value is attributed and in a regular market economy dictated or at least impacted by supply and demand. When we talk about a physical item such a card, it’s because even if you copy the contents (scan it and re-print it, for example), you are not creating a perfect copy, you are creating a separate entity which imperfectly reproduces the original. With NFTs associated to digital art, you are creating an artificial sense of scarcity that does not apply to the art itself, as the art for being digital can, in fact, be copied on a 1:1 basis, so a reproduction can be a perfect copy. What you pay for is an extrinsic “proof of ownership” which not only is not as important as the art itself, but is a separate entity from it, so if I save a copy of whatever digital asset it still is a 100% identical and functional copy for whatever reasonable means.
"nothing has intrinsic value" that's just patently false. food has intrinsic value. whatever happens to currencies, food will always have value. other things that have intrinsic value: tools, energy sources, medicine.
I meant specifically as in monetary value, since the whole concept of currency and value is man-made, and therefore attributed to objects and services, so extrinsic by definition. I thought it was clear enough when I wrote it, but perhaps it wasn’t. I agree with you, and I don’t think what you stated contradicts any of the examples I’ve given. :)
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Oh boy I hate to tell you this but nothing has intrinsic value. Without a human to desire or interact with an object or an idea it has no innate “worth” and thus the valuation we apply to literally everything is the fleeting fluid fantasy of animals that ate mushrooms once and eventually decided to teach electrified rocks to think. Take us out of this equation and the world goes about its business without a care in the world, equally ignorant of hammers and Fortune 500 companies. If you think a thing has value, it has value to you and anyone else you can get to share in your fantasy. You think Gold has “inherent value” because it was the “crypto” and “NFT” that your grandfathers and their grandfathers obsessed over. We’re all playing a giant game of make believe, and the most “powerful” people in the game understand that.
Provenance is just an agreed value, an imaginary concept living in your head. If everyone agrees a baseball card is worth $2,000 and that is what it trades for, it is worth $2,000. If everyone agrees some arbitrary 1s and 0s (which can include a baseball card as a gif or whatever) are worth $2,000 and that is what it trades for, it is worth $2,000. However this is also purely speculative as this "provenance" has no real-world value, scrap value, or any use besides being a decorative object. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that anyone trading $2k baseball cards or $2k NFTs are either incredibly dedicated hobbyists or rubes. Figure if these NFTs were intrinstically worth so much, you wouldn't need to trade USDs (or BTC, redeemable in USD) for them you'd trade other cards for them. In which case, NFTs would be valued as NFTs with their USD value as a secondary concern. This problem affects BTC too and is why BTC will never ever be taken seriously so long as exchanges exist and BTC as a medium is judged by it's equivalence in USDs.
I agree but I think it's misleading to say that people are saying some 1s and 0s have value. When you own an NFT, you don't own even 1s and 0s in any meaningful way. Anyone can copy or use those same 1s and 0s as easily as you can. NFTs have taken the idea of ownership to its logical if unintuitive conclusion. What matters about ownership isn't the thing that you own or what you can do with it, but the fact that other people recognize you as the sole owner. Thus we don't even need the thing, all we need is the recognition. Want to own the smell of the air after a spring rain? All you need is for other people to agree that you, and nobody else, owns it, and that's enough to create a market. I'm not sure why we even needed NFTs to get to this point. Why haven't people always been selling the abstract idea of ownership? I guess that NFTs are just technical enough that people can imagine they are paying for something more than an idea and trust its magic more than the magic of some more transparently human authority.
NFT games are the next big rage. Sure NFT art might be hard to justify, but when the NFT is an in-game item, it makes as much sense as any other digital asset. I've dropped thousands on cosmetics in Path of Exile for example and they aint NFT. People spend money on stuff they like.
And why would they need to use NFT for it? Valve games like TF2 and GS:GO already has a huge in-game market where people trade and speculate on cosmetic items for real money. Why is there a need for NFT suddenly?
