Semi-relatedly, to your point about religion, Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, whatever else falls under this umbrella, really does have a bizarre cultish component that I believe helps sustain its so-called "value". This is why we keep seeing shit about this on HN. Every. Damn. Day.
As I mentioned in another comment, retirement accounts, like the 401k I have, has some modicum of exposure to the zany world of cryptocurrency (see TSLA's BTC buy and that company is part of the S&P500). It's like I don't get a choice in the matter of whether or not I want to be tethered to this albatross. Sad but true.
I don't think you know what's going on here. An NFT for art sponsorship is usually just bragging rights. You're provably the first sponsor of a thing. Yay you.
But if you see something that says 'own' or 'purchase' and you don't think the court could enforce it - like the Brooklyn bridge, or the moon, then don't buy it. Insisting that every NFT be worthwhile and honest would be like insisting that all contracts be perfect and all parties must fully agree - unworkably unrealistic.
But for a comparison to software, I'd rather buy an NFT license that obviously couldn't convey ownership than I would a cardboard box that appeared to contain a product but only had the installation media on it and had a hidden EULA before purchase.
> [discussion of legal quandaries in the copyright space.]
Yeah, totes. Nobody said otherwise. So don't buy an NFT purporting to give you royalties to the work - it can't be enforced on-chain and is therefore a stupid crypto investment.
> Sponsoring the artist is also an extremely weak argument. What's the difference between this and buying a $20 printed tshirt of their art? Or a poster? Or a pdf of their comic? Or their mp3? Except for the fact I get something.
How about a webcomic where you get the output anyways, and can print it if you want? Why sponsor the artist at all if you don't get anything. But once you get past that...
Anyways, producing a book is expensive and the artist may not have the time, or I may not want the book, and they only get "normal profits" from it. If I gift them money they get it all, without any work or prep. So donation and patronage are very valuable.
> This whole thing of, "Yea, but patreon/apple/amazon/paypal/merchantServices/platformX gets a cut out of it."
Without adding any value for me and by requiring the artist to go to the trouble of running a campaign. I have nothing against Patreon as a concept, for when an artist wants to recruit a following around a new book or something. But I don't buy collectibles anymore so this doesn't meet my needs.
> Because places to purchase/convert crypto and NFT don't exist nor take a cut themselves?
The artist can do it themselves for free. And they can generally spend their crypto easily online. Buy supplies with it, etc, without specifically offramping into currency first.
> Are you going to do that for an artist to buy their stuff?
If my artist didn't know how to mint NFTs and wanted to, yes I'd do that for them.
> Or is a stamp too much of a "cut"?
If I want to send mail, then no - it doesn't even cover the costs. But if I don't want to send mail and had to buy an unwanted stamp for some reason it would be.
> Just like paypal and patreon not dealing with the debit/credit card companies for free since their data centers and employees are all volunteer anyways!
The big value those companies play is in reducing and protecting against risk. But it's my crypto already, and I know the artist's address, so there's 0% counterparty or technological risk. So what do I need them for? They're an unwanted stamp in this context.
> Do you work for free? What do you do? I guarantee the same argument can be applied to your job and you would foam at the mouth about how you deserve to be paid.
Nope. Many people do not use products I work on, or DCs I manage, or anything. Why would I care? They don't cost me anything. Similarly, me not using Paypal doesn't cost them anything.
> I mean come the fuck on. This is ridiculous.
Why are you so mad about it though?
> Concert tickets? What does it do differently? "Verifies ownership". How does it do it differently than the 2 to 3 sets of ID numbers on the ticket and/or putting someone's name on it and verifying by picture ID?
Apparently you've never heard of counterfeiting. And why do I want to go through the trouble of giving them my name just so they can make my ticket harder to use?
> A piss poor MySQL db and terrible PHP accomplishes what NFT can do, minus the computational power.
No. Use a non-PoW chain and the cost to everyone, transaction fees, computation, etc, is less than $.05. And the piss-poor MySQL DB can't prove to me that my ticket is unique so it doesn't solve the counterfeiting problem.
> That and it's not "the courts" that don't let you scalp tickets. It's the venue. The agreement to buying a ticket either lets you or restricts you from scalping, which was created by the venue or whoever is performing, but normally it's the venue's rules.
Why would I care who, or how, they decided to create user-hostile rules? They don't serve me so I won't miss them.
