Remember when NFTs sold for millions of dollars? 95% of the digital collectibles are now probably worthless.
markets.businessinsider.com
Remember when NFTs sold for millions of dollars? 95% of the digital collectibles are now probably worthless.::NFTs had a huge bull run two years ago, with billions of dollars per month in trading volume, but now most have crashed to zero, a study found.
correction... always were worthless.
It's always been a con game.
Their so-called "value" was always determined by the ability of the person shilling it to make up bullshit. Literally the definition of a "confidence" game. Same problem as crypto in general. It's only has value if you have confidence in the person shilling it. The moment that person loses the confidence of their marks, the entire thing crumbles to nothing because it isn't backed by any real tangible assets.
Also money laundering and tax rebate schemes.
akshuallllyyyyyyyy, monetary value of anything is derivative to someone else's willingness to purchase the item
You can use this logic to explain away any other ponzi scheme too.
It's not really logic, and I don't think it's defending anything, it's just the definition of monetary worth.
For better or for worse, stuff is always as valuable as people consider it to be. Which may be related to how useful that stuff is, but often is not.
Sure, but some systems are way more stable since they are established and have the general trust of a lot of people. And others simply don't have that wide ranging trust and as such aren't stable.
That's why I trust money issued by a government. Because even if individual politicians are evil and useless, the money is still backed by bombs and bullets a huge amount of infrastructure and tangible assets.
untrue.
Real currency is backed by assets. that used to be the "gold standard", but has become more ephemeral since the end of the first world war.
A government issued currency is backed by that government's infrastructure, taxes, tariffs, etc... basically how powerful that government is on the world stage.
in contrast, crypto is backed by nothing more than how persuasive the creator is because the creator doesn't need any assets to create a crypto currency in the first place.
Heck, in one case, some techbro created a crypto currency, and convinced a bunch of people that it would be stable because he was backing it with ANOTHER crypto currency he literally created for that only purpose.
And people FELL FOR IT!
When something can be created out of thin air with no assets needed but a GPU, it's inherently worthless.
It's utter insanity.
This was the comment I came here to make. "They were always worthless."
Sounds a lot like the banking system today lol.
Edit: Idk why all yall turds down voted me. The u.s. dollar is literally not backed by any physical asset..... look up fiat money and do research on the dollar.
Yes it is. It's backed by the US's economic power on the world stage. That's how economies function.
Crypto can be created or of thin air by literally any tech bro with a GPU. By definition that is literally worthless
It doesn't need to be, it's backed by the need to pay taxes in USD.
So like art. No tangible assets, but the value is derived by the highest bidder.
No, because with art, there's still a literal piece of art.
With NFTs, it's just a shitty jpeg some tech bro photoshopped up in five minutes.
With NFTs there aren't even any art. The NFT is a receipt for the art, not the art itself. You didn't buy the copyright for the actual art with an NFT, you bought a link to a specific copy of the art.
I mean, there are ways to tie them together, though the point still stands that NFTs add nothing to art. Copyright works fine without an overly complicated digital receipt.
Not even photoshopped, that would be too much effort. Nah, the most infamous NFTs are a few different elements (different mouths, eyes, accessories, etc) and then a whole bunch of permutations generated from those elements. For a technology with a supposed selling point of scarcity, you'd think they'd try to make the art special instead of procedurally-generated trash, but of course the real purposes were scams and money laundering.
Actually you're still a bit overestimating it.
Most NFT's are literally just hyperlinks, where the hyperlink could suffer link rot and stop working OR the image on the other side of the hyperlink could be changed.
And as LegalEagle had pointed out "You can't own that"
Yea, it's truly amazing anyone fell for those stupid things... Sooo little effort was supposed to magically generate real value!? Give me a break... It was sooo obviously just a way to get people to pool money in an unsafe way so it could be pocketed.
Who ever donated to those scams didn't deserve the money, as much as their losses are still a tragedy. Still, the scammers deserve that money even less. Bunch of idiots all around.
What about regular digital art?
It is art and doesn't need NFTs to give it value. People comission digital pieces all the time and don't need NFTs to get it done.
...is not an NFT
The thing with art is that even if the art itself is completely worthless, the materials used are not.
You can sell a "worthless" painting to be used as firewood.
Same with digital assets, they can be sold to be used as templates or even to train an AI.
But a location in some useless database (which is essentially what an NFT is) does not.
Well I am shocked!
No not actually.
Still overpriced!
I'm honestly amazed they're worth anything at all.
We have been attributing a huge value to a metal that's mostly remarkable for being yellow and shinny for millennia, one of the biggest investment bubbles in history was over a flower, and people thought that using a loophole to profit from the arbitrage of international reply coupons was going to last forever. Hell, people paid for fake property titles for land on the Moon and Mars. It's not that surprising that some people think that buying a random number in a distributed database is an investment.
Yellow, shiny, and untarnishable/non-poisonous. The latter are very nice properties to have for jewelry, as your skin will eat away most metals over time.
People like looking pretty, that has consistent value other than using it as a medium of exchange/ store of value.
Don't forget the beanie babies, which just like NFTs were created to be scarce and be seen as an investment.
Turned out the same as well.
I didn't get the "arbitrage of international reply coupons" reference. What's that one?
That's what Ponzi told people he was doing. And in the beginning he was, and it was working, but then he started paying investors with other investors money.
