Did Ya See? NFT Bought For 2.9 Million Can't Sell For More Than $280

WendyLuvsCatz

then what is the art?

PerttiA

WendyLuvsCatz said:

then what is the art?

It's not about art. 

glaseye

Sooo, "picture" this;

Suppose I post an image here... forum, gallery, doesn't matter....

A little time later someone creates/links (whatever it is that needs to be done) an NFT from/to it.....

Then the image gets deleted (maybe it was violating the TOS, who knows)....

NFT linking to what???? (And yes, I know, dead links have been mentioned many times over already)...

The more I read about NFT's, the less I understand the reasoning behind it.. or maybe even more despise the reasoning behind it.

AbyssalEros

WendyLuvsCatz said:

regardless of my views I will admit the lack of NFT art being posted in this forum is rather disapointing

is anyone actually rendering any or are they afraid of people rightclick downloading it?

Non Funny Clowns

I recently rendered an NFT and started a whole render challenge with it.
However, I cannot post it here because of its nature, but if you are interested, you can find it on my DA; the title is naturally "NFT."
Oh, and only adults, please.  

Richard Haseltine

WendyLuvsCatz said:

then what is the art?

The art may be the thing linked to, or in some cases buying the NFT also buys more traditional assets for example(the Beeple item that set hearts a-flutter included the physical model, the Daz NFPs included content with the NFT part carrying the license with it if tansferred).

AlmightyQUEST

glaseye said:

Sooo, "picture" this;

Suppose I post an image here... forum, gallery, doesn't matter....

A little time later someone creates/links (whatever it is that needs to be done) an NFT from/to it.....

Then the image gets deleted (maybe it was violating the TOS, who knows)....

NFT linking to what???? (And yes, I know, dead links have been mentioned many times over already)...

The more I read about NFT's, the less I understand the reasoning behind it.. or maybe even more despise the reasoning behind it.

It sounds like you understand it!

plasma_ring

Richard Haseltine said:

WendyLuvsCatz said:

regardless of my views I will admit the lack of NFT art being posted in this forum is rather disapointing

is anyone actually rendering any or are they afraid of people rightclick downloading it?

Download what? The NFT is not the image, except in a very few cases using small GIFs, nor would downloading the image have any bearing on the NFT's NFTness.

I'm not sure if this was Wendy's intent, but "right-click saving" NFTs originated on Twitter as a deliberate poke at the initial sales pitch--that purchasing an NFT is equivalent to buying a unique piece of art. That was the original claim, because the idea was that only a person who owned an NFT could eventually display it in the metaverse or legitimately use it as their avatar. There are even posts on Daz's official blog describing it as a way to sell your art. It would be disingenuous to pretend that most people who get into this haven't been told it's a new way to sell their art, and that they don't think of it as having sold an image. There is and always has been an enormous gap between what NFTs were (in my most charitable interpretation) intended to be and what they actually are, and the joke is that of course you can simply right click the art and save it, because the art is incidental to what you're really buying and there is nothing about the NFT that gives the image itself any uniqueness or legitimacy. 

In my conversations about this, I've found that the useful thing about this split definition is that it doesn't matter whether someone approaches criticism by talking about what people are really buying, or whether they take the idea of it as selling art at face value. Either way, they can be told they don't understand what an NFT is and thus they're unqualified to have a negative opinion about them. The real working definition of an NFT seems to be somewhere in between: you are only buying an entry on the blockchain, but it is poor etiquette and a breach of the NFT community's social standards to treat the image as anything other than a unique art piece by virtue of its attachment to the NFT. You are supposed to respect that the buyer intends to purchase art, and that they are purchasing the token as a proxy.

I'm not pointing this out as a criticism--social arrangements outside what is strictly legal or possible to enforce happen in art communities all the time. The only thing I take exception to is talking about this whole thing like the blockchain is special technology allowing digital artists new freedoms and not a situation where everyone is agreeing that the monkey picture came with the link and no one else should use it. 

