What if You Work Half Shift Then Go Home Sock

January 13, 2022 Post a Comment

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What is an NFT and how do they work? I can barely understand it.

Thread starter VoxTheTVDemon
Start date Nov 5, 2021

The obvious conclusion here is to take the saved image and make a new NFT with the pointer also going to that image.

My conclusion was to make NFTs of any pics the guy who dms me about right clicking posts of himself them demanding he deletes his photos.

phazon

It's people all the way down. And nice curtains.

I still don't get how people get duped by this

Largely they don't care about the minutia, and are there for the money. As long as everything crypto can be bough and sold, they stand a chance to make money off the speculation, so the inner workings are at best an excuse to give legitimacy to what's basically glorified speculation.

Or in general, if you think everybody is a fool you may be being a tad bit conceited. Many people can have a vague understanding of what a bubble is, and they will still take risks in hope of making lots of money before it burst. Others are more optimistic and treat the whole thing as it were wall street, with the thinking that as long as they pull when things go bad they can just wait and invest again forever.

If NFTs are as much a scam as people here are saying, then I have a related question: how should we otherwise establish ownership of digital art, especially in regards to monetary compensation of digital artists for their honest work?

Greater Fool Theory - The vast majority of NFT buyers get in on it with the idea that they'll be able to find a bigger dupe to sell their shitty, mass generated monkey art or whatever to at higher price than what they bought it for. Almost no one involved in the NFT scene actually thinks they have any intrinsic value on their own.

The only time I am aware of where trying to beat out the scammers work was an example during the early 2000s.

Back in the day, there was a bunch of pump and dump scams going on with Penny stocks using spam emails. Now, at this point in time there were reseafchs declaring such things were now dead because they werent finding any such emails in studies! Which was true...because they were only searching for text based spam emails, which the major email services had heavily smacked down at the time.

2 MIT students decided for some reason however to save all the spam emails they got and then sort them. They noticed that these penny stock scams were still catching people just by looking at the penny stock-market. They noticed that the successful ones were using stuff like pictures in their emails. This was a lot harder to automate detection of back them so these were getting through to people to get duped by.

They noticed a pattern with the pump and dump: The pumper bought shares then sent out the emails. They realized they could jump in and buy some shares themselves before the emails dropped and then when it gets up a decent amount sell them for a tidy profit. At which point a fun fact arises: it isnt illegal to be a third party who realizes a stock is getting targeted by a pump and dump before the pumping starts by looking at publically availible data and jump in before hand then trigger the dump. Thats just good market research. But it does ruin that scammers day.

They made a modest profit. They had some good weeks and some bad. Making more was made difficult by a simple issue: Operation Spamalot. The penny stock traders they were getting spam emails from got caught.

If NFTs are as much a scam as people here are saying, then I have a related question: how should we otherwise establish ownership of digital art, especially in regards to monetary compensation of digital artists for their honest work?

The same way any piece of artwork can have ownership established: The Copyright Office and transaction histories.

If NFTs are as much a scam as people here are saying, then I have a related question: how should we otherwise establish ownership of digital art, especially in regards to monetary compensation of digital artists for their honest work?

pay em. What? Need more? Sorry ain't going to get an better answer then that between viable/practical/realistic possibilities then what we got right now. After all thats what caused SpaceBattles to deal with the toucan incident.

If NFTs are as much a scam as people here are saying, then I have a related question: how should we otherwise establish ownership of digital art, especially in regards to monetary compensation of digital artists for their honest work?

The same way any piece of artwork can have ownership established: The Copyright Office and transaction histories.

Yup. You can register copyright if you want intelectual property, just like musicians, writers of e-books, etc. If you are not the author then you need to record you bought it, which is what a transaction history means. Contracts, screen shoots of commissions, etc.

The Copyright Office has a FAQ with all information about how to register copyright, you can do it online.

The obvious conclusion here is to take the saved image and make a new NFT with the pointer also going to that image.
Because fundamentally that's the thing; an NFT is just a pointer. It's not the actual image. The same thing that makes Blockchain an interesting medium for title is what makes it so useless for this.

