I don't understand why anyone would pay for this, under any circumstances. You're not paying for exlusive access to the tweet, or even ownership in any meaningful context - you get a certificate of authenticity tied to a cryptographic signature. The tweet is still out there in the wild, and it's not like you can delete it or transfer it to your handle or anything like that.
I truly, genuinely have no idea who's bidding on this, or what their reasoning is. In fact, I'm not sure I understand the concept of NFTs at all. In the physical world, fine art holds its value because there is exactly one of each painting, and the human hoarding impulse nurtures a sense of reverence towards originality. However, art "sold" via NFT is still accessible and available for anyone to appreciate and download. I don't have to ask for permission from the owner to look at the art, or even go to a specific location (like a gallery for a physical piece). I can just download the art to my computer and stare at it whenever I want.
The only argument I've seen for NFTs is that many famous artworks have prints made, that are cheap and available to everyone. The original painting is expensive and owned by a single person, but anyone can have an imitation hanging on their wall. I don't know that I buy the translation of this concept to the digital world, because prints are very obviously not the actual piece (not least because they're printed and not painted). If I download an image or video, or grab a link to @jack's tweet, I have the exact same configuration of bytes that the "owner" has. In the case of a link, I'm staring at the exact same thing the "owner" is, and the fact that it's on a reputable website means I'm not looking at a fake - thus providing the same guarantee as a certificate of authenticity. Hell, there's even a cryptographic element, since the site will use TLS for encryption.
Am I missing the paradigm here? Or is this just the method by which crypto millionaires will become crypto penniless?
Do both sides have to be in on a money laundering exchange, though?
I still for the life of my figure out how Grimes made millions off her shitty videos last week. It was way more than "ha, ha this is hilarious and I'm going to spend some money on the joke".
• Auctionable and sellable on the blockchain without any AML or KYC
• Creates a paper trail that posits as a legitimate way to have accumulated wealth to the taxman and government
• Round-trip costs of <2% as compared to traditional money laundering systems which can be an order of magnitude more expensive.
• Plausible denialability as art.
Basically, NFTs are a great way to launder money.
Launders will likely also do some unrelated party transactions to counter anomaly detection, so even if you don't want to launder money, buying NFTs can give you the ability to capture some money laundering premium.
You may find this description morally wrong, but don't doubt the ability for NFTs to grow in value. Money laundering is big money.
I'm fascinated by this but would like to walk it through (and no, with London and NYC as two of worlds biggest money laundering centres I think this seems likely)
I have millions of dollars in yuen in Guangdong - and I want to get it out of the country, or I have millions of dollars of cash from selling drugs in Mexico.
Then, I buy a number of ASICS and plug them in? I doubt I will get millions that way but it's a start, maybe I ... hmm the on-ramp is complicated - getting from dollar bills to bitcoin already requires laundering.
Ok, let's say I have my coins - transferred to me via the age old solution of handing cash to someone with bitcoins and they transfer them to my wallet. But of a giveaway but ok. Let's call that DirtyWallet.
Now I find a NFT company - it makes digital photos of the sidewalk in NYC and sells each paving stone online. The idea is to hide money laundering.
I buy half the paving stones on Broadway for a dollar each, from CleanWallet. Then I auction my paving stones, and amazingly they are all bought up by DirtyWallet for a million each.
CleanWallet now has millions and is ready to off-ramp.
I kind of get it but not really - it does nothing new - it still needs corrupt on ramp and off ramp people in corrupt places in the world (like London) - and that's where the real cost will come. The washing (transactions to hide origin) is the simple part - I would want to wash the money through family restaurants in MidWest (where the owner got in deep with low shark) or the other traditional approaches as well.
It just looks like this will be a small part - and given it public traceability i suspect a small part - once someone gets traced through the blockchain this will be avoided
Could NFTs be used somehow to cheaply transfer money between different foreign currencies? Currency exchange charges have always been absurd for no obvious reason besides banks controlling access...I feel like that market needs to be disrupted.
Art NFTs are a great way to launder money, but they're not unique in that aspect. There are plenty of ways to launder money with smart contacts and art NFTs aren't special.
