Commentary on The Daz 3D Non-Fungible People Holiday Challenge
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.@ outrider42 ....spot on.
Bad enough I see people walking about with all their attention focused in their smartphone while wearing earbuds already seeming oblivious to their surroundings. There have been people hit by cars, by LRT trains, taking bad falls, crikey I've even had people so absorbed in that little screen walk right into me as if I wasn't there. .
...and that's without a VR headset.
In a cyber role-play game I'm involved with there is one step beyond VR, called Augmented Reality. In the game setting, for VR people have special visors instead of a closed headset through which they can still see the world around them just with whatever they're involved in viewing appearing top overlaying the real world visuals. The way VR is in today's world, is more impressive closer to AR in the game where you are completely disassociated from your surroundings. Instead of a headset, you plug directly into the playback device via a data or chip jack. and become totally immersed in whatever environment you choose (deckers [hackers] also enter VR to heighten their ability to infiltrate hosts which use sculpted reality) rendering you completely unable to even move let alone react to the outside world until the experience finishes and logs you out or (in the case of deckers) you mentally key the instruction to quit before you can physically "jack out" back into what's referred to as the "meat" (real) world (being involuntarily "jacked out" or booted out incurs what is known as "dsumpshock" which can be rather disconcerting if not downright dangerous.
This technology is eventually coming as they are already talking about "direct neural interfacing" (in the game world abbreviated DNI). In the game DNI is the new "bleeding edge" experience and mind numbing distraction for society similar in a way to the interactive parlour walls in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.but it all happens in your head instead of around you. In the game, characters can eventually become addicted to it particularly to what are known as BTL (Better Than Life) chips, just like a drug. I sort of sense a bit of that today seeing how some people get so absorbed in what's on their phones or tablets.
DNI I could also have therapeutic and medical applications as well. Imagine a once paralysed individual having muscular stimulating implants directly linked via DNI to the motor controlling segment of the brain or someone who lost a limb being connected via DNI to a life like prosthetic. It definitely has some good implications as well.
Apologies for the tangent there. I am one of those few for whom today's VR headsets don't work as I have what is known as a lazy eye (which also has 40-60 vision) so my stereoscopic sense is severely hamstrung along with my depth perception. I can't even watch an old 3D film with those red/blue glasses without getting a headache.
Fun fact: this could be done in a slightly less VR way in MMORPGs "Lord of the Rings Online", "World of Warcraft", "Horizons" and quite a few others. And neither of them managed to generate more than a few million (or in most cases: thousands) people interested in that feature. And none of those people made any money from it...
Anyone remembering Google Glass? You know, that kinda VR-ish device that helps each and everyone of us through everyday life by being... well.. helpful-ish and the absolutely most needed gadget in human history.. which flopped so hard that it took nearly 10 years to make the next attempt to push it on the market (soon(tm)...)
Stuff like that shows that companies do whatever it takes to make more money. And that is the only real reason for NFTs existing: trying out a new way to make money from - at best - nothing.
The Holidays seems like a very odd time to be promoting this overt materialism too, it's not even gift giving as some see this as times for as opposed to goodwill and caring for others.
Thank you, McGyver, well said.
Until Daz addresses the issue of the environmental impact of NFTs, I can't participate in this in any way.
And the those who are equating age with acceptance of the NFT support by Daz are ( intentionally or not) using the label, divide, and conquer method of of avoiding the real issue. In my ( admittedly tiny sample ) 3 classes of High school art students, 3 out of 67 were interested in NFTs at the cost of the environment.
One student joked that Zuckerberg is probably wearing a 'Save the Planet' t shirt as he sweeps the real costs of NFT s under the rug.
ChadCrypto, let's not pretend there is a magic-bullet fix for proof of work. Chia tried to be Proof of Space. All that happened was, the market's entire supply of fast SSD hard drives disappeared for a while. Proof of space requires terabytes of hard disk space filled with random numbers to provide the equivalent of proof of work.
Proof of stake doesn't solve the problems. Miners are still mining! Proof of stake seems to have serious flaws. That might explain why none of the majors are in a hurry to adopt it.