Basically they aren't selling you a property title that purports to say that you own London Bridge. They are selling you a piece of paper that has "London Bridge" written on it along an address or geographical coordinate. You have zero ownership of the actual bridge. You only have property of that particular piece of paper saying "London Bridge" on it.

Functionally NFTs are like penny stocks. They have real value, just small, and the people buying them are hoping that other speculators will drive up the price and allow them to cash out for more than they paid to buy in.

Basically if Stratton Oakmont was around today, this is what it would be trading in.

Last edited: Dec 13, 2021

Earlier in Spacebattles history a particular image of a Toucan had bizarrely strong and persistent copyright enforcement. It apparently caused a significant headache at the time.

Giygas

Slimes are too cute send help

A guy owed an image of a toucan, and knocked down the site for a day or so when he discovered it was posted on Spacebattles.

Simply contacting Mods or Admins and asking them to remove the photo or change it with another was apparently too hard for him, i guess.

A guy owed an image of a toucan, and knocked down the site for a day or so when he discovered it was posted on Spacebattles.
Simply contacting Mods or Admins and asking them to remove the photo or change it with another was apparently too hard for him, i guess.

The picture wasn't even hosted on SB, it was just linked to. Like this asshat got his panties in a bunch because we linked to his picture. Which was easily findable with a google search.

I can only imagine that he'd be one of those people who'd sell NFTs and would scream at people to delete their downloads because they're not the owners!

If NFTs are as much a scam as people here are saying, then I have a related question: how should we otherwise establish ownership of digital art, especially in regards to monetary compensation of digital artists for their honest work?

This is actually a very good question. NFTs are an utter scam, but any good scam is built upon a tiny sliver of truth. NFTs are claimed by supporters to be a better method of compensating artists and tracking their rights. For example, an NFT can include a piece of code that says that every time it is sold, a certain percentage of the sale price goes back to the original artist.

However, despite sounding really neat, NFTs don't actually do anything to solve the problem. It's the fundamental paradox of DRM all over again: How do you let someone experience your work without letting them copy it? This is a problem with traditional art like music, sculptures or paintings (if I can see the Mona Lisa, I can paint a decent reproduction), but it's much worse with digital art because the copies can be perfect (if I can see an image or movie on my screen, I can screencap it). This fundamental paradox can never be resolved. No matter how cryptographically airtight the control over the NFT's state is, you still cannot control the artwork itself. You can have unhackable proof you own this particular file on the Internet; doesn't stop copies or close derivatives being made and people selling ownership to those.

This is not a new problem. How to compensate artists and experiential intellectual property in general has been an issue for centuries, at minimum. There have been no perfect solutions, and I don't think NFTs even do anything to contribute to a solution because they demonstrate no understanding of the underlying problem. If your clever scheme gets busted by right-clicking, it wasn't actually that clever.

If you want a real answer to your question, it seems that treating art as property will never work, but treating art as a service works much better. Stopping people from torrenting movies and TV shows is nearly impossible, but many people don't do it anymore because services like Netflix are just so much easier. Same deal with computer games and Steam. Most musicians make most of their money on tour, where people pay for performances. Amateur artists usually make their money from Patreon or commissions for custom art. Basically, don't try to sell the artwork, but sell convenient access to it and the service of producing it, especially live or bespoke.

Art is meant to be copied, commented upon, derived from, critiqued. Any artwork is like a single line in a flowing conversation, never really standing on its own. It's a terrible fit for property rights in general. It's much better to monetize art by non-property means.

Edit: The NFT scam is just one version of the crypto scam in general:

1. Identify real problem.
2. Claim crypto can fix it.
3. NEW PARADIGM! GET IN ON THE GROUND FLOOR OR 'HAVE FUN STAYING POOR'
4. Don't actually fix the problem.
5. Dump on the dupes before they figure this out.

Bitcoin was meant to fix monetary instability and high international transfer fees. Instead it has insane volatility and gigantic transaction fees. Ethereum was meant to be a trusted transactional backbone, a world computer. Instead it has so many scams and bugs that they had to hard fork to bail out their insiders, and scams are still constant on the platform. NFTs are meant to help artists. See where this is going?