Not all NFTs are art NFTs either, it is becuase it is art and has "intangible value" that gives sales plausible deniability. Trading card NFTs, in game item NFTs and other NFTs that have tangible value don't suffer the same issue.
Largely NFTs are an astroturfing job similar to crypto coins and things of that nature. Look at HN and search for NFTs. You'll see that there are a handful of articles years ago, but the vast, vast majority of articles/stories posted on NFTs in the last two weeks. Same on clubhouse, nothing that I recall on NFTs for a year, now at any given time there's a plethora of rooms with scare tactics titles like "Get in on NFTs now or the future will leave you behind" or "Become a millionaire with NFTs."
Not saying there's not some use for them, but this pattern is a huge red flag that there's a pump and dump style thing going on behind the scenes. ICOs and other cryptocurrency shared and share the same pattern.
That can easy be explained by their adoption by the rich and famous. Art NFTs were only made by niche artists until recently.
Now that they're somewhat mainstream yet not well understood by the public I would be more suprised if people weren't preaching it as the best thing since sliced bread.
NFTs seem like the next big scam just like many ICOs were last time in 2017. The money laundering argument makes sense to me however I still don't get how it isn't a ponzi scheme because the laundering is predicated on the value of the NFT only ever going up. With art there is at least some intrinsic value that could be argued but with an NFT there is none for the reasons you laid out.
It's just akin to a recognized by the owner and others deed of ownership over an asset.
And this gets bought by the same people that might buy an autograph or memorabilia that would be about equally useless without the story around it and others valuing it too.
As newer generations are increasingly living their lives in a digital world, is it that surprising that people will want to display wealth by acquiring native digital assets? If you had to predict what the youth of the year 2200 will be into, various forms of collectible digital tokens seems super reasonable.
Marketing/ETH pumping like the bitcoin pizza story. NFTs will be nearly useless unless they become integrated with real systems; legal system, ticking systems, royalty payment systems, DRM systems (this token allows you to download to such-and-such MP3) Buying NFTs for huge sums might move the needle on such projects.
Additionally, not only are you not getting exclusive access to the tweet, not only is it not ownership in any meaningful context, but this "ownership" that this site is selling isn't even officially ran by Twitter (though, Jack selling a tweet on there may be christening enough for some people).
I could spin up an ethereum NFT to compete with this service, and do the exact same thing. Now, tweets are being sold on two different blockchains. It doesn't have the Official Stamp of Approval that something like NBA TopShot has.
If this were ran by Twitter, or at least had Twitter's backing, I'd understand the valuations a bit more. But, the website is the simplest, most thousand-line bootstrap-templated thing I've ever seen have so much money flow through it.
My guess is it a mix of speculation and showing off. You might buy it to boast about it like the tres commas art piece in the Silicon Valley sitcom (remember it’ll be someone rich buying it) or buy it to sell to someone else in future, a greater fool so to speak.
A big part of spending a lot of money on certain things is the signaling of hey look at how much money I got.
Many luxury things aren’t useful, they are either a good way to store wealth in a manner that is less susceptible to certain market disruptions and even the reach of governments this is where gold and art come in or it’s a way to show everyone that you have so much money that you can afford to buy toilet paper made out of the fiber of some engineered pigmy pine trees grown in low earth orbit.
This one is maybe a little bit of both, because as long as there are plenty of people willing to spend money to achieve the latter this one also falls into the former.
People have been selling weird stuff for years. There are services that let you "name a star" with a fancy but meaningless certificate.
Even with fine art, there many paintings that have value because of historical and absurd cultural reasons that border on being a scam.
People have always tried to sell stuff, and there always ~~fools~~ people that will buy them. The rules get crazier when it involves things at that exist at extreme ends. Like that app that was 10k that just had a spinning diamond to prove you had money to waste. Twitter is a big service, dorsey is a relatively famous name, idk, weird stuff happens.
We've been indoctrinated our whole lives to believe that "property" is somehow fair, rational, real, etc. Plenty of room for cognitive dissonance here.
I personally thing it's incredibly pointless, but when I was a kid I also thought collecting baseball cards was incredibly pointless. (Granted, baseball cards didn't cost $2M back then.)
People believe doing things like that gives them a piece of history. Some do it because they think it will become more valuable and fetch a higher price later.
