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I made $50K in three days with NFTs
- gjsman-1000 5y agoI’d… still prefer just to have a signed original work vetted by an expert, sorry.
- codetrotter 5y agoWhy do you need an expert to vet something when you buy it from the artist that made it? And in turn, when the artist put a piece on a blockchain you can trace it back to the artist. That's the point of NFTs kind of. But if you mean you'd rather have a physical original of an artwork than a digital representation of the thing, I see what you mean I guess.
- gjsman-1000 5y agoI am calling it now: that blockchain royalty system on NFTs? It is only a matter of time before Hollywood makes NFTs interact with DRM. Your movie purchase will be an NFT with hardware-backed chain verification.
- HPsquared 5y agoIf the NFTs could be bought and sold, this would finally allow a decentralized secondary market for DRM media.
- TeMPOraL 5y agoI... don't like where those ideas are going. At this point I long for pre-Internet days, where physical media (tapes, CDs, books) achieved the same goal while wasting much less resources than it takes to keep the blockchain that would support the NFTs. I also think that anything that further solidifies IP enforcement is going to kill the future. Consider that one of these days, we might progress enough to be able to build something approaching a replicator from Star Trek. The utopian society of the show is built on "too cheap to meter" energy that allows replicators to meet everyone's basic needs (and even fancy whims) for free. But even if we reach a similar level of scientific and technological advancement, we won't be able to realize the utopia part if designs for every replicable goods are owned by a small group of people/companies extracting rent, with technology and law preventing circumvention.
- adnzzzzZ 5y agoArtists directly making money from their art without intermediaries taking huge cuts (and with resales giving them a percentage on top of it) is absolutely not going to kill the future, it's just going to incentivize better creation of art. Scarcity makes economic sense for various kinds of art and there are many fields that have been destroyed by the Internet (i.e. music). It's only natural for the solution to also come from it in this manner.
- barneygale 5y agoMusic is flourishing - it's the music industry that has been destroyed by the Internet.
- adnzzzzZ 5y agoCompared to my industry (indie gaming), indie music is in an objectively way worse state.
- barneygale 5y agoDigital art isn't scarce by its very nature - NFTs are an attempt to re-introduce scarcity, and it's fucking depressing. My childhood dream of improving the world by inventing things is a pipe dream; every bit of progress gets mopped up by the people who need it least.
- UncleMeat 5y agoBut DRM media still requires the server to verify the product. So only part of the ecosystem is decentralized.
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- Ekaros 5y agoThat would make way too much sense... I predict online streaming on poor services that will shut down in few years with no option for backup. With both monthly subscription and individual purchases, and user losing purchases if ending subscription...
- lucasverra 5y agoThat is pretty smart. How is this not already implemented for film distribution and avoid leakages and pirating? Honest question, i've been on all forms of streaming since 2000, back to torrenting lately to avoid cartelization
- Causality1 5y agoIt wouldn't be effective. If a human can watch it a computer can copy it. They'll take it right off the output pins of the display driver chip if they have to.
- dcolkitt 5y agoIt would also allow the recreation of something like the original Netflix DVD service but purely digital. No more having to manage a half dozen plus streaming subscriptions. One company could go out and start building a comprehensive library of NFTs for every film and series. When you want to watch something you check out the NFT from the library. When you’re done you return it. For very hot items, there may be a waiting list, but you’ll get it eventually. No more being stuck in a content ghetto like with modern streaming services.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Dwolb 5y agoMila Kunis has an NFT project where only token holders can view the associated episodes of a cartoon and upon NFT resale, a percent of the proceeds gets remitted back to the project creators [1]. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/k78kay/mila-kunis-stoner-cats-cartoon-is-making-millions-selling-nfts https://www.vice.com/en/article/k78kay/mila-kunis-stoner-cat...
- MereInterest 5y ago> upon NFT resale, a percent of the proceeds gets remitted back to the project creators I'd rather have more ways to restore the First Sale Doctrine for digital goods, rather than debasing it further.
- Dwolb 5y agoI don’t disagree and there’s two things I find interesting: 1) Remittance is easily implemented in a smart contract. 2) This aligns long term interests between the project creator and the NFT holder (and one can imagine different incentive structures can be implemented for different projects).
