A key feature of NFTs has completely broken / Web3 was supposed to make sure the original artist always got paid. Not so much anymore.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/17/23836440/nft-creator-royalty-fees-are-dead-opensea-optionalOpen linkView original on lemmy.world544
Comments217
Are they trying to say that NFTs are some kind of bullshit scam that should have dissolved into the ether like the crypto bro's cocaine-fueled manic state that spawned them in the first place? How shocking and unpredictable.
What do you mean? You didnt go out and spend all your money on reproducable jpegs? Whats wrong with you?
reproducable jpegs? Excuse me?
I live walking distance from my local police department. If another person uses my NFT without my consent I will report them immediately. This is MY PROPERTY. The transaction has be verified scientifically on the block chain. Anyone who violates my NFT rights will pay the price.
Buddy, you have no idea who you are messing with. I have made a ridiculous amount of money in crypto/NFTs and I have the best lawyers. If you don’t delete those stolen jpegs, you’re going to regret it. When you steal someone’s property you get punished. Watch out.
I do love how genuine you are when replying to this shitpost
Bless his kind soul. He doesn't deserve the downvotes.
woosh
LOL no kidding
You can't file for copyright registration for something you didn't create unless the creator explicitly signed over copyright ownership rights to you (and most NFTs do not)
Stares in Poe's Law.
I mortgaged my house for a computer-generated ape that my son's cousin's uncle's neighbor's mailman said would one day finance my retirement.
It will, it will. Any day now, you’ll see! My kid told me the same thing, and his favorite streamer wouldn’t just say anything for money, would he?
I spent all my money on a chance to get a certain jpg.
So the guy on Reddit who told me I better get with the NFT game or be left behind in a year was full of shit?
The whole "web3" bs has always just been a shabby scam, and people fell for it
Did they though? It might be my filter bubble, but whenever I saw web3 being pushed I saw a small refraction of responses of people who also thought it was a great idea (typical salesbros - so a good idea for others to do, just not for themselves). But the vast majority of people reject it for being a scam.
So how many people fell for it, really?
Did the average person/average internet user fall for it? No.
Did the people who fell for it get sucked into what was basically a cult that sucked the money out of a decent amount of people? Yeah.
The numbers for some of these scam projects were honestly insane.
Ah, probably my filter bubble then.
I'd like to read more about this, do you know of any specific cases?
If you have time, I would suggest CoffeeZilla on YouTube. He basically just get into crypto scam, which isn't hard to find these days. One specific case I would look at is the influencers taking on pretty much any scam projects to get money. The series is with Oompaville. A great watch.
I don't think it's even possible to calculate how much real money was lost to this stuff.
Huh…so does web3 actually mean anything then?
Yeah, I have only a little sympathy for the people who got pulled into the get rich quick scheme, particularly younger people who hit some money only to get caught in what was basically a gambling addiction.
I have way more sympathy for their friends and family who either tried to financially support them when they hit rock bottom, or those who got scammed or stolen from just to pump more money into this bubble.
More than 0, which is all the comment said.
If we're just going for semantics, don't you mean more than 1 for them to qualify as "people"?
Damn it lol
Have a good weekend ;)
Even the name “web3” is stupid. Isn’t it supposed to be the next step after “web 2.0?” Shouldn’t it then be “web 3.0?” They couldn’t even include a space between web and 3!
There actually is a Web 3.0, and it predates the cryptocurrency-oriented conceptualisation of "Web3" by quite some time.
Web 3.0 is otherwise known as the Semantic Web, a set of standards developed by the W3C for formally representing (meta)data and relationships between entities on the internet, and for facilitating the machine-reading and exchange thereof.
I thought the whole point of NFTs and the blockchain is that it's decentralized, and you can use "smart contracts" for things like this. How is one company able to decide to change it?
Apparently, smart contracts are not contracts at all... they are friendly suggestions. Unsurprisingly a contract needs a mechanism to enforce it, which makes decentralized contracts redundant at best (as you still need institutions outside of the blockchain to monitor and enforce the contracts), and or worse, completely useless if there is no legal way to enforce them.
The idea behind smart contracts is that they contain code to verify that the contract is fulfilled (that’s the “smart” part of the name).
This of course also means that you can only use it for stuff that happens on the same blockchain, because the contract can’t verify anything outside of that.
Which is why this isn’t relevant for the real world, it’s just eating its own tail.
Yeah I was tempted to add a caveat, it does technically auto executive, but because it needs to interact with the real world it will always run into the oracle problem. The only solution to the oracle problem is courts and tort law, which makes the blockchain contract redundant and unnecessarily expensive.
They can only change it for their instance, but they can’t impact all NFT marketplaces. This is only significant because this company is the largest broker so it will impact more people.
Anyone can set up their own blockchain and build it however they want. Hell, they could make it centralized even.
