• betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Are they trying to say that NFTs are some kind of bullshit scam that should have dissolved into the ether like the crypto bro’s cocaine-fueled manic state that spawned them in the first place? How shocking and unpredictable.

    • 2tone@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      What do you mean? You didnt go out and spend all your money on reproducable jpegs? Whats wrong with you?

      • xavier666@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        reproducable jpegs? Excuse me?

        I live walking distance from my local police department. If another person uses my NFT without my consent I will report them immediately. This is MY PROPERTY. The transaction has be verified scientifically on the block chain. Anyone who violates my NFT rights will pay the price.

        Buddy, you have no idea who you are messing with. I have made a ridiculous amount of money in crypto/NFTs and I have the best lawyers. If you don’t delete those stolen jpegs, you’re going to regret it. When you steal someone’s property you get punished. Watch out.

      • betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I mortgaged my house for a computer-generated ape that my son’s cousin’s uncle’s neighbor’s mailman said would one day finance my retirement.

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It will, it will. Any day now, you’ll see! My kid told me the same thing, and his favorite streamer wouldn’t just say anything for money, would he?

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      So the guy on Reddit who told me I better get with the NFT game or be left behind in a year was full of shit?

    • sab@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Did they though? It might be my filter bubble, but whenever I saw web3 being pushed I saw a small refraction of responses of people who also thought it was a great idea (typical salesbros - so a good idea for others to do, just not for themselves). But the vast majority of people reject it for being a scam.

      So how many people fell for it, really?

      • trashgirlfriend@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Did the average person/average internet user fall for it? No.

        Did the people who fell for it get sucked into what was basically a cult that sucked the money out of a decent amount of people? Yeah.

        The numbers for some of these scam projects were honestly insane.

        • sab@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Ah, probably my filter bubble then.

          I’d like to read more about this, do you know of any specific cases?

          • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            If you have time, I would suggest CoffeeZilla on YouTube. He basically just get into crypto scam, which isn’t hard to find these days. One specific case I would look at is the influencers taking on pretty much any scam projects to get money. The series is with Oompaville. A great watch.

    • comic_zalgo_sans@lemmy.world
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      People are always looking for get rich quick schemes, especially when interest rates were minimal. NFTs was another application of the tech behind cryptocurrency, which was relatively straightforward “buy GPUs and electricity, get money” for a while. It helped that it was useful for speculation, crime, taking advantage of people who wanted easy money, mixed in with the reputation art has for moving money around.

    • CarlsIII@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Even the name “web3” is stupid. Isn’t it supposed to be the next step after “web 2.0?” Shouldn’t it then be “web 3.0?” They couldn’t even include a space between web and 3!

  • Jaysyn@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Fortunately, nothing of actual value was lost. Just fools being parted from their money.

  • pruwyben@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    I thought the whole point of NFTs and the blockchain is that it’s decentralized, and you can use “smart contracts” for things like this. How is one company able to decide to change it?

    • PopularUsername@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Apparently, smart contracts are not contracts at all… they are friendly suggestions. Unsurprisingly a contract needs a mechanism to enforce it, which makes decentralized contracts redundant at best (as you still need institutions outside of the blockchain to monitor and enforce the contracts), and or worse, completely useless if there is no legal way to enforce them.

    • June@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      They can only change it for their instance, but they can’t impact all NFT marketplaces. This is only significant because this company is the largest broker so it will impact more people.

      Anyone can set up their own blockchain and build it however they want. Hell, they could make it centralized even.

      • hyperhopper@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        That’s not the question

        The post you replied to was saying, “shouldn’t it be inherent to the entry on the Blockchain, regardless of market”

  • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    A. I don’t actually feel bad for anyone because if you’re involved in NFTs in any way, you’re begging to be scammed. There is no legitimate use for NFTs.

    B. This seems like blatant illegal fraud. You can’t just advertise “get this cut of all transactions forever” to get people to join, then say “just kidding” once they include their “art” in your shitty scam. They’re entitled to their shitty cut of your shitty transaction, and you can’t hand wave it away by pointing to fine print when you sold the product very clearly making that claim.

    • Bjornir@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      There are uses for NFT, but it is clearly not what they are famous for.

      NFT aren’t pictures of monke, they are a way to authenticate something in a decentralised way, so no trust in another entity needed. The picture isn’t the NFT, and that is why you can just right click-copy it.

