I think that is kind of the point. This a social commentary on the absurdity of NFTs and crypto.
There was the study yesterday that showed that 70% of crypto trading was wash trading. I.e junk to inflate the appearance of the market. I see this being mostly zeros as effectively the same. It was meant to be found to be junk, to show how stupid it all is.
That study was not rigorous and their claim easily falsifiable. You can't prove wash trading on centralized exchanges. It's a study specifically made for people to quote in arguments such as yours.
I don’t understand; did the author of the torrent toss in a bunch of nothing to pad out the number, or is there that many references to nothing in the NFT chain?
The former seems pointless, but for the latter, I’m under the assumption that the NFT chain stores the image hashes directly, and those hashes are enforced to be unique — so there should be only one instance of a zero hash? Or I suppose a ton of images with like three bytes set and bunch of nothing for padding
Most NFTs do not hash media themselves; instead, they hash a link to the media that only exists as long as it is hosted. I'd imagine the zero hashes are links that are already dead.
No, it was quite deliberate. The "RAR" files in there are not even RAR files, they are ext4 filesystems filled with zeros. There is literallt nothing in there - the 10GB of "data" is ext4 FS metadata. https://twitter.com/originalcvk/status/1462099991858753547?s...
Isn’t the point of NFTs that it verifies ownership, not “you’re the only one that can access the content” (although there are indeed NFTs that can only allow the owner to decrypt the content)? It’s like video game cosmetics - many people can have the same skin, but people you want to impress or show off to can see that you own x, y, and z.
NFTs are probably best thought of as a recapitulation of status goods into the digital world, outside video games. The physical good versions has never made sense to me either.
Thorstein Veblen already in the late 1800s had pointed out that an object's utility as a status signal increases in tandem with its uselessness. The object must then also be recognized among peers as difficult to obtain. For the moon shares analogy to work, being objectively worthless or grossly overvalued is insufficient, it had to have also been exclusive and coveted among the "high class".
Except the company that sold Moon shares had no authority to offer ownership over any part of the moon. The blockchain does have authority to offer ownership over particular tokens on that blockchain. Those are valuable so long as there are enough people that agree they are valuable and are willing to exchange other goods and services for them. Oh yeah, kind of like fiat money.
Video game cosmetics derive their appeal from people using them while they actually play the game, not from showing off the database flag that activates it for the account. With NFTs, the whole game part of the game cosmetics analogy is missing.
Games can load them from ipfs and verify ownership or somehing, but to counterfeit all you have to do is change the shade of pixel by one bit and get a new hash.
So then you have to move to a whitelist system where someone centralized (or a DAO) has to manually act as a copyright system, whitelisting hashes, duplicating the work of the existing copyright and legal system.
Who is going to pay a studio to develop the models, artwork and code required to have a ‘NFT skin’ in a game? Money is made by selling a skin multiple times to return effort.
And what if I want that skin in League, rather than GTA? The whole concept is a nonsense.
Influencers + shady finance have collided to *create a climate melting scam.
I think you could argue that Discord/Twitter is the game, which is a much bigger space than Fortnite or CSGO, meaning that the "skins" cost more. Instead of runing around a 3d character, you just type words on a web page/chat client and get points the more people see it.
Think of it as breaking out of the games, imagine something like steam profile avatars/pictures etc. tied to your identity that you can use on any page that implements it.
But does it verify ownership of anything other than the token itself? What are the typical contract terms, if any, related to NFTs? And are those terms enforceable in any given jurisdiction?
So basically Twitter is outsourcing copyright enforcement via NFTs. Which actually doesn’t sound totally useless, but could also be done without a blockchain.
Now, when many content displayers (websites, games, multiverses, etc) outsource their copyright enforcement to multiple copyright-enforcers maybe using the blockchain starts making more sense.
Tying a copyright license (at least non exclusive) to the NFT transfer sounds not that far fetched. It would be a little bit tricky to make that work globally but you could probably do that as well.
The question is would courts accept it as a valid contacts and how to enforce them. How would NFT prevent infringement (aka mme creating the latest bansky NFT)?
> Isn’t the point of NFTs that it verifies ownership
A lot of people think that, but I would consider that more of a requirement than the purpose.
The point of NFTs is to allow the original artist to share some of the financial rewards that the art dealers and collectors get each time they resell a piece of artwork in the future. The goal is to help restore some balance and fairness to the financial side of the art trade, particularly for new artists, who often can't earn a living wage on the original sales alone. And of course, being able to verify "ownership" of the "original" work is necessary to get the artist a piece of the pie whenever that NFT is sold.
Yes, you're right about access to the work... as an observer, anyone can enjoy looking at the art just the same as the person who owns the rights to it. Just like any other image on the internet, making a copy of it doesn't give you the rights to that image. So, I don't understand the point of this archive unless it's truly just to archive the data incase the blockchain goes down.
