Stop this digital ownership madness. NFTs are bullshit. And the stupid makes me angry.
By @edent
· blockchain grift nft scam · 19 comments · 900 words · read ~17,304 times.
(A hastily written and grumpy post.)
Another day, another Blockchain Bullshit project.
Someone "claimed" one of my Tweets and added it to the Blockchain. I'm not particularly happy about that. Nor am I happy with the hoops I had to jump through to contact the company and remove my work. You can read the whole sorry thread on Twitter. But, mostly, I'm unhappy with this whole scammy "industry".
Now my Tweet is an "NFT" - Non-Fungible Token - tradeable with other people for cold-hard-cash.
This is nonsense. Let's ignore the fact that some random company has taken my copyright and indelibly stored it on a 'chain. Let's ignore that someone else is claiming my content as their own. Heck, let's even ignore that someone else is monetising my content without permission or recompense.
Why can't these people see that digital ownership is a con? The only value these tokens have is in their scarcity. Digital tokens cannot ever be scarce.
What do you get if you "buy" my Tweet? You didn't write it - so you don't have copyright. You don't get an exclusive use of it. And anyone can make their own copy of it!
There are four great big problems with trying to assert ownership of a digital token.
1. Which Chain?
The first is that it is only ownership on that specific chain. What stops someone from starting a new crypto-chain and adding the tokens to that? Just like banks can print money, anyone can spin up a new blockchain project and start minting "ownership" of digital assets. It doesn't mean anything.
Anyone can start a Blockchain-of-tweets. So what's special about this one?
There are dozens of competing "Art Chains". Which one should I register my work to? All of them? One of them? My own private chain?
2. Whose Chain?
The second is that the ownership of an NFT is often tied to a specific provider. One of the examples given in the NFT Bible is that of in-game items. Magic swords and such-like.
At the moment, NFT fanatics claim, you can't sell in-game items. And, even if you could, nothing prevents the game publisher from destabilising prices by flooding the market with millions of "rare" items.
OK, fine. But what happens if the publisher one day shuts off the game? Or refuses to accept your ownership of the token? They are a central publisher. You may be free to trade items - but they are free to refuse to accept your ownership. You're sharecropping with a hostile land-owner.
3. DRM
The third problem is that's not how digital files work! Digital files can be copied. It is intrinsic to their nature. We've had a couple of decades of DRM being defeated within 5 minutes of its release. Every Netflix show is available on dodgy sites in 4K. Trying to make digital files non-fungible is like trying to make water not wet.
Whether it is art, or text, or code, or anything - digital files are copyable. Sure, you may have bought the NFT for a fabulous piece of art - but I have a screenshot of it and it is displayed on my wall. We both get exactly the same utility from it.
If you had the original physical painting of van Gogh's Starry Night - you have something unique! But if you have a JPG of a digital artwork, and I have a JPG of it, what's the difference? Yours is signed on a chain? So what!
4. What does it even mean to own a digital file?
If you own a physical thing, like a CD, you can sell it. Maybe it is an ultra-rare pressing and the price goes up and you make loads of money. Nice.
What does it mean to own an MP3? Nothing! Sure, you could sell it - but you'd also be able to keep a copy. And anyone who has a copy can distribute it for zero cost.
What does it mean to own the publishing rights to the music? Aha! The law will probably grant you a monopoly on being able to monetise the music. But as soon as you restrict supply, users will just start illegally republishing digital copies.
What does it mean to own art on the blockchain? Less than nothing. At best, it is a weak claim that the person adding it to the chain is the original creator. That's nice from a provenance point of view. But so what?
Look - I've been down on this nonsense since a blockchain certified that I painted the Mona Lisa.
In conclusion
I'm tired of this. We know that the allure of vast riches attracts scammers to any industry. But I see no utility in NFTs whatsoever.
I guess if people really want to waste their money on digital Beanie Babies, go ahead. Just know that like GameStop shares, the market is rigged and those pushing this grift are the only ones likely to profit - not you.
What happens if you steal someone's Good Tweet™?
Of course when I first saw a room about “NFT” on Clubhouse, I thought “oh cool, the BFI is doing interesting art things about film”. Nope. shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/02/s…
Vi says:
It’s a disgrace for the true hardworking artist. It is utterly demotivating and one will question his whole life devoted to art if a dude makes millions with almost zero and mediocre work. And on top of that seeing digital artist , YouTuber etc using this nonsense topic to gain from it boosting the hype even further. What is wrong with this world? Are we heading towards singularity of stupidity?