I don't get it, but I don't begrudge people spending their money on whatever they want. Given that Dorsey is already rich, I'd hope that he'd donate the proceeds to charity, which would at least make all this worthwhile and productive.
I wonder if people imagine using the legal system to enforce their ownership in a similar way to IP enforcement by issuing takedown notices and stuff like that. I don't thimk anyone woyld buy that right now but maybe that's what people a hoping for.
I'd buy it as a troll - however others who are heavily financially incentivized in trying to get Bitcoin's value manipulated up higher and higher, are incentivized to spend a small fortune to make it appear like Bitcoin (an MLM-Ponzi scheme) has a use case for tracking ownership.
Their problem for adoption desires however is we don't have a problem with tracking ownership - and if our societal systems of real trust networks is so compromised that we start having problems with tracking ownership, along with enforcement, then that society is in far more trouble than worrying about who owns what - and a blockchain isn't going to help them.
The paradigm shift is that this is an agreed method of determining who has the right to sell a digital asset via an internet native method. You can look at the same bytes all you want, but you can't sell them, the owner of the NFT can, the same way you can look at a painting in a museum, but you don't own it and can't sell it.
Before there were walled gardens of this. Skins in something like CSGO being a good example, you could have a very valuable skin in CSGO but valve determines whether you own it or not and have the right to sell it. With NFT there's no central authority that says you have the right to sell something, you just do...
I honestly think this is a pretty powerful thing, I'm interested to see where it goes.
Agreed upon by whom? I don't agree to it. I think I own the first tweet. I'm willing to sell it to you though - for only 10 dollars!
It seems worse than the "I'll sell you the Brooklyn Bridge" scam, because, at least in that case, you're trying to buy something valuable. Here, you're trying to pay for the rights for some people to say you own something? Madness.
A painting in a museum is a physical object, it cannot be hung on two different walls simultaneously. This is why we need private property. Private property simply means that the owner of a good has the right to prevent others from consuming it or, in the case of a painting, from taking it and hanging it in their living room. None of this applies to tweets, which are not physical objects. You could theoretically exclude other people from reading certain tweets, limiting their freedoms gratuitously, but this is not what NFT art is about either. NFT art apparently is about selling "property rights" on something that doesn't really exist and that consequently don't confer the owner any actual right. The crypto-scammers have truly outdone themselves with this one.
Remember in the early days of COVID, Marc Andreessen published his It's Time to Build essay? How America needs to start solving housing, education, transportation, manufacturing?
I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build? There’s an excellent chance I’ll agree with you.
Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building. Our forefathers and foremothers built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being. There is only one way to honor their legacy and to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that’s to build.
“Bitcoin and Ethereum don’t have organizations behind them let alone marketing budgets, yet are used, owned, and loved by tens of millions of people.”
Uh, what? This is written on basically a marketing blog for one of the most well known VC firms in the world. Which will invest millions of dollars in organizations that will go on to market an ever increasing amount of blockchain companies that will do... something. Which will be written about endlessly by news outlets because prices go up crazy amounts.
This whole NFT thing has actually made me want to shut off my computer, stop programming, and start farming or something. Either all these people are idiots or I am. I can only make sense of it if I assume most of it is actual money laundering.
Im literally with you on both your reason to leave tech and to go do farming. As a tip, permaculture is more sustainable than monoculture. Make sure to pick a good, warm environment to make your life easier. Dont name your chickens... makes it harder to kill them for harvest.
>“Bitcoin and Ethereum don’t have organizations behind them let alone marketing budgets, yet are used, owned, and loved by tens of millions of people.”
This is an extremely inaccurate statement by them, wow. I feel like if nothing else it's impossible to have anything to do with Ethereum without hearing about the Ethereum Foundation. The majority of projects built on top also have their own organizations. There's also most definitely marketing.
I even like the idea of NFTs and think there's a lot of cool things to be built on the blockchain, some of which already have working early versions. This, however, is clearly a puff piece by a16z that doesn't even try to present an accurate picture.
It's just a symptom of the pandemic and upper-middle class people having too much money and time. Everything about decentralized, blockchain, token, are just made-up words like you see around stock analysis. They do not exist, people just want to gamble. It'll go away when everyone can go to bars again.