Ownership implies some kind of exclusive rights. If everybody has the same rights over the content as the supposed owner, it means they're not the owner.
But just because you have the ability to download something from the internet doesn't mean you have the same rights to it as someone who has given some kind of license to it (which is often attached to NFT sales).
I’ve tried but failed to understand NFTs. One thing I don’t understand is —- couldn’t you change one pixel in an image and register your ownership of the slightly different image in the blockchain? Then how would it be adjudicated which is the authentic version?
I think the biggest problem the art project will face is that nobody actually wants 19.5TB of not-terribly-good art.
If there wasn't a fun speculative element, then most of the artists would have trouble getting anyone to download their stuff even for free (just like most game devs struggle to get anyone to play their games - even when they're pretty good).
So really, if this art project does succeed it could be an interesting new distribution channel!
Actually, I was about to rent a big server and download the torrent as I wanted to build a reverse image search for NFTs. But since it's not 19TB, I won't do it.
there is a certain irony in peer hosting IPFS-based NFTs thru BitTorrent as an attempt at some kind of critique… I hope they do this with Hicetnunc[1] NFTs too and help back up all that media. :)
NFTs are about the token ownership, not the asset, so this archive is rather pointless on its own.
But it's a very meta "art" piece as described by the article, especially if it also serves as an NFT asset itself. Will be interesting to see how how far this layer cake will go.
I think it does illustrate that NFT themselves are useless (other than being some sort of performance art). If you legally bought the right to something, what has value is not the NFT, it is the legal contract of the transaction. If you don’t sign a contract, the NFT is just a few bytes stored somewhere that have no consequences. The value is in the legal agreement.
That's true, it's just another medium of execution via cryptographic signatures exposed as on-chain tokens. The legal foundation is still being figured out (mostly due to transparency and global jurisdiction issues) but there is something unique about having a much more programmable system.
It's like DocuSign + APIs + banking + decentralized security and governance all rolled into one, and I think societal and economic changes will catch up to make this new system of transactions much more valuable.
NFTs are obviously a bit silly, BUT, it would be nice if things bought on platforms like Steam, Roblox, Amazon, iTunes etc. were transferable to other games/platforms.
The platform providers would still need to agree that a specific blockchain / NFT is actually the source of truth, and so it's not really trustless. But the internet itself isn't perfectly decentralized either. I could see a future where developers could enable web3 support in their games/apps and allow importing assets, identities etc. between platforms, which would be nice.
I'm gonna copy my questions from another thread about transferable items because I'm genuinely curious about the answers.
Why would an asset designed for one game make sense or look good or feel at home in a completely different one?
Why would companies make one of them and sell it for a million bucks instead of trying to convince more players to buy it in a shop for two bucks?
Is the mechanic of a weapon gonna adjust to the new game when you import it or stay the same? If it stays the same, it's gonna be exploit galore. If it changes, well then, what's the point? Gonna be the same AK-47 as everyone else's, but this tiny sticker on it that nobody's gonna pay attention to is unique!
Even if we pretend this is somehow a promising field, why even use NFTs and make each one a couple of pixels different instead of making a common one, selling it for like $50, buyers get a file in whichever format is agreed upon, and import them in the settings?
I guess you could point at some metadata/description and let each game render that how it likes?
Eg if I have a red hat nft you could have that as 2d sprite art or a 3d model or just a buff to some other stat or just ignore it.
Why wouldn’t they sell it for a couple of bucks? It doesn’t have to be expensive because it’s an nft, plenty of them are sold for pennies. erc1155 is designed with lots of varying items being created on the same contract.
Why nfts? Because it’s easy to do today and has been getting more and more popular over the past three years. It seems people like them.
People don’t want to download files and import them into programs. Having one login(wallet) that you connect to anything you want and it takes your data and belongings with you seems pretty neat to me.
Ignore the speculation on NFTs as a “single owner” of a piece of digital art for now, like most high art, it’s BS.
Just think about the things you buy online, be it movies, artwork, music, in app upgrades etc. Today we trust each individual app developer to honour the purchase agreement, eg. if the Amazon disappears or changes their license agreement, all your purchases are gone.
Tomorrow we might be able to purchase a license to the asset, registered on a public blockchain, and use that to prove ownership within an application. You could actually own some of things you currently “buy” online.
Are NFTs likely to do that? No. Why would game/platform creators do a ton of work so they could make less money? And even if they wanted to, which they won't, why would they bless some specific blockchain with that power? If that is at all viable, somebody like Steam or Amazon will want it to be their own digital assets registry that wins. For that, they don't need a blockchain, just a database.
Steam has already disallowed "Applications built on blockchain technology that issue or allow exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs." from their platform. They have a very successful item marketplace which they get a cut of and aren't interested in blockchain systems competing. Epic has said they will allow it, presumably to differentiate themselves and because they don't have such a system.