Paintbox

The problem is also investment : once you dive in, and you inserted a certain amount of money in it, you can do nothing else but prop it up / cheerlead it. At that point most people would not keep a clear head and go diving in even deeper (the so called Sunk Cost Fallacy or the escallation of commitment). This is exactly the mechanism that brought the highs, and now the lows as some can not simply keep up anymore with real money.

As some companies went in full charge with Crypto/NFT, it's probably becomes harder and harder to quit it for that reason.

It also becomes a culture all on it's where people keep telling eachother how Great It Is or how This Next Version Will Be Different, aka a new bubble is formed. Normally I wouldn't mind, to each their own, if it didn't have so many negative impacts.

Torquinox

plasma_ring said:

I'm not sure if this was Wendy's intent, but "right-click saving" NFTs originated on Twitter as a deliberate poke at the initial sales pitch--that purchasing an NFT is equivalent to buying a unique piece of art. That was the original claim, because the idea was that only a person who owned an NFT could eventually display it in the metaverse or legitimately use it as their avatar. There are even posts on Daz's official blog describing it as a way to sell your art. It would be disingenuous to pretend that most people who get into this haven't been told it's a new way to sell their art, and that they don't think of it as having sold an image. There is and always has been an enormous gap between what NFTs were (in my most charitable interpretation) intended to be and what they actually are, and the joke is that of course you can simply right click the art and save it, because the art is incidental to what you're really buying and there is nothing about the NFT that gives the image itself any uniqueness or legitimacy. 

In my conversations about this, I've found that the useful thing about this split definition is that it doesn't matter whether someone approaches criticism by talking about what people are really buying, or whether they take the idea of it as selling art at face value. Either way, they can be told they don't understand what an NFT is and thus they're unqualified to have a negative opinion about them. The real working definition of an NFT seems to be somewhere in between: you are only buying an entry on the blockchain, but it is poor etiquette and a breach of the NFT community's social standards to treat the image as anything other than a unique art piece by virtue of its attachment to the NFT. You are supposed to respect that the buyer intends to purchase art, and that they are purchasing the token as a proxy.

I'm not pointing this out as a criticism--social arrangements outside what is strictly legal or possible to enforce happen in art communities all the time. The only thing I take exception to is talking about this whole thing like the blockchain is special technology allowing digital artists new freedoms and not a situation where everyone is agreeing that the monkey picture came with the link and no one else should use it. 

As I understand it, the whole point of the NFT is that the image itself can be common and easily viewed by anyone for free. This is pointed out in many articles on the subject. An image, any image, a common image found everywhere gains a modicum of exclusivity and value through the NFT's encoded link - Nothing more! This is why you can have an NFT of Nyan Cat and other silly memes that are available for free all over the internet. The idea that the NFT grants uniqueness to the image itself was never part of the bargain because the actual image or item could never be encoded into the blockchain; and the subject of the NFT was never that exclusive. All this other stuff you mention is, at best, wishful thinking.

I trimmed the quote and fixed my typos. And we may actually be saying the same thing, similar things, or something.

Torquinox

@Sevrin This guy spells it all out pretty well, I think.

vrba79

The difference between an NFT and a pet rock, is that you actually got something for your money with a pet rock.

WendyLuvsCatz

Celcius network has filed for bankrupsy, bubbles popping everywhere but chapagne glasses

plasma_ring

Torquinox said:

plasma_ring said:

I'm not sure if this was Wendy's intent, but "right-click saving" NFTs originated on Twitter as a deliberate poke at the initial sales pitch--that purchasing an NFT is equivalent to buying a unique piece of art. That was the original claim, because the idea was that only a person who owned an NFT could eventually display it in the metaverse or legitimately use it as their avatar. There are even posts on Daz's official blog describing it as a way to sell your art. It would be disingenuous to pretend that most people who get into this haven't been told it's a new way to sell their art, and that they don't think of it as having sold an image. There is and always has been an enormous gap between what NFTs were (in my most charitable interpretation) intended to be and what they actually are, and the joke is that of course you can simply right click the art and save it, because the art is incidental to what you're really buying and there is nothing about the NFT that gives the image itself any uniqueness or legitimacy. 

