Another social experiment I've wanted to try is to start an alternative blockchain and sell popular NFTs on it. Not only are NFTs abundant, but the blockchains they can reside on are abundant.
Imagine someone buys the Mona Lisa NFT for millions, and then you go and also buy the Mona Lisa NFT on another blockchain for $3.99.
Or better yet, make a blockchain that simply mirrors NFTs sold on OpenSea. Couldn't get what you wanted on OpenSea, come to SecondSea and buy the same NFT on our blockchain.
Why use a blockchain at all? Implement it using signed certificate chains (x509?) and say it's cryptographically secured via decentralized PKI, then you can offer the same value proposition that basically all NFT platforms currently offer without all the environmental implications
Why use chains at all? Use Postgres. Digital ownership and potential for profit are the value propositions. Most users probably don't care about the security and decentralization.
Why use databases at all? Use a txt file. Digital ownership and potential for profit are the value propositions. Most users probably don't care about the security, decentralization or databases at all.
Why use software at all? Use a paper title registry. Ownership and potential for profit are the value propositions. Most users don't care about decentralization or file formats at all (disagree with your premise on security). Oh wait - that's how the actual Olive Gardens are owned ;)
Authenticity of physical collector's items is a big deal for some people. Some car manufacturers have discontinued providing certificates of authenticity for classic cars because they are afraid of being held responsible for counterfeit stampings and such (one assumes). I don't know specifically how NFTs can help with this, but if they're good for anything...
The blockchain acts as a central, trustless, clearing house for making sure you have not sold your same breadstick to 2 different people.
signed chains only work if they go through a trusted authority that reconciles them and provides it's own (authoritative) proof that the trade happened and you own it.
you joke, but you wouldn't believe the number of artists and users that initially rejected our NFT app based on environmental concerns until we explained that transactions weren't on blockchain. Not saying the concerns aren't valid - they absolutely are - but it was just surprising.
I've wanted someone to do this at scale for such a long time. It's funny; it's another great way to highlight the sound and fury signifying nothing that is NFTs. You can call them "fantasy NFTs" and explain that they are identical in every respect to the real things, but available at fantasy prices.
Omg yes, please make this a reality. I made a pointless web-scraper to harvest artworks off of museum websites last year. Why not make them all NFTs and sell them? Would there be any validity to a cease and desist from the Louvre if you just made an NFT of the Mona Lisa? Is this already a thing?
It really depends on the country you’re in. For instance compare the English and German Wikipedia pages for Gerhard Richter. The English page has plenty of photos of his work under fair use while the German one only has links to works hosted on external sites.
Well, first of all, the Mona Lisa is public domain so you could print it on a coffee cup if you wanted to. (Photographs of the Mona Lisa are copyrighted, however.)
But assuming you did make an NFT of a copyrighted work, then it’s simply asking if the courts consider it a derivative work, which I could see.
This is a perfect application for ForkCoin; a currency where every time you spend a coin, you create a forked timeline where you didn't spend the coin. (Note, I just made that up now)
By "timeline" I don't mean in the many-worlds sense; I mean it in the hard-fork sense. But yeah, bizzaro-me could be very rich and/or substantially imprisoned for heading such a transparent ponzi scheme.
Same with the Mona Lisa NFT. Future buyers would only buy from the original blockchain where they can check the books to make sure someone paid millions for this in the past.
I said actual human people. Of the constant pump-and-dump hype about NFTs online, most seem to be bots and the rest seem so foreign that I'm half-convinced they came from outer space.
People care about a deed because it's a legal right to a thing that exists and does something. Nobody cares about the "Mona Lisa NFT" on any blockchain, extant or to be developed. The Mona Lisa is in a museum. You can go look at it, COVID permitting.
The "Mona Lisa NFT" is, however, a good joke. It is accompanied by many distinctly less funny jokes, like all of the art I've seen blatantly stolen to bake into a blockchain somewhere, but that one at least is sort-of punching sideways and not down.
