Will respond in more detail once home, too nuanced to respond from phone
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I’m curious about how this works with clips form YouTube as well. I don’t really know much about NFTs and haven’t really been following what’s going on but it sounds like Logan sold parts of his recent YouTube video as an NFT - could the person who bought this then file a copyright takedown on the original YouTube video if they then technically own that piece of content? Or do NFTs not give you copyright ownership?
No, unfortunately every time crypto grows it affects your life even if you never plan to own a single coin. The electricity consumption and consequential environmental and social impact for all of this mining and computational power is mind boggling and rarely discussed. It makes me more cynical by nature of most of these newer crypto-dependent endeavors.
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majority of this is based off of one of the all time worst papers out of uHawaii that has been debunked again and again and again. Nic has written about this a bunch as have many others (404: This page could not be found.) actually respected universities have published extensive studies on this (3rd Global Cryptoasset Benchmarking Study - CCAF publications - Cambridge Judge Business School) cliffs: 39% of total has fully renewable, 76% using mixed renewables. Also pull a direct comparison to total net draw of any other financial structure and it’s just a joke. Check out gold’s global energy draw when accounting for physical delivery.
Nft’s don’t make sense to me. Yes, they are non-fungible because you have a unique line of transaction, but they are still replicable. If someone sold me a digital picture as NFT, I could make an exact copy of it by simply taking a screenshot. No matter how hard you look at the 2 pictures, you could not differentiate one from the other because the only 2 relevant parameters (color and position of the pixels) are exactly the same.
This does not work with things like physical Pokemon cards or real paintings. Even the best fake of the Mona Lisa can be differentiated from the original under the microscope. And you can’t just scan a Pokemon card, print it out and get an indistinguishable copy of the original. It’s this impossibility to fake these physical items that make them valuable, the history of transactions is not really relevant, so digital NFTs are missing the thing that makes real physical items desirable.
Let’s also not forget that most humans have a tendency to want to hold the things they are emotionally attached to in their own hands. So while a digital concept like Bitcoin works great for fungible things like currency, I don’t see it as suited for things like collectibles. I couldn’t care less if I had the one and only original digital image of base set Charizard that I will never hold in my hand and that could easily be taken a screenshot of for a perfect copy. Maybe I would take a screenshot of it myself and use it as desktop wallpaper for some time, but certainly I wouldn’t spend money on it.
So I see what is currently happening with NFTs as one of the biggest get-rich-quick schemes of the past 20 years. When someone makes a low quality pixel art even I could have made in 5 minutes and sells it for literally hundreds of thousand of dollars, I’m pretty sure that there is no intrinsic value to this picture, people are just buying it because they are either bamboozled by the celebrities that hyped the items, or because they speculate to sell it for even more in the future. Pokemon TCG partly has these factors as well, but it’s not the thing that carries the hobby. What carries the hobby are the people who buy cards because they want to own them because they love them. Hype and deception alone are a house of cards that will collapse sooner or later.
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As for this, it’s definitely best left to lawyers. New space, a lot of gray, very little clarity even among the top lawfirms.
However there have been some stress tests of this recently and ultimately it really depends on what the NFT is selling. For instance, with Logan Paul youtube clips the clip itself isn’t actually on chain. The NFT is a glorified pointer to a youtube clip in the same way many of the high def art isn’t held on chain it’s a pointer to an asset and you can prove you own the pointer. Right now there is no much to stop someone else from pointing to the same asset and saying they own it, but the blockchain records would ultimately say which came first… however first doesn’t really imply ownership. What’s important here is that in the most current methods the NFT is NOT the asset it is technically a pointer to the asset in that same that that a URL is a pointer and someone can sell you a URL pointing to a picture in the same way that somebody else can sell you a different URL pointing to the same picture.
So… it depends. It depends what you are buying (or selling), it depends what rights are associated with that, etc. This is one of the major reasons I think original IP and heavily licensed IP will ultimately be what wins here.
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Gold, silver, diamonds, cotton fibers, aluminum, paper mulch, high frequency trading… Yes, of course all of this takes energy to extract as well. But that does not ease a valid fear the more valuable bitcoin gets, the more energy will be exerted to mine it. And there is less certainty of a given “break even” point where it’s no longer worth it to mine. Take coal… There is a given energy output where at a certain point it’s not cost efficient to mine. Bitcoin and crypto currencies can fluctuate in value over the years to come and diminish computing demand, but if they never reach a near - permanent state of no longer being worth extracting, the electricity consumption will continue to increase. I think it’s important to remember this when people talk about million dollar bitcoin one day.
Agree, and disagree. You see only art because that’s all that is being sold currently yet secondary market sales for games alone are in the billions. Last I heard CSGO was closing in on $500 million dollars of secondary market volume per year on Steam alone… for just CSGO.