For people interested, this is a set of 4 articles that explain in a more approachable way how proof of stake works and why it doesn't really work.
Proof of Stake Explainer (includes definitions of proof of work, stake, etc)
https://medium.com/@abhisharm/understanding-proof-of-stake-through-its-flaws-pt-1-6728020994a1
https://medium.com/@abhisharm/understanding-proof-of-stake-through-its-flaws-part-2-nothing-s-at-stake-8d12d826956c
https://medium.com/@abhisharm/understanding-proof-of-stake-through-its-flaws-part-3-long-range-attacks-672a3d413501
TL;DR from Abishek Sharma's articles:
Proof of Stake attempts to solve the energy consumption problem by moving the Proof of Work onto the blockchain itself.
No Stake problem: With no particular stake to solve in mining, miners should mine every competing branch to maximize return. Some specific coins (eg Casper, Perrcoin and NXT) have measures to limit this.
Chain length problem: There are no limits on chain growth rate. A new proof of stake coin begins with a few staked coins. The originators can "revive" these coins so that they are the only ones who can imie on them and they control the bulk of assets on the coin. This also increases the length of the chain.
Weak Subjectivity problem: When a node comes online for the first time, they must ask a trusted source for the hash. This undermines the trustless nature of blockchain.
The existing Proof of Stake coins have measures to deal with these problems, but they reveal a trade-off between cost and trust.
There is no free lunch in the land of cryptocurrency.
To the actual topic, I also say no again and again. The more Daz tries to ram their NFT garbage down my throat, the less I want to spend money here or even visit here. As a binary male, I do feel left out - not that I would join an NFT discord or an NFT anything. I deleted this morning's orange banner without looking at it.
Welp, I'm nonbinary and I'm not thrilled with their choice of subject matter either. They've been good at adding more diverse models, but this goes back to the digital influencers thing and how real people are always going to be more important. I don't know many trans folks who can afford to buy into this stuff or any who like it, and they passed "the underground" as they were calling it about fifty miles back.
Even if I love daz for trying to be inclusive and a place for everyone, mixing in NFT stuff really gets me down. I wish you concentrate on providing us with tools to be creative (which I love you for), and leave the means of monetizing those creations to us, especially when it involves one so divisive.
I guess I'm too old for that kind of in-gang, but I'm only getting a headache when every place recently is asking me to 'create an account and join'. I can't keep track on all of those, which I may or may not come back to in about a year's time, and then I've often forgotten the password anyhow.
Besides the energy costs to create blockchain entries, there's the cost of hardware. Thanks to all this crytpo fun, graphics cards are near impossible to obtain. I'm finally getting a system with a 3090 graphics card and it's going to cost me about $1,500 more than it should have just because of how hard it is to get one of those cards. (Yes, I know it's not only because of mining, but that made things substantially worse.)
When the Proof of Stake first came out, hard drive prices shot up as well. Chia mining (one PoS scheme) can kill hard drives in less than 2 months. I haven't been monitoring hard drive prices like I have graphics cards but I'm pretty sure they're still noticeably higher than before this started. So that's more money that I've had to shell out for no benefit. On top of that, there's all the energy it takes to create the graphics cards and hds and how much extra landfill all these used up components will take up.
NFTs suck and the more DAZ pushes them, the more I wonder about spending money at DAZ. Then again, the premium I had to pay to get a new computer is money that might have gone to DAZ. I had to find the money somewhere, and a good chunk of it came from my DAZ budget.
great points, but who told you about my beanie-boo stash?
All good points and well said
Think about how you hear about NFTs.
-Someone sold NFTs for a lot of money.
-Somebody bought NFTs for a lot of money.
-Some company starts selling NFTs for money.
-Some game lets you earn NFTs for money.
------------
Something is missing here...what is it?
Oh that's right, the actual ART. Nobody ever talks about that aspect of NFTs. When it comes to NFTs, it is purely about the money.
You can talk about art without mentioning money. You can talk about video games without mentioning money. You can talk about VR without mentioning money.
That is a big issue people have with NFTs. It is no longer about the art anymore, it is about the money. And when something is so focused on money, you can bet problems will arise from it.