I feel like these discussions are emotionally charged.
We are talking about NFT X where someone paid $1M for. X is on Y blockchain. Creating X on Z blockchain is meaningless exercise. Why you may ask? Well, future bidders won’t consider X on Z. It’s no longer “X”. I guess uniqueness can then be considered as “X on Y”.
I think the Deed example up the comment chain perfectly illustrates this. Look, I have zero horse in this game. I probably hate this NTF culture as much as you do. But you’re missing the entire idea of NTFs. And so are most people here although the Olive Garden joke is pretty funny.
The meaningless exercise, by-and-large correctly identified by people who are not involved in NFT excusemaking, was the desperate clutch at the thing on the first blockchain. It is the attempt at relevance for a deeply compromised thing itself, not its content. So yeah. People might be talking past one another, and it's not the fault of folks who Just Don't Understand Crypto, Man that it's the case.
But at any rate, it isn't the "NFT culture," no matter how odious it is (and it is!), that I have a problem with. It is the thing itself and the desperate excusemaking so attached. It's "emotionally charged" because it is a scam whose externalities burn the planet on which we live. That should carry emotional charge. It is good to be revolted by nasty and selfish things.
What are your thoughts on Baseball cards that sell for absurd prices? Or real life painting auctions that sit in a warehouse acting as a unique object. It’s all very absurd.
Theoretically, I think NFTs are similar to real life unique items (there are many threads on HN going back and forth) with a caveat - NFTs can’t contain actual data of the JPEGs, but only a URL of the server serving it. That seems like a huge gaping hole in NFTs.
Fundamentally though, atoms or bits, pick your unique-arrangement medium. Try to sell it to people that are willing to pay for it.
Edit: I can’t comment anymore (limits) so I’m answering here. You switched the argument now. We were discussing uniqueness in the world of atoms vs bits. But now you’re arguing about energy usage. We can discuss that but it’s no longer the central argument.
Collector items exist, and while a certain amount of resources have to be burned to preserve them, on the whole, they seem to me like a positive effect on the environment.
Say there is an old Bugatti that rich people trade for tens of millions of dollars.
That is basically a token, and the cost to society is the original manufacturing cost plus the upkeep.
The inflated market price is a good thing, because it represents the potential consumption that rich people are not consuming and is therefore available for the rest of society.
On the other hand, if someone spends the same amount on a brand new yacht, then they are putting all that value into environmental impact, either directly or indirectly. And they're taking it away from all the poor and hungry, even if the yacht builders benefit and it "trickles down".
It's exactly the same logic as the famous Eisenhower speech about national defense taking away from the needy.
One simply needs to make the mental transition to considering all wealth the property of society.
Most people seem to have it all backwards, where abstract tokens and bank accounts are a waste, and consumption is "creating jobs" which is good.
Crypto, as far as I can tell, neutralizes things through requiring undue consumption to create the tokens, so it seems to me like a massive step backwards.
> What are your thoughts on Baseball cards that sell for absurd prices?
I wouldn't buy them. But they're things that actually exist, and nobody needed to burn more energy than a refrigerator uses in a month so that they could record its existence in one of a dozen rivalrous venues--or to do so again to hand it to somebody else.
The absurdity here isn't just the tulip mania. Which is absurd. It's the vicious abuse of a shared planet to attempt to plant one's own batch and get out of Dodge before the whole thing collapses.
well, but if you buy an artwork at auction and then fly it to your home, then fly it to a museum to show it, etc. you are also consuming a lot of energy. A lot more than an NFT. Real-world things & experience generally require a lot more energy than virtual ones. In the big scheme of things, if people start buying less real world stuff and more virtual stuff that's good for the environment, even if for now the system is inefficient. So take your pick - is your argument against NFTs based on the environment or physicality?
This isn't that complicated. They are foolish because they are do-nothings. They are evil because they are consumption for the sake of consumption at a scale that's hard to fathom.
