NFT and the Future of Digital Content
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It requires courage and integrity for someone to admit he/she had made a mistake. I am missing the courage. Trying to "hush it up" will not help much, the damage is already done. A clear cut will be the best move.
https://twitter.com/DT_comic/status/1382610461162680321
The TLDR version: mostly some combination of speculators/investors hoping to profit on resale, people who like hyped up tech for the sake of being hyped up tech, and technolibertarians hoping to wrest economic power away from nation states and financial institutions (Disclaimer: Daz is probably not in this group).
Whole thing is incredibly impractical for art, because you never own the art. NFT evangelists like to compare buying an "original" NFT to buying the original Mona Lisa - way more prestigious than just getting a print. Except it's more accurately like buying a "unique" token (they may have minted multiple unique tokens) to see the Mona Lisa and you can come back to the Louvre whenever you want to see it again. However, you can't take the actual painting out of the Louvre and hang it up in your house (they'll let you take a reproduction from the gift shop, but they're giving them away free to everyone else too). Also, the Louvre doesn't have to keep it out where you can see it, token or not. In fact, they can burn it if they want, but unlike most NFTs the Mona Lisa is culturally and artistically significant enough they probably won't. Also, all of the other museum goers can see the same painting for free without a token and take home a free reproduction too, just without the "prestige" of being a token bearing museum visitor.
Plus, let's face it, unless you're a millionaire, you aren't even buying the equivalent of a token to see Da Vinci's famous painting in a respectable museum like the Louvre. It's more like a token to YeetyBoi69's apartment to see his artwork. And it might not even be his apartment or painting, and again, if he moves or throws it away, all you've got is your fancy shmancy token (but it's still a unique token!). Admittedly, a Daz NFT is slightly nicer, since it'd be like getting a token to see a painting in an art supply store, but actually you came to the store for paints for your own paintings and the tokens have caused a canvas shortage (it's a metaphor for GPUs).
But as long as speculators/investors believe the token may appreciate in value, they'll take the chance. For others spending money on the newest hyped up tech trend helps them feel like they've got something cutting edge and cool, regardless of whether it is. And then you also have anarcho-capitalists and technolibertarians who support anything crypto related because they'd like a decentralized currency driven by individuals engaging in a utopian pure free-market economy beholden to no nation state/banks/corporation. Thus The Individual can reign supreme, free from the tyranny of government regulations, financial institutions, and I assume taxes (likely doomed to backfire horribly). Also those fees for NFT transactions and minting make the platforms profits regardless of whether Daz or other artists recoup the cost of trying to sell an NFT. (Disclaimer: I'm not in any way suggesting Daz is in the technolibertarian group, I think they're in the "this is new and cool" group).
Million dollars for a gray pixel... Makes one wonder what was it, that was actually sold... Did the token include coordinates and instructions to Hefner's private collection of magazines with "interesting articles" or the location of some rare and valuable plant based product that makes the blue pill look like placebo?
The grey pixel was just conspicuous consumption in its most extreme manifestation. There's a subculture of people who made a lot of money in crypto, who are busy congratulating themselves on having all this money, and since they can't think of any useful way to spend their wealth buy this kind of thing for silly amounts of money to show off to each other. Nothing anyone outside their circle thinks matters. This is the true utility of NFTs. The whole "art" thing is just incidental at this point.
My immediate response to this nonsense was the cancellation of my platinum club subscription. But apperently not enough people did the same, as the NFT link is still up on the site. I also haven't made a single purchase in the daz store since. It's too bad becasue I was looking forward for what the next gen figure would be likee, but I guess they were busy working on this nonsense instead of an actual product.
You could say the opposite happened, with untold number of people rewarding Daz by buying into the season passes. You too can get 5 characters you haven't seen and might not want at a slightly higher price and without the power to return it if it's unappealing or defective. But expect the bulk of people who bought in to defend that choice. That's confirmation bias at work.
...good points.
Saw an advert promoting crypto investing on the telefvision yesterday while watching a baseball game.
Like stock pump-n-dump games, if they can't get others to 'invest' it all falls apart.
It looks like the season pass has replaced the nfts as the annoying add in the sales email for the moment.
...it really boggles the mind that people with money will drop millions on these dumb little tokens but then recoil at idea of contributing to worthy causes or even tipping service workers at a restaurant (one famous NBA star was renowned for the fact he rarely if ever left a tip in spite of the fact he made far more on average per game during his career than many of those workers did in an entire year).
