this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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It's hard to feel sorry for anyone who fell for a very obvious art grift. Even harder to be sorry for those caught grifting.
Even a cursory understanding of value would have told these people that pretty looking receipts are a piss poor investment, but no, they were convinced that NFT's (a tech they obviously knew nothing about) held intrinsic value despite having nothing of value backing them.
Everyone caught up in the NFT art grift did so because they thought they could make a quick buck being ahead of the wave of the next big pump and dump like crypto and got fucked by their hubris. The grifter's meanwhile were out here selling them graffiti'd up CVS receipts and saying they were worth the Mona Lisa.
The result? A perfectly valid and valuable technology has been completely disregarded by the public because 90% of people were too stupid to think before they bought into a tech they didn't understand and they all lost money to grifters. Worlds most widespread art grift and everyone was played a fool, and a valuable tech has been discredited, misunderstood, and shunned.
Damn, you were so close! Just expand what you said about NFTs to the whole crypto bullshit and you got it.
The one example I’ve heard that makes sense are NFTs to represent a purchase of digital games. This then allows the selling of digital keys second hand.
Other than that it all sounds like a scam.
you dont need useless nft tech for that to be possible
Of course not, but what little I know of NFTs is they do the two things needed for that to be possible: one, ability to transfer ownership, and two, verify ownership.
I have no clue if NFTs are the best way to accomplish that, let alone even a good way, and people much smarter than me can figure that out.
In the end I don’t think it matters. For it to be viable it would require the big companies to adopt it, which I never see them accepting a legal way to do second hand sales of digital goods.
Yeah, if you are waiting for a company that loses money through second-hand sales to implement an NFT scheme to facilitate second-hand sales... That could take a while.
This post of yours is one that I completely agree with.
That's a fundamental issue with NFTs though. Every instance of a fitting use case already has a non-NFT way to accomplish the same in the way the people in charge want to keep it.
Why would e.g. Steam want you to be able to trade games without Steam being involved/getting a cut? They can just ask you go buy from them.
Why would a state want to hand over control over the land registry to some cryptobro?
Why would the whole financial side of the art industry want to hand over control to a block chain and make themselves redundant?
Also, revertability of mistakes is a core feature of any reasonable transaction system. A system without that is worthless.
Sorry, this turned into a rant.
I can see ticket sales being issued via nft. They could set a maximum the ticket can be resold for, thus hindering scalpers and the original seller can also get a stake in the resale of the ticket. Beyond that I have never seen another decent use.
But again, why do that if you can also bind tickets to names and use that to make yourself the only possible place where people can sell their tickets on, with a substantial fee (like Ticketmaster does)?
They have no incentive to let people freely sell tickets when thy can also force themselves in as mandatory man in the middle.
You remove the burden of verifying the names and storing the personal data and you don't need to handle the resale inhouse. Other than that yeah it's pretty much the same thing
To a reasonable company, this might be a burden. To a big corporation it's half the reason they are doing this.
Yeah that is true
Yeah and rent-seeking is the only real big business left in town besides personalized advertising.
No way a rent-seeking opportunity this great isn't going to be gobbled up by the existing players and instead given up for free so that they can use new, poorly performing, expensive technology instead.
You can't cap resale prices with technological limits because payment can be split between multiple channels before the seller transfers ownership.
Yeah, that's why I only said hinders not stops. I mean I personally wouldn't send two payments where one of the transactions is one sided because you just open yourself to bring scammed but I'm sure some people would
I could see that being a use case if it weren't for how much the underlying technology sucks ass. Blockchains spend too much time doing their silly little trust-less security nonsense dance to be able to perform at the scale needed by systems that will sell...say...Taylor Swift concert tickets.
Steam would get a cut
They arent. For the NFT to do anything in a game it has to interact with the game in some way. The game gets to decide how it interacts with each NFT. So you are already using a central authority to change your NFT to something of value in the game, So why bother with the whole distributed trustless aspect of the blockchain and not just have a row in a database table?
Also you can just do piracy
That is already possible without the use of NFTs, and much more efficient and secure.
There's no point in using NFT for that.
What assets are games going to allow you to import? Just anything?
Or only from authorized issuers (like the original game dev and authorized artists)? If so then you have no real place for NFT, you already have Steam marketplace and equivalent where the game dev sets up or integrates with an online marketplace.
Want transparency in the marketplace? Use transparency logs, not blockchains.
If you're allowing literally any NFT then this is no different from allowing people to import arbitrary assets, with the sole difference that some have a digital receipt attached.
Blockchains are really only useful for certain coordination problems among mutually untrusting parties who can't find a common trusted 3rd party. For most game devs that trusted 3rd party is Steam marketplace. It's really only if you want to share assets in both directions between specific games from specific other developers AND want to make them exclusive / player owned AND don't trust marketplaces like Steam, that it MIGHT be relevant to investigate if a blockchain solution fits.
There is value in a fully distributed append-only database system that can run on nodes that don't trust each other. We just haven't found any valid use of it outside crypto yet.
FTFY
How is crypto not a valid use? Crypto as a get rich quick scheme is stupid and useless, but crypto for peer to peer payments is perfectly valid.
What (of value) does crypto do that existing payment services don't?
I'm not suggesting that crypto replace any existing use for bank cards or apps like zelle or cash app. I'm suggesting that there are other payment scenarios where excusing systems don't fit, like a dispensary that lost access to a payment processor (hypothetical, not sure if this has happened) or a merchant wanting to avoid transaction fees. It's absolutely useless in 99% of all transactions, but it's not 100%.
Are you arguing that any technology that does the same thing as an existing one has zero value whatsoever?
If I had to spitball an answer, I'd say the value of an innovation increases as it improves on existing similar things, and decreases as it worsens from them.
I don't see any benefit to crypto for sending money, and introducing a new, volatile currency backed by people's imagination is a detraction to me.
Oh yeah I love paying someone using a wildly volatile currency that goes up and down like a roller coaster and has exorbitant transaction fees. But at least I'm not a chump who uses a bank card.
I'm not anti bank or bank card, when those aren't an option crypto is a valid option. Ideally something without much for transaction fees, of course. Since prices are volatile, you would likely only purchase what you needed when you needed it.
This is wildly inconvenient, but remember this is a "banks are not an option" scenario. That's really up to the recipient. It could be a dispensary that got shut down by their payment processor, or another shop that wants to avoid the 3-5% transaction fee that payment processors charge. And yes, it could be something nefarious or illegal on the dark web.
To say crypto has no valid uses is simply inaccurate. For most people, though, there are better options like peer-to-peer payment apps (zelle, cash app, etc.) or just plain old cash.
I’ve read both these five times and I’m not seeing the difference, help!
"outside crypto" at the end is crossed out.
Huh. Thank you. It's not showing that for me using the Voyager app on Android. Thought I was losing my marbles
Oh weird must be a Voyager issue then, not seeing it via that on iOS, thanks for the reply!
If there's no valid use how do you derive value? It's old tech at this point and still looking for a problem to solve.
No. Stop. If blockchain, nfts, etc. had actual merit over what we already have rn, they would be used everywhere. But ever since the inception of the og blockchain, they do not. Because there is not a single actual use case of them that isn't already done (and done better) by other tech.
So stop this "oh it was good, just misunderstood" nonsense. It was never good, and never will be.