I might be wrong, but to my recollection, he never got it to work; in the beginning, he merely believed that he could eventually get it to work, and that the first fraudulent payouts to early investors were originally intended as a temporary way of buying time without losing investors.
The OG ponzi
Yeah, the really smart people bought whole stars!
True, but to be fair, them shiny metals for the longest time were reasonably rare and couldn't be made, and served well for a means of currency. NFTs are pretty ridiculous all things considered. People also "bought" stars too, so yeah, many will buy dumb shit.
Yes, but also very rare, and effectively impossible to create or destroy.
They’re still not
I'd pay $10 to clown on some tech bro if I cared enough. $10 doesn't even buy you a sandwich these days
It's just a "Save picture as..." with extra steps, and money!
Things only have a price when two people are willing to do the transaction.
Say 99% of NFT owners have given up and mentally written off their NFTs as a complete loss. If the remaining 1% are selling at a 90% loss and some sucker is still buying at that 90% discount, the "average price" will be whatever those two agree on.
This is a bit different from physical goods because those can't just be deleted out of existence. If someone had a warehouse of beanie babies they might choose to give them away (setting the price at zero) or maybe there's some tiny value of the cloth so they sell them for a few cents per kg.
If you want to give me an NFT, I won’t accept it unless you sweeten the deal with an additional 20 €.
You mean to tell me that purchasing what is essentially a URL hosted on someone else's server is a poor investment?
Shocked Pikachu Face
I like how the url could also have the picture changed if someone wanted to lol. You don't even own the picture that the url points to, you just have a receipt that says "this url is my url, no I don't own the url, because someone can change what's on that. No I also don't own whatever is hosted on that url either"
And the receipt isn't necessarily unique. The centralized world of Web 3 decided mostly to use Opensea(?) for NFTs, but it isn't the authority on who owns URLs. It's just the biggest, most commonly used "star registry" that let people claim that they owned certain stars. But, the same "stars" could be sold by other people on other platforms too.
Some had ipfs links. In that case they couldn't be changed.
Everything we create can be changed. Just because it may be difficult doesn't mean it is impossible, no matter what those tech bros tell you.
Same with any blockchain. Nothing is secure, everything can be hacked.
In a matter of fact, it already has happened.
You do know the hash of the file part of the address, right? Any different file would by definition be a different address.
There could be an undiscovered bug in ipfs, but then that bug would be highlighted and fixed, and you could find a way to break the hashing algorithms, but then we'd have far bigger problems than an NFT being changed.
Also, the article you linked to lists no attacks on the blockchain, only theft of bitcoins using normal blockchain operations. That's like saying someone hacked the US dollar when doing a bank robbery.
Small correction: Even though some NFTs sold for millions, the NFTs have always been worthless.
They literally provide no value. I don't see how people didn't get that.
It's a link, you bought a link. If the power goes out at the server hosting it, you can't even access it anymore.
If I told you I had a magic box, and for a million dollars you could look inside whenever you wanted, you'd tell me to go fuck myself. But do it on the Internet and it's beanie babies all over again. But at least THOSE were tangible.
Never work in tech, friend. It is an endless parade of buzzwords. Idiots will think it is a revolution, people who put even the smallest amount of effort into understanding it will know it isn't. Sadly, the idiots tend to be the ones making the decisions. So you get to spin your wheels on a fool's errand until their surprisingly lengthy attention span moves to the next buzzword. As the parade continues you just lose more and more faith in humanity.
I wish I had an answer for you other than some people are really fucking stupid.
I work in manufacturing, I came from an office setting for a national Internet provider. At first it was refreshing, all of the bullshit was gone, and it was just about getting shit done.
But then a tech bro got his teeth in to our CEO and the company has gone to shit. They've tried desperately to placate people but the attrition here is harder now than it was during COVID, when we literally begged people to go home. People are leaving for lower paying, non union jobs it's gotten so bad. I think the only reason I'm still here is I know how much worse it could be.
Sigh. How eager our boss was to make all our products "AI powered" as soon as he heard about ChatGPT, even though the techies had all tried it and knew it wasn't appropriate for what we do. We're still adding "AI power" to things, because he already put it in all the marketing.
You're saying all this like people aren't fucking stupid. They are.
So it was like we thought all along, cool.
Depends what they are. I have a bunch of NFTS and they have all mostly held their value or increased. The difference is they are all related to games, and the most I have ever paid for one was probably like $15, with the average being like 50 cents. This only seems to be looking mostly at art NFTs on ethereum networks. I don't have a single NFT that uses ethereum, although I know that was the craze, especially for "investments". Which anyone with half a brain should have been able to tell someone an NFT is not a good investment plan.
Frankly that says more about the gullibility of gamers than the legitimacy of NFT. Gamers will pay for the chance of getting access a fictional character in a game that will eventually close its servers and take everything down with it. They can't seem to differentiate the value of something within the fictional ludic context and the value of something as a piece of media or an entertainment product, and gaming/tech businessmen these days take full advantage of that oversight.
What about the enjoyment they get before the game indeed does shut down? That's gotta be worth at least something right?
Definitely less than it would be from having a game which they can keep playing, and getting that content permanently.
Is the enjoyment of getting a single instance of a single character, sometimes not even having full access of their abilities, worth as much as an entire other game? Maybe even a console or more, as the price surpasses hundreds of dollars? Not to mention any other practical things that they could use that money for.
