Do I think it is starting as a stupid toy and may eventually do more interesting things? Yes. If Reddit gives you an NFT for being a top poster for a year in a specific subreddit so you can show it off on Discord and Twitter, I don't see much value in that, but there are plenty of people who do, a lot.
1. Artist creates work, signs it with his good old fashioned PGP key, publishes it.
2. Patron pays to "sponsor" the work. Artist makes a bundle of the work and patron's public key, and signs it with his own. Publishes it.
3. Patron decides he has to "sell" his patronage. He takes the bundle from 2, adds the buyer's public key, and signs it. Optionally, the artist signs it too to indicate he's OK with the "transfer". They publish it.
Are there ways to cheat? Yeah, if you're confident no one has downloaded the signed document that you published, you can try double-selling. But that's risky: if you're wrong, someone can publish the signed document and prove that you are a fraud.
This illustrates that most of the utility of "distributed blockchains" come from simple digital signatures. If all parties are accountable, public identities, this simplified scheme is strictly superior.
And remember, we're talking about art and public patronage here, not trade of illegal goods. The whole point is that you want people to see it and associate it with a public, accountable identity.
You don't need a blockchain for interoperability, neither does it enforce interoperability.
Considering how much most HN users rail against centralized services and things others not to turn stuff off, it seems like the value is obvious to me.
How so? Why is it any better than a public API?
> In the situation above the benefit is you, the recipient, are never again dependent on Reddit to validate that award for you.
You're assuming that Reddit would create an NFT that doesn't grant them any special power. Why would they do that? Why wouldn't they create a blockchain NFT with an admin address that they own and which can do pretty much anything?
> Considering how much most HN users rail against centralized services and things others not to turn stuff off, it seems like the value is obvious to me.
You can be centralized on a blockchain though, e.g. using an admin address as I described.
Specifically in that using my API won't require you to pay him money. There are other reasons they'll claim but once you dig through the chaff that's what it comes down to.
Just consider it something like decoupling in coding but for the whole internet.
- NFT can have data on the .json file, so the rewarded user can be recorded.
Even if they don’t directly care, you had better believe that the price of a Rolls Royce shapes the way that people think about them; and you buy one because of the way people will think about it. Same goes with the art you put on your wall (an incredible painting that you got for cheap will never be as cool as something by someone whose art is in the MoMA, even if it’s still very cool).
I’m not sure NFTs are going anywhere either, but some people definitely care about receipts. Conspicuous consumption can be very conscious.
Fortunately, we have the option to aspire to something better. I’m not saying such signalling etc doesn’t exist, just that in the same way as I choose not to assault or murder people when I’m angry at them, I also choose to present myself and choose my partners based on personal qualities rather than superficial crap.
Seems I’m generally speaking a lot more fulfilled, content, and happy in life than those who choose to live like chimps.
And not everything you signaled was profound and you might not have even realized your partner chose you for the shallow parts, even if they'd never admit it directly.
If you buy a jpg for 300k while you could have bought a nice house with that amount of money, you are honestly unfuckable and being unfuckable and gullible is all that you are signalling.
Besides, it's women who do the signaling, that's because they can't approach to save their lives.
NFT crowd should grow some balls, approach, get rejected and repeat until success...like real men do, instead of buying monkey jpg to "signal mating"
Sorry, but spoken like someone who has no idea how the fashion industry operates.
Seriously though, it’s one thing to not like the superficiality of the fashion market, but to deny that NFTs exploit the same demand (for less-gauche proof of wealth) seems wrong.
Recently I learned folks appraise ‘64 mustangs based on VIN and markings - so they know how close to the “first off the lot” that mustang was. They don’t need a blockchain to do that.
I think there is a valid point to this take - humans don’t need irrefutable cryptographic proof that something has a story attached to it; they just need enough compelling evidence the story attached to an object is true. And the kinds of stories folks value tend to be human stories (this is the crown worn by so and so, this is the finger bone of saint so and so, etc.) which NFTs can’t capture.
You indeed do not need a blockchain - the artworld has been doing it using paper certificates for a long time. But these are conceptually the same as an NFT, just accessible and tradable.