This is what floored me when he wrote that essay. For years, a16z has been poring millions into pointless crypto related companies. And they just keep doing it. Yet Andreessen has the audacity to tell us all to build while he chases the decades most trivial investments and asset classes.
That’s your opinion. What if others disagree and view their investments in cryptocurrency tech to be investments in a future where individuals are liberated from banks and legacy money systems? That’s how I view it. Personally, it’s enough to remember how these people exploited the system to crash the economy during the “housing bubble” to sign up for that future. Disparage it all you want.
From the second link: "Modern video games like Fortnite contain sophisticated economies that mix fungible tokens like V-Bucks with NFTs/virtual goods like skins"
Fortnite skins are different from NFTs - you're not supposed to sell them on. I just checked this with a quick Google search just in case the developer had changed how they work since I last played. They haven't, the way to sell skins is to sell your account details via an external market. Some games companies ban players from online matches who are caught buying or selling like that. I also found a site for buying /selling useful in game items, and the way that the item handover works is literally by making players meet up in game and the seller dropping the item on the floor.
VBucks are just tokens that can only be spent in Fortnite and make it slightly harder for spenders to know how much they are spending on each thing. You get them slowly in game, and can also buy them with real money. You can only use them to buy different appearances and gestures, and only from the developer.
I'd therefore argue Fortnite does not have a sophisticated economy, nor uses NFTs. It has a clever business model, using free download of the game as a whole but paid customisation, to help make it very shareable and very effective at gradually warming players up to the idea of making a purchase or five. It has become much like a shopping mall for modern teenagers - they willingly hang out there for hours for free, right next to places tempting then to purchase.
Instead? As though some VCs allocating a couple billions of dollars of private capital to crypto investments gets in the way of the government properly allocating ~$7.8 trillion in tax revenue every year.
Venture capitalists don't build bridges or infrastructure, fortunately (although they could hardly do worse than the various governments in the US). Government does that by and large. It's the responsibility of government to allocate its tax revenue to infrastructure.
The US has among the least responsible governments that has ever existed in world history. That's on the shoulders of the voters and the politicians they elect. It's not the VCs or politicians (insert scapegoat here) that are the primary problem (they're all secondary), it's down to the American people that have behaved like absentee sloven bastards for half a century now.
To be fair, it's not like Twitter is useful to society. You cant expect people who got a positive feedback loop for building useless to switch to building a bridge, water treatment plant or a mosquito net.
Apart from the obvious questions such as "What does owning an NFT associated with a tweet actually mean?" an interesting aspect of this is: Is Jack Dorsey selling this tweet as CEO of twitter. Does he own it because he's the CEO of twitter and twitter owns the tweet, or does he own it because he wrote the tweet. If he owns it because he wrote it then does that mean I can sell my tweets? If he owns it because he's CEO of twitter does that mean twitter is selling it and it'll be listed on their accounts?
Also, the top bid is by Justin Sun at $2m, a man who from what I can gather is more famous as a "Tech entrepeneur" brand than for anything he's actually done. Also famous for bidding $4.5m for lunch with Warren Buffet.... and then failed to pay up.
Frankly, he looks like a great poster child for this transparent pump and dump.
Looks like he complained about some health issues:
"[Justin Sun] unexpectedly dropped out days before the scheduled lunch date, blaming a bout of kidney stones. However, he apologized on social media for overpromoting himself, and Bloomberg reported that Chinese authorities briefly detained Tron employees, sparking conspiracies that he bowed out under pressure from Beijing."
The case for NFTs rests on a virtuous cycle between artists and buyers. On the artist side, there are temporary benefits, such as increased prices and pandemic-safe fundraising. But the killer feature is programmability - for example, it is possible to program the NFT such that the artist takes a chunk out of every resale on the secondary market. This means that as long as there are buyers, there will be artists issuing their work as NFTs.
The buy side is more complicated, because people buy art for different reasons. But there are benefits such as digitization making money laundering more convenient. The main issue is legitimacy concerns, but so long as artists can benefit from NFTs, they are incentivized to express the legitimacy of the NFT. In the equation of who gets to decide legitimacy, I would say the artist has the most sway.