      You can’t however just copy the NFT, the actual token. Having a token that’s verifiably owned by someone is useful for certain things. It’s like a certificate of authenticity, but digital.

      • magic_lobster_party@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Digital certificates has already existed for half a century. There’s nothing new. A certificate doesn’t get any more legitimate just because it’s recorded on a blockchain.

        • bjorney@bjorney.lol
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          1 year ago

          Yes but NFTs are held in trust by you, not a 3rd party business. If you want to sell your NFT to a friend you can do that without brokering the exchange through a middleman who can/will charge a cut

          • magic_lobster_party@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            How you transact the ownership of NFTs is a different story. I’m reacting to the claim that NFT is “like a certificate of authenticity, but digital”, which is not unique to NFTs at all.

            This claim is also often misunderstood, since the NFT can only verify the authenticity of the certificate itself, not the art/asset it’s pointing to.

            I can easily create an NFT of Mona Lisa. The blockchain will see no problem with it at all. Heck, I can create 1000 NFTs of Mona Lisa if I want.

          • kitonthenet@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            This is still solved by certificates, I can make my own self signed certificate that says it me and sign whatever I want. The only thing that crypto “solves” is over the wire man in the middle attacks, which aren’t even really a problem in the modern internet

            • bjorney@bjorney.lol
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              1 year ago

              How do I know you haven’t made 10 copies of that same certificate and sold 9 to other people?

              If it was an NFT I could see you issued 9 other copies of it before I was approached with the sale. Any other way I either have to place blind trust in you or rely on a 3rd party to handle the issuance/transaction

          • orca@orcas.enjoying.yachts
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            1 year ago

            This sounds completely logical, until you realize it’s for selling JPGs and expecting them to only exist in that one buyer’s hands.

      • sab@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Are there any practical (non-theoretical) uses for NFTs that couldn’t be done otherwise easier/better without them though?

        Edited to make it easier for NFTs to show their worth.

        • Maturin@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Basically anything that is currently traded on any digital or quasi-digital exchange but relies ultimately on a paper/manual backend.

            • Maturin@sh.itjust.works
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              There is a lot of talk, for example, in the sustainability space where things like emissions allowances, carbon offsets, etc. are traded the old fashioned way where a digital ledger using NFTs would be both instantaneous and transparent/easily auditable.

              But the most obvious example is security exchanges, e.g. stocks, bonds, etc. (which would be a massive threat to the existing financial institutions) because it could allow for instantaneous settlement and fully transparent markets.

              HUGE HOWEVER, not all NFT systems would be equally useful for that kind of thing. What we saw with FTX, for example, was a blockchain exchange for tokenized securities where the blockchain aspects served no real useful purpose - it was a centralized, controlled, opaque use case. The distributed ledger model (which I think casual observers of blockchain assume all blockchain systems are) can correct for those failures. I personally think part of what made the FTX story so big was a combination of moves by major financial market players to get out in front of tokenization of securities by created the existing system again but with a blockchain coat of paint on top that then failed under its own scam at lightning speed which then gave the ammo to a whole “blockchain a scam, NFT an even bigger scam” narrative. They are just software utilities that can be used effectively or not just like any others.

              Whenever I see someone identify a jpeg as an NFT, or put SBF’s face on a news story about it, I think about how successful the astroturfing of these narratives has been.

                • Maturin@sh.itjust.works
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                  1 year ago

                  There are tons of people (actual serious people, not like SBF) working in this space and building these things now, so they are definitely more than theoretical, but they are not at the mass adoption stage.

                  And no offense, but this response has echoes of people saying federation would never work. But it’s just a different utility to accomplish similar goals to centralized forums. And when the old-fashioned, centralized alternatives really start to self-destruct because of their inherent flaws, the merits of the decentralized version become more obvious.

                  I’m actually pretty shocked that Lemmy/the Fediverse beats the same tired old drums about NFTs (ape jpegs being the most obvious), since they are red herring arguments. A tokenized jpeg has no value because a jpeg has no value. A tokenized security has the value of the underlying security. The token is just there to eliminate the need for accountants since the open ledger shows its work and the entire chain of custody.

        • sphericth0r@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          But the same could be said for almost anything, for instance a car’s engine is non-theoretical but could be otherwise done with a horse instead. I will still prefer the more advanced technology, but of course you do you

          • sab@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            You’re right. I’ve edited my question to make it easier for NFTs to qualify. After all, cars do the same as horses, but a whole lot better.

