Please don't post unsubstantive defensive stuff about the community. I realize it's frustrating to hold a minority/contrarian view (believe me, I understand) but all a comment like this does is add bile, which helps nothing.
Two productive choices are: (1) take up the cross of patiently and respectfully explaining what you believe to be the better information; or (2) chalk it up to people being wrong on the internet and just don't post.
Sorry dang I have patiently defended crypto / blockchain for years and taken all the downvotes. Twitter announces full integration and it’s still all negativity. Not sure what success would be anymore to convince the HN community.
In that case you could always go with option 2. I know it's frustrating, but the internet is to a first approximation wrong about everything, so it's a frustration we all have to live with.
The problem is that HN actually does understand crypto and blockchain. The layperson might believe the myth that NFTs, for example, are "amazing tools with huge potential for monetization of all sorts of digital goods", but most of HN will know the reality - you are "buying" nothing more than a URL in a JSON file (i.e. no legal ownership of anything), almost all artists will lose money (there are over 20M listings on OpenSea and almost every one of those will not sell or sell at a loss to the artist given all the costs in making a listing), and most "investors" will too (unless they are one of the rings of anonymous bidders who collaborate to artificially inflate the price of their selected "artists").
Indeed, the mainstream media talks about NFTs as if they were property titles, completely misleading the public into thinking NFTs are something they are not. A lot of people also think Bitcoin spends a lot of electricity because it needs to do super complicated calculations. When you explain them how bitcoin actually works they usually can't believe it. The misinformation floating around with regards to cryptocurrencies is staggering.
Art is one application of NFTs, but NFTs are not specifically made to represent digital art. Gods Unchained cards are a much better use case since there is built-in utility.
Artists can also mint on ImmutableX without paying any fee at all.
> you are "buying" nothing more than a URL in a JSON file (i.e. no legal ownership of anything),
This is wrong. I can see why you think it, but it is wrong.
The URL in the JSON file is free, as is the artwork that it points to. It's very hard to restrict the copying of digital artworks anyway, so why bother trying to?
The person buying the NFT is not "buying a URL". This phrase doesn't even mean anything! What they are buying is control of a record on the blockchain, which (with some slight hand-waving) contains a list of the signatures of the previous owners, including the original creator or their agent. While it is trivial to copy a JPEG, it is not at all trivial to copy the list of signatures from one part of a blockchain to another, unless you happen to have the private keys of all of the previous owners.
As such, the JPEG is abundant but the record is scarce. This mirrors the physical world, in which Picasso prints are abundant but signed originals are rare and hard to copy. What you're paying for is the uniqueness of the signature, not the ability to look at the content of the artwork, which you can probably already do for free on the internet.
"No legal ownership of anything" is not really true. You do legally own the blockchain record! You can decide whether to sell it or keep it, and you can generally dispose of it as you would with any other property. You don't legally own the copyright of the artwork, but as we've already established, that copyright probably isn't worth very much.
Your other statements may be perfectly accurate - I can't imagine 20M artists on OpenSea all turning a profit, and I imagine that a lot of the investors are likely to lose some money too. I just don't think that this has anything to do with faulty assumptions about how NFTs work.
No you don't. In fact, I don't think NFT ownership has been litigated in any court of law (yet). The deed/title analogy is pretty good. But what makes a deed a deed is that it has the force of the law behind it. NFTs do not.
This might depend on your jurisdiction, but in general legal systems are quite lazy: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If it's something that I have exclusive control over, and I paid someone else money for that exclusive control, then it's my property. There doesn't need to be a written contract or a deed, any more than there needs to be a written contract or a deed for me to sell you, say, my bicycle. If I agree to accept payment, and you provide payment and I provide you with the bicycle, there is no sense in which you are not now the owner of the bicycle.
The crypto space does have an unfortunate history with a kind of legal mysticism, in which people ignore legal practice in favour of attempts to re-derive everything from half-remembered Locke, or something from Nick Szabo's blog, or some weird way of doing things that turns out to be an elaborate attempt to evade securities law rather than any actual legal requirement for sale of property. The term "smart contract" takes this tendency and multiplies it. Ignore this stuff and focus on simple principles: party A paid party B for something that party A was indeed able to transfer to party B in return for the agreed payment. Unless there was an agreement specifying otherwise, B has just acquired some property from A.
So, what we have is the artwork. The artwork, as a digital artifact, continues to exist as long as there is a copy of it anywhere. A copy that was hosted at a particular URL may cease to exist, though.
"Buying a URL" doesn't make sense because there's no transfer of rights. I already have the URL! There's no meaningful mechanism by which I can take control of the URL, and there are no rights over the URL that anyone can sell to me. The reason people mock the idea of "buying a URL" is because they rightly observe that it doesn't make sense.
The value of the record is not directly related to the URL. The value of the record is that it has the artist's signature on it (or the signature of someone I believe to be the artist, or the artist's designated agent; fraud is definitely possible here!). Notably, the URL does not have the artist's signature on it (how could it? This also does not make sense as an idea). The artwork pointed to by the URL might or might not have the artist's signature on it, but if it does then the signature is easily copyable, because the image itself is easily copyable.
The thing that is not easily copyable is the blockchain record. This is because it contains an encrypted transaction signed by the artist's key, and I can't make a duplicate of this unless I have the artist's private key.