In my conversations about this, I've found that the useful thing about this split definition is that it doesn't matter whether someone approaches criticism by talking about what people are really buying, or whether they take the idea of it as selling art at face value. Either way, they can be told they don't understand what an NFT is and thus they're unqualified to have a negative opinion about them. The real working definition of an NFT seems to be somewhere in between: you are only buying an entry on the blockchain, but it is poor etiquette and a breach of the NFT community's social standards to treat the image as anything other than a unique art piece by virtue of its attachment to the NFT. You are supposed to respect that the buyer intends to purchase art, and that they are purchasing the token as a proxy.

I'm not pointing this out as a criticism--social arrangements outside what is strictly legal or possible to enforce happen in art communities all the time. The only thing I take exception to is talking about this whole thing like the blockchain is special technology allowing digital artists new freedoms and not a situation where everyone is agreeing that the monkey picture came with the link and no one else should use it. 

As I understand it, the whole point of the NFT is that the image itself can be common and easily viewed by anyone for free. This is pointed out in many articles on the subject. An image, any image, a common image found everywhere gains a modicum of exclusivity and value through the NFT's encoded link - Nothing more! This is why you can have an NFT of Nyan Cat and other silly memes that are available for free all over the internet. The idea that the NFT grants uniqueness to the image itself was never part of the bargain because the actual image or item could never be encoded into the blockchain; and the subject of the NFT was never that exclusive. All this other stuff you mention is, at best, wishful thinking.

I trimmed the quote and fixed my typos. And we may actually be saying the same thing, similar things, or something.

Late to this, but we're saying similar things, or at least not contradictory things. 

I went into this in one of the other threads, but the whole argument for NFTs assumes a future in which they're a ubiquitous, universally-valued commodity and the metaverse--or something like it--is the new social media. Twitter's hexagon PFP is a functional example of where they thought this would go, but Metakovan has talked extensively about how he sees NFTs as the thing people will use to express their identity and individuality in the metaverse--like a pair of designer shoes. An example someone gave was having a digital apartment in the metaverse and being able to display the NFTs you own on your digital walls. That doesn't stop other people from looking at the art, but it's a kind of exclusivity that confers bragging rights; if you're authorized to display this digital item, everyone knows you had the money to pay for it and you were savvy enough to have good taste at the right time. And that exclusivity is enforced by a (hypothetical) system in which everything is built on the blockchain and it can be easily verified that you're the legitimate owner.

I can look at images of nearly all the famous works of art in private collections for free online, but only one person has purchased the exclusive ability to touch and display the original piece. NFTs are an attempt to recreate that exact dynamic with digital artwork, except that the exclusivity in play is entirely prestige-based because there isn't anything particularly special about the experience of holding an "original"--unless someone is able to build the online infrastructure to make displaying that certified original prestigious. If you don't believe with all your heart that someone is going to do that, spending $100k+ on a blockchain entry sounds a little foolish. If you absolutely believe that's where the future is headed, purchasing an NFT now is like having the opportunity to buy any of these before the entire world realizes their true value. 

Because the infrastructure of the metaverse does not yet exist, people are trying to create the culture they'd like to see everyone adopt by treating NFTs as prestige items and honoring their exclusivity and emotional value. They treat images attached to NFTs like gallery pieces or unique expressions of individual identity. They basically have to be characterized as an exclusive status symbol to have any chance of capturing the popular imagination, and the best way to do that is to pretend like they already are. 

Someone trolling an NFT fan by reposting their PFP image under their tweet and going, "Look, I have the same NFT!" doesn't truly think they're taking anything away from them; they're thumbing their nose at the idea that owning it is impressive. It's a refusal to honor the exclusivity or help create the consensus of prestige. 

 

PerttiA

plasma_ring said:

That doesn't stop other people from looking at the art, but it's a kind of exclusivity that confers bragging rights; if you're authorized to display this digital item, everyone knows you had the money to pay for it and you were savvy enough to have good taste at the right time. And that exclusivity is enforced by a (hypothetical) system in which everything is built on the blockchain and it can be easily verified that you're the legitimate owner.