There is more than simply art that can and will be sold, and there will be many places to authenticate it in the future so no a screenshot won’t be the same thing as the original just like taking a screenshot of any asset somebody else owns isn’t the same thing as owning it for many different reasons. You’ll own a picture of it, but you wont OWN it. (tbh for most art a picture is good enough for me)
But at the same time efficiency of mining is growing in magnitudes and largely has been pareto superior to moore’s law, it’s not like you freeze frame efficiency right now and extrapolate it into the future
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The thing is, if I can own exactly the same thing as someone else simply by copypasting it, where’s the value? If someone takes a photo of their Pikachu Illustrator and posts that photo to their instagram and I save a copy of that pic on my hard drive, I still don’t own their illustrator. But if the only thing that exists to begin with is the digital image and I get this exact image simply by saving it on my hard drive, why should I think of it as valuable?
I somewhat get the point about in-game purchases, as many people are paying thousands for loot boxes, custom skins, bonus content etc. for video games right now.
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Ok so the easiest way I can explain it is this. Let’s say banksy decides to make a piece of digital art, and twitter with their new NFT-dom makes a way to display digital art. Some guy buys the banksy for $10m, and can display it on his twitter-wall-of-digital-art. You can take a screenshot of it, and create another NFT of the screenshot but nobody will think you own the original. There will be verifiable proof you do not own the original. And even if you could make the most perfect copy in all of the world it will be clearly known which is the original and who owns it.
You can also pull the source code off of many websites too, but it doesn’t mean you own the website and nobody will believe you do. Having exact pixels is not always the same as having the actual thing. As soon as there is verifiable proof nothing you do will change that as long as people value the originals. In the same way that even an exact perfect replica of the mona lisa that nobody could EVER tell was different other than some digital proof that would always say it’s not the real one would never ever go for the same as the actual mona lisa. People care about authenticity more than they care about reproducibility in many cases because at the end of the day it’s all a big dick swinging contest for most. digital or not
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@primordialaa , I see. I guess it’s just me, because I personally stop seeing ownership of something as special if the thing I own can easily be replicated, because I personally don’t see reason in spending extreme amounts of money on something that can easily be replicated. Regarding your example, I would feel pretty bad spending millions on a digital Banksy drawing, not because I don’t respect the artist or don’t appreciate his talent and skill, but because I don’t want to spend millions on owning a digital painting that anyone else can have on their computer for free.
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Legit question, does anyone on this forum actually like NFT’s? Can you explain why, I just can’t see the appeal and would like someone who has a legitimate interest tell me their point of view.
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To me it just seems like collecting blades of grass.
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Thanks @primordialaa. Your explanation about the pointer and comparing to URLs was helpful and intriguiing.
On the energy consumption side – no, I do think there is a massive difference.
Industrial mining has cost and technical limitations that cannot compete with the rate of growth for bitcoin. There are no energy executives taken seriously who insist coal will soon be able to generate 100x more energy than it currently does. Or diamond mine owners convinced machine-grade diamonds can increase in price by 100x and maintain that price. But if you ask a room of cryptofans, plenty will be convinced the price of bitcoin can increase by 100x in their lifetimes. Even if demand ebbs and flows, or there is an energy crisis, there will always be gas deposits not worth fracking and diamonds deep in a mine so heavily excavated it’s too expensive to send a crew down. The same perception does not exist for bitcoin – rather a hopeful optimism in a future where bitcoin is universal to command such a price (and that they’ve all made it rich in this future). But no acknowledgment of the resources that would be exerted to to mine said coins.
I bought my first bitcoin in high school. I have enjoined learning about various cryptocurrencies over the years. But the deflection in crypto circles when consumption is brought up leaves a sour taste in my mouth. If crypto continues to boom, it’s easy to envision that the global minining operation in five years time may use ten times the amount of energy it currently does. I can’t say that about gold, or paper, or oil. Which is why the issue should be addressed sooner rather than later.
At the end of the day it’s also bad optics and terrible for the long-term prospects for crypto. Consider the current pressure right now on hedge funds, banks and financial giants to divest from coal. People will care less about the lofty ambtitions and promises of tech developers and more about the enormous mining factories overseas if consumption increases on its current path. And that may well lead to divestment, regulation, disinterest or plain distate, etc.
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This will go down to 1 cent over the year lol
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When it comes to art nfts… you’re not buying the art… you are buying the receipt. This is why the art will not fair well… there are better applications… until there is a digital space we can meet in where you can display and show your nft’s much like if you came to my house and I handed you my 1st ed charizard… there’s no real value outside speculation.
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I have really enjoyed collecting digital collectables over the last 4 years. Almost equally as enjoyable as collecting Pokemon Cards.
The company I use to collect is in a transitioning period where they want to give tokens for each digital collectable they release.
This does not really effect my collection and it doesn’t effect if I’ll be collecting with them after the fact.
It’s really subjective but I have one of the best digital Adventure Time collections in the world lol.
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What do shilled Ponzi schemes have to do with Pokémon???
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I’ll never buy something where the supply isn’t regulated and the seller has a vested interest in spamming more.
What is stopping LP from just making more NFTs of the same “moment”?
Imagine if the creator of Bitcoin could just spawn more out of thin air, do you think the coin would be where it is today?
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