If I'm buying an NFT, I'm doing it because I think the artwork is going to be popular or important in some way. If this is true, there are going to be many copies of it. I don't really care about what happens to any single copy, even if it's the copy that was presented as the reference copy at the time I bought the NFT. If I'm truly concerned that the image might disappear entirely, I will download a copy to my laptop and save some backups. If it turns out that the thing I bought was so unpopular and unimportant that months later nobody anywhere saved a copy of it, then I suppose that sucks for me.
Here's my question - NYT could charge me $5 and then deduct from my balance on a per-article basis.
Do we need crypto to enable those transactions? If micropayments made sense, why haven't they caught on already with the payment infrastructure 99% of people already have? Micropayments via crypto are just payment with extra steps.
I'm not for/against either one. I'd just like to see a coherent argument against the idea that crypto is a solution looking for a problem.
I think the answer looks different when you talk about NYT (a large organization most of us probably trust to not steal) vs smaller websites/blogs. I wouldn’t pre-pay some no-name blogger $5 and trust them to charge me properly.
With the pre-pay model, you may even end up with each site dictating it’s own payment terms, which would naturally create opportunities for scammy terms that users don’t understand until their money is gone.
A tipping model incentivized quality content and keeps funds under the user’s control.
In this specific case, it looks like some Strike-related company will have custody of funds, which does defeat the purpose of using a decentralized payment method.
Most of the world does not have access to cheap and easy dollar-denominated payments. Using Bitcoin for this simplifies the implementation for Twitter, and reduces fees.
Most of the world has credit and debit cards. Or, at least, most of the world where people have enough disposable income to shell out for NYT articles. I don't live in a country that deals in USD but I have a debit card and very often buy services denominated in USD.
Fees and chargebacks are the ones that usually come to mind. Oftentimes major credit card provider networks set a "minimum" interchange fee to disincentivize small transactions (a chargeback on a ten-cent transaction is often not worth the squeeze from a support/processing perspective).
Basically all major payment networks are facilitated by a middleman of some sort, and that middleman entity usually has operational costs that disincentivize them from offering micropayments.
Your point about a "balance" lands though - nothing stops NYT from making one "big" charge and then deducting from it other than consumer psychology (paying $10 up front can feel different than paying $0.05 at a time, for example).
Imagine a world where not everyone used the dollar. Then imagine having to support different currencies and ensuring that your price per article stayed in line with currency fluctuations.
Translate the payments to some abstract credits with consistent rate across currencies. Then just forex the money received to euros or dollars or what ever your local currency is.
Actually, there is already a massive platform that does this sort of thing with what really are microtransactions too and even in local currencies, namely Steam.
It's a spectrum of course. Some people thoroughly understand it and still think it's rather boring or dumb. Some people thoroughly understand it and, like yourself, think it's a revolutionary game changer. And most people don't understand it and either (a) think it's dumb and downvote it, or (b) think it's awesome and are fanatical about it.
When an NFT is sold a unit of data stored on a digital ledger is transferred. When a D3 item was sold a unit of data stored on in the database was transferred. Why are those meaningfully different?
Thanks for asking! The difference is that Diablo 3 represents 10E6~ dev hours invested into making a fun game, and items make it more fun. The items are a kind of 'share' in the total fun of the game. Now if we imagine NFTing the Diablo 3 item system, that's interesting.
Mostly what's interesting about it is why it hasn't happened. I've noticed that actors in public blockchain ecosystems VERY strongly seek 'incentive wells' i.e. locally maximized extraction mechanisms. This might be a property of certain general public-ledger economic systems, because it sure comes up a lot. Basically the law is: as long as a blockchain/Dapp/pattern makes money, the people writing it won't improvements to it outside the core extractive mechanic; at least not without some rare external inputs, which inputs are surprisingly rare in practice.
So if your application is on an incentive hill from this perspective, you know it will never get written.
The Diablo 3 Dapp won't get written by Blizzard because it lies on an incentive hill from blizzard's perspective, simply because: assets would (1) increase item prices due to fees and (2) Blizzard would be cut out as a middleman for at least some transactions.
Only once you find public-ledger tech that fixes those incentives (and probably other incentives I've missed) will you start to see interesting and complex distributed applications
I don't understand OPs point, but the meaningful difference is that the digital ledger is decentralized. If Blizzard shuts down D3, your virtual goods are gone forever. NFTs and ownership of NFTs live as long as the blockchain lives
NFTs solve the problem of digital theft. It's just...that's not really an issue with the sort of digital goods that can use NFTs. Nor do most people want to download a whole blockchain for every marketplace they want to participate in (and then continue participating in to facilitate transactions).
How's the eco status on NFTs these days? I know Bitcoin is still trying to cook the Earth but have they fixed NFTs yet?
My only "get off my lawn" take on it
Also it all seems to be digitally drawn portrait templates with different accessories on (eg robot heads). I have no idea if they sell but someone's giving Twitter a bunch of money to shove those in my face haha. I'll put that one down to not getting it, I never got into pokemon cards etc either
The production proof-of-stake system has actually been running in parallel since last December, staking real ETH, with over 200K full nodes. What's left is just to repoint the main clients, so instead of choosing blocks by the most work, they let the staking network choose blocks.