However much one might argue that value is subjective, what isn't subjective are the conditioning tactics being used. Habit-forming mission and reward structures, content being put in gambling formats to incentive compulsive spending. The fact that the game is bound to private servers is itself generally only done to enable monetization, and even more cynically, to force players to move to the next thing once that one ceases being sufficiently profitable.
I see enough people ultimately regretting how much they spent to question if they ever got that value out of it.
I don't disagree, there is a lot of shady shit going on, but the state of gaming is what you're describing. I'm having a lot of fun with BF2042, but it's a live service game with servers provided by EA. It will get shut down, which is retarded, but I'm still enjoying it while I can.
There are of course exceptions, like Baldur's Gate, but overall, not a good vibe unfortunately
For all my criticism, I do enjoy some live service games too, but I'm of the opinion that any live service game would have been better off without those conditioning tactics, without a balance marred by Pay2Win and power creep, and if it was hostable by any player. Not all them are fundamentally bad, but they are made worse by these elements.
But unfortunately, games keep being made that way because it's more profitable.
It is worth something... a refund.
Have you ever ate something enjoyable? Absolutely worthless
Honestly these games are so crude that most regular gamers would never even think of them as games. There are a lot of failed projects, that really just did become click and play, but there are a couple good ones on WAX. MoM is a part of WAX and has turned into something interesting, albeit they had to add extra revenue models, although I think the Devs are mostly Ukrainian... so they are likely going through some shit.
(The easiest way to describe MoM, is as a trading and crafting game. It's definitely not for most, but I enjoy playing around in the real life economical ecosystem thay has developed. There are arguably other points to it, but I think those arguments are weak...)
At first I thought you were a clever advertisment for that game, but as it turns out searching "mom wax" does not garner any results about games at all, so if you're not pulling our legs and they game actually exists could you post the full name? It sounds interesting
Are we talking about CS:GO skins? Because I never got a knife.
Why did you even buy them though? Surely you could have just downloaded them for free?
Because they are tied into the game. The NFTs contain information about the game asset. And a lot of the NFTs weren't bought, they were generated from aspects of the game. I don't know how else to explain it, without detailing the entire game or subset of games this falls into.
I will say, that I am lucky, picked a good project and didn't spend too much.
Yeah same here. I’m a Solana dev and have collected a handful. I’ve spent maybe $50 total the last two years and all together probably worth $3k or so
That's actually one chain I have some NFTs on. One of the games uses a dual Wax/Solana system for it's NFTs.
You keep talking about the games, which games?
Does anyone else think that NFTs are an allegory/miniature version of how art is easily commodified by capitalism? IIRC, NFTs were there to help finance artists who work on a purely digital medium, but then grifters coopted the NFT space and try to sell sets of same-looking artwork. Complete with "fandoms" and drama, as well.
NFTs are simply a straightforward con, without the financial hullabaloo of cryptocurrency. The con is simple: convince someone that something is valuable when it's not. Selling a brass ring as gold to a mark too naïve to check, has been around as long as there have been gold rings.
Nah, NFTs were always about the grift first and the art second.
After all, all an NFT token is is a digital receipt which links to an image hosted somewhere off-chain, not the image itself. All the "art" does is help to persuade people that the tokens are actually worth something and hype up the price even further.
It is an allegory for the whole financial system ... it's all made up imaginary money, funds and amounts that don't exist and never will .... it's all based on trust, faith and belief. If enough people wake up tomorrow and stop believing in a segment of this entire system, it can all quickly collapse.
I remember reading about ten years ago that if all debt was stopped all over the world and all of it was to be repaid ... it would take the world several million years to do so.
There is wealth in the world but we've created very complicated, imaginary ways to make it seem that wealth is worth millions of times more than there actually exists.
I see it as a modern day religion ... it exists because we all believe in it .... if the faithful ever lose faith, the religion dies.
God I cannot wait for the religion of capitalism to die. Markets are rough enough without greedy fucks institutionalizing their greed.
That's not true at all. They were a con from their inception. The "helping artists" bit was something they made up to further that con. Just like when they claim cryptocurrency is an actual viable currency alternative to fiat.
Yeah it was huge in the art world, all the art magazines had articles about how it was the next big thing and how to mint your own nfts - which of course all turned out to be 'pay my buddy $200 and we'll turn your jpg into an nft!' which was a scam within a scam.
Artists generally aren't tech minded and honestly often pretty surface level in their understanding of things because that's where their focus is, they're looking at the visual not the mechanical. There's nothing wrong in that because life needs a wide range of people.
I'm curious if you have a source for this. I haven't heard it anywhere else...
The whole point was to get dollars into crypto so the holders could cash out. The value was never meant to stay.
Not my Donald Trump trading cards! Nooo!
Weren't those not even nfts? I believe I remember reading that they were basically just jpegs or something to that effect. Makes sense though, better return of investment on that scam.
95% seems a little low. I assume that it's closer to 99.9%.
💯
Even at the hype max there was already a lot of worthless NFTs, so it can easily be even less than 95%.
I'm sure they were a great way to launder money at the time.
That's why it's at the time. I made a quick $600 and never looked back cuz I knew it was unstable, but I wasn't ignorant to the idea like many people who just wanted to bandwagon hate.
Maybe now I'll finally be able to buy the ones I want
(There aren't any)
It sounds like you could have always bought the ones that you want!
I find it fascinating that NFTs were supposed to be a proof-of-ownership technology, but because people are stupid & greedy made pictures to sell with it
It always reminds me of those certificates for owning a piece of the moon.
Because it's pretty much the same.
