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Dunno if this is Culture War or not, but I could really use some Instruction for the Bewildered on this.
So NFTs are a bubble that has finally burst, surprising nobody (or at least, nobody seems to be willing to admit publicly they believed the hype). They were the Tulip Mania of our day.
Or maybe they're not, at least if you have the right ones. Who knows, certainly not me, that's why I'm asking for explanations.
I couldn't understand just exactly what was meant to be so wonderful about them, and the common reason seemed to be "they're not fungible", which left me where it found me.
Was it just because of the magic worlds "crypto" and "blockchain"? What the hell was supposed to be going on here? You can buy a share of some (generally terrible) image, but you won't own it, the original creator will, and many others can also own a share of it, but because it's "blockchain" this somehow makes it vastly valuable?
At least Jack's magic beans really did grow into a giant vine where he eventually obtained treasure, but this sort of thing bewilders me as to what the hell is going on.
This was very obvious even without hindsight . Good thing i stayed away from this stuff. it's valuable for the same reason some artwork is valuable. a market forms in which supply and demand determines the price. the community collectively subscribes to the belief that these jpgs are worth something, and hence they are.
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I recommend Foldable Ideas video on NFTs. If you're familiar with (or don't care about) the history of crypto and tokens more generally you can probably skip to Section 4 (~39:00), though I recommend watching the whole thing.
On the buyer side, NFTs were an example of what finance calls greater fool theory. The basic idea is you can get people to pay irrational prices for something as long as they are convinced they will be able to sell that thing to someone else (the "greater fool") for a profit. People didn't buy NFTs because they (necessarily) believed in the value proposition of an NFT at some particular price point, but because it would be a profitable investment due to an appreciation in value. Wash trading, for example, is a way a particular seller might manufacture a history of an NFT increasing in value before selling it to someone else, who hopes to see a continued pattern of increase in value. The technical aspects of NFTs and blockchain function in a primarily obfuscatory capacity. To give people some tech jargon for why their investment will appreciate that they fundamentally do not understand. A demonstration that Eulering is alive and well.
I don't recommend Foldable Ideas videos on anything. NFTs are bullshit but that guy is a soy douche all around. I don't trust him not to misrepresent anything he lays his hands on.
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In theory, it was supposed to be an authentication schema that avoided a lot of present authentication issues.
In certain circles, there's a major problem with digital art, in that it's very hard to prove that a specific piece is 'yours' or was 'commissioned by' you, in the way that possessing a physical piece of traditional art does. Not just in the sense that someone else could take a picture or save-to-hardrive and repost, but they could readily do so and pretend you were faking. You could post it onto a website, but not only does that invite someone to right-click-save, it's only useful so long as the website is active with your media on it, and only to the extent the timestamps there are more authoritative than those from a random self-host who could fake them. Having process files like version'd photoshop files or sketch layers largely just cycles back a level.
This isn't a hugely valuable things in terms of productivity or world-changing ramifications, but for people who care a lot about digital art, it can be really annoying. Even at casual levels, there are Problems -- a lot of bigger-name furries find themselves impersonated on sites like F-list by people who are just trying to leverage their art, which doesn't sound that bad until you stumble on a profile claiming to be you and into some stuff. At more professional spheres, art impersonation is a big deal.
By having some strongly delineated identifier showing ownership, with a good way to transfer it, which is authoritative but separate from an authority, could be useful.
In practice, it got dominated by grifters early on, as with a good many other crypto crap did -- just like a lot of 'decentralized' crypto DNS ended up running through a couple oracle servers, a lot of NFT implementations did that and validated the url (why?) instead of some meaningful identifier for the image, and that's when they weren't just a glorified pump-and-dump. I think there are some technical issues for part of that, but there was also just some inexplicably high dollar values going around very early on in the tech's development. There's some charitable explanations possible, like zero-index-rate behaviors or tech-dumb investors huffing farts, but I expect a lot of people saw rumors of conventional modern art as money-laundering and thought this would be the next thing in that field.
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Buying outrageously ugly ape for outrageous price, and reselling it to
bigger foolshrewder crypto investor for even more outrageous price? Everything is wonderful about this plan, when it works as intended.Yeah, it needs to be emphasized that the apes (and the lions, etc, but particularly the apes) were really some of the ugliest, most offputting "artwork" that's been hocked specifically as a good investment i've seen in some time. It flabbergasts me that the sheer ugliness of those things didn't immediately give the people "yeah, that's not going to appreciate in value expect in very short timelines" reaction.
I think there is some element of some people liking that.
Ex: I've always been put off by shows like Spongebob and Regular Show due to the almost grotesque art style they often delve into, similar to various of the NFTs. Of course they're better cartoons, but it shows that some people like that general style.