There are no bragging rights in tipping or worthy causes...
...yeah I know, but there is the good karma of doing something nice for others.
I've been following the Season Pass thread, and lots of buyers feel they've been made a fool. Brooke and the "hangout" freebie have been controversial, to say the least. Reactions to Brooke's reveal start here, the "freebie" is a page or two before. While some people ARE genuinely happy with Brooke and the "hangout" (and I'm glad they didn't waste the high cost of a Platinum subscription on stuff they can't use, even if I personally refuse to give Daz money until the NFTs are gone), others are embarrassed they bought it or angry.
At this rate, I suspect by the time Daz has given up on selling NFTs, I'll probably have given up checking the site. And possibly uninstalled Daz completely - once I'm done with my current project, I'm going to try the Reallusion Character Creator trial if NFTs are still up. Since Blender 2.8 Eevee I don't really render in Daz anyway.
I really shoufd have spent my stimulus check here before they did the NFTs, but I got it so late there wasn't really time. I could pretty much buy anything in the store I want right now, but that would make me an unprincipled hypocrite, albeit a hypocrite with more Stonemason. Oh well.
Wouldn't that purchase also be simply a means to inflate the value of the cryptocurrency? Like it's not about the artwork at all...they just need 'something' so it might as well just be a single grey pixel, or a picture of a squirrel's bunghole...they both would serve the same purpose. It all feels very insider trading to me. Maybe that's the wrong word for it as I know next to nothing about trading stocks, but it's just extremely shady and fishy.
I spent my stimulus check on the shiniest new NordicTrack iFit indoor bike so I can pretend I'm cycling through the Scandanavian countryside rather than in my basement. Maybe then I'll actually use it and lose some weight. Either way, better than spending on Daz stuff right now, lol.
I don't receive any subscription emails from Daz. I cancelled them from ATI's stuff.
I think Daz have finally killed of my liking for them as a company; it's suffered a couple of knocks the last couple of years, but this (and NFTs) feels like a death-knell.
... And it's very scary.
Oh there's quite a bit of wash trading (trading between related parties who reimburse each or are the same entity) going on all over the crypto business, and there are ample opportunities for money laundering. This also goes on in other areas, like regular art dealing, cash businesses, etc. but crypto's lack of regulation means it's mostly kind of wild westy. There's not a lot of Know Your Customer or AML/CFT due diligence with exchanges. With Coinbase, you now need to upload a facsimile of a passport or other photo ID to buy or sell, which you didn't need to do previously, but that's not any kind of serious impediment to shady dealing.
...yeah mine came late as well, but I finally paid off some bills that were nagging me, aswell as am looking at getting a few upgrades for the workstation, a back brace for my sore back, and a new pair of (real) shoes (thankfully there's no "autofit" in RL).
This is more than one pixel, its gotta be worth something, right? right?
...at least worth ten times the value of the one that already sold
Nah, I think you're going about this backwards. One of those old school transparent one pixel spacer .pngs would probably be worth more. Think about it, it'd be retro classic, on an internet timescale. Who wouldn't love to own a hyperlink to internet history?
(EDIT: Can I just say, I will forever respect you for being vocally outspoken against the NFT stuff as a Daz PA.)
I hope your back feels better.
Like with most modern art, it's not the pixel that matters, it's who made it.
With NFTs it doesn't matter who made it either. What matters is who bought it.
And what they spent on it.
And what they are willing to spend on it.
And that's the trick, a few very rich types trading these things back and forth shouting "See? These things are worth REAL money!" to pump things up - the better to make a killing when it comes time to dump their crypto-coins.
...thank you. Yeah it's slowly getting better. It's a pinched nerve in my lower back that acts up now & then if I move or twist wrong. Had it for a good part of my life. The brace should arrive either Wednesday or Thursday.
It's been three weeks to the day and NFT is still being promoted through the menu. :(
The higher up the food chain the idea came from the harder it will be to kill. ;-)
And three weeks is nothing! When working at Dell ('96-03 and still said as hell) we'd get a bad idea dumpped on us and we would be six months working around it before someone upstairs said: "What? Our great idea's causing a problem?" and another three to six months as they tried everything but undoing it before admitting that maybe it wasn't the best thing to have done in the first place.
I don't think DAZ has that much mass/inertia to fight, so it shouldn't take them quite as long.
(Of course for all we know they're doing a booming business - stranger/nuttier things have happened!)