At the very core ownership that isn't recognised by the state is meaningless. So that ape picture? No one really cares about some guy claiming to own it because they have control over the token. As long as it's on the internet everyone can just copy it and there's no authority caring about it one bit since NFT isn't recognised as for example copyright is.
Even when it comes to stuff like items in games, these also are only worth anything as long as the publisher of the game recognises your claim to it! And even if they did recognise it, there's absolutely nothing preventing them from changing their minds later. Simply because they create the game however they like and have 100% control over it's development.
Except it's not ownership, it is digital rights management. Right now DRM is handled by private corporations, not the state, and it generally is anti-consumer. NFTs could be used for DRM in a more pro consumer way.
That all hinges on a pretty big "could".
Absolutely, companies are not going to just decide to implement NFTs in a way that gives more control to users unless it means more money for them. Does change the fact that the technology has that potential, even if it remain unutilized.
Only if the companies in charge would allow that. And they really have zero incentive to do so. The way it currently is, is way more profitable for them.
What confused the fuck outta me as someone who has been in the crypto space since 2010 is that it wasn't new or novel in any way. Colored Coins was virtually the same thing and it flopped in a similar fashion and there were several similar projects that did the same or never made it off the ground. Then, some shitty monkey drawings come along, are backed by virtually the same thing I had seen before and suddenly people I knew from my hometown who barely had two brain cells to rub together were claiming to be financial and tech gurus while peppering "block chain" into conversation. The one thing that brings me solace is that they all lost their investments
Right, when NFT’s we’re going crazy, the pictures and shit didn’t make sense to me at all but there’s a huge opportunity for digital ownership of physical materials like cars or houses. It would make private sales/transfers easy. All title information on the house would be recorded and attached in the blockchain so when you go to sell your home, you can prove there aren’t any liens against the home and once financing has been approved, transfer the ownership on the blockchain and done. That’s where I always saw the practical application going but now nobody will take NFT’s seriously until it’s named something else and rolled out with government approval and systems in place or nobody will feel safe transferring such a large investment digitally
Don't we already have state or local databases for stuff like houses and cars? How does the blockchain stuff add anything?
The difference is that you can't retroactively edit the block chain, and the block chain contains all the data in it.
Databases can be edited, deleted, corrupted, poorly maintained, etc.
Think of the block chain like a permanent audit log of all transactions with it.
Edit: the NFT exists as a value in the block chain as the "point of origin". As this value is carried forward, the blockchain will always point back to the original.
That's why the whole pictures thing fucked it all up and we missed out on powerful tech. It could have essentially saved lives in critical machines and made PII tracking easier.
Block chains can also be edited, deleted, corrupted.
They aren't as secure as tech bros claim. Nothing possibly can be.
Blockchains already have been hacked multiple times.
This is the Web3 you are simping for: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
No, they can't. The article you point to mentioned stolen crypto. Crypto can be stolen if someone has the private keys to a wallet.
A block chain is algorithmically verified by members of the network.
Can you blame them? If I gave someone a photo and then they offered to give me $1,000 if I also would write down a unique number, then I would without hesitation write down a random number and get my grand.
Started laughing when nfts were introduced, still chuckle today.
It's great. Love it.
Grab the tulips! Grab them!
It is all worthless?
Always has been
Shocking
well that surprised no one
The
rubespeople with useful opinions on Reddit assured me I would be left behind if I didn't understand NFTs. I'm sure they're surprised.Whomever named them NFTs instead of grift cards missed an opportunity.
Oh man. I remember getting downvoted to hell for stating that they were a scam and provided no actual value or true, to technical "non-fungibility".
Well, NTF is based upon the Greater Fool Theory.
So if those with invested interests are unable to find a bigger fool to sell them to, those NFT become worthless.
You got downvoted because you were interfering with money from the NFT investors.
"Don't ever come between a man and his meal" - Dave Chappelle
I feel like a lot of people probably knew that to some degree, but didn't want to believe it to be true. Supposed to leave your emotions at the door when trading stocks or crypto, but a lot of people don't seem to do that.
Yup. Does feel good to be vindicated for being willing to honestly express reality, in spite of willful delusion and ingnorance. Not that I am happy for those that suffered immense losses but, they can't say that they weren't warned.
Wowie gee whiz, no one in the universe could have seen that one coming. /s
All those rappers and celebrities with cartoon donkey and monkey profile pics showed how much for sale they are. They will promote poison to you for money
Or they'll promote just silly pictures for people with lots of money. They don't owe you an education in investing. If they paid lots for a NFT that's not an issue, you don't have to.
It's no different in someone buying Gucci on minimum wage because a Kardashian wears it.
Except, much like crypto, they were heavily marketed to be just like stocks and other legitimate securities (but the future, because internet stocks!), instead of just speculative gambling on completely unregulated assets. Sure, you could do a modicum of research and see that they did include in the fine print they were explicitly NOT regulated securities, but your Average Joe has no clue what that means and just sees someone he trusts (don't ask me why, but people absolutely do), telling him he'll be super rich if he buys some C-list celebrity's monkey JPEG.
Do I still think people like Average Joe are idiots for buying them? 100%. But that doesn't make it okay that people are taking advantage of their financial naiveté either.
Ponzi schemes have an oversaturation problem like every other one.
Don't put your reputation on the line to sell links to ugly JPEGs, please.
Why you pretend to be a celebrity online?