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Following up on /u/MaiqTheTrue's point:
In modern art, artists making intentionally ugly, crass and disgusting work is no impediment to their making a pretty penny.
The difference here is that I can, if I wish, ignore all of that stuff and never see any of it apart from random glimpses of Piss Christ when someone chooses to have that debate again or perhaps one of Hirst's works (which are aesthetically generally more pleasing than the apes), whereas at the height of the NFT mania it was impossible to browse Twitter without seeing some ape avatar posting about whatever dumb shit.
True, although some of this stuff is more mainstream than you might think. Andres Serrano created the cover art for two Metallica albums, for example.
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In defense of the apes, most modern art isn’t valuable because of its beauty, but rather because it’s made by someone famous in the art world. It’s not a new phenomenon. A guy can paint a canvas in a single color, and providing that he’s famous enough, people will spend thousands of dollars for a square canvas painted green.
Heck, add a stripe of a second colour and you're talking millions.
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Yes, this is exactly it. Like other highly-speculative assets, the "fair price" of an NFT can be approximated by [expected value of the asset conditional on the bull case being true] x [probability of the bull case being true]. In the case of NFTs, the bull case is, "the Ethereum blockchain becomes integrated into all aspects of life and is recognized as the authoritative ledger of monetary transactions, ownership, and recordkeeping." In such a scenario, ownership of the NFT would in fact correspond to legal ownership of the property represented by the NFT.
Of course, now that crypto has been exposed, it is pretty obvious that [probability of the bull case being true] is approximately zero, so the value of NFTs are approximately zero.
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Sophisticated_Artist puts random squiggles on a page - artwork worth millions of dollars!
Crypto_bro puts random memes on a webpage, on a blockchain - why should that not be worth millions of dollars?
I maintain that there's literally nothing wrong with NFTs. I don't want them. Nor do I the rubbish that art galleries (especially modern art galleries) pay 'artists' for. I see no reason why the former are privileged and the latter despised. In fact, the latter are better since they aren't used to cheat charitable donation tax loopholes.
Honestly, I've been wanting to use NFTs to cheat those loopholes for a while. I'd do anything to get them closed, including break them so wide open that they have to be closed. Unfortunately this would probably just lead to the NFT-specific loophole being closed if it was ever open to begin with.
The idea would be, create Fake Art Collection, keep its valuation ridiculously high, allow people to commission new NFTs in the Collection but only if they donate them to NFT Art Museum. It would be a nice easy way to make the loophole exploitation process effortless and available to everyone, not just the rich and well-connected. Would love if anyone has any idea whether this could work from a legal standpoint--I could easily build the blockchain side of it.
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NFTs were supposed to have a mechanism where you could verify ownership, track transfers, and maybe even compensate the original producer every time a work changed hands. Lots of drawing board schemes appeared on how you could pivot this platform into a fair system for paying creatives, and creatives would produce like never before, in some kind of decentralized way through common consensus.
Everyone got so excited about it that they took a leap of faith on the NFT part and... kinda forgot to actually build the rest of that stuff? The default way to even trade these things ended up being a central exchange (Opensea). Pretty far from the ideal.
Tulipmania ensued and then a crash happened.
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In some ways, you could argue that the Bored Ape stuff was one of the more justifiable uses of NFTs, in that they were, ostensibly "club membership cards". Ie. they were tradable tickets that marked you as a member of the "Bored Ape Yacht Club". Which seems clearly not worth the price of admission, but rich people spending stupid money on irrelevant status markers, including clubs that are all about networking with other rich people by screening out those too poor to afford dues isn't really a new thing, so arguably this is no stupider than a lot of stuff.
However, a lot of the dislike for all this is that uses of NFTs are 99.9% scams - and even if not, are typically cases where the NFTness isn't providing any actual value. Ie. most clubs don't need NFTs to prove membership, just keeping a database of who's paid their dues and is considered a member.
NFTs promise to move that database outside the control of the club - making the database public such that trading tickets, proving membership etc is outside the control of the club. Which sounds like it might have some value, except that recognition of that NFT as denoting membership (ie. using the forums, perks etc of the club) is still under the control of the club: if they decide to refuse to recognise your NFT, there's still nothing you can do (except the same legal remedies you could seek without them). It probably wouldn't do that of course, but only for the same reasons it wouldn't do it without NFTs: it'd destroy the club's ability to attract funds). Which all means that being an NFT doesn't really add much, except perhaps provide tradability that the club doesn't have to be a party to - but that could still be done without needing the complexity of blockchain involvement.