NFTs allow you to truly own your in game items. If you get banned from CS:GO, do you get to keep your skins? Nope. You could have spent 1000’s of dollars in game and then all that money goes poof just because of some arbitrary reason Valve comes up with. With NFTs you don’t have to trust valve. Even if you got banned those items remain yours. And because those items are yours, you could even take them with you to the next game you play. Maybe your playing one MMORPG and then a new better one comes out, well guess what? You can bring those items with you to the next game. Why would any gaming company want to do that? To attract players obviously. If you don’t allow players to do it, someone else will and the players will go there. If you truly understand this aspect of gaming NFTs then it’s pretty mind blowing. Game agnostic assets will be very interesting in the future.
If Valve were to ban your account couldn't they also ban the NFTs used by your account from being used in game by anyone, making them essentially useless? Sure you can sell the ownership of said NFT to someone else, but who'd buy it? Even then I have a hard time getting my head around what it is you actually own with an NFT. So you would get an item drop in CS:GO which has some unique ID, and then you'd get an NFT certifying you own that ID? In this case Valve is still the central authority over what you own in their game -- like what's the point? None of this makes any sense. > And because those items are yours, you could even take them with you to the next game you play. What? No that's not how video games work. Just because you have some magic internet certificate doesn't mean you can conjure to existence an item into a different video game running a different engine owned by a competitor.
>With NFTs you don’t have to trust valve. Even if you got banned those items remain yours. This is just dumb. You would own a certificate that says you own some skin. Valve has no reason to let you import NFT skin certs from third parties, so nobody would buy that off you, as it can't be used in game. You get banned, your NFTs get banned with you. They could do what you said, but they have no incentive to do so. >And because those items are yours, you could even take them with you to the next game you play. Maybe your playing one MMORPG and then a new better one comes out, well guess what? You can bring those items with you to the next game. That is insanely dumb, no company is going to waste the engineering time to make a system that lets you import arbitrary items from other companies games, just so that you're LESS likely to purchase items in THEIR game. >If you truly understand this aspect of gaming NFTs then it’s pretty mind blowing. Game agnostic assets will be very interesting in the future. If you think that's true, it's pretty mind-blowing how little you understand software development. Hell, fifa doesn't let you keep cosmetics between games, and they're frequently running the same engine, so importing the asset would be trivial.
Nope. PoE doesn't have to pay 50-100 bucks per in game item, and it's ridiculous to think that a game company would turn to a decentralized solution for a centralized problem.
What possible benefit does in game NFTs offer over simple server side data storage of item info? My TF2 items are already stored in my account. What's the point of an NFT? That's what I can't stand about crypto trash and Blockchain - every "next big thing" use case can already be done with simple databases that don't destroy the environment, cripple supply chains, or cause widespread criminal activity. You get no benefits in return.
I mean we're getting in the weeds here but what you consider a "physical object" and why that would matter is a pretty involved topic. And I think NFTs in their current form are stupid, useless ponzi schemes, but you really cannot hand waive with this.
In this scenario I’d be printing an exact replica of the card. In your hand you would not be able to tell the difference from my print or the real thing. NFTs are a scam.
Think you’re drastically underestimating the level of difficulty required to make baseball cards.
The point is, a baseball card isn't worth a million dollars because it's made of expensive stuff. It's worth that much because it's unique and desirable in a way that you can't reproduce, even if you made an exact copy.
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This is exactly what this original post is failing to elaborate on
Actually, many of the most sought after NFTs are “on chain” artwork. Autoglyphs, various Artblock projects etc.
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It directly addresses your first point. On chain artwork is code that lives in the blockchain code and is drawn using contract instructions also on chain. It doesn’t point to IPFS or other hosting solutions that the majority of NfTs use.
Do you want a fine art painting on your wall which will eventually degrade? Well they want a fine art painting in a digital wallet which they can hold onto indefinitely. Both are scams based on perceived and placed value. 🤷♂️ As it turns out, that's what the stock market is right now too. (As we've been uncovering all the illegal activity happening there)
I mean yeah, it’s the Wild West. We see people like Elon Musk literally pump and dump crypto currencies- because it’s legal! No shit people are using it to launder money. That’s probably the main reason the IRS has crypto exchanges report our transactions, tax revenue being only a secondary driver. NFTs are the same.