Helps sell more NFTs /s
If you really want me to sell you stuff, buy a shirt or a mug here or something. I don't know.
https://www.sagaftra.org/official-sag-aftra-strike-swag-available
Sir these based levels are off the charts
Does based mean pointless and extremely cringey?
I don't even know what to say to that lol
My favourite part of NFT/Crypto is all of the creators that outed themselves by pushing for it, taking sponsorships, etc.
Yes, it was lovely. We now have a great list of folks who were either too dumb or too greedy to hold back on scamming their fellow humans.
I won't lie though, for a little while there I was worried the pumping would continue like it did with bitcoin
Oh no.
Anyway.
Now? Always were.
The biggest operation of money laundering in the history of the world.
Not dissimilar to money laundering or MLMs.
Lol, classic. Where's Ubisoft's NFT collection they were selling so hard last year?
IIRC they backpedalled on that before they released due to the massive backlash
"Bull run"
More like Bullshit run. Literally nobody fell for the grift. Celebrities bought into it because it was a pump and dump scheme and they can afford it. There is literally no use case for NFTs and even basic normies saw that.
Someone somewhere has an NFT instead of a bunch of money. Even if everyone participating knew this was a very expensive game of hot potato someone had to be holding the potato when the buzzer went off.
Yeah, a lot of the NFT craze was pump and dump where people were selling NFTs to themselves. Even that famous digital artist who got super rich did it because the guy who paid him was trying to inflate the market. But, like any con game, there are suckers. Many of them aren't rich, just stupid.
A lot of FOMO from people who missed out on bitcoin saw this, and thought it was the next big thing. And for like seventeen seconds, it was
The use case for NFTs is to provide a bulletproof cryptographically secured registry for arbitrary content. Such as deeds or titles. Legally recognized, that would represent a marked improvement on the current system. You can have it represent digital goods also, that's just more of a toy than a useful tool.
"bulletproof"
Blockchain can be hacked, just like any other digital technology. In fact, it has already happened.
If you write smart contracts with vulnerabilities, they'll be hacked, that is not the same thing as a blockchain being hacked though. Also, smart contracts can be fully audited and provably correct, a lot of companies just half ass it. ERC721 spec (NFT) has drop-in contract code which no doubt has been audited and not hacked on its own.
All my apes, gone
This is even funnier in retrospect
I still think NFTs could be used to make a form of DRM that is actually fair to the consumer, by maki g it so you can resell your digital goods and also make it so your digital rights don't vanish as soon as the seller gets bored. But nobody in a position to make that happen wants that.
DRM =/= fair to the consumer.
DRM as a concept seeks to limit your digital rights. Any DRM of any kind is a form of punishment to the consumer. You bought it, it should be yours to do with in perpetuity as you please.
What about the rights of the creator and fair compensation? That argument alone is driving the entire backlash against AI and AI created art whereby people's work was read and incorporated in some level without restriction, why not here too?
So you're pro-DRM then if it helps content creators sell one copy per customer?
People can buy multiple copies if so they wish to. Most digital sellers are perfectly happy to charge you multiple times for things you technically already own. Artificial scarcity by way of limiting a digital good is unethical.
I was under the impression that the main point of DRM was to prevent blanket copying of a product and sharing with others who haven't purchased said product.
If I buy an e-book I should be able to read it on any device I want. If I purchase software I should be able to install it and use it on as many devices I own that I want.
You can't buy a book, print off a ton of copies, and then sell those copies. You can do whatever you want with your book, lend out, give it away, but you're not allowed to profit off it.
Sure you are. You're allowed to sell it to a book store, and if it's somehow more valuable than what you paid when you bought it, you profit.
You can't make copies and then sell those copies to the book store
Legally I cannot, but physically the book does not come with a device that prevents me from doing so.
That's why you get paid up front for your work.
We should worry more about what corporations are doing with people's work, than what individuals are doing with what they've paid for.
Or simply, if someone's profiting off of someone else's work, then worry about the rules.
I guess this is kind of my point. The general left consensus on copyrights, creator's content, DRM, and AI is not founded a position of principles, it's foundation is seemingly only what serves the end goal which is whatever is perceived to help middle/lower class the most.
Which of course I can totally get down with, but I just resent that everyone covers their arguments as if it's coming from a principled idea when in actuality they hold little principles on the matter and just want an end goal.
Copyright only exists to serve society, to promote the creation of content. It's not about restricting anything, other than as far as it helps more people create, more creation happen. Corporations stomping on individuals does not promote creation.
DRM could be fair to the consumer, it just isn't in the interests of the publishers to make it so, and as a result the versions of it we have are not fair to the consumer.
DRM certainly can't be fair as long as it's illegal to circumvent.
NFTs or blockchains are not needed for this. You could just implement selling or transfers in the content platform.
I do think using contacts for escrow and having the sale being independent from the vendor are cool features, bit not at all essential ones.
Okay but what happens when the platform goes away, or decides to change the rules? That`s the only part I could see NFTs actually potentially answering. If the ownership verification was all done client-side via a blockchain it could potentially survive the shutdown of the store you bought it from.
Don't get me wrong, I can see problems with this. And potentially this could also be done with simple public key cryptography.
Yes, but that's a different, independent problem.
How would that be fair? There would still be drm running on your computer to verify you have the nft. That would have all the issues of DRM already. And those who want information to be free could still just make illegal cracked copies and distribute them.