David Khoo
In upper case A Art, the term is "provenance", and it is hard enough with physical artwork*. With digital media, I think at a certain point you need a different model entirely and have different expectations with provenance.

*There have been major scandals in the art world with forgeries of famous artists because a sufficiently talented painter can make reproductions or copy the style of artists closely enough it requires sophisticated forensics and a skilled appraiser to tell the difference. I remember an auction house scandal involving a previously "unknown wealthy collector" (read: a con woman found a talented Chinese painter who was good at copying the style of certain artists) and produced things like previously unknown paintings attributed to artists like Rothko, which go for millions. There is question whether the auction house did their due diligence, but at the same time, with Rothko, he was poor during his career and also gave away his paintings all the time because he hated the notion of them being a collectible for wealthy assholes (irony alert!). It is entirely possibly that there ARE unknown Rothkos out there with no known provenance and he painted in the middle 20th so a forger still has all the same materials he might have used. It ended in a lawsuit cluster fuck.

How you deal with that with digital work? I think you have to give up somewhat on the idea of provenance.

David Khoo
In upper case A Art, the term is "provenance", and it is hard enough with physical artwork*. With digital media, I think at a certain point you need a different model entirely and have different expectations with provenance.
*There have been major scandals in the art world with forgeries of famous artists because a sufficiently talented painter can make reproductions or copy the style of artists closely enough it requires sophisticated forensics and a skilled appraiser to tell the difference. I remember an auction house scandal involving a previously "unknown wealthy collector" (read: a con woman found a talented Chinese painter who was good at copying the style of certain artists) and produced things like previously unknown paintings attributed to artists like Rothko, which go for millions. There is question whether the auction house did their due diligence, but at the same time, with Rothko, he was poor during his career and also gave away his paintings all the time because he hated the notion of them being a collectible for wealthy assholes (irony alert!). It is entirely possibly that there ARE unknown Rothkos out there with no known provenance and he painted in the middle 20th so a forger still has all the same materials he might have used. It ended in a lawsuit cluster fuck.

How you deal with that with digital work? I think you have to give up somewhat on the idea of provenance.

For the record, with things like works of art, music, and the like, merely proving the artist used the vast majority of elements used by another work of art isnt enough and neither can any one element be copyrighted. It needs to be substantially similar. So fanart of a character from another work? Ansolutely fails this standard unless you can prove proper parody...which almost no fanartist can. Making a painting of a scene you saw that ends up similar to a famous artist? Not as likely. Note that your example wouldnt be able to get copyright because it would lack a credible transaction history.

As for the auction house, legit non-zero chance they knew it was fake but felt it was a convincing enough one they could pass it off as real. Auction houses constantly get in trouble for fraudulently trying to make things seem mote valuable then they are due to the fact they get a percentage commission. A good example was the gold coin market back during the 80's where one auction house had high ranking members go and "sell" each other good coins for new record prices. The price of gold coins has still yet to return to the peak it once had. Which isnt surprising since said peak was fraudulent.

Fun fact: Those headlines about record auction prices for vintage video games? They are fraudulent. They just happened to have been between 2 board members of the same appraisal company, who had also appraised them, and had stated beforehand they dont appraise their own employees stuff. Oh and if that doesnt sound fishy enough, one of the major board members happens to be a high ranking executive at an auction house...that just happens to have stated it will only accept video games on it appraised by said appraisal company.

Said Auction House exec BTW has already been convicted once for such fraud while working with that auction house. Hes the one who orchestrated the gold coin fraud.

Is there any way to stop them? It already seems like the scam is growing. How long will this be going on for?

Can you guys break it down for me? I still don't get it. All I get is that people sell...'art' of ugly pics for money and it somehow works into a crypto currency. I don't get how people get money from this since it sounds like a waste and an obvious scam yet...it works?

Imagine a commemorative plate, with a serial number to identify it. This plate of Jar-Jar Binks is unique and only you own it.

Now imagine that it's an image file, rather than a plate, and the people trying to sell it to you assure you that it's worth will grow over time.

