NFTs

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Woodchopper
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Re: NFTs

Post by Woodchopper » Thu Nov 11, 2021 2:33 pm

Article provides some info on the benefits from buying an NFT.
But NFTs don’t just provide a kind of digital “deed.” Because blockchains are programmable, it’s possible to endow NFTs with features that enable them to expand their purpose over time, or even to provide direct utility to their holders. In other words, NFTs can do things — or let their owners do things — in both digital spaces and the physical world.

In this sense, NFTs can function like membership cards or tickets, providing access to events, exclusive merchandise, and special discounts — as well as serving as digital keys to online spaces where holders can engage with each other. Moreover, because the blockchain is public, it’s even possible to send additional products directly to anyone who owns a given token. All of this gives NFT holders value over and above simple ownership — and provides creators with a vector to build a highly engaged community around their brands.

It’s not uncommon to see creators organize in-person meetups for their NFT holders, as many did at the recent NFT NYC conference. In other cases, having a specific NFT in your online wallet might be necessary in order to gain access to an online game, chat room, or merchandise store. And creator teams sometimes grant additional tokens to their NFT holders in ways that expand the product ecosystem: owners of a particular goat NFT, for example, were recently able to claim a free baby goat NFT that gives benefits beyond the original token; holders of a particular bear NFT, meanwhile, just received honey.

Thus owning an NFT effectively makes you an investor, a member of a club, a brand shareholder, and a participant in a loyalty program all at once. At the same time, NFTs’ programmability supports new business and profit models — for example, NFTs have enabled a new type of royalty contract, whereby each time a work is resold, a share of the transaction goes back to the original creator.

[...]

The Bored Ape Yacht Club, for example, comprises a series of NFT ape images conferring membership in an online community. The project started with a series of private chat rooms and a graffiti board, and has grown to include high-end merchandise, social events, and even an actual yacht party. SupDucks and the Gutter Cat Gang similarly began building communities around NFT image series and associated online spaces; the former has bridged into a boardwalk-themed metaverse game, and the latter has focused on real-world benefits like extravagant in-person events.

People often take on membership in these collectives as part of their personal identity — even using their favorite NFT image as their public profile picture on social media. Each NFT community has different personalities and purposes, and there are so many by now that almost everyone can find a group they can call their own. In this way, NFT ownership provides an immediate shared text that people can use to connect with each other.

And moreover, in many of these communities, ownership also conveys partial or full commercial rights — or even some degree of governance in how the community is run — which means people members can build properties on top of their NFTs that grow the value of the overall brand. Crucially, this creates a channel by which engaged fandom can feed back into the brand itself: “Jenkins the Valet” is a Bored Ape member-created project that has effectively become its own sub-brand. Individual SupDucks members have created art and character identities around their NFTs that have been absorbed into the SupDucks metaverse. And community-created fan projects have built out parts of the Gutter Cat Gang story arc.

All of these benefits make owning the associated NFTs more valuable — and almost paradoxically, this increase in the value of ownership comes in a form that helps separate the value of ownership from the purely financial opportunity of reselling.

Building on this phenomenon, a few well-known brands have recently introduced NFT series that serve to identify, reinforce, and expand their existing communities of brand enthusiasts. The popular streetwear brand The Hundreds, for example, has built an NFT project around their mascot the “Adam Bomb,” and directly rewards their community of NFT holders with improved access to the brand through connection with the founders and early access to new product releases.

Many emerging NFT applications, meanwhile, are seeking to more explicitly blend online NFT ownership with offline use cases. A few restaurants, for example, have started using NFTs for reservations. And the ticketing industry has a major opportunity here: By issuing tickets as NFTs, venues can give a variety of benefits to purchasers, creating more of an incentive to buy, as well as providing the venues an opportunity to collect royalties on secondary sales.

Other companies are exploring how NFTs could be used in establishing and recording people’s identity and reputation online. MIT recently started offering blockchain-based digital diplomas, which are effectively non-transferable NFTs. Meanwhile, both established players like Facebook (now Meta) and new ventures like POAP and koodos are providing ways for individuals to create and share NFTs around activities, affinities, and interests.
https://hbr.org/2021/11/how-nfts-create-value

NFTs as a way to pay for access to the cool people makes sense.

Perhaps we should make a Scrutable NFT that people need to buy in order to post here.

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Sciolus
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Re: NFTs

Post by Sciolus » Thu Nov 11, 2021 2:47 pm

What a load of guff. None of that requires or is facilitated by NFTs or blockchain, except as a vehicle for hype. For example, Patreon and the like have provided a way to buy access to content creators for years.