Any gamer who has watched the gamining industry can attest to what something like loot boxes has done to the art of video games. How microtransactions have turned many games into grind fests. You can now pay money to NOT PLAY the video game you purchased to play. That is what experience boosters are, they allow you to skip the grind for a while, so that you do not have to play the game as much to level up.
Can you imagine if classic pen and paper D&D sold experience boosters to skip the grind??? That doesn't even make sense. But this is happening in video games. Things that might have been cheat codes in years past are sold as premium add ons.
Some people are making money on NFTs, so now every share holder meeting at every game company has share holders asking how or when their game will get NFTs. There is pressure being applied to studios to find some way, any way, to force this monetization into their games. This is not me spouting off, you hear this sentiment from game developers all over the industry who have to deal with share holders.
Valve banned NFTs from games sold on Steam. So no game that uses NFTs can be on Steam. So there's tha
The only place NFTs are going is toward safer transactions that protect the creator of the art, and the buyer, by putting a digital hamper on forgeries. A vast majority of humans feel authenticated by what they wear or own or achieve. Some buy brand name shoes for various reasons. Others couldn't care less about brand name shoes. Ego can play a part in some NFT acquisitions. Some people like exclusive clubs or name dropping, and some simply appreciate a thing of value or beauty. Some strictly see it as an investment opportunity. Pablo didn't just buy Beeple: Everyday to collect it or be the first. He had a plan. Four months later he resold a piece he paid 66K for 100 times and co-founded the Museum of Crypto Art (for his ever expanding collection). Many collectors are playing the NFTs like one would play the stock market. They analyze the volume traded, the community, the number of assets, the value (as a realtor I would use comps to assist sellers or buyers), the rarity, and most importantly the utilities (assets) of each item. Trends are hard to forecast, they rise fast and fall faster. Trends don't have the lifespan of a classic.
The following is for anyone foggy about NFTs:
Anyone can right click and mint an NFT, but if you do not have the legal right to reproduce the work, it is considered a forgery and the legal ramifications exists, as usual. NFTs allow the purchase and reselling of art by giving that art a unique identifier, similar to how us humans each have a social security or social insurance number etc. Because the identifier is attached to the item, and not the creator or the minter, the journey of the item is transparent and has a traceable digital footprint. The prime issue with NFTs is it is extremely difficult to determine if an NFT is an original or an unauthentic right click mint. Adobe has launched a beta Content Credentials, which when rolled out will be open source. The point of such is to identify the creator of the art to the buyer and impede the purchase of unauthenticated art. And nobody is interested in buying a NFT forgery. Thanks to Content Credentials, buyers will be able to click and see if the work is authentic. It can even track edited pixels. It will be an open source available to all, including Gimp users etc, in the near future. Minting is easy. It's simply uploading and posting artwork for sale or posting a collected piece for resale. We can all see that Pablo minted (resold) one piece from the Beeple collection 100 times. If I looked I'd probably find the trading volume higher than 100. A piece of art can be minted as new or as a resell. You simply upload your art piece, enter the amount of pieces, it can be any number (a collection can be any number of pieces - several are at 10,000), add a value (price can be fixed or auction bids), add description. A strong community helps. The biggest value is not always the art item. Sometimes the utilities is what motivates movement. A ultility is simply an additional asset, benefit or perk. A few examples would be an invite to a real life event, a part of the proceeds donated to a charity, exclusive membership or game access. These utilities are offered by the minter (the one who posts it for sale) and to the buyer/ collector who typically resells the asset at the right time in the future. These utilities are typically tied in with the artwork, by putting a ticket in a hat etc. I have seen some buyers resell assets nine days after they purchased, at a price below what they paid for the item. Maybe they have buyers remorse, need the money for something better or relisted it for a lower when they were drunk. It could also be out of fear. Prices fluctuate and sometimes people panic as soon as they see it plummet toward a downward trend and fear holding out for the upside. If you read someone had a L, that one letter lingo means s/he took a loss. This sort of reminds me of when the cloud 'arrived'. If people had not used that word [cloud] and used different verbage, [a cluster of individual servers located in homes and businesses throughout the world, piggybacking/clones of each other, dedicated to hosting your data/site so when one bites the dust, another still has it backed up and serves it to you] people would not have been so initially mystified about the cloud. Simply put some of us have been doing some of these types of things already. Putting money in your wallet at PayPal. Cryptocurrency is electronic money. Minting is uploading/posting art for sale. A Utility is buy this item and you get these freebies/benefits/perks. The NFT is similar to an ISBN or an ASIN. It's unique to the book or e-book and recognized worldwide and traceable to the publisher (minter) and the author (artist/creator). An NFT does the same for digital art but is not traceable YET to the artist/creator. Once Content Credentials is rolled out and working, I think more artists will participate and use the platform. Gas is an issue (the cost of transactions) but they are anywhere heavy traffic occurs during a big sale or launch. And you can watch and monitor the gas prices and choose to lose out on a utility and buy later when the crowd thins, but it's that utility, get a free this or that, that motivates buyers. A catch 22 for energy usage. An example is an item for 0.001 ETH + a ETH gas fee of 0.044 costing $176USD. A refresh 2 seconds later had a price of $208USD. Wait for lower gas prices and the item will probably be unavailable. Makes rendering costs seem easier to swallow.