Legitimate owner of the token (NFT), but that does not say anything about being legitimate owner of the content linked in the token,,, 

plasma_ring

PerttiA said:

plasma_ring said:

That doesn't stop other people from looking at the art, but it's a kind of exclusivity that confers bragging rights; if you're authorized to display this digital item, everyone knows you had the money to pay for it and you were savvy enough to have good taste at the right time. And that exclusivity is enforced by a (hypothetical) system in which everything is built on the blockchain and it can be easily verified that you're the legitimate owner.

Legitimate owner of the token (NFT), but that does not say anything about being legitimate owner of the content linked in the token,,, 

Right, but there's a difference between being the legitimate owner from a legal/copyright perspective (i.e., you own the copyright or commercial rights to the artwork) and being the legitimate owner of it in terms of what it was sold to you for. "Legitimate user" is probably more correct for the latter case, but because NFTs are so closely tied to identity and the concept of digital ownership, I'm willing to venture a guess that most of the people who've purchased them would not think of it that way. But any one-of-a-kind art piece you purchased wouldn't come with the rights to use it commercially by default.

I compare it to adoptable character designs all the time because it works almost exactly the same way. If I create a pre-made character design and sell it to someone, I retain the copyright and the buyer doesn't have the right to use the image commercially, because I'm selling it for personal use. If they want to use it as their avatar or display the artwork on Toyhou.se and write stories about the character and roleplay as them, that's covered under the terms of the sale. However, my terms explicitly state that they can't use the images to create items for sale, or use it as a logo for their business, or add it to their for-profit project (or mint it as an NFT...). If they want to do that, they need to work with me to arrange a commercial use license and additional payment. 

That person still owns the design under the original terms of sale. They can even resell it if they want, and I no longer have any control over what becomes of it beyond what we agreed on at the point of sale. But they don't own the commercial rights. 

The sale of an NFT is typically granting that kind of ownership. Where some (in fairness, not all) NFTs muddy the waters is that they're pitched as a kind of radical advancement in digital ownership and a form of ultimate control over the thing you bought, which...is absolutely not realistic in most cases. Even in the sunniest, most optimistic version of the world where people think video game developers are going to start selling them their Legendary Armor of Hodl to keep forever and ever, no IP holder would automatically include the commercial rights. After bigger gaming companies actually started to release NFTs, I saw a lot of people who'd been excited for it balk when they realized they were....literally just more expensive cash shop items, under the exact same restrictions, which they were warned would not be preserved indefinitely. The most a publisher might do is give them the right to resell it to others. Which they can do without blockchain, it's just usually a disaster idea because introducing real money trading to games attracts game-ruining behavior. 

PerttiA

Because there is no mechanism to prove that the seller of the NFT has any rights whatsoever to the content linked to the NFT, the NFT concept does not provide (by itself) any more rights to the content than one has for content one can copy freely from the net.

Paintbox

The problem is that every company wants to "own" the metaverse. Facebook even changed its name to be the first mover in this space. It's the exact anti-thesis of how the world wide web came about (a way to collaborate between universities)

Torquinox

plasma_ring said:

Late to this, but we're saying similar things, or at least not contradictory things. 

I went into this in one of the other threads, but the whole argument for NFTs assumes a future in which they're a ubiquitous, universally-valued commodity and the metaverse--or something like it--is the new social media. Twitter's hexagon PFP is a functional example of where they thought this would go, but Metakovan has talked extensively about how he sees NFTs as the thing people will use to express their identity and individuality in the metaverse--like a pair of designer shoes. An example someone gave was having a digital apartment in the metaverse and being able to display the NFTs you own on your digital walls. That doesn't stop other people from looking at the art, but it's a kind of exclusivity that confers bragging rights; if you're authorized to display this digital item, everyone knows you had the money to pay for it and you were savvy enough to have good taste at the right time. And that exclusivity is enforced by a (hypothetical) system in which everything is built on the blockchain and it can be easily verified that you're the legitimate owner.