"People could buy less virtual stuff!" People could also just buy less stuff, and not pay grifters money for nothing.
Haha, that sounds exactly like buying a fake Mona Lisa print. “I’ll consider it, sounds like a bargain”.
You’re right, and that is a totally rational thing to do. I suspect that the market of fake paintings and prints is in few billions at least. They’re quite popular. But that doesn’t stop the art auction “scams” at Christie’s and Sotheby’s.
Not the same thing. You're comparing the relationship between a fake version of an artwork and the artwork itself to that between two digital objects both of which are derivative of a third thing. The third thing is the analog to the artwork, making the metaphor unusable
What if a bunch of us fork the original blockchain and stop caring about the original blockchain? What stops it?
My point is eventually blockchains, if they are going to succeed, will find their success in the barrel of a gun, and at that point will be no different than any other centralized government system?
The reason I can't mint my own currency is because, ultimately, men with guns would make me stop. Few would care about my currency at first, but market forces are not enough to stop it.
Decentralized social pressure doesn't make a stable currency and it won't make a stable blockchain until there's a powerful central entity backing it. At that point, what is the point?
Forks have already happened. See the Bitcoin derivatives and Etherium vs Etherium Classic. You can read up on it if you want to know what happens. You don’t have to guess.
Reality. Reality is what the majority choose to believe it is. If youve put the effort in to convince enough people that your chain is the truest chain, congrats.
it's a digital signature. You can simply agree with a group that it will be valid - just like you can agree in trading that closing a deal by saying 'done' on the phone is valid.
The physical force of law is consensus by violence.
State/NFTs on a secure blockchain have a force of law, which is what the proof-of-X consensus mechanisms are. Consensus by game theory/computation.
On a normative note, saying "actual human people" don't care about something you either don't like or don't understand is closer to what I would describe as cringe.
It’s not the consensus mechanism that matters, it’s the enforcement of the relation between a record of ownership and an actual physical asset. Ownership of a token or wallet may be inalienably ensured by the blockchain. The right use that property for one’s benefit in the physical world must be enforced by someone’s violence - the owner, if not their agent, if not the state. A irrevocable deed on a blockchain is worthless if it does not also entitle me to forcibly dispossess someone of the property, and preferably the agents to do that on my behalf.
I can own a share on a blockchain, but if I execute a takeover who will cut the locks on the factory gates? I can buy a house, but who will evict the squatters? I can buy lunch with ETH, but I can’t eat it if someone with a gun suggests I hand it over.
Why stop at your neighbor’s house? You can also write up a paper deed to an Olive Garden location and sell it on the internet! In fact, I think I know of some people who did that already…
NFTs aren’t fundamentally new. Look at any form of collecting like baseball card collecting or stamp collecting.
Sure, you could legally get into trouble for making fake copies, but what really the biggest barrier is that the people who collect these things care a lot about it.
If you don’t care about collecting a particular thing, then you were never gonna get it to begin with.
This experiment basically just points out that whether value storage is primarily a social concept or a technical/resource distribution one is still an open question. It seems like as we are seeing so many forked coins we are seeing an entropic diffusion of value throughout the crypto ecosystem where before it would have just accumulated to BTC, but its not clear if the whole thing will keep expanding or shrink.
yep. Likewise with USD monetary aggregates growing - one would imagine that the value of the underlying US economy would be diffused among more USDs (inflation) but it often seems that loose policy helps the US economy grow and somewhat make up for it (eg we have inflation now, but back post 2008 it was really surprising to me that we didn't). Of course with crypto you have the factor of more forks/coins rather than more of the same...
True, you could describe any inflation as "value diffusion" but USD inflation seems to me more like the intra coin inflation that comes from more BTC being mined (until the cap is hit of course), whereas these people are creating new currencies.
I am of the opinion that NFTs on OpenSea are equally uncool and worthless as any other NFT marketplace including ones created on your local machine in secret.