That's not the question
The post you replied to was saying, "shouldn't it be inherent to the entry on the Blockchain, regardless of market"
You'd think it should be, but their contracts never enforced it in code
Fortunately, nothing of actual value was lost. Just fools being parted from their money.
I am ok with this
It's broken now? I'd say that's a bold assumption that it ever worked in the first place.
Edit: to be clear, I mean that it is and always has been an impossible problem. The only reason it ever worked is because some broker company wanted it as a feature, not because anything compelled them to give original artists a cut. And that's before you consider the question, "but how do you know the NFT was made by the original artist?"
How is this Web3 scam still a thing? I thought I would finally stop hearing it after the crash but it just keeps coming back. The only people who will get rich from this are the scammers themselves.
It’s a mindset. Once you know that the solution is Blockchain, all you need to do is to find a question that fits this answer to get filthily rich.
Casinos are also a known scam, but that hasn’t stopped them.
Mastodon and fediverse is more web3 than web2 (lest I've misunderstood). The problem has been shitty implementation.
I.e In reality, nothing is more valuable than the ground work it stands on. So just because it's an NFT doesn't mean it should've been worth anything. It has to provide meaning and value to the consumer. Like if all of steam would put their marketplace on a blockchain, those items would still be just as valuable as before. The value comes from the item implementation, not the "storage" technology
"Web3" was supposed to enrich a bunch of assholes. It was never meant to do anything else.
Hard disagree, "web3" (defi) is meant to provide a decentralized alternative to our modern economic infrastructure, that doesn't have huge institutional points of failure like central banks or investment banks. The only reason people piled into these speculative projects, centralized exchanges etc. is because probably > 60% of the population is into the idea of getting-rich-quick while < 1% of the population is into trying to build a better future with tech, or even just getting their head around how the technology work in the first place & what kind of potential it actually has.
I've been watching blockchain since Bitcoin was under a dollar and it really blows my mind how much people love to spout off about it without understanding anything about the space. You've got teams of hundreds, thousands of people working for years to solve all the problems in the space like PoS or scalability or contract security, but the general public is all just talking trash about the entire space because of NFTs.
Even this article, "Web3 was supposed to make sure the original artist always got paid"? Who said that? "A key feature of NFTs has completely broken?" No one who knew anything about NFTs ever said there was some universal "guarantee an artist would get paid", particularly not if a contract to purchase an NFT didn't guarantee that directly. If a given contract guaranteed that (or at least, the party creating the NFT on-chain), then it still does. If it didn't, then it didn't. Anyone actually learned Solidity and read a smart contract for themselves? Cause I'll tell you, any smart contract where some institution has "god controls" over the state of the contract, that's against the entire point of "web3"/"defi".
Bunch of words about people working hard on a ponzi scheme doesn't make it not functionally a ponzi scheme.
Fundamental difference between a currency accruing value due to superior characteristics over its competitors, and a Ponzi scheme where a truly worthless good that only has transitory value because it's "the next big thing" is passed along from original entrants to new entrants. USD has no "inherent" value (not even the "full faith and credit of the government") either, and critical issues where the broader institution responsible for its issuance is a corrupt war-mongering police state. If we're being honest here.
If a currency were a superior currency it would not necessarily increase in value, it would increase in acceptance and (generally) velocity.
Stop using Economics terms. They're definitely made up and not at all a description of how people actually act. Seriously though. It's obvious that Bitcoin is just a Ponzi scheme. Otherwise, people would actually use it as currency instead of a speculative asset.
Notice how people who buy bitcoin get really happy when the price in USD goes up. That's because they don't value Bitcoin except as a way to get more USD. Do you get all excited when the dollar is worth more in foreign currency? Or if you're European, the Euro? Not really because you are not holding onto USD or EUR as a speculative asset.
Nothing is priced in Bitcoin just like nothing is priced in baseball cards or beanie babies. No one uses it as a currency because transactions take forever and there's nothing backing it. With USD or EUR you are guaranteed to be able to pay your taxes in it. Bitcoin is complicated Venmo and its backers want to hide that fact.
Its not even complicated Venmo because transactions are barely done in it. People just buy it hoping it will go up in value.
Well no, I've bought "a lot" with bitcoin. Through bitpay I could buy confuser parts, VPN. And I've bought a lot of games for btc too
Paid maybe 30-50 cents per transaction, which is nothing compared to traditional banking. If more had support for either btc or bitpay-like-services, it'd be easier to use.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/730818/average-number-of-ethereum-transactions/
Yeah, I'll just unlearn all the monetary theory books I read because, trust me bro money is worthless. I got this new money, it's worth more money. I see now.
Didnt you know that a 27 year old technobro is smarter than generations of monetary systems built upon since the dawn of man? Lol
Hey, the guys who never took an econ class know more than you. Trust me bro. It's amazing. It will change the world.