            So what is a practical application of NFTs that, now that it’s implemented, makes someone’s life so much better?

          • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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            1 year ago

            No, automobiles and mass transit were a massive innovation that drastically changed everyone’s way of life. Look at the current state of global logistics. You can essentially order any fruit from home and have it fresh at your doorstep at any time of year. You can’t do that without engines.

          • Shalakushka@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            This still works because cars ruined Western society in the guise of “advancement”, so that’s cool

          • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            I know what they are. They’re a “solution” to a problem that doesn’t exist and very probably never will exist.

            They have never once been used for anything even neutral. Every single case has been outright malicious.

      • JayK117@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        I reckon the meeting about the tokens went something like “okay, how can we monetise this?”, “Okay hear me out here… monkeys!.. digital monkeys!”

  • Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    This is now a recurring feature of tech vaporware. Claiming something that is clearly shit is okay because it does some good, or something that is uselesslt frivolous and speculative will have and important function and use-case in the future.

    My condolences to those that have been made fools by this - we all need to keep an eye out for these patterns going forward.

    I wanna add: prosecute and sue these thieves. Sue the people who took money to promote these lies. They all deserve to have those ill-gotten funds ripped away.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    One of the big promises of NFTs was that the artist who originally made them could get a cut every time their piece was resold.

    Starting March 2024, those fees will essentially be tips — an optional percentage of a sale price that sellers can choose to give the original artist.

    The marketplace will continue enforcing the fees on certain existing collections until March 2024, at which point they’ll become optional on all sales.

    Critics say it will hurt small artists and undermines creators’ ability to control their relationship with the people who buy their work.

    OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer criticized the fees’ “ineffective, unilateral enforcement” and said that creators will find other ways to monetize their work.

    “Our role in this ecosystem is to empower innovation beyond a single use case or business model,” he writes in the blog post announcing that OpenSea will no longer support the ecosystem’s primary business model.


    I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • stormesp@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Except people has been stealing art to do NFTs without paying the artists from day 1?

    • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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      Yeah, wtf do they mean “anymore”? Did they not see a single artist having their stuff copied and put into some blockchain by grifters?

    • devils_advocate@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Right click. Save as.

      Also note that the ERC721 standard says nothing about royalties. Royaltiew weren’t designed as a “key feature”

    • ChrislyBear@lemmy.world
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      It’s not the art that you buy, it’s the “original URL” that belongs to you. You buy a treasure map leading to a princess. It’s your princess, that’s what is says on the napkin, but everyone can fuck her.

  • Stinkywinks@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Ik the technology is useful, but selling shit I can screen shot is fucking pointless. If you want to buy shit from the artist, just buy their shit.

    • Fisk400@feddit.nu
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      Turns out that the smart contract is a post-it note stapled to the NFT and the marketplace can just ignore what the post-it note says because it’s not legally binding.

      What they can’t do is trade with marketplaces that do enforce the contract. Originally it was enforced because if one marketplace stopped enforcing it the marketplace would be cut off from the Echo system but turns out that the 5 big marketplaces just need to agree to drop it and everything is fine.

        • Fisk400@feddit.nu
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          1 year ago

          There is no good design for this. The only design that works is external regulation and laws wich is why we use that for real things that aren’t scams.

          • mihor@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Why? It could be enforced in the same way that a BTC transaction is validated, just adding a rule that a wallet, specified as the author, should get a percentage of the trade.

            • Fisk400@feddit.nu
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              Because the second the rule becomes inconvenient there will be a fork or some kind of bullshit that removes the rule. This has already been done a couple of times when money got stolen from big investors. The thefts followed the rules set up on the blockchain and nothing in those transactions were different from a normal transaction but humans looked at them and said that they weren’t valid and did whatever technical bullshit they needed to do to reverse them.

              • TitanLaGrange@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                whatever technical bullshit they needed to do to reverse them

                Apparently ultimately this involves hitting the person hiding the encryption keys with a $4 wrench until they provide the keys.

              • mihor@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                I disagree, forks can be made but in reality nobody cares, 99.999% still follow the ‘main’ repo. Sometimes shit like that happens (looking at you, Buterik!), but that kinda misses the point that the validation is not implemented optimally.