I can look at images of nearly all the famous works of art in private collections for free online, but only one person has purchased the exclusive ability to touch and display the original piece. NFTs are an attempt to recreate that exact dynamic with digital artwork, except that the exclusivity in play is entirely prestige-based because there isn't anything particularly special about the experience of holding an "original"--unless someone is able to build the online infrastructure to make displaying that certified original prestigious. If you don't believe with all your heart that someone is going to do that, spending $100k+ on a blockchain entry sounds a little foolish. If you absolutely believe that's where the future is headed, purchasing an NFT now is like having the opportunity to buy any of these before the entire world realizes their true value. 

Because the infrastructure of the metaverse does not yet exist, people are trying to create the culture they'd like to see everyone adopt by treating NFTs as prestige items and honoring their exclusivity and emotional value. They treat images attached to NFTs like gallery pieces or unique expressions of individual identity. They basically have to be characterized as an exclusive status symbol to have any chance of capturing the popular imagination, and the best way to do that is to pretend like they already are. 

Someone trolling an NFT fan by reposting their PFP image under their tweet and going, "Look, I have the same NFT!" doesn't truly think they're taking anything away from them; they're thumbing their nose at the idea that owning it is impressive. It's a refusal to honor the exclusivity or help create the consensus of prestige.

Plasma Ring, your post clarifies things brilliantly. Thank you for that.

It also illuminates how completely ill-equipped I am to participate in that world. I've never been interested in twitter. No account, don't want one. I totally side with the troll in your last paragraph. I feel the same about the metaverse, and I can't imagine what would have to happen to change my mind about it.

When you talk about the $100k for the NFT and I know full well the number could be much bigger than that, I die inside thinking that much money in more enlightened hands could be used to do something good for the world. That will not happen, of course. And I tend to think anyone preening over their prestige that way is best described with a seven-letter word not allowed here. I do not believe any of this will be worth the electricity burned to make it exist in the world. Even if it could physically exist, it's not worth burning the biosphere to do it. But I don't control the wants of others.

So, I guess I'll just sit in my studio making art that has no Eth value and mostly only interests me.

Thanks again. Always good to read your posts.

Wonderland

plasma_ring said:

Torquinox said:

plasma_ring said:

I'm not sure if this was Wendy's intent, but "right-click saving" NFTs originated on Twitter as a deliberate poke at the initial sales pitch--that purchasing an NFT is equivalent to buying a unique piece of art. That was the original claim, because the idea was that only a person who owned an NFT could eventually display it in the metaverse or legitimately use it as their avatar. There are even posts on Daz's official blog describing it as a way to sell your art. It would be disingenuous to pretend that most people who get into this haven't been told it's a new way to sell their art, and that they don't think of it as having sold an image. There is and always has been an enormous gap between what NFTs were (in my most charitable interpretation) intended to be and what they actually are, and the joke is that of course you can simply right click the art and save it, because the art is incidental to what you're really buying and there is nothing about the NFT that gives the image itself any uniqueness or legitimacy. 

In my conversations about this, I've found that the useful thing about this split definition is that it doesn't matter whether someone approaches criticism by talking about what people are really buying, or whether they take the idea of it as selling art at face value. Either way, they can be told they don't understand what an NFT is and thus they're unqualified to have a negative opinion about them. The real working definition of an NFT seems to be somewhere in between: you are only buying an entry on the blockchain, but it is poor etiquette and a breach of the NFT community's social standards to treat the image as anything other than a unique art piece by virtue of its attachment to the NFT. You are supposed to respect that the buyer intends to purchase art, and that they are purchasing the token as a proxy.

I'm not pointing this out as a criticism--social arrangements outside what is strictly legal or possible to enforce happen in art communities all the time. The only thing I take exception to is talking about this whole thing like the blockchain is special technology allowing digital artists new freedoms and not a situation where everyone is agreeing that the monkey picture came with the link and no one else should use it. 

As I understand it, the whole point of the NFT is that the image itself can be common and easily viewed by anyone for free. This is pointed out in many articles on the subject. An image, any image, a common image found everywhere gains a modicum of exclusivity and value through the NFT's encoded link - Nothing more! This is why you can have an NFT of Nyan Cat and other silly memes that are available for free all over the internet. The idea that the NFT grants uniqueness to the image itself was never part of the bargain because the actual image or item could never be encoded into the blockchain; and the subject of the NFT was never that exclusive. All this other stuff you mention is, at best, wishful thinking.