Of course, it's entirely possible that NFTs will fail. First off, it could fail if the issuing blockchain failed or had a contentious fork. Secondly, it's possible that the primary blockchain or issuer for NFTs could change, which could reduce the value of "obsolete" NFTs. There is also regulatory risk. Finally, there is the possibility that people who abuse NFT system, such as repeatedly reissuing art or issuing pirated art, could poison the well. But that's entirely different from saying NFTs are doomed to fail and inherently worthless.
The right they contractually set with the buyer. Secondary market prices exploding compared to first sale prices isn't exactly uncommon in the art world, so why artists would be interested in this is fairly obvious. (To a degree it can also help keep first sale prices lower, it somewhat discourages quick speculation resales (which many in the art world think is a good thing), and lets the artist participate in later value growth of their work which given that the value is due to their work many people would say is fair, and thus they agree to such contracts)
Currently it's done through the marketplace platform, so actually commissions don't track when you sell through other platforms. EIP-2981 aims to standardize this.
Depending on your view of platforms, this could be less than ideal. It should also be possible to modify the transfer function in the EIP-721 contract to be a swap, but this would require a new standard. In any case, it could be gotten around by an escrowed transfer with swap amount being set to 0. I don't think there is a way to prevent this.
The sale is done in via smart contract, a buyer essentially sends tokens (commonly Ethereum) to the smart contact. Under commissioned scheme the smart contact will create transactions that split the Ethereum between the relevant parties (commonly buyer, platform, seller).
That problem already exists in the real world, where for example some paintings or gold necklaces are claimed by multiple countries, due to a lot of war looting and tomb raids.
Each country may hold a legitimate deed over the piece of art, whether that deed is recognized by other countries is another thing.
I would like to see something like this but for media licenses.
It would be nice to be able to keep an offline NFT library (of, for example, music) where the tokens can be presented (with authentication) to streaming services like amazon or spotify in order to download a DRM-free copy of whatever media the NFT proves I own license to hold.
I agree. I should have emphasized "something LIKE this".
I don't think any blockchain bullshit necessarily needs to be involved.
I would like to be receive some kind of cryptographically secure token from Bandcamp (or whomever) that is secure enough to be accepted as proof of purchase by content distributors.
This could make it feasible for places like spotify or google play music to sell "Bring Your Own Album" streaming service priced by operational costs rather than licensing fees.
Or for Amazon Music to sell "Replace your library" as a giant bulk download when your offline music library is accidentally destroyed but your carved-in-stone hard copies of all your proof-of-purchase licenses tokens (that provably belong to you and only you) are still safe.
Not really. What happens when the sellers pass away and someone has to check the chain of transmission ? Do you have to go to each spouse in order and ask them to retrieve "you know, a big file full of numbers" somewhere in the deceased's backup usb key?
You need a public and immutable chain of authentified transactions for that to be an instant check.
It does not, but agreeing where to keep register is a political problem. Why would register to be run by Sony and not Warner? With NFTs it is already there, held by forever neutral party, so it is easier for all market players to recognize it.
The tokens should be smaller and accessed less frequently. Potentially enough (in both aspects) to facilitate being backed up by printing out to some long-term hard copy like Base64 encoding on paper.
Additionally, they could make it feasible for places like spotify or google play music to sell "Bring Your Own Album" streaming service priced by operational costs rather than licensing fees. Instead of accessing the content in their normal subscription, you can access anything for which you can present a valid license.
Just checked some of my Bandcamp receipt emails.
Not seeing anything that looks cryptographically secure.
The "Download your purchase" and "Listen now in the Bandcamp app" links both have a "sig" option that appears to be some kind of thumbprint but they are not the same and are probably just related to tracking rather than the actual content.
Readit News
I truly, genuinely have no idea who's bidding on this, or what their reasoning is. In fact, I'm not sure I understand the concept of NFTs at all. In the physical world, fine art holds its value because there is exactly one of each painting, and the human hoarding impulse nurtures a sense of reverence towards originality. However, art "sold" via NFT is still accessible and available for anyone to appreciate and download. I don't have to ask for permission from the owner to look at the art, or even go to a specific location (like a gallery for a physical piece). I can just download the art to my computer and stare at it whenever I want.