So would be right to call NFTs a digital, private version of a Registrar office? Someone (something) that records a document and/or a transaction and makes it public for the world to see if required later?

Except, a Registrar is backed by governmental authority and uses a normal electronic database/a massive book of records while an NFT uses blockchain to store the record?

Why do NFTs use a lot of energy? To generate the blockchain? Or to verify the ownership?

Why do NFTs use a lot of energy? To generate the blockchain? Or to verify the ownership?

For both

Proof of Work

Unfortunately, NFTs come with environmental limitations. Most "crypto art" distribution and security technology derive from Ethereum. The Ethereum platform uses 48.14 kilowatt-hours of energy per transaction.
The Ethereum blockchain generates thousands of transactions every day. One transaction uses as much power as the conventional household over a day and a half. As a result, it significantly increases global energy consumption.

The blockchain uses vast quantities of energy for proof-of-work (PoW) security.

Blockchains based on proof of work models mine and trade with enourmous energy cost, there are other models being tested like proof of stake and Bitcoin promisses to change to renewable energy. It still seems like an enourmous amount of resources for digital art.

of average electricity prices and the latest price for bitcoin, and you can get an accurate, if imprecise, estimate of electricity consumption. The most reputable such estimate comes from the University of Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, according to which the global bitcoin network currently consumes about 80 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, roughly equal to the annual output of 23 coal-fired power plants, or close to what is consumed by the nation of Finland.

Shocker

The weed of Crime bears bitter fruit.

People who buy NFTs would tell you they totally own it, just look at the blockchain, it totally says so.

"I'm not owned! I'm a legitimate entrepreneur now!"

There's something about NFT owners that liken them to hard-core console wars people in mentality. I bought this thing so I need to fanatically defend doing so.

But at least a console owner can physically fucking touch what they paid for.

To be honest all i can say is if you want to get into this area it might just be easier to buy the copyright for an image etc from the artist or whoever originaly owns. As a NFT seems to just be a complicated way of as everyone else has said conning people and damaging the planet.

At least with Copyright the issues around it have been resolved on the whole in court, then again i am just a photographer and well i would avoid NFT's like the plague. You want a licence that can be done , you want a print that can be done or you wabnt the copyright we can discuss but it will cost you.

I'm going to copy paste an answer from reddit. It explains it best.

What is NFT?

This comes down to what is meant by fungibility. Basically, when we describe something as fungible, what we mean is that you can readily replace it with something equivalent and that's fine for everyone concerned. Take a dollar bill, for example. We say it's fungible because if someone rips up a dollar bill in your wallet, they can replace it with another dollar bill and you're no worse or better off: both of those dollar bills spend the same. Similarly, one share of Apple stock is worth the same as any other share of Apple stock. It doesn't really matter which one you have, because from the perspective of being able to get value from it, number 304 is the same as number 3,539. One 1kg lump of pure gold is functionally the same as another 1kg lump of pure gold, if you're using it as a store of value. They're designed to be equivalent and interchangeable. (Keep in mind that this isn't just about the value of the item. One share of Company A might be priced the same as one share of Company B, but you can't just swap those shares even if they're technically worth the same. To be fungible, the two items have to be functionally identical.)

However, now imagine the lucky dollar bill you have that you saved from your first paycheck -- the one you believe brings you good luck, Scrooge McDuck style. If someone rips up that bill, then replacing it with another dollar just isn't going to cut it. It's no longer a fungible item.

So now imagine something like a book. You can have a fungible copy of a book (any mass-market paperback is pretty much interchangeable with any other, after all; if all you're buying is the text, you're fine). However, you can also have non-fungible copies of a book -- like, for example, a first edition with a limited cover and a signed bookplate from the author. Once those are all sold, you're out of luck if you want to get one. They're just not making any more. This has been a big selling point for physical media for decades, with collectors -- and people willing to pay a premium -- paying more to get that unique extra, even if they're not technically getting more out of it. (It's not like buying a special edition of a DVD with extra commentaries and special features, for example.) This is the reason why an original Picasso costs so much more than even the most skilled reproduction. You're not just paying for the look of the painting, but for its history and provenance. You're paying for the fact that it's a Picasso.