I trimmed the quote and fixed my typos. And we may actually be saying the same thing, similar things, or something.

Late to this, but we're saying similar things, or at least not contradictory things. 

I went into this in one of the other threads, but the whole argument for NFTs assumes a future in which they're a ubiquitous, universally-valued commodity and the metaverse--or something like it--is the new social media. Twitter's hexagon PFP is a functional example of where they thought this would go, but Metakovan has talked extensively about how he sees NFTs as the thing people will use to express their identity and individuality in the metaverse--like a pair of designer shoes. An example someone gave was having a digital apartment in the metaverse and being able to display the NFTs you own on your digital walls. That doesn't stop other people from looking at the art, but it's a kind of exclusivity that confers bragging rights; if you're authorized to display this digital item, everyone knows you had the money to pay for it and you were savvy enough to have good taste at the right time. And that exclusivity is enforced by a (hypothetical) system in which everything is built on the blockchain and it can be easily verified that you're the legitimate owner.

I can look at images of nearly all the famous works of art in private collections for free online, but only one person has purchased the exclusive ability to touch and display the original piece. NFTs are an attempt to recreate that exact dynamic with digital artwork, except that the exclusivity in play is entirely prestige-based because there isn't anything particularly special about the experience of holding an "original"--unless someone is able to build the online infrastructure to make displaying that certified original prestigious. If you don't believe with all your heart that someone is going to do that, spending $100k+ on a blockchain entry sounds a little foolish. If you absolutely believe that's where the future is headed, purchasing an NFT now is like having the opportunity to buy any of these before the entire world realizes their true value. 

Because the infrastructure of the metaverse does not yet exist, people are trying to create the culture they'd like to see everyone adopt by treating NFTs as prestige items and honoring their exclusivity and emotional value. They treat images attached to NFTs like gallery pieces or unique expressions of individual identity. They basically have to be characterized as an exclusive status symbol to have any chance of capturing the popular imagination, and the best way to do that is to pretend like they already are. 

Someone trolling an NFT fan by reposting their PFP image under their tweet and going, "Look, I have the same NFT!" doesn't truly think they're taking anything away from them; they're thumbing their nose at the idea that owning it is impressive. It's a refusal to honor the exclusivity or help create the consensus of prestige. 

 

This is what I don't understand. There already are several metaverses. I have an art gallery/club/party space in Altspace VR and put giant jpgs of my art on the walls and even gave someone else a few watermarked jpgs of my art to put in some of their worlds. You don't need it to be an NFT to display your art in the metaverse. You can put your website and socials on the jumbo jpg and display it on large buildings. Technically you can put anything you find on the internet on your metaverse house or gallery walls as jpgs. What is the point of it being an NFT? Especially if you're the original artist. I started to create NFTs, actually one NFT I was going to try to sell as an experiment then realized it cost a lot of money just to mint it and put it for sale and my bank (Chase) won't even connect to Coinbase so I'd have to create some new weird digital bank account asking for my SS security number and the whole thing just seemed like a bizarre scammy venture. I'd rather just sell prints of my art or even sell it on coffee mugs, t-shirts, etc... It seems like the whole point of NFTs is collecting, like baseball cards or rare comic books. Except you don't even actually posess anything. In the art world you can create limited edition prints and still maintain a rarity.  I really don't see how NFTs can be more than a fad or have any intrinsic value. 

nomad-ads_8ecd56922e

The collectible-bubblegum-cards aspect of NFTs is simply what the current focus of the media and whatnot is.  One of the other expected purposes an NFT could be used for is if some future (or existing) virtual world system builds its inventorying system around the NFT mechanism such that ownership of a particular object, such as a virtual chair or table, is coordinated via the NFT system so that things like non-copyable are kept track of and honored by the underlying virtual world system.  I.e. if the table is non-copy, and there's already a copy rezzed out, it would recognize you already had a copy rezzed somewhere else and not let you rez another until you've gone and picked back up the earlier one you rezzed.  My understanding is there already is a particular virtual world system that integrated NFT tech into it wrt in-world objects.  (Remember, NFT isn't just pictures.)