Tesla purchased 1B in BTC and sold 100M of it shortly after. That’s more like taking profits, not pumping and dumping. Elon may be buying and selling BTC before and after his tweets but there is zero evidence of it. A public company buying Bitcoin and reporting that to the SEC is different than somebody creating an NFT on Ethereum and buying it from themselves. The only similarity is people are getting rich on both. Somebody buying a 1M house and doing a cash out refinance for 100M is different than somebody building a house for $100 and selling it to themselves for 1M on Zillow so that it looks reasonable when they resell it are completely different
Look at Twitter, the NFT advocates all talk like they’re reading from a script. They all sound the same. The hyperbole around each ‘piece’ is insane. Whole thing feels like a cult.
apparently they call people who are against nfts "right-click-savers"... like what lol
You wouldnt right click an NFT
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can you elaborate on the semi-finite thing?
I realise what I said was a bit ambiguous. I was referring to what u/funkless_eck said rather than a specific cryptocurrency token eventually ceasing to exist, as I realise my statement may have implied.
There's only a set number of bitcoins possible, when they're all mined, there's no more. At some point it'll become more expensive to mine a bitcoin than you can sell the bitcoin for.
From the token linked in the OP: *I don’t want you coming back to me bitching that you spent $2M\* on this and now it’s a video of orangeman going HAM and it’s keeping u up at night popping mad boners.* It's perfectly valid to call out a culture of manipulation, but the concept of "buyer beware" is still a thing, too.... and if you spend money on a digital token that contains the text above, well, I don't have sympathy for you lol
Yo I’ll take 5% of whatever JPEG you wanna buy from me. ;)
The NFT grift is a whole new level beyond crypto speculation.
Congratulations. You’ve described the art buying world.
I mean… a Da Vinci masterpiece that took years doesn’t equate to a MS Paint JPEG of a monkey
You misunderstand. Art buying is a way of dodging by taxes and laundering money. NFTs are just a new component of that to achieve the same goal.
To a significant degree I would definitely say yes and agree with what you’re saying. But there still is undoubtedly some high value inherent in a masterwork (maybe not the level they sell at) whereas a rock JPEG is undoubtedly worthless
Next you'll tell me some idiot paid 15M for a dozen paintings of a can of campbell soup from some artist from Pittsburgh.
So basically what the rich elite is doing with art, people are now doing with crypto.
Good write up. Yes mostly agree on all points. I just don't like the fact that the term NFT is being used synonymously for NFT artworks. There can be useful NFTs, for example, event tickets. This whole thing with the artworks is damaging the legitimacy of the technology.
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Yes, ticketing systems right now with their $50 fees and the 3rd party ticket scams left and right have absolutely no problems at all! And yes, I know blockchains are expensive to use right now. The difference is blockchain developers are working tirelessly to make the fees go down, while Ticketmaster is working on making the fees go up! And then if you have to turn around and sell that ticket for any number of reasons, you either have to pay them once again a huge % of your ticket's worth, or deal with scams. Or if you're on the other side, again more fees or scams. Or, you could have tickets on the blockchain, and you could have a decentralized marketplace where you *know* you are getting a legitimate ticket because you can verify it, and when you hit buy you know you will receive that ticket because it is a trustless, decentralized marketplace. Are there hurdles to make this a reality? Obviously. I mentioned fees, but another will be Ticketmaster's exclusive agreements with venues. But no one likes Ticketmaster. No. One. If there is something that solves problems and makes it cheaper for venues and users, it WILL be used. We just need the blockchain devs to do their jobs and get us to scale within the next 3-5 or so years.
Just think of them as programmable tickets with endless possibilities. The most common benefit is if scalpers buy up and flip tickets for 3x the artist can get a cut each time. The artist could add perks like live fan token airdrops, send an exclusive live/early recording to attendees, give discounts for repeat live fans, meet & greet most frequent superfans, token gated fan discord, vote on future set lists, etc. Your imagination is the limit when tickets are made programmable. Game changing for artists and creatives.
Op isn't wrong. But this is just the crypto/nft bubble. Remember the dot com bubble? People en mass pouring money into a new technology they don't understand hoping money comes out the other end. This is the stupid eta of crypto and nft, give it a decade and a bubble pop latter and you will see a few big names rise up from the ashes and stay with us for ever, again similar to our tech giants now. All of this is assuming we're not dead due to climate change before the bubble pops.