Public has started to realize what a joke the entire concept is. The true believers are all so mad now. Hopefully new investors dry up soon and the entire clown show can collapse with no new money flowing in (you know how a ponzi scheme goes bust).
The society built on those monetary systems is literally destroying the planet. The history of those monetary systems is of the ruling class debasing currency and seizing as much value under the eyes of the law as possible for their private benefit going back thousands of years. Our entire legal system grew out of the Roman Empire, European feudalism, British Empire and then the slave-built corporatist state of the U.S.
Is your argument that "tradition must be right"? Slavery is traditional, war is traditional, pollution is traditional, animal agriculture is traditional, oppression is traditional, class hierarchy is traditional.
Thinking cryptocurrency is just a new dollar built on a ponzi scheme has nothing to do with supporting modern capitalism. New money has all the same issues as old money. Which it will be exchange for and values with. This entire circle jerk is ridiculous.
You know who owns a ton of the Bitcoin? Hedge funds and investment banks. You're supporting a system built on burning a whole bunch of fossil fuels to create a few lines of code that can be horded by the same people who horde all the wealth. You aren't changing shit.
Want to change something? Got get a gun and become a domestic terrorist or something. You aren't changing the world by buying crypto.
They're all anti-capitalist until they want to bitch about cryptocurrency.
Am I supposed to treat this like a good faith comment? Let's assume you're wrong, how would I even reply? It's basically "no u".
If you really know so much about monetary theory I'd expect you to lead with what you actually know, not just vaguely allude to how much you know. Right?
I'd expect that I wouldn't want to waste time trying to convince a brainwashed crypto bro or that I give a single fuck past making fun of you.
Here's some super basics of almost all monetary economic theory. Currency is a medium of exchange. It's velocity (or rare it moves through the economy) is a vital measure of the health of the economy and effectiveness of the currency. How easy is it to go buy something with Bitcoin, and how fast is it moving through hands in an economy? Oh, it's a joke as a currency you say? Description of how it is being used sounds exactly like a ponzi scheme for some reason.
See to everyone else, it's very, very obvious why it's a ponzi scheme. It will collapse someday. As it's only real use is as a very ineffective currency. Somehow people like you have made that worth tens of thousands of dollars to each other.
See, this is the classic bad faith anti-blockchain argument. Article we're talking about is about NFTs, which are based on Ethereum, an extremely sophisticated blockchain with proof-of-stake, smart contract capability, and a huge infrastructure of people who've built economic machinery on top of it and are using it actively. But you want to prove your point, so you cherry-pick Bitcoin, the very first "proof of concept" blockchain which has essentially had active development halt because the creator wanted anonymity, vanished into thin air, and the developers working on it largely refuse to hard-fork it, so which has no real smart contract capability, still uses wasteful proof-of-work, etc.
It's not "obvious" that it's a ponzi scheme, it's the point you want to make so you're just bending the facts and cherry-picking things to try to prove it. I'm not impressed. And tossing "monetary velocity" out there as a term isn't making me think you're some brilliant economist - if anything, monetary velocity is an overstressed concept in modern econ because the government sits around trying to manipulate it via interest rates instead of letting people's actual spending priorities dictate how the economy works, leading to a consumerist frenzy and catastrophic boom/bust cycle.
USD had value in that it is how i pay my taxes. I can either use USD to pay taxes or go to jail. That's about as concrete as value can get.
Yes, the value comes from ADOPTION.
So, you're claiming that you need a constant new stream of people buying into it, to make it work? Man, that's almost like the definition of a ponzi scheme. Weird.
Another "I know you are but what am I" class comment. I'm talking about actual adoption, usage, cyclical exchange, not buy low sell high, that should be obvious from what I wrote.
The issue is not much effort is put into developing price stability in cryptocurrencies, this is because it is counter to the incentives of the creators and early HODLers. They do not want price stability, they want significant price decreases, this causes people to speculate on the "currency" not use it as a currency. Until a cryptocurrency implements some form of MV=PY it will not really be successful as a currency.
How does one "implement" the equation for calculating GDP? All the (descriptive) variables in the equation are already present. IDK how that got 4 upvotes.
Several major cryptos are already used as media of exchange. That's the actual criteria for "success of a currency", relative usage. They haven't overtaken USD, but let's not pretend it's just a speculative vessel, Ethereum sees over a million transactions per day.
You cannot, but you can increase money supply money supply more stably when following average GDP growth, and increase money supply more when velocity decreased- and atrophy the supply when it increases. And a currency is much more than just what people can spend at a store. It is what people keep their savings in, what companies pay their employees in, what banks lend.