plasma_ring

Wonderland said:

plasma_ring said:

Torquinox said:

plasma_ring said:

I'm not sure if this was Wendy's intent, but "right-click saving" NFTs originated on Twitter as a deliberate poke at the initial sales pitch--that purchasing an NFT is equivalent to buying a unique piece of art. That was the original claim, because the idea was that only a person who owned an NFT could eventually display it in the metaverse or legitimately use it as their avatar. There are even posts on Daz's official blog describing it as a way to sell your art. It would be disingenuous to pretend that most people who get into this haven't been told it's a new way to sell their art, and that they don't think of it as having sold an image. There is and always has been an enormous gap between what NFTs were (in my most charitable interpretation) intended to be and what they actually are, and the joke is that of course you can simply right click the art and save it, because the art is incidental to what you're really buying and there is nothing about the NFT that gives the image itself any uniqueness or legitimacy. 

In my conversations about this, I've found that the useful thing about this split definition is that it doesn't matter whether someone approaches criticism by talking about what people are really buying, or whether they take the idea of it as selling art at face value. Either way, they can be told they don't understand what an NFT is and thus they're unqualified to have a negative opinion about them. The real working definition of an NFT seems to be somewhere in between: you are only buying an entry on the blockchain, but it is poor etiquette and a breach of the NFT community's social standards to treat the image as anything other than a unique art piece by virtue of its attachment to the NFT. You are supposed to respect that the buyer intends to purchase art, and that they are purchasing the token as a proxy.

I'm not pointing this out as a criticism--social arrangements outside what is strictly legal or possible to enforce happen in art communities all the time. The only thing I take exception to is talking about this whole thing like the blockchain is special technology allowing digital artists new freedoms and not a situation where everyone is agreeing that the monkey picture came with the link and no one else should use it. 

As I understand it, the whole point of the NFT is that the image itself can be common and easily viewed by anyone for free. This is pointed out in many articles on the subject. An image, any image, a common image found everywhere gains a modicum of exclusivity and value through the NFT's encoded link - Nothing more! This is why you can have an NFT of Nyan Cat and other silly memes that are available for free all over the internet. The idea that the NFT grants uniqueness to the image itself was never part of the bargain because the actual image or item could never be encoded into the blockchain; and the subject of the NFT was never that exclusive. All this other stuff you mention is, at best, wishful thinking.

I trimmed the quote and fixed my typos. And we may actually be saying the same thing, similar things, or something.

Late to this, but we're saying similar things, or at least not contradictory things. 

I went into this in one of the other threads, but the whole argument for NFTs assumes a future in which they're a ubiquitous, universally-valued commodity and the metaverse--or something like it--is the new social media. Twitter's hexagon PFP is a functional example of where they thought this would go, but Metakovan has talked extensively about how he sees NFTs as the thing people will use to express their identity and individuality in the metaverse--like a pair of designer shoes. An example someone gave was having a digital apartment in the metaverse and being able to display the NFTs you own on your digital walls. That doesn't stop other people from looking at the art, but it's a kind of exclusivity that confers bragging rights; if you're authorized to display this digital item, everyone knows you had the money to pay for it and you were savvy enough to have good taste at the right time. And that exclusivity is enforced by a (hypothetical) system in which everything is built on the blockchain and it can be easily verified that you're the legitimate owner.

I can look at images of nearly all the famous works of art in private collections for free online, but only one person has purchased the exclusive ability to touch and display the original piece. NFTs are an attempt to recreate that exact dynamic with digital artwork, except that the exclusivity in play is entirely prestige-based because there isn't anything particularly special about the experience of holding an "original"--unless someone is able to build the online infrastructure to make displaying that certified original prestigious. If you don't believe with all your heart that someone is going to do that, spending $100k+ on a blockchain entry sounds a little foolish. If you absolutely believe that's where the future is headed, purchasing an NFT now is like having the opportunity to buy any of these before the entire world realizes their true value. 