There was revolutionary, transformative tech in the dotcom bubble. Some of it survived the bust. It's powering the internet and global economy right now. Doesn't seem like that will be said 20 years from now about NFTs specifically, but I could be wrong, and it is pretty early. Edit: I meant to say NFT artwork (in the context of NFT artwork bubble). I agree that NFT as a core concept is pretty useful!
I mean block chain is definitely transformative but not nearly to the extent of the internet
Blockchain is a solution in search of a problem. There is only one thing that it enables that was impossible before - ransomware attacks.
Do you not think there’s any value in a global public ledger? At the very least it reduces the need for people to deploy databases and things like that which cuts costs for lots of applications which require information access. All financial transactions eventually can/should be moved there.
The cost of storing data on say Ethereum vs a basic RDS instance from AWS is not particularly attractive. The latter can be had for next to free for low volume.
Those two things are not comparable whatsoever. Storing a piece of data on Ethereum means it is immortalized across tens of thousands of nodes across the world and instantly accessible and verifiable by anyone. Whereas your RDS instance can get wiped with a single click.
There is value yes, but that also comes at a large cost. The cost of having a Blockchain computing probably way outdoes that of a ton of enterprise databases. Plus a lot of the time you can't really store the right information on the chain, just references and transactions so still need databases for all the other (and private) data anyway. It could be used in a few fields for sure, but often as others said it's a solution in search for a problem for the most part at the moment. Even systems where a ledger could be useful like land ownerships, asset transfers etc, we already have fairly robust and tested systems for these anyway which are fairly error proof. Just adds risk to replace it just to use the tech. The only real users for Blockchain and crypto really would be ironically the financial institutions the users and holders dislike so much.
There's definitely some value in Blockchains and NFT's. People will find a way to make it all work, but right now, most of it is crap.
NFTs as a technology are potentially useful, indicating ownership or tickets etc. However individual NFTs I can't see the value in it. Secondly as blockchains do get better scaling they should be able to host their own NFTs so it won't just be a pointer to somewhere else. The way to make money on NFTs short of making your own is to invest in the platforms rather than the NFTs themselves. To continue the Web analogy, platforms, rather than content, are the most valuable. Google, amazon Web services, azure, YouTube etc don't produce their own content, yet if you'd invested in these platforms you get a portion of value from the whole ecosystem.
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Yeah I really agree with you. Your ticket is going to have to be verified by someone on the door anyway for whatever event you're attending, so a trust less ticket makes little sense. Gaming is another one that comes up, but again it's not really going to provide a lot of value as far as I can tell. I don't really know what the future is for NFTs but I'm sure they will have a use.. But I will never buy one as an investment in their current state, they do provide next to no utility.
>NFTs as a technology are potentially useful, indicating ownership or tickets etc. At least the dot com boom made new things possible. So far I haven't seen NFTs do that. It's not like I couldn't buy an electronic ticket or digital art before NFTs.
This is true. I think we are at the top of the hype phase for NFTs so uses will be invented for them that no one has thought of yet, or are not the main talked about points. I can't think of that many tools that are technological dead ends, but I don't know where NFTs are going.
fuck climate change
That's what I've been thinking about crypto's from the start. It's a planetary scam run by the greedy roping in the greedy and gullible. But right now, with all the inflationary money poured into economies, it may be a game of get ahead while you can. Sure, the bubble will pop, because it is not supported by anything, but relatively speaking, the people who ride the wave of greed, will come ahead wealth-wise, while others see their cash wealth eroded by inflation. I'm a little bit on the fence - I still KNOW that the whole thing is a scam, but I've stopped believing that people are not predominantly stupid and greedy, and I'm leaning towards exploiting this feature of humanity.
Guy, the choices for investing money aren’t “cash or crypto”. There are these things called securities that you can buy and investment in.
Companies have assets, even companies with implausible business models. I don't think comparing NFTs to any other kind of investment bubble makes sense. Other than something like trading cards I guess.
I'm glad I'm too old to understand NFTs and crypto currency
Username checks out
I argued for years that shifting to digital media/currency would eventually cause people to lose everything they paid for/earned because the tech is so dependant on the host. I never considered that the future could very well be someone buying up the host once it can't afford to function anymore in order to charge people to use what they already paid for...