Video game ownership rights have been going downhill for years. Most games can disappear from your account at a whim, and you can't sell them on when you're done anymore. At least with blockchain-based DRM, you'd be able to sell it when you're done - and if the thing is hosted in a decentralized manner (IPFS, Pinata etc) then the creator can't simply delete it or delist it. You'd own it without permission.
In theory it could be a good idea. If done right.
Or not. The company could choose not to honor that sale.
In the situation I'm referring to, the issuer has no control over the asset once it's been bought; it would be sold to another buyer, and the transaction could be done on any third party marketplace. In return for loss of this discretionary power, the issuer receives a cut of the secondary resale - that is baked into the token when it is created.
It'd be as close to mimicking the rights of owning a DRM-free physical copy that I know of, with the added bonus of cutting creators into the secondary market, which incentivizes them to care about long term support. I like that bit, and it is too rarely mentioned.
Why not instead imagine a future without DRM where there's no artificial scarcity for digital goods?
If I'm in the mood to fantasize, I can do a little better than that.
Hmm, kind of an open source Steam client that shares game files in a secure and verified peer to peer manner and only lets users play that have the corresponding NFT in their connected wallet. Now you'd only need an incentive for someone to develop something better and way more complex than Steam without making anything close to the same profit from it. Also you'd need a reason for publishers to sell their games this way, if after half a year they won't sell a single copy anymore, as there is always someone that offers their used license cheaper.
Uh, yeah. GameStop is making it, from what I hear. They can't keep selling old physical copies forever and the new board knows it. They're already partnered with some blockchain firms to build it. Means + motive on a platter.
As to why a developer would go for it? This kind of token can be sold on any such marketplace, but can have a royalty baked in so that no matter who sells it or where, they get a perpetual revenue stream. I usually hate rent-seeking behavior, but in the case of software you need a way to pay for continued support, and this solves it.
You're adding another person to the equation (the player that sells their game) and everyone is supposed to profit? Someone will make a loss compared to the status quo for this to work out and it's never the marketplace operator.
When we buy a game, there is already an intermediary. The GoG, Steam, Itch, whatever. This would be the same number of middlemen. The unique selling point would actually be disintermediation, since buyers would be able to resell the game and creators would be cut into the 'used game' market, giving them an incentive to maintain its quality long-term. There are other useful angles as well, but that's the one I like best.
I would say that wouldn't solve the main problem with DRM, the fact that it locks you out of your own computer. I don't settle for any DRM.
I prefer physical DRM-free copies. If the industry as a whole is going to try to move away from that model, as it appears to be, I'm not going to walk away from gaming; I'd rather be at the table and talk about viable compromises rather than be left out of the conversation.
How is it unfair? To me fair means making sure the creator gets paid without stomping on the rights of the purchaser; in particular, the right to keep the thing after the publisher has gotten bored of selling it, and the right to sell it, though that last one is a difficult proposition with digital goods, seeing as they don't devalue.
I would say any DRM is unfair, because it works by locking down your own system from yourself, and you should have a right to use your system unencumbered by any restrictive DRM, which tries to take away your right to use the system. Check out Securom and the Sony rootkit. You could buy discs from the publisher, and resell them. But your system was still locked down by the DRM.
Who is going to buy those digital goods?
And which developer is going to implement the digital goods of an other developer instead of creating their own which makes them money?
Not talking about that kind of thing. When I say digital goods, I mean things like games, things we currently have DRM for.
Of course, there being no reason to buy a game new if someone is selling it used, that part would never work.
Mostly used for money laundering
I'd say there's a fair number of people just speculating.
And a couple people get lucky and make it big. And that's promoted. Cuz it looks great.
But like a lot of the big movements, are money laundering as you said, or a way to bribe people. This politicians wife's cousins son sold an NFT for 4 million that's amazing!
But we get this with traditional art too. Any market where there isn't commodity pricing, price discovery is flexible, so it can be used for lots of social reasons
Isn't most art for money laundering. You move money and purchase a piece or "art" for 4 million. Art isn't worth it. But because it's been bought it now has a value. If you sell it. Now you've created money from nothing. Fucked up
Fine art and race horses, ad platforms, and let's not forget high-end gambling and sports gambling.
Sheldon Adelson made billions laundering money for Chinese oligarchs through the Sands Singapore.
There's so much dirty money floating from place to place with these obvious financial VPNs.
Not wrong
I don't think your examples complete.
You buy art from some no name but dead artist. You buy all the art. Then you take your dirty money which you can't put on the open market, and give it to somebody who then uses clean money to buy your artwork on the public market. For a fee of course.
So now you have an argument that this artist is appreciating after their death, you've sold a bunch of artwork for a large profit, minus taxes, minus the cleaning fee from the buyer.
That would complete the money laundering cycle.
But that's annoying, cuz you're basically using somebody else to clean the money for you, it's just the transfer back to you that the art facilitates.
I think bribes are where art really shines. Bribes are different than money laundering, because the money is ostensibly clean anyway, it's just giving it to you for a reason that's difficult. So the art is the excuse that enables the bribery
Certainly not. Millions of people create art every day for various reasons and various success. Heck, artists are generally known to be on the poorer end of society exactly because they often care for the art even if it doesn't sell well. That is the case even for some of the now most famous artists in history. Quite a few of them died dirt poor while their pieces now sell for millions.
Is some art in certain circles used for money laundering? Most likely, but that's definitely not "most" but at best mabye a few thousand pieces which are dwarfed by the billions of art pieces around today.