Because the infrastructure of the metaverse does not yet exist, people are trying to create the culture they'd like to see everyone adopt by treating NFTs as prestige items and honoring their exclusivity and emotional value. They treat images attached to NFTs like gallery pieces or unique expressions of individual identity. They basically have to be characterized as an exclusive status symbol to have any chance of capturing the popular imagination, and the best way to do that is to pretend like they already are. 

Someone trolling an NFT fan by reposting their PFP image under their tweet and going, "Look, I have the same NFT!" doesn't truly think they're taking anything away from them; they're thumbing their nose at the idea that owning it is impressive. It's a refusal to honor the exclusivity or help create the consensus of prestige. 

 

This is what I don't understand. There already are several metaverses. I have an art gallery/club/party space in Altspace VR and put giant jpgs of my art on the walls and even gave someone else a few watermarked jpgs of my art to put in some of their worlds. You don't need it to be an NFT to display your art in the metaverse. You can put your website and socials on the jumbo jpg and display it on large buildings. Technically you can put anything you find on the internet on your metaverse house or gallery walls as jpgs. What is the point of it being an NFT? Especially if you're the original artist. I started to create NFTs, actually one NFT I was going to try to sell as an experiment then realized it cost a lot of money just to mint it and put it for sale and my bank (Chase) won't even connect to Coinbase so I'd have to create some new weird digital bank account asking for my SS security number and the whole thing just seemed like a bizarre scammy venture. I'd rather just sell prints of my art or even sell it on coffee mugs, t-shirts, etc... It seems like the whole point of NFTs is collecting, like baseball cards or rare comic books. Except you don't even actually posess anything. In the art world you can create limited edition prints and still maintain a rarity.  I really don't see how NFTs can be more than a fad or have any intrinsic value. 

You've basically hit the exact reason these tanked and the philosophical objections people like me had to all the attempts to brute force them into the mainstream. This stuff is only important or worthwhile in a world where the main reason to care about art is demonstrating that you have enough money to purchase some kind of exclusive access to it. Every argument in favor of something like, say, NFT gaming is just someone excitedly saying, "Imagine if you could use your vast wealth to buy your way to being the top Mario Kart player of all time, and no one else could win because you own all the Specialest Boy tokens! Wouldn't that be amazing?!" and everyone else just stares back at them in silence for a few minutes before asking if they even know what Mario Kart is.*

*They don't.

plasma_ring

nomad-ads_8ecd56922e said:

The collectible-bubblegum-cards aspect of NFTs is simply what the current focus of the media and whatnot is.  One of the other expected purposes an NFT could be used for is if some future (or existing) virtual world system builds its inventorying system around the NFT mechanism such that ownership of a particular object, such as a virtual chair or table, is coordinated via the NFT system so that things like non-copyable are kept track of and honored by the underlying virtual world system.  I.e. if the table is non-copy, and there's already a copy rezzed out, it would recognize you already had a copy rezzed somewhere else and not let you rez another until you've gone and picked back up the earlier one you rezzed.  My understanding is there already is a particular virtual world system that integrated NFT tech into it wrt in-world objects.  (Remember, NFT isn't just pictures.)

I work for a company that sells cosmetic microtransactions as a major part of our business model. We do very literally sell virtual chairs for use in a virtual world. This is already 100% possible and in fact how most items in video games are coded; you have to make sure people can't spawn infinite copies of a model because that can easily crash a game.

There is nothing whatsoever about the "tracking ownership" or "access permissions" aspects of blockchain/NFTs that every video game does not already do, and do better; claims otherwise are either misinformed or attempts to find a use case for the technology that doesn't begin and end at making money. There is one--and only one--reason to use NFTs to track virtual ownership, and it's that if you want cryptocurrency to have longterm value, it really helps it out if there are things you need to use crypto to buy. If you move all virtual item transactions to the NFT model, the average consumer suddenly has a reason to care that crypto exists, on account of being forced to use it.

I have straight up heard people pushing this stuff trying to claim that features no video game microtransaction system could function without are just now possible thanks to the magic of blockchain. They're excited because they have no idea what they're talking about.