- MereInterest 5y agoI'd agree that it is "interesting", but as additional reasons to be opposed to cryptocurrencies. 1) Remittances for resale imply that ownership was not fully transferred. The item isn't mine, but is some weird mix of being mine, but still having some link back to the person who made it. This is already a problem with digital goods, where I cannot lend an ebook to a friend in the same way that I would lend a physical book. 2) The long-term interests are already aligned due to the existence of a second-hand market, and do not need additional technological protections. Somebody who buys cars new and sells them after 5 years still cares about the maintenance costs of a 15-year-old car, because those impact the sale price at 5 years. 2a) The siphoning of money from a re-sale discourages a second-hand market. If the original maker of an object absconds with 20% of the re-sale price, that gives me less of an incentive to sell it, rather than just throwing it away. This is both from an economic standpoint, because there's a decreased profit motive, and from an emotional standpoint, because somebody is laying claim to my efforts in securing a resale without having a valid reason to do so.
- bouncycastle 5y agoWhy use a Blockchain? MySQL will work just fine.
- mpfundstein 5y agoand who controls the database?
- RupertWiser 5y agoWho controls the unencrypted video?
- brazzy 5y agoAnd who the fuck cares except for some crypto nerds?
- lottin 5y agoIt doesn't matter, as long as it's a legal entity and can therefore be sued for breach of contract.
- bouncycastle 5y agoYou're asking the wrong question... NFTs won't work with DRM, because with DRM you need to encrypt the content and then decrypt it to view it. But you cannot put the decryption key in the NFT, because everything on the blockchain is public. If you put the decryption key with the NFT, everyone will have it. So you will still need some kind of centralized system where you will issue the decryption keys to your viewers, and probably the easiest way to track subscriptions and keys is to use a database like MySQL. (Btw, I do not like DRM at all)
- cm2187 5y agoThat will stop people from using bitorrent
- RupertWiser 5y agoWhat’s the purpose? You still need a centralised store for your unencrypted video. Why would this be preferable to having a database?
- jeroenhd 5y agoThey could, but why would they? Right now, they can lock content behind a subscription, remove listed content, edit and re-release content, and pretty much do whatever they want. You don't buy a movie, you buy the limited right to watch what goes as the current iteration of a video file for a certain amount of time. You can't resell your purchase, so everyone has to pay full price to the sellers. Using NFTs or other cryptographic DRM would be hugely beneficial to consumers, but what's the point of helping the consumers? It'll only cut into costs because NFTs require some kind of cryptocoin network to do a bunch of calculations, which is expensive to run and wastes enormous amounts of electricity. A simple RSA signature could be used to license a file to your computer and some DRM comes pretty close to that. If the industry wanted to give you ownership, they already could've done it before the NFT speculators set up the current hype.
- teruakohatu 5y agoI think the vast majority of people selling NFTs are not recouping their listing fees.
- blue_rog 5y agoAlthough you may be right, OpenSea (the NFT Marketplace used in the article) does lazy minting. Of course, one can still not make any money if no one buys the NFT. The author writes about it here: > There's a bit of nuance to how OpenSea does things. They do so-called lazy minting. While you may need to pay an initial gas fee to list a new collection, each NFT listing does not require any fees. This works because the NFT is not actually minted yet. It gets officially minted once the buyer pays the gas fees to mint the artwork on the blockchain.
- kzrdude 5y agoWhy is it called "gas" fees?
- codetrotter 5y ago> Gas is essential to the Ethereum network. It is the fuel that allows it to operate, in the same way that a car needs gasoline to run. https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/gas/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/gas/
- hk-im-ad 5y agoSmart contracts get compiled into byte code that get run on the blockchain. Each instruction costs a certain amount of money. This fee is called a “gas” fee, because you need to put in enough money to execute your entire contract, which varies by how complex it is, similar to how you need enough gas in your car to drive a certain distance.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y agoThe sibling comments appear to be accurate, but I think it’s more helpful to think of gas in this context as the fuel that powers gaslights. The deceptive kind, follow?
- tiborsaas 5y agoNice job an all of this, but the real story is about how to capitalize on 40k Twitter followers.