This cannot be done with an unstable currency- you cannot have a debt that will either go up or down 20% in value in the same year. I do not think fiats are inherently more stable, but some fiats have proven to be somewhat more stable because of responsible central banking- its not a good idea to count on central banks being responsible for ever. But essentially all widely spread cryptos continue to have a significant amount held by speculators and therefore they cannot be stable currencies.
The simple answer is that fiats are only more stable because their relative worth is more settled. For the same reason small stocks are unstable while big blue chip stocks are (relatively) not. If you look at logarithmic charts of any big crypto over time you can literally see the volatility tapering out as the market cap increases.
I think the Trump NFTs were my first time hearing of perpetual trade royalties. Most of the NFTs I own are tied to games though... maybe it's more common in the art space and chains I don't frequent.
I was into BTC before anyone really had a good place even check the value and would waste them on side projects and also gamble them away randomly like they were Chuck E Cheese tickets. It does not keep me up at night, in fact everyone constantly checking the price of crypto is almost the antithesis to Crypto in my opinion. The investing mindset is kind of nauseating, you can't talk about any project without price being brought up.
Yeah NFTs themselves don't guarantee royalties, but most publicly advertised NFTs are based on unique or limited run graphics that include such contract terms. When artists started getting sketched out by the idea, one of the biggest arguments in favor of them was that artists could receive royalties on every sale, something that became a major selling point for marketplaces aimed at laymen who didn't really know anything about crypto.
It's not surprising, then, that this feature being taken away seems to negate one of biggest supposed benefits that NFTs provided. This was supposed to be the thing that balanced concerns about art theft and the value of quantity over quality that haunt NFTs to this day.
The general opinion of crypto isn't going to improve until people feel it's stable and safe enough to actually trust their money with, and moves like this certainly aren't helping that image of volatility.
I don't know much about NFTs, but can't the "give original artist a cut of royalties" clause be coded into the smart contracts? Why does it depend on a particular platform?
It doesn't depend on the platform, but the venn diagram of artists trying to get paid and people who know how to write a smart contract doesn't overlap much. Marketplaces were built to ease the former into the space by taking care of all that for them. The artists, for their part, just had to trust that the contracts actually did what they said they did and watch for the money to hit their accounts as proof.
People who were depending on the platform to sort that out are now stuck with either finding another platform or figuring out how to write the contracts themselves on top of their other business duties. Even if they do so, they're likely going to lose a good portion of their following and brand precense in the move.
Very well put. I'm so sick of people dog-piling on NFT/Blockchain because their only exposure to it is shitty Bored Ape images and manipulated crypto currencies. There's so much potential there but lazy media reporting and people's unwillingness to actually learn something about it has done some serious damage to web3 viability.
This is now a recurring feature of tech vaporware. Claiming something that is clearly shit is okay because it does some good, or something that is uselesslt frivolous and speculative will have and important function and use-case in the future.
My condolences to those that have been made fools by this - we all need to keep an eye out for these patterns going forward.
I wanna add: prosecute and sue these thieves. Sue the people who took money to promote these lies. They all deserve to have those ill-gotten funds ripped away.
To me that whole royalties spiel was always just marketing to bait non-technical people into adopting the NFT system.
I've never seen anyone build and use an enforcable mechanism for a multi transaction chain to pay out to one original address repeatedly. I think at the very least you would always have to hold the NFT in a multi sig wallet between the artist and the current owner, for the artist to have a mechanism to keep enforcing their royalty claims. That would also require involvement of the artist in every further transaction.
Maybe I'm missing something like a smart contract that can fabricate new multi sig transactions on demand with pre-approval of the artist somehow... If anyone knows of something like that I'd be interested in the technical details.
It could theoretically be done by implementing a covenant system in contracts, but it never got built despite all the talk about it (probably because of the extra complexity it requires in validating new transactions). Otherwise, like you said, multisig is needed so one side can simply demand the new transaction to be signed use the same contract before agreeing on transferring. Which requires this second signer to anyways be available online...
A. I don't actually feel bad for anyone because if you're involved in NFTs in any way, you're begging to be scammed. There is no legitimate use for NFTs.
B. This seems like blatant illegal fraud. You can't just advertise "get this cut of all transactions forever" to get people to join, then say "just kidding" once they include their "art" in your shitty scam. They're entitled to their shitty cut of your shitty transaction, and you can't hand wave it away by pointing to fine print when you sold the product very clearly making that claim.
There are uses for NFT, but it is clearly not what they are famous for.
NFT aren't pictures of monke, they are a way to authenticate something in a decentralised way, so no trust in another entity needed. The picture isn't the NFT, and that is why you can just right click-copy it.
You can't however just copy the NFT, the actual token. Having a token that's verifiably owned by someone is useful for certain things. It's like a certificate of authenticity, but digital.
Digital certificates has already existed for half a century. There’s nothing new. A certificate doesn’t get any more legitimate just because it’s recorded on a blockchain.