The only argument I've seen for NFTs is that many famous artworks have prints made, that are cheap and available to everyone. The original painting is expensive and owned by a single person, but anyone can have an imitation hanging on their wall. I don't know that I buy the translation of this concept to the digital world, because prints are very obviously not the actual piece (not least because they're printed and not painted). If I download an image or video, or grab a link to @jack's tweet, I have the exact same configuration of bytes that the "owner" has. In the case of a link, I'm staring at the exact same thing the "owner" is, and the fact that it's on a reputable website means I'm not looking at a fake - thus providing the same guarantee as a certificate of authenticity. Hell, there's even a cryptographic element, since the site will use TLS for encryption.
Am I missing the paradigm here? Or is this just the method by which crypto millionaires will become crypto penniless?
A huge amount of art holds value because someone needed to launder money. NFTs merely provide a simpler way for people to do that.
I still for the life of my figure out how Grimes made millions off her shitty videos last week. It was way more than "ha, ha this is hilarious and I'm going to spend some money on the joke".
• Auctionable and sellable on the blockchain without any AML or KYC
• Creates a paper trail that posits as a legitimate way to have accumulated wealth to the taxman and government
• Round-trip costs of <2% as compared to traditional money laundering systems which can be an order of magnitude more expensive.
• Plausible denialability as art.
Basically, NFTs are a great way to launder money.
Launders will likely also do some unrelated party transactions to counter anomaly detection, so even if you don't want to launder money, buying NFTs can give you the ability to capture some money laundering premium.
You may find this description morally wrong, but don't doubt the ability for NFTs to grow in value. Money laundering is big money.
I have millions of dollars in yuen in Guangdong - and I want to get it out of the country, or I have millions of dollars of cash from selling drugs in Mexico.
Then, I buy a number of ASICS and plug them in? I doubt I will get millions that way but it's a start, maybe I ... hmm the on-ramp is complicated - getting from dollar bills to bitcoin already requires laundering.
Ok, let's say I have my coins - transferred to me via the age old solution of handing cash to someone with bitcoins and they transfer them to my wallet. But of a giveaway but ok. Let's call that DirtyWallet.
Now I find a NFT company - it makes digital photos of the sidewalk in NYC and sells each paving stone online. The idea is to hide money laundering.
I buy half the paving stones on Broadway for a dollar each, from CleanWallet. Then I auction my paving stones, and amazingly they are all bought up by DirtyWallet for a million each.
CleanWallet now has millions and is ready to off-ramp.
I kind of get it but not really - it does nothing new - it still needs corrupt on ramp and off ramp people in corrupt places in the world (like London) - and that's where the real cost will come. The washing (transactions to hide origin) is the simple part - I would want to wash the money through family restaurants in MidWest (where the owner got in deep with low shark) or the other traditional approaches as well.
It just looks like this will be a small part - and given it public traceability i suspect a small part - once someone gets traced through the blockchain this will be avoided
Not all NFTs are art NFTs either, it is becuase it is art and has "intangible value" that gives sales plausible deniability. Trading card NFTs, in game item NFTs and other NFTs that have tangible value don't suffer the same issue.
Not saying there's not some use for them, but this pattern is a huge red flag that there's a pump and dump style thing going on behind the scenes. ICOs and other cryptocurrency shared and share the same pattern.
Now that they're somewhat mainstream yet not well understood by the public I would be more suprised if people weren't preaching it as the best thing since sliced bread.
And this gets bought by the same people that might buy an autograph or memorabilia that would be about equally useless without the story around it and others valuing it too.
The problem is knowing which ones.
I could spin up an ethereum NFT to compete with this service, and do the exact same thing. Now, tweets are being sold on two different blockchains. It doesn't have the Official Stamp of Approval that something like NBA TopShot has.
If this were ran by Twitter, or at least had Twitter's backing, I'd understand the valuations a bit more. But, the website is the simplest, most thousand-line bootstrap-templated thing I've ever seen have so much money flow through it.
We’re in an everything bubble and the recent investment/attention boom for NFTs is not surprising.