But, if you as a venue wanted a transfer fee you could enforce it more easily then by suing resellers. It'd happen automatically and risk free. So once they get their fee they won't need to care how I transfer it, giving me the ability to easily buy a bunch of tickets for friends without having to know who exactly is coming, or whatever.
Even if they encumber the NFTs they'll be no worse than paper tickets in any way.
> not give a shit about an obscure 3rd party system that grants no value to them or the customer?
Except that it provides value to them and the customer.
No tickets to print, no defrauded customers with fake tickets complaining, no worries about scalpers eating your lunch... If they do place a bunch of restrictions I'm no worse off, and likely they wouldn't because with a more transparent market they could just arrange a Dutch auction and capture the money themselves in one simple step.
> Why NFT has ruffled my feathers so much is honestly weird. It has this Twilight Zone feel to it. The question is, wtf is the punchline at the end? I know it's not going to be pretty. Crypto in general led us to this weird new religion of tech.
There are people who dream of replacing fiat currencies. Most everyone else just wants to send money to friends, play games, etc. Don't let the ideologues freak you out.
> Or maybe it's the worship of "disruption" regardless of purpose or benefit? Disruption for the sake of disruption and regardless of consequences.
Disrupting companies is pretty safe. If everyone switched from Paypal they'd go bankrupt but nobody would be hurt - employees would get new jobs and life would go on. Disrupting the entire currency system is dangerous but is potentially required to avoid corruption.
> The biggest difference, crypto tech is energy consuming. Nuclear tech was rapid energy producing.
And interestingly, both have a large crowd of detractors who don't understand the tech or the risk/reward tradeoff but want them gone.
Want to "sponsor" an artist, how is an NFT any better than mailing them a five dollar bill or sending them $5 through paypal? The "someone takes a cut" argument is null because someone is always going to get a cut no matter the system and that includes NFT. What does the NFT do special? Does it magically make the $5 dollars spent a $10 dollar bill without the need for market speculation? Because then it's smarter to just gift the artist a treasury bond or gamestop stock at that point. But again, most people don't like "gifting". They prefer buying prints or do-dads from the artist. Something they can get to mess with or decorate. An NFT is just... eh? It's as unique as naming a blank text file a random 32bit hash. Sure, it's got a unique name that's probably never existed in all of time like a 7-times shuffled deck of cards... but so what? There's a ledger that says you "have" that unique string which gives you the ability to... say you have it?
Yea, venues and artists make rules for the nature of their performances. Why can't they? "You buy a ticket, you can't resell it." I wonder why they would do that... OH RIGHT! Because assholes with a fuckton of money would just buy out all the tickets to a popular concert (like the '05 The Killers concert in Tampa... fucking bastards, I'm still angry over that shit) and resell them at triple the price so poor fans/teens can't attend! You think maybe those pesky venues are not just protecting their own wallets but making sure the average schmuck isn't screwed out of participating in events? This is why I absolutely hate crypto folks. You have zero clue how or why the rules are in place in our current systems. After smoking a bowl, you skim a few manifestos and, "I know it all maaaaan." Ten minute youtube cartoons can't teach you about, "The truth to money". You keep saying it provides value to people. Where? Do you know what that means? Adding value means it's solving some sort of problem in a way that can't be done in other, simpler means. It's another one of those $400 over engineered juicers that squeezed a pre-juiced pouch into a glass. Pouches that could be hand squeezed faster than the machine could. That's not value. That's mental masturbation.
An Ethereum NFT transaction, one transaction, single, is 60 kWh: https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption That's no 5 pennies. That's 2 days worth of average household energy usage. PoW and PoS are energy hogs, get out of your cult.
The cult of crypto is a, "I don't like the old players had a headstart to the game. I'm changing the rules for me." Yea, it sucks. Millennial here. Fresh in the job market and the economy raw dogged us all. Grow up. For one, the wannabe new system is flawed and unsustainable already. This push is so damn disingenuous of, "there are no problems, everything is perfect, this is the way" it's far more sinister that the archaic system. A generation will go by and they're going to want to ruin the new system because they weren't apart of the last "wealth redistribution". No great revolution really helped the poor in history. They just transferred power from one set of assholes to another. The honeymoon period is when the most poor people suffer.