                • Fisk400@feddit.nu
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                  I hope you are aware that you went from “this can’t be broken” to “I trust that people wouldn’t break it” to “sometimes they do break it but it’s not that often” in a very short comment.

            • chameleon@kbin.social
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              You can easily end up with A gifting B a million and then B sending A the NFT for free, potentially with a trusted escrow service in between to make sure both of these actually happen. The NFT marketplaces are essentially already acting as escrow, so this isn’t weird.

              Only thing you could probably enforce is that moving something from one key to another requires a fee to be paid to the original artist, but that’d also trigger if A wants to move their assets to a different key (eg in or out of some hardware wallet, online wallet or marketplace). And if A and B trust each other strongly they can simply share the key.

      • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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        No see it’s a lot more sophisticated than that. The post-it note is immutable because of maths or something, so what that means is that it’s capital-P Property. And because Property is a magic spell that binds even the old ones, and this spell is unbreakable, I own all these apes.

    • kautau@lemmy.world
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      I can’t believe I’ve never seen this, it’s incredible. When NFTs were first hyped I spent far too much time explaining to techbros how they were just buying an entry in a decentralized ledger that pointed to some url on a centralized server someone owned and could take down or change on a whim. Nobody cared, because as this video demonstrates it was never about art or anything but about grifting. Thanks for sharing

    • Gnubeutel@feddit.de
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      I know i’m really late to the party, but this video gave me an idea how blockchains could actually be useful for art. Not to sign a digital image to your name, that’s bullshit. But to link an actual piece of art to you as a certificate of ownership. So in case it gets stolen, you can prove you’re the real owner. This requires first time entries to be verified by certified experts, but after that you’re good to go. You would need to solve a bunch of problems, like what happens when someone dies and the objects are inherited, or what if you buy it, but the owner doesn’t update the chain or makes a mistake, etc. You would probably need a group of mods/experts who can amend the entries. But then you could more easily contact the owner, manage reproduction rights and in general make art theft less attractive, because all art dealers can easily check the current state.

      • PopularUsername@lemmy.world
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        This was actually the original idea of non-fungible tokens, but because you need special legislation to tie an object to this digital receipt (there is nothing legally tying one thing to the other), they just skipped over it completely and said the NFT itself was the commodity, which is why they could only do it for digital art with the a web link. (we could, for example, see this more useful for a title to a car or house)

        In fact, many NFTs don’t even contain any language about copyright or licensing, they don’t even attempt to pretend that the NFT holder owns the copyright. The owner of the NFT in these cases only owns the NFT, and not the copyright. Of course, you have to transfer the copyright separately from transferring the NFT, which makes this whole thing redundant for buying/selling on secondary markets, but they could have at least tried to pretend they could.

  • Eranziel@lemmy.world
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    It’s broken now? I’d say that’s a bold assumption that it ever worked in the first place.

    Edit: to be clear, I mean that it is and always has been an impossible problem. The only reason it ever worked is because some broker company wanted it as a feature, not because anything compelled them to give original artists a cut. And that’s before you consider the question, “but how do you know the NFT was made by the original artist?”

  • viking@infosec.pub
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    1 year ago

    As long as I can take a screenshot of any random NFT and integrate a picture into my website, there’s no fucking way those things are worth anything.

      • viking@infosec.pub
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        1 year ago

        I’d rather launder money through physical art, at least I can put that on my wall in the interim and don’t have to first find means to convert my illegally acquired cash into a digital currency.

    • xavier666@lemm.ee
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      You think it’s funny to take screenshots of people’s NFTS, huh? Property theft is a joke to you? l’ll have you know that the blockchain doesn’t lie. I own it. Even if you save it, it’s my property. You are mad that you don’t own the art that I own. Delete that screenshot.

  • db2@sopuli.xyz
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    NFTs have a place but it isn’t central to the Internet. That was hype to separate idiots who didn’t know better from their money, aka grifting, and that kind of grifting has used literally everything to do that same thing in the past so NFTs are not a unique tool to that end.

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      NFTs have no place at all. There has yet to be any good suggestion on what they should be used for that isn’t served by something else just fine. Or if not “fine”, then at least solves no problem that would make it better. Not in-game items, not ticket sales, not silly ape pictures.

      • db2@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        The games themselves. Proof of ownership of a digital copy. It creates a secondary market for digital games.