All potential solutions to that question have one thing in common: An event has by definition a centralized entity, which is the organizer. Everything that a blockchain supposedly solves in event ticketing is after all a solution due to digitization, not decentralization.
> If you sell it to me as an NFT, how do I know it‘s not a fake NFT ticket or even a fake event?
This is actually not a problem at all:
- It's not likely you'd buy ticket for some event that you don't know/not interested.
- The event official (which you already know) should publish these info for query:
- The blockchain
- The contract address
- The NFT token ID
How often do you actually know who that really is? Let‘s say Beyoncé is coming to the arena closest to you. Are you aware of who actually organizes that event and is in charge? Ticket buyers most often don‘t know and don‘t care.
Plus, if I have to go to the central entity and check all that data, where is the benefit of going decentralized?
> How often do you actually know who that really is? Let‘s say Beyoncé is coming to the arena closest to you.
Interesting, so you are saying either:
- Beyoncé official publish nothing about the event
- We have no way to look up the ticket info
> Plus, if I have to go to the central entity and check all that data, where is the benefit of going decentralized?
Well, de-centralization is nothing about convenience, and it's not just about ticket-selling.
I totally agree that blockchain & web3 is not mature at all comparing to how it is now, and I don't think it's going to be success unless they find a way to generally interact with real-world technically and legally.
1. How do you know the ticket is valid?
2a. How do you know I send the ticket after you pay me?
2b. How do I know you send the money after I send the ticket?
3. How do you know I don't send the ticket to someone else too, if it's digital?
A cryptographically signed I owe you is and will always be meaningless. What is meaningful is the signature at the end of the chain, when the concert organizer lets you in.
(My understanding is that NFTs can be constructed to charge a fee on transfers. At least, this is what I've been told by people trying to promote their use for artwork...)
They charge as much as they do because they have removed a lot of competition from the market (see e.g. jwz - https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2018/01/31.html). There’s no reason why they would implement an NFT where they’d get less money — in fact, they’re the kind of unethical weasels who’d figure out as many ways to hide fees in the smart contracts and play games with the blockchain they use to maximize their take.
Blockchains not only don’t change that, they encourage it by so heavily favoring the richest participants. There’s no way an unethical incumbent would use that as you hope rather than how they’ve used everything else, and without access to the venues and artists in their network you’re going to be limited to the smallest places and bands.
EDIT: remember, everyone not getting paid by them hates Ticketmaster. Their website has been terrible since the 90s and their random fees have been the subject of rants and jokes for just as long. There have been several generations of developers who thought tickets shouldn’t cost so much, knew their musician friends hated Ticketmaster, and said “hey I know Perl/PHP/Python/Node/etc. and could build a better website!” They all failed, and it would be really critical to ask what you’re bringing which is different and especially whether this is actually a technical problem or you have power to apply leverage to the business problems.
Importantly, wouldn't those tokens be... fungible...?
What are the gas fees and how do they compare to the average concert ticket?
BOOM!
5 minutes later I was under the stage.
They do when buying physical artwork, coins, stamps, pokemon cards or other collectibles. There are plenty of things people buy that are only valuable because they are provably "genuine", and would be worthless if they were exact replicas with no provenance.
My friends won a contest for an all inclusive trip to the Super Bowl a few years ago when it was in Arizona.
Flight was good, hotel was good, but they showed up to the stadium for the game... fake tickets. Someone scammed the people running the contest. (I think it was a radio station -- need to check)
NFTs fix this in a way nobody else in the industry is.
Oh! The anti-NFT crowd does get it. Unfortunately, only too well. And the thing is that there is nothing there to actually get it.
>> the verifiable receipt is what matters
No, this is just a marketing strategy to fool gullible and naïve people into aping into NFT. Nobody ever had a problem with verifiable receipts when attending concerts or buying a car or eating at a restaurant. NFT is a solution simply looking for non-problems to solve to justify its existence.
NFT is simply put 100% speculative asset. The only reason it got a big hype is because people want to spend 0.00001 Eth and sell it for 100 Ethers and then they don't have to work for the rest of their lives.
There is a suicide hotline that gets posts after every crypto crash. Inevitably the same thing is going to happen once the NFT market crashes (100% guaranteed) and regular people lose most of their savings for worthless jpeg that nobody else wants to buy.