Why am I mad? I got real angry too when those bastards with a dehumidifier in Hawaii won an XPrize purse on "solving" water supply issues in arid African countries. Now, it only works in a select few, high humidity locales that are better served cheaper and faster with a well and water purifier. Perhaps I'm sick of good tech and ideas being passed up for venture capital because con artists gallivant around with their bullshit "I'm going to change the world for a better place. All you have to do is give me lots of money and not question me." We all want to scream and cry about how no one is putting money in research that "matters". Yea, well, $70m for an alphanumeric string that amounts to fake... it's not even ownership or anything. You can't call it ownership. It's literally nothing. You get nothing. This is the most outrageous con, I swear. Maybe I'm just pissed I didn't make up this con myself or this is going to sideline the greats like Victor Lustig.
Crypto was also claimed to help the poor obtain wealth. Yea, well $70m goes a long way on buying bags of rice and wheat to feed the poor. Would have been better spent that way.
Yea, but copyrights do. Lots of pro-photographers have lawyers as best friends for this exact reason. The drawback to buying long dead artist art is their copyright ran out. Oh well. We all celebrate public domain day for books even though they're subjugated to the same rules. The NFT, inherently at least, doesn't give you the right to distribute or anything of the sense. It really obfuscates the concept of ownership into some weird hippie mentality that boils down to, "How can you own anything man?" It literally neuters the idea of ownership because what in the hell do you actually own? A string of numbers saying you bought what amounts to a wallpaper background? But at the same time, everyone has access to it anyways without buying it? What bothers me about this "ownership" discussion is just that, what are you even talking about? The idiom possession is nine-tenths of the law refers to this. Not just the law "enforces" possessing something, it refers to defining what that even means and limitations. Copyright and IP lawyers are their own special sector because it's a far more complicated aspect of the law because so many people want to have such a wishy-washy idea of "ownership". Are you allowed to produce, distribute, end of sale, consume and just how much consumption? Within your own home, to a group of people? For how long? Etc. That's just the easy stuff by the way.
Sponsoring the artist is also an extremely weak argument. What's the difference between this and buying a $20 printed tshirt of their art? Or a poster? Or a pdf of their comic? Or their mp3? Except for the fact I get something. This whole thing of, "Yea, but patreon/apple/amazon/paypal/merchantServices/platformX gets a cut out of it."
And?
Because places to purchase/convert crypto and NFT don't exist nor take a cut themselves? When was the last time you mailed a check or cash to someone? Are you going to do that for an artist to buy their stuff? Or is a stamp too much of a "cut"? That and the envelope. Those pesky manufacturers of envelopes. Why do they oppress us by not providing them for free? Just like paypal and patreon not dealing with the debit/credit card companies for free since their data centers and employees are all volunteer anyways! I mean come the fuck on. This is ridiculous. Do you work for free? What do you do? I guarantee the same argument can be applied to your job and you would foam at the mouth about how you deserve to be paid. No one goes into these services stupid. They don't go, "Oh, this is a 100% free services and I make all ze monies." Specialization is such a worshipped concept around here, this is part of it. Someone deals with ease of purchasing and a marketplace so an artist can "art" instead of figuring out how to connect with a merchant services API and the cart to fulfill transactions, let alone all the security required. Yes, they deserve to get paid.
This whole NFT thing feels like some twisted Twilight Zone red herring. It's an immensely complicated way of solving nothing. Concert tickets? What does it do differently? "Verifies ownership". How does it do it differently than the 2 to 3 sets of ID numbers on the ticket and/or putting someone's name on it and verifying by picture ID? A piss poor MySQL db and terrible PHP accomplishes what NFT can do, minus the computational power. That and it's not "the courts" that don't let you scalp tickets. It's the venue. The agreement to buying a ticket either lets you or restricts you from scalping, which was created by the venue or whoever is performing, but normally it's the venue's rules. That's then upheld in court as the agreement is considered a binding contract. Again, the whole "ownership" and legality wannabe work around doesn't work. The restriction was placed by the venue. You think they won't do the same? Or even better, not give a shit about an obscure 3rd party system that grants no value to them or the customer?
Why NFT has ruffled my feathers so much is honestly weird. It has this Twilight Zone feel to it. The question is, wtf is the punchline at the end? I know it's not going to be pretty. Crypto in general led us to this weird new religion of tech. Or maybe it's the worship of "disruption" regardless of purpose or benefit? Disruption for the sake of disruption and regardless of consequences. Could even lead to the same type of pandora's box that the nuke gave us. The biggest difference, crypto tech is energy consuming. Nuclear tech was rapid energy producing. Curious what the fallout from this insanity is going to be.