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Re: NFTs

Post by plodder » Thu Nov 11, 2021 3:11 pm

yeah but “digital wallet”

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bjn
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Re: NFTs

Post by bjn » Thu Nov 11, 2021 4:52 pm

Sciolus wrote:
Thu Nov 11, 2021 2:47 pm
What a load of guff. None of that requires or is facilitated by NFTs or blockchain, except as a vehicle for hype. For example, Patreon and the like have provided a way to buy access to content creators for years.
And it’s all done with an insanely wasteful system.

Let’s do a database, but an incredibly slow one that burns MWh to add a single entry.

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Re: NFTs

Post by sheldrake » Thu Nov 11, 2021 9:17 pm

bjn wrote:
Thu Nov 11, 2021 4:52 pm
Sciolus wrote:
Thu Nov 11, 2021 2:47 pm
What a load of guff. None of that requires or is facilitated by NFTs or blockchain, except as a vehicle for hype. For example, Patreon and the like have provided a way to buy access to content creators for years.
And it’s all done with an insanely wasteful system.

Let’s do a database, but an incredibly slow one that burns MWh to add a single entry.
This is only true of proof of work currencies. It’s bot the case for proof of stake currencies like cardano, tezos and soon ethereum. Most NFTs are currently implemented as ethereum blockchain tokens

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Re: NFTs

Post by bjn » Thu Nov 11, 2021 11:53 pm

sheldrake wrote:
Thu Nov 11, 2021 9:17 pm
bjn wrote:
Thu Nov 11, 2021 4:52 pm
Sciolus wrote:
Thu Nov 11, 2021 2:47 pm
What a load of guff. None of that requires or is facilitated by NFTs or blockchain, except as a vehicle for hype. For example, Patreon and the like have provided a way to buy access to content creators for years.
And it’s all done with an insanely wasteful system.

Let’s do a database, but an incredibly slow one that burns MWh to add a single entry.
This is only true of proof of work currencies. It’s bot the case for proof of stake currencies like cardano, tezos and soon ethereum. Most NFTs are currently implemented as ethereum blockchain tokens
:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

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Re: NFTs

Post by sheldrake » Fri Nov 12, 2021 12:11 am

I'm not sure what you find funny?

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Re: NFTs

Post by sheldrake » Fri Nov 12, 2021 12:22 am

Sciolus wrote:
Thu Nov 11, 2021 2:47 pm
What a load of guff. None of that requires or is facilitated by NFTs or blockchain, except as a vehicle for hype. For example, Patreon and the like have provided a way to buy access to content creators for years.
And before the internet you could just look things up in the yellow pages. Get off my lawn.

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Re: NFTs

Post by sTeamTraen » Fri Nov 12, 2021 12:52 am

Apologies if we've already had this, but: the person who claims to be the inventor of NFTs thinks they're a scam.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ke/618488/
Something something hammer something something nail

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Re: NFTs

Post by sheldrake » Fri Nov 12, 2021 1:10 am

sTeamTraen wrote:
Fri Nov 12, 2021 12:52 am
Apologies if we've already had this, but: the person who claims to be the inventor of NFTs thinks they're a scam.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ke/618488/
That's not exactly what they say. They think it falls short of its potential, bemoan the fact that rich people are hoarding them and then make some weird, ahistorical claims that sound like they've gotten out of touch with the crypto world.
Theoretical uses abound, but no ordinary person is choosing a blockchain-based technology over its traditional counterpart. More than a decade after blockchains first caught tech geeks’ eye, not a single smartphone app that you use with friends or co-workers relies on that technology.
There are millions of people trading cryptocurrencies today. Social media that can't be censored by some corporation or state busybody is coming https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/123 ... -on-solana
By contrast, when the web was the same age that bitcoin is today, it had half a billion users around the world.
Depends when we date in the invention of the web. Http was invented in 1989 and bitcoin in 2009, but blockchains that supported the smart contracts useful for building distributed apps have only been around since 2015. The web didn't have anything like 500 million users six years after its invention, in 1995.

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Re: NFTs

Post by bjn » Fri Nov 12, 2021 7:40 am

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry invented the concept of NFTs…
...But you cannot pluck the stars from heaven..." "No. But I can put them in the bank." "Whatever does that mean?" "That means I write down the number of my stars on a little paper. And then I put this paper in a drawer and lock it with a key." "And that is all?" "That is enough," said the businessman
.