YOur wrong. POS is very low energy. If you go after this, then you have to go after all the gaming in the world. Using same GPUs and hundreds of millions of people playing 24/7. using up all that power to play their games. Maybe we all should stop using electricty and go back to the time of no power. Because everything is putting a drain on the enviroment!
Well, this is why the world of NFTs is interesting. People are paying money to these game companies on microtransactions. Where they don't own the assests. With NFTs you own those game assests. And they are able to be be used anywhere, as long as the other games allow it. Even if the game goes under. You still own it, unlike if you buy that skin in Counter Strike. If Valve goes away. you skins go away. NFTs will always be in your wallet. Which is the big difference. You all don't see the big picture. And for me, it's about the art as well. Yes, I was able to earn money trading NFTs. So I can pay my bills, live and purchase stuff from DAZ3d. I don't see a downside for at least myself.
In the end, this is about putting the power to the player. Where they can hold, sell, trade and use their owned assests. Where you really can't do easy with game controlled assests. You simply do not own them, even though you paid for them.
i was going to learn about this and give it a try, and signed up to the DAZ Discord thing ...but I'm going to drop myself off. Too much complicated mumbo jumbo for my old head. Wow ... I had joined Discord before and didn;t like it at all...stopped, and will again. good discounts coming from there though at the DAZ store.
If I quit do I need to send my free and highly discounted loot back I've gotten yesterday and today?
No! it's yours. So to speak. Which actually brings up just that. When we buy Daz products in the usual way. We can only use them for visual media. We have to pay more to use them in games. We can get extended use. Yet we really don't own those products. I might be wrong though. TOS are so long and such garble to understand sometimes.
I started to join this new DAZ Discord and was going through the steps for the freebies. But when it came to "Share with DAZ what discord channels you're on" I noped out and canceled the whole thing.
Thankyou, kyoto kid very inspiring!
LOL, that would be odd for me since the other discord channels I sub to are mostly gaming ones and some of the games use DAZ assets, so there is a bit of piracy going on no matter how many times I report it.
One reason (and just one out of the many) is with some countries (I won't mention those off the top of my head, but there are a lot) there is nothing you can do about it because they don't recognize copyright laws and use the assets to create games, well just about everything and sell it mostly to their own people.
If AML regs aren't a concern with NFT, then can we relax with the nudity in the gallery?
I don't care that much about the NFT topic, but if you're going to be loose on the one, then functional &/or artistic n00dz would be helpful to customers, at a minimum. Let's play looser in general.
(Usefulness. Like, tanlines and baked-in pubic hair, and sometimes even the hard arse shadow line below the buttocks on some textures.)
Yea, but a lof of things that use electricity are an absolute necessity for maintaining reasonable living standards. NFTs are not.
Artangel, thank you for that detailed explanation. You are obviously very knowledgable about all of this.
Now, someone else want to try explaining WHY someone would buy an artistic NFT and WHY they would ever increase in value?
Is it stated somewhere, how many years the link to the digital content will be up?