Yes but NFTs are held in trust by you, not a 3rd party business. If you want to sell your NFT to a friend you can do that without brokering the exchange through a middleman who can/will charge a cut
Don't blockchain brokers charge a transaction fee?
Yes.
How you transact the ownership of NFTs is a different story. I’m reacting to the claim that NFT is “like a certificate of authenticity, but digital”, which is not unique to NFTs at all.
This claim is also often misunderstood, since the NFT can only verify the authenticity of the certificate itself, not the art/asset it’s pointing to.
I can easily create an NFT of Mona Lisa. The blockchain will see no problem with it at all. Heck, I can create 1000 NFTs of Mona Lisa if I want.
Rookie numbers, I can create billions
This is still solved by certificates, I can make my own self signed certificate that says it me and sign whatever I want. The only thing that crypto “solves” is over the wire man in the middle attacks, which aren’t even really a problem in the modern internet
How do I know you haven't made 10 copies of that same certificate and sold 9 to other people?
If it was an NFT I could see you issued 9 other copies of it before I was approached with the sale. Any other way I either have to place blind trust in you or rely on a 3rd party to handle the issuance/transaction
I could just use 10 different URLs for each NFT. All pointing to the same image. I can also use 10 different wallets to obfuscate it more. For that matter, I can use different blockchains as well.
Now it’s 10 completely different NFTs pointing to the same image. To verify there are no duplicates, you need to check every NFT in existence (across all blockchains in existence).
Why are people so obsessed with bringing scarcity back on the internet
Why would I want that, I’m not selling you anything
This sounds completely logical, until you realize it’s for selling JPGs and expecting them to only exist in that one buyer’s hands.
There's basically 3 ways to verify a certificate.
In all three you need to trust someone, and ask three are a pain to transfer something to new owner.
NFT gives a fundamentally new option here, that's transferable and doesn't require trust. That it's been used for and gotten known for monkey scams is a shame.
And how do you verify that the NFT can be trusted? With any of the 3 methods you mentioned!
Blockchain doesn’t circumvent this need of trust.
The thing blockchain eliminates is the need of a timestamp authority when doing transactions. Satoshi even called his invention “distributed timestamp server” before people started to call it blockchain. You don’t need timestamps when verifying the authenticity of an NFT.
Not really, signatures on blockchains is just another TOFU or WoT variant, because how do you know the original token is the legit thing you wanted in the first place? It's only after you have identified it that the existence of the blockchain becomes relevant in that it can track ownership without central authority.
Are there any practical (non-theoretical) uses for NFTs that couldn't be done
otherwiseeasier/better without them though?Edited to make it easier for NFTs to show their worth.
insert word jumble about unrealistic scenarios made up in my basement while stoned
https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/nft-use-cases/
It is just a tool, it's what you do with it that gives its worth. Monkey pictures... Well that's not worth anything
These are the same promises the emergence of the blockchain gave us. We're now nearly a decade later, and the most useful application has been get-rich-quick schemes. Yet, all these listed applications are still not in use, and/or better than their non-blockchain counterparts.
Hell, if you know why electronic voting is not, and will never be a good idea, you definitely wouldn't want them as an NFT.
How you can really know electronic voting is a bad idea - all the people who would be the ones to be hired and paid a ton to build and implement it, cryptographers and infosec experts, are the same people who loudly oppose it.
There are so many different problems;
Assuming you manage to build the perfect system, can you actually explain it to people? If you put a prospective voter in front of the real deal, a secure electronic voting machine, and put a fake replica next to it, will ANYBODY EVER succeed in telling them apart? Or will you be forced to continuously audit the hardware from production to shipment to use, and somehow still respect voters' privacy as they use the machine?
And how can you be confident your implementation is secure? You can to prove the algorithms are correct, that the implementation is correct, that the implementation behaves as end users (voters) expect, and that even the hardware is flawless (both in terms of logic and protection against manipulation).
How do you ensure people only vote once, yet also protect their privacy, but ALSO prove to them their vote was really counted? Individual keypairs? How do you distribute and protect them? Physical ID cards? What if they get stolen (in significant enough numbers)? What if a significant fraction of the population won't use the new system, do you still run old school voting and combine the results?
How do you give somebody a receipt they can understand without enabling coercion to try to force people to vote a certain way?
Yeah, that about sums it up.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/LkH2r-sNjQs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Basically anything that is currently traded on any digital or quasi-digital exchange but relies ultimately on a paper/manual backend.
Can you give a real life example of that being applied?
Monkey pictures!
There is a lot of talk, for example, in the sustainability space where things like emissions allowances, carbon offsets, etc. are traded the old fashioned way where a digital ledger using NFTs would be both instantaneous and transparent/easily auditable.
But the most obvious example is security exchanges, e.g. stocks, bonds, etc. (which would be a massive threat to the existing financial institutions) because it could allow for instantaneous settlement and fully transparent markets.