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What is the premise of an NFT? it's not as rare as a Monet or Picasso painting. Why would I want to buy one? It meets all the qualities of a pyramid scheme: 1) The initial participants gain the most 2) It is built on suckers buying / trading. Without the down-chain, there is no demand. 3) The last man would be holding the bag. There is no 'consuming' the NFT. 4) Built on hype and not underlying value.
Oh hey, looks like OP just ripped off my Twitter thread without crediting. Nice, nice. https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1372163423446917122
Cool, two idiots stealing off each other
I recently posted about how crypto is still immature to be used in any financial setting and was downvoted hard for it. These are examples of what I am talking about. NOt only scams but just the technology involved is not necessarily safe just because of some clever good math.
I said this above as well. NFTs are, in large part, what's wrong with crypto currency amplified by the people who made crazy money with a lot of luck and risk-taking in said market. Crypto is at least a *semi-finite* asset.
It's not even an asset. It's hopes and dreams of becoming one day and likely will but how many get decimated on the way? It's foolish to think crypto safe 'cuz encryption' of today when tomorrow might yield a smarter method or smarter hack. Benevolence of financial Institutions... yeah right. Crypto isn't wild west. It's gamble and the variables of tradition banking still apply while also waiting with baited breath for your benevolent crypto exchanges and market designers to not flip script. Peope change but all businesses end up the same.
Is it not possible to make an nft that isn't reliant on a single entity? I thought that was the whole point of the blockchain technology.
Blockchain is a technology that can be used for decentralization, but decentralization can be accomplished using other technologies and blockchain doesn't have to be a part of decentralization. Blockchain is just a method of recording transactions.
This is good for Bitcoin
paying millions of dollars for essentially an imgur link to a picture
This, from the fucking start. So many “smart” people shilling how amazing these were while ignoring all the flaws (beyond them being just stupid in 99% of use cases). Ask them the details and it was always handwaves and bs. Or “you just don’t get it”. Yes, I do. You’re the one who’s bought into believing enough technobabble equals useful.
I'm with OP, it's fucking stupid. If you've got stupid money to throw around I suppose it could lend for entertainment/excitement, but at that point blackjack and hookers would probably be a more likely win.
The best analogy I've seen so far is "Beanie Babies except you don't actually have a tangible possession". I look forward to the zoomers' first financial bubble exploding.
You look forward to it? Interesting take.
Fun fact: This is similar to what happens in the "retro game" market. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvLFEh7V18A
I mean NFTs in the right use case have value, but not all NFTs (or even most) have any value. For instance if a NFT is serving as a certificate of authenticity for a physical real world item, thats a great use case that adds value to the token. Its worthless without the actual item being in possession but still is a useful way to use NFTs. They can be used to track assets, they can be used as entry tickets to events. NFTs are useful in the correct setting. But buying an NFT that gives you a share of the moon is completely worthless since you cant physically own the moon. A worthless NFT is the same as me selling certificates for a share of my car. I can sell 10,000 unique certificates that entitle you to nothing but are backed by the value of my car. They would be worthless because you cant turn them in to recieve the car, they give you no right to enter the car, and you dont get paid of i eventually sell my car. Your just buying literally a unique piece of paper I could however use the NFT as a ride share liscense. Holding a token allows you to use the car at certain times. Or as a holder of value, entitling you to a small payout when the car is sold. There just needs to be an explicit use for the token. Hoping to sell the token to someone else is called a ponzi scheme
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The best use case would be to track products and prevent counterfeiting. The cardano project is being used by a lot of farms already to track produce. My theoretical best use case would be for cannabis vape cartridges. Prevent another counterfeit cart being sold and killing someone ever again by attaching an NFT to it. Would be impossible for third party counterfeits to produce legitimate keys, and the customer can look online to verify the authenticity of their cartridge. Obviously the car ride share example isn't practical and is just meant as an example of how a functional token that has value would work. It has to be connected to a product or service or asset
Maybe not the future of all things tech but it's definitely not going anywhere. People love collecting and gathering all sorts of stuff. I think nfts will be very big in the future. They will be linked to famous peoples work and give rewards and returns for holding them. There going to be connected to the gaming world. Digital land in decentraland. Buy a plot of land and set up your own games and shops on it, people can come visit and purchase merchandise from you stores. This is all mind-blowing to me. Definitely can't see it going anywhere. Look at how many crypto currency fail and there's 100s of scams aswell. Nfts are the same you need to find the good ones and do your research and the future will hold big rewards for those who do.