What is the value of the unique NFT (=not unique art piece) when the link goes down?
There is no way the "other games allow it" thing happens on any kind of scale unless we hit the singularity and completely remake the way games are created from the ground up. It'd be so expensive and resource-intensive that it would require pretty much all dev resources to go toward it. You owning your NFT microtransaction skin forever means exactly as much as me not owning my FFXIV mount skin forever if there are not lots and lots of developers willing to remake someone else's assets to put in their game so you feel like you got your money's worth.
It doesn't work like Daz; they can't just import an OBJ and have it work on multiple platforms. In order to transfer most assets across games, they would need to be remade. Rescaled for your new characters. Re-rigged. Re-textured. Implemented using whatever pipeline they have set up. QA checked. That's if it's just a skin and not something with stats like some people apparently think is possible. And all of that working under the assumption that game companies have no interest in a consistent art style and just love the concept so much that they're willing to let you buy stuff in another game and then implement it for you in theirs for free. And every game that did this down the chain would be in a worse position, because players would have more and more assets from other games and less and less of a reason to buy anything from theirs.
Now, if you only want to play NFT-based games that have made a philosophical commitment to honoring the transfer of assets, cool. I legitimately wish them good luck with that, because if they can come up with an efficient pipeline for development on that scale we can roll it out to the rest of the industry and solve crunch.
Okay... What appliances do you own that consume 180 kWh (one Ethereum Proof Of Stake transaction) each time you use them?
If you were to say "low energy in comparison to a typical crypto transaction" (the average bitcoin transaction is 1,170 kilowatt hours, equal to six weeks worth of energy consumption for an average American household), then I could accept that claim, but "low energy" is absolutely not what I'd call Proof Of Stake's 180 kilowatt hours (that's like 6-7 days worth of energy consumption for the average U.S. home) and that's kind of a misleading statement which I'm just going to assume was not done deliberately, but perhaps was done just quoting a pro Ethereum site.
These statistics are not randomly made up and are easily available, including begrudgingly available from pro-crypto websites.
Granted if an individual owns a Stargate or other trans galactic wormhole generation device, one might find 180 kWh a bit on the low energy side, but most of my appliances are ENERGY STAR rated... hell, my refrigerator is only 300 watts and my time machine barely sucks in 100 watts... although it does use 6 D-cell Quantum Yttrium-flarbide backup batteries, but still, that's entirely off the grid and hardly more dangerous than the quantum singularity that powers my electric razor.
Regardless, 180 kilowatts hours is still like 100k worth of individual credit card transactions and people complain about that too... it's also not that great considering the average number of Ethereum transactions per day is around 1.2 million... so that's still 216,000,000 kWh per day, far outstripping all other transaction methods in the financial industries.
Every time I visit DAZ these days, I come away feeling the opposite of inspired.
So can I just NFT blockchain my entire DAZ library into the ethereum and be done with it?
Brilliant! And the only way I can think that all of that might work is if all the games shared an engine that could use assets in a standardized format that unifies scale and all the other elements you describe. There would have to be rules for making such items and the items would have to have a file format that stores all the requisite data implementing those items. The games would have to be programmed to accept and handle that data - Maybe through a universal plugin?
But what are the odds that game devs would want all that extra headache? It's enough headache for game devs to make their own games. And, of course, technology moves forward. Assets made today might seem quite lame in a few years. Then what? And when the format changes (as it surely will over time), would all the newer games have to somehow maintain backward compatibility without breaking anything? Would the older games have to be rewritten to handle newer items? All of this might work better when we reach the point that AIs are writing most of the code - If we ever reach that point. But AIs tend to do things their own way. And their interpretation of instructions is sometimes quite unexpected.
As for getting people to buy new items, that's easy. Devs can fix it so power level in the game worlds increase and each generation of new items is more powerful and cooler than the last. It invariably reaches the point where the older items become useless as the overall power level of the games continues to increase. Maybe that deliberate temporal obsolescence is the key to making the whole thing work. IDK, and I don't really want to find out. But hey! Thanks for the pleasant diversion
LOL, Isn't that suppose to be "1.21 gigawatts of electricity"? Sorry had to say that.