Art dealers then. The art that sells for millions. Who values these. One person buys it for something. So it creates that price tag. Now you can sell it for that valuation
Anyone with the ability to read who bought one deserves what happened to them. The sellers are probably still laughing.
99 times out of 100, it was the seller selling it to himself to artificially inflate transaction numbers and nudge the price up.
Yeah, but that's the thing with scams. They make thousands of attempts, but they only need that one sucker.
Now? Probably?
Remember? Fuck no.
It was what for like 5 minutes during a year with a million other more important things going on to pay attention to that thing that kids with only somewhat rich parents used to try and scam their way to being as rich as the kids with really rich parents.
You wouldn't right click a car would you.......
Probably?
It's a free market. Anyone can come up and say that they are willing to pay millions for an
indifferent_insect_boat_club.jpegat any moment.It was just another form of money laundering though 'art'.
That's exactly what it was. If I wanted to wash money, the easiest way to do it would be to create some bullshit digital pic and then buy it myself from an alt dummy account.
pushes glasses up I believe what you meant to say is that its a buyer's market. /s
Tell me you don’t know anything about the blockchain without telling me you don’t know anything about the blockchain
…is what Techbro Legion (for they are Many) would say if they didn’t have to put all their stuff in hock to recoup their losses
Turns out it was "not knowing anything" all the way down.
A load of rich stupid people got fucked over. Beautiful.
So did poor people.
Yeah that part sucks.
Dumb poor people who were obsessed with greed.
I have no sympathy.
Dumb poor people who were hoodwinked by slick advertising by con-men run firms like FTX, who just wanted some part of the American Dream.
Rich or poor, they were all stupid.
Oh no….anyway.
GOT EM! They were all confused and excited that it might be the next Bitcoin..All I need is one good con like this and I can get off this fucking hamster wheel!!
👨🚀🔫👨🚀
Clever assholes convinced fools that they had "the next big thing". The "smarter fools" realized the problem and offloaded their losses onto greater fools, a considerable portion of which are now wondering how to catch an even greater fool than themselves.
There's a reason these things are called bubbles. They pop.
Bored Apes Yacht Club is run by nazis prove me wrong
Don't know, don't care. NFTs are a scam, and that's enough reason for me to avoid them. Well, that and the art is fugly.
Idk man I liked my tomagatchi and that little fuck was worthless as shit but it was still neat to me 🤷🏻♂️
Why not prove yourself right first?
I don't care about BAYC, but....
Their nazi symbolism.
Care to elaborate? First time I'm hearing about all this
https://youtu.be/XpH3O6mnZvw
TL;DW: BAYC is full of really blatant Nazi references
Thanks
Because it’s been done over and over and I’m not gonna take the time to explain nazi symbols to people almost a hundred years later lmfao.
shocked Pikachu
What happened to the influencer guy. He started out selling alcohol or something and then had random videos where he bamboozes someone doing a house clearance and got excited for making 36 dollars off a box of toys, then went on to shill the ever fuck of fungible tokens, it's the future.
Gary z? Gary V?
Don't spread knowledge of grifters, the sooner they fade out of collective memory the better. The opposite gives them views and helps them.
*Are
Yes, I do remember when Russia came up with a new money laundering scheme after crypto died out.
... crypto didn't die out
I will sleep well tonight.
not f'n there
"Now"?
I'm just gonna plug The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith. Really clear, funny, sarcastic writing that is highly relevant here. The kind of economics I wish there was a whole lot more of; the Samuelson program with its assumptions of rationality and perfect knowledge has been a disaster.
Free at
https://static.fnac-static.com/multimedia/PT/pdf/9780241468081.pdf
Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is also a great on-topic read:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm
The chapter about asset bubbles obviously, but there's also a chapter about the historical catchphrases of London that shows that circlejerk shitposting has always been part of humanity... Yesteryear's "What a perfectly dreadful hat" is today's Stroganoff.
What is today's Stroganoff? This is like the third time I've heard a reference to Stroganoff this week, but they don't seem connected, just like everyone's talking about Stroganoff all of a sudden.
Just a fad going around Lemmy right now. Like the beans, if you were here for that one.
My, what a perfectly dreadful hat.
Someone check on Seth Green
I wonder if he's still making that show with himself as his monkey nft
Most of them have been worthless all the time but people like gambling.
There are only very few that hold real world value.
95% are worthless...so far
The great Tiny Tim has a comment about this digi-swindle.
At what point do they turn the servers off?
Good.
Hey at least we got that asshole Beeple.
Still waiting for that Seth Rogen TV show...
Weird word usage.
Dot com boom in the 90s, NFT boom in the 20s.
Dot com wasn't worthless or useless
Yeah, it was a bubble. Dot com companies were worth less than investors hoped, but not worthless.
Many of the dot-com companies that survived the crash exceeded their bubble valuation. Amazon, for example is worth far more than it ever was in the bubble days. Same with eBay, Priceline, etc.
Yahoo is widely considered one of the biggest flops, but it survived the dot-com crash, dropped to just a few dollars a share, then eventually climbed back up over $40/share. Despite being massively overvalued in the bubble and then massively mismanaged after, it fundamentally had some value and people used it for years.
Not many people had their own website in the late 90s, same as today. Domain names are useful to some just like how some see NTFs are being useful.
Yeah people visit websites more than looking at NFTs. However some will prefer NFTs over physical collectiables. Just a preference.
That's... Not what the dot-com boom was.