Many luxury things aren’t useful, they are either a good way to store wealth in a manner that is less susceptible to certain market disruptions and even the reach of governments this is where gold and art come in or it’s a way to show everyone that you have so much money that you can afford to buy toilet paper made out of the fiber of some engineered pigmy pine trees grown in low earth orbit.
This one is maybe a little bit of both, because as long as there are plenty of people willing to spend money to achieve the latter this one also falls into the former.
People have been selling weird stuff for years. There are services that let you "name a star" with a fancy but meaningless certificate.
Even with fine art, there many paintings that have value because of historical and absurd cultural reasons that border on being a scam.
People have always tried to sell stuff, and there always ~~fools~~ people that will buy them. The rules get crazier when it involves things at that exist at extreme ends. Like that app that was 10k that just had a spinning diamond to prove you had money to waste. Twitter is a big service, dorsey is a relatively famous name, idk, weird stuff happens.
People believe doing things like that gives them a piece of history. Some do it because they think it will become more valuable and fetch a higher price later.
I don't get it, but I don't begrudge people spending their money on whatever they want. Given that Dorsey is already rich, I'd hope that he'd donate the proceeds to charity, which would at least make all this worthwhile and productive.
* because they have a lot of coins, and they don't care what they're spending it on. For example, cryptokitties were fun
* they think they can make money out of that, because there's some hype
* they are promoting their own NFT platform with fake purchases
Their problem for adoption desires however is we don't have a problem with tracking ownership - and if our societal systems of real trust networks is so compromised that we start having problems with tracking ownership, along with enforcement, then that society is in far more trouble than worrying about who owns what - and a blockchain isn't going to help them.
Before there were walled gardens of this. Skins in something like CSGO being a good example, you could have a very valuable skin in CSGO but valve determines whether you own it or not and have the right to sell it. With NFT there's no central authority that says you have the right to sell something, you just do...
I honestly think this is a pretty powerful thing, I'm interested to see where it goes.
It seems worse than the "I'll sell you the Brooklyn Bridge" scam, because, at least in that case, you're trying to buy something valuable. Here, you're trying to pay for the rights for some people to say you own something? Madness.
I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build? There’s an excellent chance I’ll agree with you.
Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building. Our forefathers and foremothers built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being. There is only one way to honor their legacy and to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that’s to build.
https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/
Well, it's been less than a year, and it looks like a16z is now big on NFTs.
https://a16z.com/2021/02/27/nfts-and-a-thousand-true-fans/
Uh, what? This is written on basically a marketing blog for one of the most well known VC firms in the world. Which will invest millions of dollars in organizations that will go on to market an ever increasing amount of blockchain companies that will do... something. Which will be written about endlessly by news outlets because prices go up crazy amounts.
This whole NFT thing has actually made me want to shut off my computer, stop programming, and start farming or something. Either all these people are idiots or I am. I can only make sense of it if I assume most of it is actual money laundering.
This is an extremely inaccurate statement by them, wow. I feel like if nothing else it's impossible to have anything to do with Ethereum without hearing about the Ethereum Foundation. The majority of projects built on top also have their own organizations. There's also most definitely marketing.
I even like the idea of NFTs and think there's a lot of cool things to be built on the blockchain, some of which already have working early versions. This, however, is clearly a puff piece by a16z that doesn't even try to present an accurate picture.
As a VC, he bets on what makes money in the current system.
As a citizen, he calls for a change to a better system.
Fortnite skins are different from NFTs - you're not supposed to sell them on. I just checked this with a quick Google search just in case the developer had changed how they work since I last played. They haven't, the way to sell skins is to sell your account details via an external market. Some games companies ban players from online matches who are caught buying or selling like that. I also found a site for buying /selling useful in game items, and the way that the item handover works is literally by making players meet up in game and the seller dropping the item on the floor.
VBucks are just tokens that can only be spent in Fortnite and make it slightly harder for spenders to know how much they are spending on each thing. You get them slowly in game, and can also buy them with real money. You can only use them to buy different appearances and gestures, and only from the developer.
I'd therefore argue Fortnite does not have a sophisticated economy, nor uses NFTs. It has a clever business model, using free download of the game as a whole but paid customisation, to help make it very shareable and very effective at gradually warming players up to the idea of making a purchase or five. It has become much like a shopping mall for modern teenagers - they willingly hang out there for hours for free, right next to places tempting then to purchase.