HUGE HOWEVER, not all NFT systems would be equally useful for that kind of thing. What we saw with FTX, for example, was a blockchain exchange for tokenized securities where the blockchain aspects served no real useful purpose - it was a centralized, controlled, opaque use case. The distributed ledger model (which I think casual observers of blockchain assume all blockchain systems are) can correct for those failures. I personally think part of what made the FTX story so big was a combination of moves by major financial market players to get out in front of tokenization of securities by created the existing system again but with a blockchain coat of paint on top that then failed under its own scam at lightning speed which then gave the ammo to a whole “blockchain a scam, NFT an even bigger scam” narrative. They are just software utilities that can be used effectively or not just like any others.
Whenever I see someone identify a jpeg as an NFT, or put SBF’s face on a news story about it, I think about how successful the astroturfing of these narratives has been.
So... Just theoretical applications so far?
There are tons of people (actual serious people, not like SBF) working in this space and building these things now, so they are definitely more than theoretical, but they are not at the mass adoption stage.
And no offense, but this response has echoes of people saying federation would never work. But it's just a different utility to accomplish similar goals to centralized forums. And when the old-fashioned, centralized alternatives really start to self-destruct because of their inherent flaws, the merits of the decentralized version become more obvious.
I'm actually pretty shocked that Lemmy/the Fediverse beats the same tired old drums about NFTs (ape jpegs being the most obvious), since they are red herring arguments. A tokenized jpeg has no value because a jpeg has no value. A tokenized security has the value of the underlying security. The token is just there to eliminate the need for accountants since the open ledger shows its work and the entire chain of custody.
But the same could be said for almost anything, for instance a car's engine is non-theoretical but could be otherwise done with a horse instead. I will still prefer the more advanced technology, but of course you do you
You're right. I've edited my question to make it easier for NFTs to qualify. After all, cars do the same as horses, but a whole lot better.
So what is a practical application of NFTs that, now that it's implemented, makes someone's life so much better?
So..."No"
No, automobiles and mass transit were a massive innovation that drastically changed everyone's way of life. Look at the current state of global logistics. You can essentially order any fruit from home and have it fresh at your doorstep at any time of year. You can't do that without engines.
This still works because cars ruined Western society in the guise of "advancement", so that's cool
NFTs have never once not been very blatant fraud.
NFT aren't monkey pictures.
I know what they are. They're a "solution" to a problem that doesn't exist and very probably never will exist.
They have never once been used for anything even neutral. Every single case has been outright malicious.
It's called a database.
An inefficient one
I reckon the meeting about the tokens went something like "okay, how can we monetise this?", "Okay hear me out here... monkeys!... digital monkeys!"
OnlyFans
Theres like.. less than 1% of the user base who earn "buttloads of money"
Buttloads. Yes.
Not money.
I mean, it was just a joke lol.
Ask Chris Roberts about this, he knows a way.
It sure sounds like that wasn't a feature of NFTs, but a feature of OpenSea
Who could have seen this coming? Who could have foreseen that all of Web3 was a ponzi scheme that would say anything to get people to pretend hashes on a blockchain is worth 100s of 1000s of dollars. Who? WHO?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
One of the big promises of NFTs was that the artist who originally made them could get a cut every time their piece was resold.
Starting March 2024, those fees will essentially be tips — an optional percentage of a sale price that sellers can choose to give the original artist.
The marketplace will continue enforcing the fees on certain existing collections until March 2024, at which point they’ll become optional on all sales.
Critics say it will hurt small artists and undermines creators’ ability to control their relationship with the people who buy their work.
OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer criticized the fees’ “ineffective, unilateral enforcement” and said that creators will find other ways to monetize their work.
“Our role in this ecosystem is to empower innovation beyond a single use case or business model,” he writes in the blog post announcing that OpenSea will no longer support the ecosystem’s primary business model.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
pfffffffffffffffff
I want to be sympathetic, but honestly, I'm just not.
Web3 was a mistake from the beginning.
Because web2 centralization worked out fine. Meta owns half the web and everything feels dead
Except people has been stealing art to do NFTs without paying the artists from day 1?
Yeah, I don't know why people think this is somehow a new problem.
Right click. Save as.
Also note that the ERC721 standard says nothing about royalties. Royaltiew weren't designed as a "key feature"
Yeah, wtf do they mean "anymore"? Did they not see a single artist having their stuff copied and put into some blockchain by grifters?
It's not the art that you buy, it's the "original URL" that belongs to you. You buy a treasure map leading to a princess. It's your princess, that's what is says on the napkin, but everyone can fuck her.
Ik the technology is useful, but selling shit I can screen shot is fucking pointless. If you want to buy shit from the artist, just buy their shit.