>Why would game/platform creators do a ton of work so they could make less money?
I know, right? Or to look at another similar situation: why would Verizon, China Mobile, T-Mobile, and AT&T all make their voice/data networks interoperable?
This could be done without NFTs. There aren’t that many platforms, they could all build api integrations if they wanted. But they don’t want to because they like having users locked in.
NFTs along with all non money crypto feel like a solution in search of a problem. And all of these solutions are things already possible and easier without crypto.
Just imagine, if you bought a movie or game and could "consume" it on any platform you want, or event download files from web, skipping platforms. While technology is there, and you could prove ownership using public or private blockchain, this is obviously "bad for business" and no company will ever implement it. They better re-sell you same digital goods few times on several platforms.
So the idea is that when I play Call of Duty, I can wear the hat I purchased in Roblox? And when I'm in Roblox, I can use the character I purchased in Call of Duty?
Yeah, nobody wants that. I think they shoehorn this idea in every NFT discussion, even though they know it's not a very good idea, because so far it's the only use-case they have been able to come up with.
I'm not holding my breath for transferable content between platforms when big game studios cannot make save data compatible between the same PC game if bought on different stores. If you start playing Forza Horizon 5 on Xbox Game Pass and then decide to buy it on Steam, you have to start from the beginning because the save data is not compatible between the two different store versions.
Ah yess, when you put something publicly available then claim piracy and copyright infringement when people actually use those "public bits".
Gotta love this logic.So if i don't right-click your precious NFT I don't pirate it, how about if i get it from my browser's image cache?Am i pirating it then or not?(I'm not going into copying and selling, which is more nuanced, but even then one could argue in the same manner).
To me these questions are extremely rhetorical, especially if one believes in the concept of property. If you don't want to freely give people copies of your precious hard work,don't put it on the internet, period, not even under a protected information system. I would further argue on this principle about computer security aswell, but that actually requires understanding how computers work, which the vast majority doesn't know.
By putting your work publicly available you already explicitly give permission on people to copy your bits into their computers(a.k.a viewing).I guess people think machines are like humans and automatically "forget" what they see, thus enforcing the value of copyright.
Readit News
https://gist.github.com/zhuowei/ebd5601f7dd8e5ee186bf302874e...
https://www.twitter.com/zhuowei/status/1461576936241733638
There was the study yesterday that showed that 70% of crypto trading was wash trading. I.e junk to inflate the appearance of the market. I see this being mostly zeros as effectively the same. It was meant to be found to be junk, to show how stupid it all is.
Not commenting on the general sentiment.
The former seems pointless, but for the latter, I’m under the assumption that the NFT chain stores the image hashes directly, and those hashes are enforced to be unique — so there should be only one instance of a zero hash? Or I suppose a ton of images with like three bytes set and bunch of nothing for padding
Although this is totally different, because it’s blockchain.
Thorstein Veblen already in the late 1800s had pointed out that an object's utility as a status signal increases in tandem with its uselessness. The object must then also be recognized among peers as difficult to obtain. For the moon shares analogy to work, being objectively worthless or grossly overvalued is insufficient, it had to have also been exclusive and coveted among the "high class".
Except the blockchain only keeps the url, so the “content” doesn’t get any of the properties of the blockchain
Video game cosmetics derive their appeal from people using them while they actually play the game, not from showing off the database flag that activates it for the account. With NFTs, the whole game part of the game cosmetics analogy is missing.
So then you have to move to a whitelist system where someone centralized (or a DAO) has to manually act as a copyright system, whitelisting hashes, duplicating the work of the existing copyright and legal system.
Who is going to pay a studio to develop the models, artwork and code required to have a ‘NFT skin’ in a game? Money is made by selling a skin multiple times to return effort.
And what if I want that skin in League, rather than GTA? The whole concept is a nonsense.
Influencers + shady finance have collided to *create a climate melting scam.
Edit: spelling and errant word
Digital “jurisdictions” like Twitter are starting to support displaying “verified” NFTs though: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bragging-rights-twitter-previ...
The next step in the chain is OpenSea, which sounds like they will enforce real world copyrights: https://support.opensea.io/hc/en-us/articles/4404423595667-H...
So basically Twitter is outsourcing copyright enforcement via NFTs. Which actually doesn’t sound totally useless, but could also be done without a blockchain.
Now, when many content displayers (websites, games, multiverses, etc) outsource their copyright enforcement to multiple copyright-enforcers maybe using the blockchain starts making more sense.
Tying a copyright license (at least non exclusive) to the NFT transfer sounds not that far fetched. It would be a little bit tricky to make that work globally but you could probably do that as well.
The question is would courts accept it as a valid contacts and how to enforce them. How would NFT prevent infringement (aka mme creating the latest bansky NFT)?