“we’ve written all your tweets to a database, which we seem not to be able to delete”
Apart from the mounting ecological cost of blockchain projects, there‘s not much to gain if you follow the suggestions of its advocates to their logical conclusion.
shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/02/s…
For GANksy I’ve simply sold full rights to the higher-res images for real money… and had a steady stream of people reacting as though it’s weird/stupid to do that instead of crypto 🤷♂️ vole.wtf/ganksy/
I sort of don’t mind the flawed thinking around ownership & value, but currently the horrendous energy waste & surrounding vortex of vaguely-scammy crypto bullshit stops it being fun
It's indeed bullshit but there's a market for it. Just like there is a market for beanie babies, monochrome paintings, psychedelic drugs, diet food, etc. You may think it's useless, but there is a market for it. You don't need any other justification 🤷♂️
Greg says:
Markets are associated with supply and demand. All things you mentioned have a limited supply. NFTs technically have a limited supply of one each. The reality is the supply is infinite. And that is why they cannot even be spoken about in the same vein as beanie babies or any other physical item. To compound the issue, even the most expensive expensive collector value pales in comparison to an item you can CTRL+C.
Apart from the whole scammy snake oil aspect of NFTs (shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/02/s…), the environmental impact is absolutely disastrous (joanielemercier.com/the-problem-of…). No one in their right mind should be actively pushing this while we struggle to deal with climate change.
David Clark says:
The art piece of the current nft craze certainly has its issues. But sports team owners like Marc Cuban are interested in the potential of the smart contract abilities of nfts for ticket sales. The blockchain could help fight forgery and also could be programed to send a portion of resold ticket profits to the original seller, discouraging scalping and secondary market price inflation. So yes, while the current craze in art and collectibles may be hype, there is clearly longterm potential for those with the imagination to find solutions to real world problems with nfts and other blockchain innovations.
@edent says:
Marc Cuban appears interested in hyping up anything which will profit him.
Ticket sales on the blockchain don't really address any of those problems. You still have a central authority (the issuer of the ticket) who determines whether they want to let you in. You still need to check with the issuer whether the token you're buying is valid (which is easily done with serial numbers on non-blockchain tickets). You can avoid sending a portion of revenue back to the source by selling a token off-chain (maybe even for cash!). If venues want to discourage inflation, they should make it easier and cheaper to return unwanted tickets. Or they and fans can accept that the price of tickets is artificially low and only rich people can afford them.
Basically, all of the problems of, say, ticket sales can be solved culturally and with a central database. A ledger adds nothing but environmental pain.
I've spent years looking into this and I haven't yet found a DLT which has a real world use.
Ray says:
The only value that NFTs add for ticket sales is having a secondary digital marketplace already built, but this only encourages scalping...
I deeply appreciate this post. Though I see some potential for NFTs - it's nothing close to the Tulip Mania we're currently seeing.
Everyone is losing it over the potential of NFTs. Sure, there's potential. The cool looking TV show that Bittorrent promised had potential.
All this happened back in 2017 as well - but with a much smaller audience. Remember Po.et coin or Singular DTV? Both practically dead projects at this point.
Unless a NFT platform with the UI/UX of Cash app gains major traction I don't see long term viability at a larger scale. Just a niche audience like Pepe cards. Like wayyy back in 2016.
To be clear, nobody is “going crazy” over NFTs. Beeple didn’t actually receive $60million for his digital pile of turd. The whole thing is simply a scam devised by crypto grifters to part naive artists / prospective grifters with their money by charging them the cost of “minting” their shit piles in the hope that some utterly clueless billionaire will make them rich.
The gullible press, who absolutely live for stoking the fires of FOMO and generally making people feel bad about themselves are currently trumpetting a story how some crypto grifter bought two Beeples for a few dollars, then masterful;ly “flipped” them for thousands of dollars to someone evidently even more masterful who now “values them” at a cool half a mill. In his great financial mind, this moron has just “made” $0.5m. Using the sort of accounting shenanigans more appropriate in a Bitfinex/Tether or BLMIS audit and that would probably secure you a visit from to very humourless looking FBI agents the fantasy lives on for another week or two.
I think when people look up the word fungible, to realize it simply means "no refund", then they get the drift. NFT may have some future merit but in its current form it is a joke.
Having lots of discussion around web3/nfts but this is succinct reasoning and is pretty much my position. shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/02/s…
Sane person says:
Hallelujah, there are some sane people left in this world who are thinking the same thing I was. I can't begin, words fail ...when I try to explain how demeaning and utterly stupid and useless this selling of "gifs " and "memes" and "texts" etc. is. Basically you can sell , apparently , a photo of anything, an amateur photo let's say, of a tree...and they make it sound like it's a unique piece of art that will make you rich. Is elon Musk behind NFTS? It's a disgrace. It's dumber than tik tok and I don't think anything is as dumb as tik tok (except NFTs).
Chris Farrow says:
Hello.
As the editor of a Technology News publication I would have to say I toally agree with you.
NFTs are one of the biggest loads of shit the 21st century has ever produced.
Take a picure of a some pubic hair, stick it on an old car tier, hit it with some spray paint. Call it an NFT and sell it.
How the world has advanced hey!