Venture capitalists don't build bridges or infrastructure, fortunately (although they could hardly do worse than the various governments in the US). Government does that by and large. It's the responsibility of government to allocate its tax revenue to infrastructure.
The US has among the least responsible governments that has ever existed in world history. That's on the shoulders of the voters and the politicians they elect. It's not the VCs or politicians (insert scapegoat here) that are the primary problem (they're all secondary), it's down to the American people that have behaved like absentee sloven bastards for half a century now.
Also, the top bid is by Justin Sun at $2m, a man who from what I can gather is more famous as a "Tech entrepeneur" brand than for anything he's actually done. Also famous for bidding $4.5m for lunch with Warren Buffet.... and then failed to pay up.
Frankly, he looks like a great poster child for this transparent pump and dump.
Do you have a source for this?
Looks like he complained about some health issues:
"[Justin Sun] unexpectedly dropped out days before the scheduled lunch date, blaming a bout of kidney stones. However, he apologized on social media for overpromoting himself, and Bloomberg reported that Chinese authorities briefly detained Tron employees, sparking conspiracies that he bowed out under pressure from Beijing."
The buy side is more complicated, because people buy art for different reasons. But there are benefits such as digitization making money laundering more convenient. The main issue is legitimacy concerns, but so long as artists can benefit from NFTs, they are incentivized to express the legitimacy of the NFT. In the equation of who gets to decide legitimacy, I would say the artist has the most sway.
Of course, it's entirely possible that NFTs will fail. First off, it could fail if the issuing blockchain failed or had a contentious fork. Secondly, it's possible that the primary blockchain or issuer for NFTs could change, which could reduce the value of "obsolete" NFTs. There is also regulatory risk. Finally, there is the possibility that people who abuse NFT system, such as repeatedly reissuing art or issuing pirated art, could poison the well. But that's entirely different from saying NFTs are doomed to fail and inherently worthless.
I fail to see why this is desirable. What right does an artist (or indeed, anyone who produces anything) have to any portion of resales?
I hear this and like the notion, but I'm curious - how does the smart contract know what the sale price was?
Depending on your view of platforms, this could be less than ideal. It should also be possible to modify the transfer function in the EIP-721 contract to be a swap, but this would require a new standard. In any case, it could be gotten around by an escrowed transfer with swap amount being set to 0. I don't think there is a way to prevent this.
With NFT, auctioneer guarantees item is unique, but nothing prevents you selling the same item on different markets.
Basically you are betting on the market you are using will be the ‘one’ in the future.
Each country may hold a legitimate deed over the piece of art, whether that deed is recognized by other countries is another thing.
In real world, you may have the deed but without the item, it has actually no value.
In digital world, you only have deed, not a physical item. So deed has the only value.
It would be nice to be able to keep an offline NFT library (of, for example, music) where the tokens can be presented (with authentication) to streaming services like amazon or spotify in order to download a DRM-free copy of whatever media the NFT proves I own license to hold.
I don't think any blockchain bullshit necessarily needs to be involved.
I would like to be receive some kind of cryptographically secure token from Bandcamp (or whomever) that is secure enough to be accepted as proof of purchase by content distributors.
This could make it feasible for places like spotify or google play music to sell "Bring Your Own Album" streaming service priced by operational costs rather than licensing fees.
Or for Amazon Music to sell "Replace your library" as a giant bulk download when your offline music library is accidentally destroyed but your carved-in-stone hard copies of all your proof-of-purchase licenses tokens (that provably belong to you and only you) are still safe.
You need a public and immutable chain of authentified transactions for that to be an instant check.
Additionally, they could make it feasible for places like spotify or google play music to sell "Bring Your Own Album" streaming service priced by operational costs rather than licensing fees. Instead of accessing the content in their normal subscription, you can access anything for which you can present a valid license.
The "Download your purchase" and "Listen now in the Bandcamp app" links both have a "sig" option that appears to be some kind of thumbprint but they are not the same and are probably just related to tracking rather than the actual content.
https://lunarland.com/moon-land/
I guess I don't understand the value of purchasing this or I'm missing something obvious.