There is more value in being the owner of the thing everyone has, than the thing no one has.
Keep right clicking, we love it.
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/85/156418/my-collectible-ass/
A lot of people think that, but I would consider that more of a requirement than the purpose.
The point of NFTs is to allow the original artist to share some of the financial rewards that the art dealers and collectors get each time they resell a piece of artwork in the future. The goal is to help restore some balance and fairness to the financial side of the art trade, particularly for new artists, who often can't earn a living wage on the original sales alone. And of course, being able to verify "ownership" of the "original" work is necessary to get the artist a piece of the pie whenever that NFT is sold.
Yes, you're right about access to the work... as an observer, anyone can enjoy looking at the art just the same as the person who owns the rights to it. Just like any other image on the internet, making a copy of it doesn't give you the rights to that image. So, I don't understand the point of this archive unless it's truly just to archive the data incase the blockchain goes down.
If there wasn't a fun speculative element, then most of the artists would have trouble getting anyone to download their stuff even for free (just like most game devs struggle to get anyone to play their games - even when they're pretty good).
So really, if this art project does succeed it could be an interesting new distribution channel!
[1] - https://mattdesl.substack.com/p/hicetnunc-and-the-merits-of-...
But it's a very meta "art" piece as described by the article, especially if it also serves as an NFT asset itself. Will be interesting to see how how far this layer cake will go.
It's like DocuSign + APIs + banking + decentralized security and governance all rolled into one, and I think societal and economic changes will catch up to make this new system of transactions much more valuable.
The platform providers would still need to agree that a specific blockchain / NFT is actually the source of truth, and so it's not really trustless. But the internet itself isn't perfectly decentralized either. I could see a future where developers could enable web3 support in their games/apps and allow importing assets, identities etc. between platforms, which would be nice.
Why would an asset designed for one game make sense or look good or feel at home in a completely different one?
Why would companies make one of them and sell it for a million bucks instead of trying to convince more players to buy it in a shop for two bucks?
Is the mechanic of a weapon gonna adjust to the new game when you import it or stay the same? If it stays the same, it's gonna be exploit galore. If it changes, well then, what's the point? Gonna be the same AK-47 as everyone else's, but this tiny sticker on it that nobody's gonna pay attention to is unique!
Even if we pretend this is somehow a promising field, why even use NFTs and make each one a couple of pixels different instead of making a common one, selling it for like $50, buyers get a file in whichever format is agreed upon, and import them in the settings?
Eg if I have a red hat nft you could have that as 2d sprite art or a 3d model or just a buff to some other stat or just ignore it.
Why wouldn’t they sell it for a couple of bucks? It doesn’t have to be expensive because it’s an nft, plenty of them are sold for pennies. erc1155 is designed with lots of varying items being created on the same contract.
Why nfts? Because it’s easy to do today and has been getting more and more popular over the past three years. It seems people like them.
People don’t want to download files and import them into programs. Having one login(wallet) that you connect to anything you want and it takes your data and belongings with you seems pretty neat to me.
Just think about the things you buy online, be it movies, artwork, music, in app upgrades etc. Today we trust each individual app developer to honour the purchase agreement, eg. if the Amazon disappears or changes their license agreement, all your purchases are gone.
Tomorrow we might be able to purchase a license to the asset, registered on a public blockchain, and use that to prove ownership within an application. You could actually own some of things you currently “buy” online.
This is a huge net win for end users.
Are NFTs likely to do that? No. Why would game/platform creators do a ton of work so they could make less money? And even if they wanted to, which they won't, why would they bless some specific blockchain with that power? If that is at all viable, somebody like Steam or Amazon will want it to be their own digital assets registry that wins. For that, they don't need a blockchain, just a database.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/15/22728425/valve-steam-blo...
I know, right? Or to look at another similar situation: why would Verizon, China Mobile, T-Mobile, and AT&T all make their voice/data networks interoperable?
Obviously, they wouldn't chose to do that.
NFTs along with all non money crypto feel like a solution in search of a problem. And all of these solutions are things already possible and easier without crypto.
One day, it might not be a normal business practice.
Is this something that players desire to do?
I wouldn’t even be mad if you kept the money.
Gotta love this logic.So if i don't right-click your precious NFT I don't pirate it, how about if i get it from my browser's image cache?Am i pirating it then or not?(I'm not going into copying and selling, which is more nuanced, but even then one could argue in the same manner).
To me these questions are extremely rhetorical, especially if one believes in the concept of property. If you don't want to freely give people copies of your precious hard work,don't put it on the internet, period, not even under a protected information system. I would further argue on this principle about computer security aswell, but that actually requires understanding how computers work, which the vast majority doesn't know.
By putting your work publicly available you already explicitly give permission on people to copy your bits into their computers(a.k.a viewing).I guess people think machines are like humans and automatically "forget" what they see, thus enforcing the value of copyright.