- melomal 5y ago1000 true fans is a great article that is well worth reading. It really does go to show that building a community can be a worthwhile task, even if it does take time the long term benefits can be huge.
- codetrotter 5y agoThis one? https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
- melomal 5y agoThat's the one. Honestly, if anyone wants to know just why NFTs do work, take a read of this.
- airpoint 5y agoThanks for saving me from the 17 mins reading time
- finexplained 5y agoThis. Currently NFTs are a tool for monetizing social capital.
- devaler 5y agoPerfect summarization, in my opinion.
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- CPLX 5y agoWhy do people keep acting like this phenomenon is confusing? Like gee maybe people are really into mini Jpegs now. Or wow I guess if people really like spending buy-a-house money on a Twitter avatar this will be a thriving sector of the economy. I mean people really like gambling. Actually they fucking love it. Like they’ll build an entire city in the middle of an uninhabitable desert just to do it. They’ll give up their kids future for it. People making $7.25 an hour will spend hundreds of dollars a week on scratch off lottery tickets in order to participate in it. An endless demand for new ways to gamble is the least fucking confusing cultural development to ever happen. Put people in a prison and they’ll do it with cigarettes. Give a bunch of construction workers a lunch break and they’ll bet on which pigeon is gonna to take off first. Hand a group of people a round ball or a deck of cards and they’ll figure out how to do it. Beanie babies, little ceramic figures, baseball cards, coins. The desire for people to speculate on synthetically created scarcity is boundless, spanning generations. Speculation is common to every culture in every era of human history. NFT’s are a gambling fad, an extension of the more general crypto gambling fad. People will do it until it’s banned, matures, or gets replaced by the next gambling craze.
- pixelmonkey 5y agoYour comment reminded me of this excellent post, best read with its fun accompanying illustrations, "How Money Forever Changed Us": https://moretothat.com/how-money-forever-changed-us/ https://moretothat.com/how-money-forever-changed-us/ Specifically, the discussion of the "pogs" craze in elementary schools in the US in the 90s. "Basically, a nice little gambling ring was growing amongst us starry-eyed 2nd graders." The OP would certainly read differently if he wrote, "How I won $50K in 3 days with NFTs", rather than saying how he "made" $50K. Also the Gordon Gekko quote from "Wall Street": "Money itself isn’t lost or made, it’s simply transferred –- from one perception to another. ... I create nothing. I own."[1] [1]: https://amontalenti.com/2011/12/16/wall-street-the-movie-25-years-later https://amontalenti.com/2011/12/16/wall-street-the-movie-25-...
- victor106 5y ago> Money itself isn’t lost or made, it’s simply transferred –- from one perception to another. ... I create nothing. I own That’s profound, thanks for the link
- folli 5y agoSlightly off topic, but I built a web service to create NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain without the need to set up a wallet and buy Ether beforehand. You pay the gas fee on in USD, the service takes care of everything: https://nuftu.com https://nuftu.com
- rubyn00bie 5y agoI just think it’s a way for people to show off their wealth. An NFT is pretty much a joke, “here’s the original” doesn’t really mean shit when I can quite literally have an exact and indistinguishable copy of the work. It honestly feels like insanity to me. Like, I can right now go set my avatar to the exact same Ape picture Curry purchased. It’s not even a replica, or recreation, it is literally the same exact image. The only real world analogy we kind of have is if we could freely “duplicate” physical goods with the press of a button. Would the Mona Lisa be valuable if DaVinci could have made 1000s of EXACT copies? I’m gonna say no, but that’s exactly where we are. It’s cute someone says they own something like an NFT, or that it’s the original, but it’s nothing more than an illusion of uniqueness. Edited: slight wording tweak for clarity.
- midasuni 5y agoIf you need multiple art experts to decide which of two painting is real and which is the forgery, is there really a difference in the value other than the bragging rights of owning the original?
- soco 5y agoI think that's the entire point of NFTs: bragging rights. That and money laundering but the latter is not for everyone.