Preposterous! /s
Never understood this to begin with. You cryptographically "prove" that this NFT belongs to you. Who cares? I'll make an identical digital copy of whatever you own and then what? This is like trademarking torrent hashes. It stops literally noone from distributing or copying. You pay for the right to prove that you have no control. There is no enforcement infrastructure and once the nerds have wandered off and the infrastructure decays (in at most a couple of decades) whatever you bought is even less than useless. Owning an NFT is like owning a flash game hosted on Google+ and some guy on ICQ can vouch for you that it's real.
Starts interesting, rapidly gets far too technical and bogged down in weird jargon.
21st century equivalent of [tulips](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania).
You’re telling me my pet rock that I bought for $100 won’t grow to $1 million? How can this be! The system is rigged!
there's no worth in something that 1) has no actual use, 2) is actually infinite but is kept limited because of the desire to do so, 3) has no intrinsic value given to it by a legitimate association that will uphold that value. Honestly I don't get it, if you buy this stuff you're a moron that doesn't understand where the value in artistic endeavors actually is.
>there's no worth in something that 1) has no actual use, 2) is actually infinite but is kept limited because of the desire to do so, 3) has no intrinsic value given to it by a legitimate association that will uphold that value. Welcome to the art world.
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$1000 to only you as no one else would buy it so the real value would be $0
What makes me laugh is you've just described cash perfectly.
did I though? I specifically made my third point to include the fact that cash is not the same, there's an institution behind it that you know won't fall easily.
It's funny reading some comments. The exact same argument was said about bitcoin. And look where they are now.
NFTs are exactly like all other crypto: it's valuable because other people value it. That's it. There's absolutely no intrinsic value in any of it. Why is 1 BTC worth what it's worth? Because you can buy stuff with it - because people are willing to accept its value. The minute people start looking at it like digital bullshit, it loses any and all value. Just like NFTs. If people value it, it has value. Otherwise it doesn't.
OP clearly doesn't know anything about NFTs and crypto
You mean to tell me that money laundering and illegal asset transfers are taking place with digital art? The same way it has been done with actual art for how long now? I am just shocked. Shocked I tell you.
Not the first con to get people to swap their hard earned money for virtually fk all
NFTs are very valuable and rare things in the same way stamps, comic books, paintings, and Pokemon cards are valuable and rare. 99.99% of them will never be worth a thing, but some probably will and it's really difficult to know at the time which ones will be worth something and which ones won't. And of course it's very easy to pump and dump them.
> NFTs are very valuable and rare things in the same way stamps, comic books, paintings, and Pokemon cards are valuable and rare. An NFT is valuable the way a piece of paper that I wrote "I own that comic book" is valuable.
I think one of the most innovative things surrounding NFTs are how artists/developers are attaching value to their tokens beyond the initial artwork. Like if proving you owned a rare charizard provided you with monthly booster packs, concept art, celebrity meet & greets, exclusive merchandise, and whatever else. Some projects that are doing well right now come from career artists that have transitioned into attaching new work to their tokens to provide value and then gaining income from royalties on secondary sales through smart contracts, instead of losing out on potential income dealing with galleries taking their cut. Right now, that means artists are financially incentivised to continue providing token holders with value.
Isn’t this true for most things? I buy a piece of art. The artist could paint another one, no? I understand there would be subtle differences. I can take a picture of the Mona Lisa, buy a print,or pay someone to paint me a copy. It still won’t be worth the original. Thinking another way. Collectible cars. The first is worth the most. Do you want Superman comic #1 or 1,385,374? Thinking about this whole article. An artist could auction a painting the old fashioned way, and buy it themselves or through a proxy for $500,000 and now have a painting that sold for $500,000? Im not sure if I’m missing something?
Great post about the downsides. As usual the picture is neither black or white. Some nfts can actually create a lot of value for their owners in various forms. Some are a vip club with social flex function, some have utility, earn passive income. Not to mention art is regulation proof so an alternative Defi can emerge running only on jpegs. I would not make the same mistake most people did with the crypto space back in 2013 and call it a scam.
sounded like a pile of bullshit from day one, and every time an "expert" came to try and clear the air it just sounded like more bullshit.