Storing a full JPEG on the blockchain would be way too expensive. It’s not a bulk data storage system.
A hash still isn’t the file itself. I think that the ones that use ipfs even have a hash in the URL.
Obligatory rather funny If NFTs Were Honest | Honest Ads https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG_v4bb2e4k which sets this out, a year ago
I can’t believe I’ve never seen this, it’s incredible. When NFTs were first hyped I spent far too much time explaining to techbros how they were just buying an entry in a decentralized ledger that pointed to some url on a centralized server someone owned and could take down or change on a whim. Nobody cared, because as this video demonstrates it was never about art or anything but about grifting. Thanks for sharing
I know i'm really late to the party, but this video gave me an idea how blockchains could actually be useful for art. Not to sign a digital image to your name, that's bullshit. But to link an actual piece of art to you as a certificate of ownership. So in case it gets stolen, you can prove you're the real owner. This requires first time entries to be verified by certified experts, but after that you're good to go. You would need to solve a bunch of problems, like what happens when someone dies and the objects are inherited, or what if you buy it, but the owner doesn't update the chain or makes a mistake, etc. You would probably need a group of mods/experts who can amend the entries. But then you could more easily contact the owner, manage reproduction rights and in general make art theft less attractive, because all art dealers can easily check the current state.
This was actually the original idea of non-fungible tokens, but because you need special legislation to tie an object to this digital receipt (there is nothing legally tying one thing to the other), they just skipped over it completely and said the NFT itself was the commodity, which is why they could only do it for digital art with the a web link. (we could, for example, see this more useful for a title to a car or house)
In fact, many NFTs don't even contain any language about copyright or licensing, they don't even attempt to pretend that the NFT holder owns the copyright. The owner of the NFT in these cases only owns the NFT, and not the copyright. Of course, you have to transfer the copyright separately from transferring the NFT, which makes this whole thing redundant for buying/selling on secondary markets, but they could have at least tried to pretend they could.
You don't need blockchain, coins, or NFTs for any of this to be possible.
Yes, legally notarized documents like proof of purchase has been used for this in the past
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=sG
https://piped.video/watch?v=sG_v4bb2e4k
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I thought the royalty payments were enforced by the contract?
Turns out that the smart contract is a post-it note stapled to the NFT and the marketplace can just ignore what the post-it note says because it's not legally binding.
What they can't do is trade with marketplaces that do enforce the contract. Originally it was enforced because if one marketplace stopped enforcing it the marketplace would be cut off from the Echo system but turns out that the 5 big marketplaces just need to agree to drop it and everything is fine.
There is no good design for this. The only design that works is external regulation and laws wich is why we use that for real things that aren't scams.
Nah the actual limitation is that providing people a way to transfer the token without paying a royalty is essential if you want to give people the option to freely transfer it between their wallets without selling it and paying a royalty. You could write a smart contract that does enforce this but then you would lose the ability to have that free transfer.
You can easily end up with A gifting B a million and then B sending A the NFT for free, potentially with a trusted escrow service in between to make sure both of these actually happen. The NFT marketplaces are essentially already acting as escrow, so this isn't weird.
Only thing you could probably enforce is that moving something from one key to another requires a fee to be paid to the original artist, but that'd also trigger if A wants to move their assets to a different key (eg in or out of some hardware wallet, online wallet or marketplace). And if A and B trust each other strongly they can simply share the key.
Or they set up a multisig wallet, each creating one keypair directly on approved (tamper resistant) hardware wallet models, transfer it to the multisig wallet, and now control of the collection of multisig wallets means you control the token.
So now you trade it by trading the set of hardware wallets. Validated by each original participant including results from an audit of the key generation procedure with the hardware wallet.
No trace on the blockchain, and the trust model is more robust than simply taking the word for it as one of them share the private key claiming they did not keep their own copy.
The protocol doesn't support covenants like that in smart contracts. It has been discussed a lot but not implemented.
It gets complicated fast.
Because the second the rule becomes inconvenient there will be a fork or some kind of bullshit that removes the rule. This has already been done a couple of times when money got stolen from big investors. The thefts followed the rules set up on the blockchain and nothing in those transactions were different from a normal transaction but humans looked at them and said that they weren't valid and did whatever technical bullshit they needed to do to reverse them.
Apparently ultimately this involves hitting the person hiding the encryption keys with a $4 wrench until they provide the keys.
I know that reference.
I hope you are aware that you went from "this can't be broken" to "I trust that people wouldn't break it" to "sometimes they do break it but it's not that often" in a very short comment.
Royalties were not part of the original design.
No see it's a lot more sophisticated than that. The post-it note is immutable because of maths or something, so what that means is that it's capital-P Property. And because Property is a magic spell that binds even the old ones, and this spell is unbreakable, I own all these apes.
Okay, I assume this comment is in defense of crypto contracts or whatever? This is solving a problem that doesn't exist.