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Re: NFTs

Post by jaap » Fri Nov 12, 2021 8:46 am

bjn wrote:
Fri Nov 12, 2021 7:40 am
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry invented the concept of NFTs…
...But you cannot pluck the stars from heaven..." "No. But I can put them in the bank." "Whatever does that mean?" "That means I write down the number of my stars on a little paper. And then I put this paper in a drawer and lock it with a key." "And that is all?" "That is enough," said the businessman
.
science_fox mentioned it, but I think it went unremarked in the thread.
science_fox wrote:
Fri Oct 08, 2021 1:28 pm
NFT vs Little Prince https://twitter.com/jbtuason/status/1440377649658949635 fair cop?
I think it is an amazing piece of prose, though in my limited understanding I'm not sure it captures what an NFT is.
I think of it more as a signed photo of a filmstar. The photo is not unique and not particularly valuable, but the signature makes it collectible. Until you realise that the signature is probably fake.

Not relevant to NFTs, but I found this Andy Warhol art project very amusing.

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Re: NFTs

Post by plodder » Fri Nov 12, 2021 8:54 am

jaap wrote:
Fri Nov 12, 2021 8:46 am
Not relevant to NFTs, but I found this Andy Warhol art project very amusing.
That is fantastic. We need an art thread.

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Re: NFTs

Post by secret squirrel » Fri Nov 12, 2021 9:53 am

jaap wrote:
Fri Nov 12, 2021 8:46 am
I think it is an amazing piece of prose, though in my limited understanding I'm not sure it captures what an NFT is.
I think of it more as a signed photo of a filmstar. The photo is not unique and not particularly valuable, but the signature makes it collectible. Until you realise that the signature is probably fake.
The main problem with NFTs is that to firmly associate them with any external (i.e. not on whatever blockchain the NFT is on) thing you need an external apparatus (e.g. reliable web hosting, copyright enforcement and so on), and if you have the external apparatus you don't need an NFT. So the better analogy here is that you have a signed slip containing the code to a safe that may or may not contain a photo of a film star.

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Re: NFTs

Post by bjn » Fri Nov 12, 2021 10:06 am

An NFT is a small number of bytes, typically a URL, bound to an entry in a distributed ledger. That’s all. The non fungibility just means that you can track that token as it get transferred between accounts in the ledger, plus being unable to enter a “split” transfer whereby you put those bytes into two entries in the ledger. The secure chain of transfers let’s you see the “authenticity” of which account currently has that token.

However, I could make brand new entry in the ledger with the exactly the same bytes in it with a different chain of ownership.

Plus what Secret Squirrel says.

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Re: NFTs

Post by bjn » Fri Nov 12, 2021 10:07 am

secret squirrel wrote:
Fri Nov 12, 2021 9:53 am
jaap wrote:
Fri Nov 12, 2021 8:46 am
I think it is an amazing piece of prose, though in my limited understanding I'm not sure it captures what an NFT is.
I think of it more as a signed photo of a filmstar. The photo is not unique and not particularly valuable, but the signature makes it collectible. Until you realise that the signature is probably fake.
The main problem with NFTs is that to firmly associate them with any external (i.e. not on whatever blockchain the NFT is on) thing you need an external apparatus (e.g. reliable web hosting, copyright enforcement and so on), and if you have the external apparatus you don't need an NFT. So the better analogy here is that you have a signed slip containing the code to a safe that may or may not contain a photo of a film star.
More like a slip saying there is a safe that may or may not exist and may or may not contain a photo of a film star.

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Re: NFTs

Post by bjn » Fri Nov 12, 2021 10:20 am

Forgot to add. If some decides to fork your blockchain then your NFT has been duplicated. What happens then? If it gets transferred in one ledger but not the other, who “owns” it then.

The whole of crypto needs to die in a fire.

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Re: NFTs

Post by basementer » Fri Nov 12, 2021 11:16 am

plodder wrote:
Fri Nov 12, 2021 8:54 am
jaap wrote:
Fri Nov 12, 2021 8:46 am
Not relevant to NFTs, but I found this Andy Warhol art project very amusing.
That is fantastic. We need an art thread.
Reminds me of what Richard Hamilton said about Marcel Duchamp. The latter signed a copy of "Bicycle Wheel" that he and Hamilton had made, and he was laughing: "Every time I sign one, they become worth less."
Money is just a substitute for luck anyway. - Tom Siddell

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Re: NFTs

Post by sheldrake » Fri Nov 12, 2021 2:00 pm

Do you remember the first dotcom boom? This is somewhat like that. Its a new thing with real uses mixed in with a bunch of terrible ideas that might make some money for a few lucky people who get out fast enough. But there will also be Google-like enduring useful things emerging

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Re: NFTs

Post by dyqik » Fri Nov 12, 2021 2:07 pm

bjn wrote:
Fri Nov 12, 2021 10:20 am
Forgot to add. If some decides to fork your blockchain then your NFT has been duplicated. What happens then? If it gets transferred in one ledger but not the other, who “owns” it then.