And that's probably the core issue with pretty much all uses of NFTs. There are theoretical cases where such a trustless distributed database of ownership could have value, but for pretty much all actual uses, it's not providing any value whatsoever, and is just a vehicle for scams relying on obscuring that point.
NFTs are like MTG cards ,yet the latter proved to be a way better investment. MTG cards have the advantage of utility (in the context of playing them) and scarcity, whereas NFTs have no utility even if there is scarcity in terms of the mint run.
Funny enough, the most valuable MTG cards are never played with, to the extent where it's legal to use fakes (proxies). Unless I've misunderstood it and you have to own a Black Lotus to enter a tournament with a proxy of one.
You must own a Black Lotus to enter a sanctioned tournament with one. And it must be damaged during the tournament for the judge to issue a proxy for it. You can’t just make a proxy.
That said, casual game? No one cares.
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They are illegal in sanctioned events, which is why sanctioned vintage events are extremely rare. The only real sanctioned vintage is in the online version where the cards are 2 orders of magnitude cheaper.
There are unsanctioned tournaments, but I hear they limit the amount of proxies allowed. No point in showing up with your deck worth more than the per capita GDP if you get smoked by some kid playing a bunch of lands with ancestral recall and black lotus written on them.
In MTG do you win other people’s cards if you beat them? I always thought TCGs operate best with that system, to add a little real risk.
That sounds like it would transform the game from "no one would play any card worth more than $1000" to "no one would play any card worth more than $1". Of course, for cards at that level market price depends on play viability in the first place, so...
Okay, MtG rules are my wheelhouse, including early ones as well as current ones. Hyperion is more correct than not, but not quite there.
Very early in the game's history there was an "ante" rule where each player was supposed to set aside the top card of their deck at the beginning of the game and the winner kept all the ante cards. As he mentions there were even a few cards that interacted with this, say by forcing the opponent to ante an additional card, or anteing one yourself as an extra cost for a very powerful effect.
It was dropped very early on, not so much due to "playground fights" as because it (a) was incredibly unpopular, and (b) raised concerns about gambling laws in some jurisdictions, or at least WotC was worried that it might. The latter was the main reason WotC cited for removing it. It is still in the rulebook but is very heavily deprecated, and the use of ante (and the cards that directly interact with it) is banned in all sanctioned tournaments and has been for something like 95-97% of the game's history at this point.
I don't think it was framed as optional in the earliest rulebooks, though in my experience it was treated that way in practice. It certainly is optional now, and the clear default is to not use it. Though it's redundant, the rulebook also bans it where prohibited by law.
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Well, the idea is to even the playing field somewhat. If you have an expensive but powerful card, you can play it, but only if you are willing to risk the possibility of losing it.
Yeah but if I've got a deck of 60 cards and I'm against a fast burn deck and I've got GAMEWINNER9000 (RRP $10,000) which instantly wins me the game if drawn in my deck, I haven't actually got that big a % of actually pulling that card in context of a single game.
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Richard Garfield, patrilineal descendant of James A. Garfield never expected anyone to buy more than a dozen packs of the cards. So, when they did they had to fix the rules. Magic as Richard Garfield intended, where you can draw 3 cards for one blue mana.
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They originally had that as an optional rule in MTG but all the playground fights caused it to die out. There were even ante cards printed; but, they, along with the skill cards are banned even in Vintage.
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It appears that an "ante" rule exists, but is not used in official events.
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MTG did have a rule like that initially. It was called "ante", but didn't last very long. From a wiki:
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NFTs are stateless distributed and permissionless certificates of ownership.
That's what the hype is originally about, it's Bitcoin for assets. And some of the original NFTs are stuff like address space on Urbit that actually has a concrete use online.
A novel art market for digital images developped on top of this technology, with the usual pitfalls any art market has. From wash trading to counterfeits to money laundering to bubbles.
None of the dynamics are new. What is new is that these dynamics can exist for completely digital assets whereas true private property was previously impossible for such assets as they would require a centralized authentication.
Tie these certificates to actual assets and they'll have value, but outside of online institutions that can enforce the redeemability of such certificates through code, they are only as valuable as this tie.
If no tie exists, the value is purely based on speculation.
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The best steelman logic would be the point at which the NFT, as a kind of certificate of authenticity, becomes so respected that it is shameful to display art that you don't own the NFT for. No one would ever display something they don't own the NFT for, because everyone would point and laugh at them.
Think of luxury applications. A company like Rolex faces constant problems with ever better fakes. In a hypothetical future where people really care about NFTs, the NFT becomes authenticity. You just wouldn't wear a watch you didn't own the NFT for.
I don't see any of that happening.