- hk-im-ad 5y agoWould the Mona Lisa be valuable if DaVinci made one but we could make exact molecular replicas now? I would still say it would be valuable. You can make nearly indistinguishable copies off the Mona Lisa now, but they aren’t worth anything. The pictorial content of the Mona Lisa is only a small part of its value.
- rubyn00bie 5y agoYou’re sort of missing my point. An artist creating a similar work is not equivalent. If they were atomically identical copies, they would be literally the same. Any idea of “difference” would be completely false. That’s the difference here, these (NFTs) are by all means atomic copies. They aren’t close to the same, they ARE the same. If we could make atomic copies of the Mona Lisa it would surely drop in value… scarcity is what causes works like the Mona Lisa to be valuable. With an NFT there is no scarcity because unlimited duplicates, each as real as the original, can be produced for nearly free.
- bshimmin 5y agoI read this article with some interest because I'm thinking of getting a new kitchen, and while I understand the technologies involved (both generative art and Ethereum), the part I'm struggling with is... why on earth anyone would pay money for these things. Can someone explain it to me? My only guess is that the people buying these things already have large amounts of theoretical money in Ethereum anyway and thus spending a small fraction of it on some sort of very poor glowing Mondrian-esque art is little more than an amusing distraction that seems cool?
- bradleyjg 5y agoYou need to separate out ultimate owners from people looking to get rich quick. Maybe it’ll turn out everyone is in the second category.
- ddevault 5y agoHow I grifted $50K from my Twitter followers by selling them an imaginary product. This is morally wrong.
- kzrdude 5y agoJust like how pokemon cards are morally wrong (!)
- dgellow 5y agoIs it really that wrong? Buyers know exactly what they get for their money. I'm not a fan of NFT stuff and think it's a giant pile of bullshit, but people know in advance they they are spending money for something that is pretty meaningless.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y agoIt’s only morally wrong for the numpty who gets caught holding the bag. Everyone else will be celebrated, and can pat themselves on the back, for having the foresight to time the market.
- chejazi 5y agoA lot of dunking happening here - titles like this article's can definitely turn people away, as people have learned that money means something (undesirably) different in "crypto." That said, the article does provide a pretty good job documenting the creative process, the path to minting, and the launch of a campaign. I encourage anyone interested in the space to get past the triggering headline and give it a read. edit: looks like the submission got flagged/removed from the feed on HN. sigh
- a-dub 5y agosometimes i like to blow my own mind by considering the fact that nfts and cryptocurrency are really just open source and decentralized drm in its purest form.
- Ekaros 5y agoAnd then further blow my mind that they don't actually do any actual rights management...
- al2o3cr 5y agoAs they started to sell I noticed people quickly listing theirs for sale at much higher prices so I experimented with increasing my prices. Holy money-laundering batman
- lovemenot 5y ago(keep reading for a less cynical take) As sold now, nearly all NFTs will end up being a poor investment. A write-off. Some people hope to get rich quick and will punt on pretty much anything. Longer term, and several rebrands later there's potential here. The digital economy as it curently stands is a shit-show. Just attention grabbing for money. A race to the bottom. But it needn't be so. A digital economy based on assets rather than attention could eventually emerge. Asset licencing may be sub-1 cent per copy. That'd be fine, when the necessary payment infrastructure is in place. High volume, high efficiency, low cost. Put your money on the infrastructure. Get rich slow.
- Borrible 5y agoArt is in the eye of the beholder. Just like value. So, in a sense, art is the perfect expression of the subjective theory of value. And by the way, it resembles religion in that, one must believe in it. But as every good artist, salesman and priest knows, it is of greater importance that as many others as possible be convinced of how valuable it is. Nothing new here. It doesn't matter wether there is the possibility of a 'perfect' copy. You just have to convince your connoisseurs, buyers, believers that art is a process and a story/history not a product. Et voilà que. There is your uniqueness! And/or you license it and go mass market, see Dafen in China. https://www.dafenvillageonline.com/ https://www.dafenvillageonline.com/ Okay, they copy it without license, but hey, they're Chinese so that comes naturally. By the way,the art game is rigged since decades. The moment the Saatchis of this planet decided NFT's were a thing, they were a thing. Of course it's an illusion, but some sell it and a lot buy it. They agreed on it. That's its value.