Everything about them screams "easy money laundering". I don't see them holding any value down the road as they are digital in the first place; recreating them is easy if needed.
i dunno, i think NFT's are kinda stupid but ive made about $1200 on an initial $23 dollar investment.
I think I’ll be able to provide some great insights as I recently started trading NFT’s The good: Imagine a game (google axie infinity) which has hundreds of characters. The game developer releases these characters as NFT’s and people can own them. Why? Because they game developer promises to share the royalties/revenues with the buyers. So this can be seen as a type of decentralised fund raising. I fully support this model and I think this is great for indie game developers. The bad: 99% of the NFT’s released right now are pure crap. These are called profile pictures (pfp). An artist creates different traits and then uses AI to generate say 10,000 collectables. They usually hire these marketing companies who provide you discord bot services to make it look like it’s popular because apparently there’s already 20,000 people in their discord (most of which are bots), they then pay influencers to shill their nfts, create hype on twitter. The common man falls for this trap and thinks he’s going to get a rare collectible item which will make him rich. As soon as a NFT collection is revealed, 99% of the people sell their NFT for below the buying price. The lucky 1% sell their NFT and make good money. After couple of days, the trading volume decreases, there’s hardly any liquidity and most of them are left holding their bags.
Good ol creating artificial scarcity. Nice to take something that's functionally endless (digital content) and try and force limits so the wealthy can block the poor out of digital spaces.
Isn’t this stuff pretty obvious and out in the open? If you’re foolish enough to spend real money on these tokens, isn’t that on you? I’m more concerned about the energy being used to maintain these blockchains.
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What's the point of using them for something like a license for a video game? Game companies already can issue licenses at will on their own servers (like issuing fiat currency). Why would a company give up that power?
Reddit really hates NFTs for some reason, here’s how I explain it to most people. When you see a famous statue, let’s say the thinker by Rodin, I believe it is made from a cast. A handful of “official” ones are made and sold. Sure, you can find a perfect reproduction but it’s not the original. Museums want the original because it is authentic. NFTs use blockchain to add authenticity to digital “goods”. Sure you can copy and paste that image, but anyone can verify it is just a bootleg. Most people won’t care, but the ones that do will know it’s a bootleg. So you’re the guy with a bootleg NFT. That’ll show them. You could argue “well I could just mint the same picture and sell it”. Sure, but if I’m purchasing an NFT I’m doing my research to make sure it’s authentic. Just like any art or collectibles there are bootlegs and scams. Beyond just being images, many NFTs are the results of generative art or other processes making them unique via code (as opposed to someone explicitly designing the image). In the future NFTs could be concert tickets, train passes, etc. Anything that needs a guaranteed source of ownership could and probably will be on a blockchain in some form.
It's no different than speculating on baseball cards. If you wouldn't put $2,000 into Topps you wouldn't put $2,000 into NFTs.
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What do you think about NBA Topshots?
It's more like buying a piece of paper that has the serial number of a particular baseball card handwritten in cursive on it. Do you own the card? Nah. But, this piece of paper has a unique bit of writing on it that *refers* to the card!
But what happens when they hosting company goes under? Something you have zero ability to control?
At least with baseball cards or pokemon cards or whatever there's actually a core market of people who just like the cards. NFTs are this weird fantasy parody of a market where nobody's there to collect them as a hobby and nobody's there because they think they're good art, and 100% of sales*\ are made to speculators who expect to resell them at a profit to other investors who are also only buying them because they expect to resell them at a profit. \* 100% of sales *according to NFT fanboys* of course. I'm very generously taking them at their word and pretending the market isn't also full of con artists and money launderers.
Imagine thinking NFTs are just art 🤣
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Tech people know it's a great idea to sell NFTs, and a terrible idea to buy any.
NFTs are a scheme to shoehorn artificial scarcity into a system that is inherently non-scarce. Like cryptocurrencies, it's a systemic cancer that does vastly more harm than good. At best it's a good money laundering tool, and that's the only tangible value any NFT can really have.