Also, homie has obviously never heard of geocities... or livejournal
Your post is pretty nonsensical anyway, but if anything more people had their own websites as a proportion of the web, with Geocities and Angelfire etc. This was before social media, so to have a presence on the web you had to have your own site, and people did.
You’re both correct. In the late 90s it was common to have your own webpage as a subdomain on someone else’s site, but not super common to have your own domain.
Facebook and Instagram are still basically web pages on someone else’s domain.
pretty sure the 20s is for AI
During the shitcoin hype, bought $100 chunks of various projects. Only 1 coin 🚀 to the moon for a nice $20K profit (it crashed 2-3 weeks after selling). If it had shed another 0, would have had a nice chunk of money.
Yeah you could make a lot of money during that bubble if you knew what you were doing. Aka, if you were cognizant of it being a bubble.
Why does everyone need to point out how “they were always worthless”? It’s a collector’s “item”, it only has value if someone wants to buy it, nothing new.
The only difference is that this one’s value if the market completely crashes is absolute zero, but does that change much if regular collectible items are physical and can be sold for 1 cent instead?
I never bought NFTs and never will, but as a collector this pisses me off because it’s the same as those people who mock card collections because “it’s just cardboard”. You’re completely missing the point.
If I buy a lot of baseball cards for 1 cent, at least they don't suffer from the oracle paradox.
NFT's were nakedly a solution in search of a problem that weren't even a very good solution to the problem they were purporting to solve. That's what pisses people off.
Sorry, I tried to understand this Oracle Paradox you’re talking about but every explanation I found had so much jargon that it fried my brain at the third line. Do you know where can I find an ELI5?
And yes, I get why people dislike the concept of NFTs, but mocking their value (or lack thereof) seems dumb when it’s “obtained” the same way as pretty much every other collectible.
Essentially, the NFT is "proof of ownership" only insofar as what is put into the blockchain is correct and accurately reflects reality.
If you don't vet what goes on the blockchain for accuracy, the blockchain is useless, and if you do validate, you don't need a blockchain because the validator can just use a traditional database.
It is a solution in search of a problem.
So it’s a matter of being relatively easy to scam people with it? Is it an issue only when the NFT is “made” for the first time or for every transaction too?
I personally thought the appeal was that you can sell them as regular items, whereas if they were in a traditional database you still would’ve needed the transaction to be approved by the database itself.
At least that’s what I figured, I know nothing of how selling an NFT works so I could be just talking out of my ass.
That is merely a side-effect of one of the original sins of programmable blockchains - the fact that there is a delegation of responsibility of data management from a database administrator to whoever happens to have control of that data, and the controller can only manage that data according to the underlying code of the NFT.
This only sounds appealing if you've never actually touched a database in your life. There are too many points of failure, and said mistakes are much harder to correct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing
This saying is connected with the answer to a question Socrates is said to have posed to the Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, in which the oracle stated something to the effect of "Socrates is the wisest person in Athens."[3]
Socrates, believing the oracle but also completely convinced that he knew nothing, was said to have concluded that nobody knew anything, and that he was only wiser than others because he was the only person who recognised his own ignorance.
Now I’m even more confused. How does that have anything to do with NFTs?
That was only the first wave of NFTs, it's normal for this to happen with any technology. The oldest first generation of televisions and radios also became worthless as newer better ones came out. The next generation of NFTs is going to be more impressive and earn even more profits for their creators, mark my words. If anybody wants to get in on the ground floor of NGNFT (next gen NFT) drop me a line and I can help you make 1000x your initial investment.
Cool send them all to me for free then. Later...oh weird nobody sent me anything.
I mean in your hypothetical their options would be to either spend effort to send you something worthless or not spend the effort and experience zero difference on their end.
Not zero difference, doing nothing means they still have their goofy useless monkey to use on X!
Sure, here's one, totally free.
https://thechainsaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/untitled-design-90.jpg
CryptoPunks still going strong though.
What's with the downvotes? They are trading for ~$80k a piece currently and have been around since 2017. I'm not saying it's a solid investment, far from it actually. But I don't believe they will be "worthless" any time soon.
Cause they don't add any value to the world. They are like parasites.
Yes, its largely inexpensive to spin up a new batch of collectibles, so the vast majority of them are indeed worthless because anyone can just make one.
The small handful that are actually collected by the public at large and are considered worth something... continue to be worth something.
It's like grouping thousands of meaningless mass produced collectable trading cards made by game companies that no one actually gives a shit about, in with the likes of MTG/Pokemon/Hockey/Baseball/etc
Like yeah if you look at it as a whole, no one gives a shit about 99% of them, because its literally just ink on paper, so its not exactly that hard to shit out yet another "collectible" no one cares about.
But the public will latch onto the very small handful that actually hold some form of appeal, and those will absolutely continue to hold value.
99.9% of Magic the Gathering cards aren't worth the ink and paper they are made of.
Doesnt have any bearing on whether your mint condition Black Lotus is worth $$$$
So none of them. Got it.
It's one thing to dislike the concept.
It's another to ignorantly ignore the indisputable fact that hundreds of millions of dollars worth of transactions happen every month, and the market caps for each collection are easy to look up.
Last 24h alone, as of writing this post, Bored Apes alone had almost 1.8 million dollars in transactions.
I don't even collect nfts myself but I'm not going to deny the tens of billions of dollars that move around on that platform this year.
Is it less than 2021? Oh God yes, way lower, major cooling off.
But calling billions of dollars moving around "dead" is foolish at best.