I was exposed to many, many litigation cases in my time working in the legal system. The worst ones happen because contracts aren't made or are sloppily constructed. I have never, ever, in many years of seeing civil cases go through the office, seen a single example where the problem was that someone had falsified a contract or there was disagreement about what a contract actually says. Contracts change all the time, so making them immutable makes them less useful to both parties.
Also big companies break contracts all the time, and they don't get away with it by lying about the contents of the contract, they get away with it because they have all the money and all the power.
The same thing with money. Counterfeiting is a tiny problem with almost any currency. The real problem is theft, and the lawless, immutable nature of the blockchain renders theft absolute, with no recourse.
This is the problem with the blockchain in general - immutability solves a nonexistent problem and creates a much worse problem. The no-trust basis of the system attracts grifters because there is no way to take back a bad transaction. The only reason people believe it works is because they somehow believe that documenting transactions immutably will make them bind people, just like some sort of magic spell. That's just not how the world works.
You've said a lot of words but you still haven't explained how crypto actually solves these problems.
Once again: laws, including contract law and currency, aren't magic spells. They don't have power just because they exist. They require the power of a state to enforce them. Crypto is the same. Just because you're tracking transactions on a public immutable ledger doesn't change anything about that.
Now, as an anarchist, I'm not saying that to defend the current system. I am saying the solution is to remove the actual power of the state. Crypto is only attempting to replace tokens of state power, with no attempt to address the power itself.
And yes, I understand how you could in theory make changes to a contract with further ammendments, the thing is that costs transactions. There is no such thing as a modification based purely on consent of the parties. That is a serious problem for their usefulness, which was my actual point.
You’re thinking too rationally now. The thing with NFTs is that it’s not rational at all. Try again.
Basically the transfer function on an erc721 interface (nft) cannot have enforced royalty payment otherwise it wouldn't support people transferring the token outside of a sale. Theoretically you could use some kind of interface standard or write up a different contract where users are forced to pay a royalty on any kind of transfer but then there wouldn't be a way to transfer it without paying the royalty and basically no nft trading platforms would support it because under the hood you have to transfer them the token so they can sell it on your behalf once a buyer is found.
FYI not trying to shill funny pictures but I do know a bit of solidity so maybe someone here is actually curious about the limitation.
Thank you. This is what I wanted to know!
That was just many parts of the grift. Also when that feature was very rarely used, it was ironically a regular web 2.0 feature that was pushed between participating centralized MFT marketplaces. You know, because it was never actually decentralized.
As long as I can take a screenshot of any random NFT and integrate a picture into my website, there's no fucking way those things are worth anything.
They're worth a lot if you're laundering money
I'd rather launder money through physical art, at least I can put that on my wall in the interim and don't have to first find means to convert my illegally acquired cash into a digital currency.
The problem with laundering money through physical art is that it's getting more tightly regulated... in fact that happened around about the same time as NFTs started to get big.
The purchase is legitimate! My left hand really bought the NFT from my right hand!
You think it's funny to take screenshots of people's NFTS, huh? Property theft is a joke to you? l'll have you know that the blockchain doesn't lie. I own it. Even if you save it, it's my property. You are mad that you don't own the art that I own. Delete that screenshot.
A problem with a blockchain-related grift? I’m utterly shocked!!!
thank fuck nobody bought the nft of my dingus
NFTs have a place but it isn't central to the Internet. That was hype to separate idiots who didn't know better from their money, aka grifting, and that kind of grifting has used literally everything to do that same thing in the past so NFTs are not a unique tool to that end.
NFTs have no place at all. There has yet to be any good suggestion on what they should be used for that isn't served by something else just fine. Or if not "fine", then at least solves no problem that would make it better. Not in-game items, not ticket sales, not silly ape pictures.
The games themselves. Proof of ownership of a digital copy. It creates a secondary market for digital games.
Why would a game company prefer to distribute their game that way instead of Steam.
Why would a game company prefer to distribute their game with Steam instead of as shareware? Also nothing about having an NFT-based ownership license to a copy of a game precludes it from being on Steam except Steam not wanting to have a secondary market. Outside of a bean counters ledger there is nothing incompatible with them.
This is the funniest use of NFTs I've ever read about:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/fart-jar-tiktok-stephanie-matto-interview-1280395/
OpenSea is bad on purpose. Who remembers their insider trading scandal(s)?
At this point I hope no one’s surprised about this.
In hindsight, that’s about the least surprising thing for me. The smart contract system (like everything around cryptocurrency) was not designed and implemented by legal or financial experts. It was designed by tech bros who think they’re smarter than everyone else because they’re competent at programming and/or math.
That’s the generous interpretation, anyway. The less generous interpretation is that the people who designed the system knew it was all bullshit and just wanted to scam people to make a quick buck.