But people do display reproductions of art pieces they like, but could never afford the original. Museums make a tidy sum off selling everything from key chains up that are plastered with popular art works - think how many times you've seen the Raphael angels on something.
I suppose people could club together and purchase a stake in a new valuable art piece, and get the right to display it with the NFT showing they own a piece of it, not like the people who can't afford to do so but can only afford prints or copies - the way syndicates that own racehorses do.
People wear fake brands now, and don't care about them being authentic. I could see fake NFTs for your fake Rolex becoming A Thing.
Some people do, some people absolutely refuse to. Among some people the rep Rolex is acceptable, or even privileged, a sign of cleverness. Among others, wearing a Rep would be found shameful, even disgusting. And the thing is, group A's opinion does not matter to group B, and if group B is large enough the value of the "real" asset will rise. Telling a room full of rich people making fun of your rep that "other people wouldn't care about this" isn't going to help.
If you're going to try to understand the concept of NFTs, or of authentic fashion/art/branding/etc, without just pointing and laughing you have to start by realizing that social groups exist where ownership is status, and ownership of the real thing is status. Am I one of these people? No. But there's lots of them around. Frankly there are times I wish I was, that's a whole class of emotions that I don't get to experience.
Sure, but if I'm in a gathering of people wealthy enough to have real genuine Patek Phillipe watches, I'm not going to be wearing a fake (if I can only afford a fake, the only way I'm in that room is as a servant of some kind).
If I'm among people who buy and wear and use fake brands, I don't care and neither do they so long as the item is good enough for use.
The problem in both cases is the signalling: I am rich enough to afford the real thing. If you are too gauche and nouveau riche for group A, they will shun you for other reasons than "that's a fake"; even if it's genuine, the 'wrong' brand or 'he/she is plainly trying to show off' will be enough to have fun made of you. Think of mocking rappers for suddenly deciding to drink Hennessy, or how Burberry became a down-market brand by catering to chavs. Or the crassness of the 'purchase for investment, lock it away so it stays unseen' of the Saudi prince who bought the Salvator Mundi(and indeed the crassness of rushing to establish it as a genuine Leonardo so it could be sold off for $$$$$$).
For group B, it's the same shunning for showing off, except in this case it's "he/she thinks they're better than us".
There's a narrow band where "I'm rich enough now with my newly-minted wealth to afford the real thing" is appreciated and a source of emulation, and I think that's where the NFT art falls. I don't care about real or fake, except insofar as appreciating real craftsmanship or real artistic merit and beauty (I'm never going to be impressed by "see how rich I am? see? see?") and so the status games don't matter to me.
So I think both the authentic old money set and the 'can only afford fakes' set would both laugh at the "see my authentic NFT token proving my authentic ownership" set trying to boast of their money and status. Does anybody think the oil-rich princelings of the Gulf States are arbiters elegantiaes or rather tasteless playboy yahoos squandering fortunes on hookers and blow? 'Dude look at my 200 real genuine NFTs' 'yeah, your highness (what a maroon, does he really think splashing cash around equals taste?)'.
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As someone who works in the blockchain full-time, they're all scams. I will write more on this topic if/when I find time, but in short there is a miniscule fig leaf of objective justification for their price (perhaps blockchain something something will make NFTs priceless) and a perfect storm of incentives leading folllowers to hype the NFTs up. Like how pyramid schemes do actually have real products, but are like 5% product and 95% pyramid, NFTs are 0.01% product and 99.99% self-sustaining (until it pops) bubble.
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It's less about "NFTs" and more about the idea of "buying digital art". The 'right click, save' criticism was so apt because the 'value' of owning expensive art is in the prestige of possessing a rare piece with good provenance and being able to show it off (either in your home or by lending it to a museum). "Showing off" your NFT, on the other hand, is literally showing off a JPEG, it's not only "functionally identical" to it, it is identical, because the "NFT" is only a (hypothetical) loicense tracking system.
When you buy art, you own the art. When you buy an NFT, you own a cryptographic key that says you have some kind of partial, meaningless "right" to a JPEG (but not the JPEG itself).
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It's a scam. If a panel of Joe Biden, Abe Simpson, and Muhammad Ali can't understand how it makes money, it doesn't. The only way for it to be a worthwhile investment is to leave someone else holding the bag.
That's pretty good. Did you invent this?
It’s an expression I developed, yes. Originally it was ‘if Joe Biden can’t explain how it makes money, it’s a scam’, but it kept being mistaken for political commentary about the Biden economy so I switched to using Abe Simpson because ‘confused old man’ was the relevant part. Then it just developed from there.
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I think at best, the hope was that they would be like digital versions of famous ticket stubs, autographs or similar collectables that have little to no intrinsic value.
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