I don't know if NFT's have a future or not. I'm kind of agnostic on this one. But what is not cool today can be cool tomorrow and vice versa. Internet used to be for nerds only. There's a famous sketch of Letterman making fun of Bill Gates about it. So we will see.
It’s not even as complicated as using a different network is it? Each NFT is only non fungible within the context of its specific ERC721 token. So you can just start a new token B and mint NFTs of token As content (eg cryptopunks) with token B. Of course if the original minter confers other privileges to holders then those can’t be replicated. But OTOH holding the original NFT doesn’t guarantee the original minter will continue to extend those privileges either!
Yes, my company launched an NFT app that is not on any blockchain (although we're looking into how you can export your NFT to a blockchain of your choice if you want). An artist can certainly sell their art in our app and on ethereum, say, just as an app can be on iOS and Android, or a stock can be traded on multiple markets. We have had people try to upload copies of bored apes and so on and we reject those, but if it's the artist, that's fine.
I feel like launching a closed-loop digital art marketplace is way higher lift long term than an NFT marketplace, but don’t let me stop you from validating the “liquidity begets liquidity” saying
not sure if I'm getting your point/ if you are being sarcastic and if you mean higher lift as in 'more effort' (bad) or 'more uplift' (good). in comparing the 2 the the liquidity of the blockchain mas to be weighed against the liquidity of traditional app stores.
This seems like a really fun, potentially profitable, arbitrage experiment (using existing blockchains to identify "underpriced" NFTs of existing art; not making your own)
The one on the prior blockchain will have an earlier timestamp from thousands of nodes. Did you really think this through? Yes, you can scam people on other chains, but of course if you are writing this you consider the earlier timestamp version to be a scam as well. You can still acknowledge the difference.
I mean, those earlier timestamps are on a different blockchain my users don't care about. My personal blockchain with 2 users says I bought the Mona Lisa NFT in 1993. But nobody cares, because to almost everyone my blockchain is just some random "other blockchain". I don't have as many nodes, how many do I need?
I’m not sure I follow your point. You could hypothetically create an art auction that only seems super cheap copies of famous paintings on newsprint. People could decide to join your community and decide to only value your cheap copies, and not value the original paintings at all. Setting aside the likelihood of this actually happening, even assuming it did happen what have you demonstrated?
Who came to your blockchain and sold it to you? Is there a bridge to move value from the existing blockchains over to yours? Who runs the bridge? Alternatively is there an exchange that allows withdrawals to your blockchain, again, to move value there for transfer at all? Its not just about the nodes.
The timestamp is meaningless. For example, the timestamp for these Olive Garden NFTs will be dated before anything that might be minted by Olive Garden's corporate owners.
Olive Garden’s corporate owners wont do NFT’s of these low quality images of their locations and pretend its ownership of one.
So because their wouldn't be a collision it doesn't matter that the non-owner minted these earlier.
Even if they did, to be ironic, the social proof from that official issuance, would attract all the value, ignoring these. Which has also happened before in the NFT space.
If the owners gave validity to this collection later, it may accrue actual value despite being incapable of being a claim to any building or land or franchise.
Either because other people want it and placed high bids, or there were a spike in other people wanting it, or offchain PR from trusted sources.
You have to check your own collection, or collections you find interesting. There’s not going to be a push notification.
Whether its a collection of polaroids or a collection of nfts its the same in this regard. (except you could make your own tool to know about the bids and volume in real time with the NFTs, and the chain of prior purchases and prices are built in, compared to physical goods on ebay or trying to aggregate and archive craigslist where you also wouldn't be assured of those pieces being actually part of the desired collection)
Imagine someone buys the Mona Lisa NFT for millions, and then you go and also buy the Mona Lisa NFT on another blockchain for $3.99.
Or better yet, make a blockchain that simply mirrors NFTs sold on OpenSea. Couldn't get what you wanted on OpenSea, come to SecondSea and buy the same NFT on our blockchain.