The whole of crypto needs to die in a fire.
Even more fun will be when courts start having to rule on who really owns NFTs, due to fraud on the other side of the transaction, and it turns out that several different forks of the blockchains all have different invalid transactions on them.

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Re: NFTs

Post by sheldrake » Fri Nov 12, 2021 11:26 pm

bjn wrote:
Fri Nov 12, 2021 10:20 am
Forgot to add. If some decides to fork your blockchain then your NFT has been duplicated. What happens then? If it gets transferred in one ledger but not the other, who “owns” it then.

The whole of crypto needs to die in a fire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBV-k9E0eHg

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Re: NFTs

Post by Woodchopper » Sat Nov 20, 2021 6:46 pm


Piracy' website offers NFT art as free downloads

[…]

The NFT Bay purports to offer "all NFTs from Ethereum and Solana" - two cryptocurrency networks - in a whopping 17 terabyte (TB) file.

Critics of NFTs point out that anybody can access, download and copy the digital artwork attached to the "token of ownership".
"NFT art right now is nothing more then directions on how to access or download an image. The image is not stored on the blockchain," said Mr Huntley.

However, proponents of cryptocurrency say owning the NFT carries clout and bragging rights - and that simply right-clicking and saving an image is not the same.

While the NFT Bay download contains images of NFT artwork, it does not contain any of the digital tokens that "prove ownership".
Mr Huntley hopes the website means "future generations can study this generation's tulip mania" - a reference to one of the most famous examples of a financial bubble.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59262326

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Re: NFTs

Post by Woodchopper » Sun Jan 09, 2022 12:15 pm

Perhaps this could be peak NFT?
The Marxist political scientist Michael Parenti once wrote, “The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital.” Perhaps no one knows this more intimately than 90-Day Fiance star Stephanie Matto, a YouTuber turned adult content creator who claims to have made upwards of $200,000 selling her farts in jars.

[...]

So how did you decide to pivot to NFT fart jars? Was that before you went to the ER?

I was working with a graphic designer on developing a collection of digital fart jars. We had actually launched that already on FartJarsNFT.com. It’s also available to mint on OpenSea. And it’s basically a collection of 5,000 unique, digitally drawn fart jars, and they all have a different theme. And some of them actually come with unlockable, redeemable attributes. So 100 of the 5,000 fart jar NFTs actually do unlock the ability for you to redeem it for an actual physical fart jar. It’s a very, very, very limited quality, simply for the release of this NFT.

How many have you minted so far?

The last time I checked, it was over 100. It’s only been a couple of days… today this morning, last time I checked, someone had purchased a fart jar [NFT] for I think it was like $200 value and they had resold it for a thousand. So they made money.

[...]

A lot of people have been questioning the value of NFTs or calling them a scam. I’m wondering, is this project intended to be a commentary on the actual value of NFTs is or the NFT marketplace in general? Or are you like a true NFT believer?

Oh, my gosh. That’s a loaded question. I do believe in the value of NFTs. I think they’re a way for people to recognize digital artists. Are there NFTs out there that could be scammy? I’m sure, just like with crypto, there’s coins in the past that have been scams, essentially. So I can’t speak on behalf of every NFT project, but mine is obviously legit and I think a lot of them are too.

But I want to push you on this a little bit because I mean, I think a lot of people would say that farting in a jar and packaging it as an NFT is, very much on the scam side of the spectrum. So what makes the fart jar NFT more legitimate than other types of NFT is, in your opinion?

Well, people are paying for artwork on the blockchain, and I think that it’s a pretty straightforward transaction. There’s no false promises in play. There’s a lot of people out there who do believe that NFTs are scams, but I just think it’s maybe because they don’t understand really what they are, and that’s their default is just to say it’s a scam. But there’s a whole community that supports it, and I’m enthusiastic about it.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/cu ... w-1280395/

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Re: NFTs

Post by lpm » Sun Jan 09, 2022 12:44 pm

Image
⭐ Awarded gold star 4 November 2021

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Re: NFTs

Post by bjn » Sun Jan 09, 2022 3:40 pm

lpm wrote:
Sun Jan 09, 2022 12:44 pm
Image
Damn that’s good. I was toying with the idea of doing something similar, just for shits and giggles and to troll crypto bros.

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