But how does that work with the shift towards electronic media, such as digital art and ebooks? After all, the whole point of digital media is that (in theory at least) it's infinitely reproducible. My copy of an ebook is quite literally an identical copy of your copy, right down to the same ones and zeroes. You can't really have a collector's edition of an ebook, right? How do you have something special, given the technology that allows you to create an exact copy in the time it takes you to press Ctrl+V?

This is where blockchain comes in. Remember how, with cryptocurrency like BitCoin and Ethereum, the whole point is that you can use what's basically a giant list to keep track of where the money is, and who owns what? You can use that same technology to ensure that you own a 'limited edition' version of a creative work that, because it's digital, would otherwise be infinitely reproducible. Just like the person with the limited-run edition of their favourite novel on their bookshelf, or an original painting by their favourite artist, you have a token that says (effectively) 'I bought one of only 200 limited edition versions of this piece, and no matter how many times the piece itself is copied, there will only ever be 200 of these tokens. As a result, it is special.'

For some people, it's for bragging rights. For some people, it's to support their favourite creators by buying a 'premium' version that's unique to them (or certainly more unique). For other people, it's an investment; as with any good where only a limited number exist, they may expect it to increase in value over time, so it can be sold on.

In short, it's a way of applying some of the limited edition value of physical objects to the digital marketplace by creating an artificial scarcity.

Is it a scam?

It sounds a little weird at first glance, but it's no more a scam than buying any sort of limited edition item is. You may very well not think it's worth it -- and honestly, I'm inclined to agree on that -- but that doesn't make it a scam by itself. You're buying something that is perceived by some people to have value, that can be traded or sold onwards, that is unique, and that will (in theory, at least) exist forever. The fact that it doesn't have a physical manifestation doesn't make it a scam, any more than paying for an experience like bungee-jumping is a scam. (After all, once you've done it, you don't have any physical manifestation of it -- just the non-physical knowledge that you are now a member of that particular club. In some ways that's even less valuable, because you can't transfer it and recoup your investment no matter how many willing buyers there might be.) There are plenty of things that have value that don't exist in physical space. Don't believe me? Well, Bitcoin just topped $60,000, and that's equally not-real. The value of something lies in what you can get someone to pay for it, or what you'd pay to keep it. Nothing more or less.

They're basically another way to launder money. I mean people are paying millions of dollars for something that is essentially worthless. Either they're very stupid or doing something illegal. Like the whole concept of NFTs feel incredibly scummy and shady to me right from the start.

The appeal from what I understand is like collectable items.

Such as a signed baseball card with a certificate of trust.
Or a first edition comic book with a trusted certificate of validity.
Or a Van Gogh painting with an appraisal stamped certificate near it

It's a measure of trust that the thing in your hands is 'genuine' and that you own it.

Sure someone can photocopy a Van Gogh so that most could barely tell a difference, or even make a replication to fool experts.
But without the certificate isn't not a 'true thing'

It is mostly luxury and novelty. Like NBA Top Shot selling highlight clip GIFs from an 'official NBA source'

The GIFs are basically like basketball sportstar cards, except as a moment of time of a key somewhat famous moment or important/flashy looking move

And just like the NBA delivers 'official basketball cards', same with this NFT

Sure you can copy a basketball card or make your own, but its not from an 'official source', the player or the NBA

Also as above stated, used to launder large amounts of money

Most of these items have no practical value, but have emotional value to some, who are willing to pay. As a status symbol or luxury symbol to some as well

Or some think it has value.
Examples would be

Dutch tulip mania

Beanie Baby mania

and various cryptocurrency lottos with 1000s of individuals sinking in pennies and some putting in thousands or more, most of which are scams to take from people.

"I'm not owned! I'm a legitimate entrepreneur now!"
There's something about NFT owners that liken them to hard-core console wars people in mentality. I bought this thing so I need to fanatically defend doing so.

But at least a console owner can physically fucking touch what they paid for.

Actually, the thing they remind me the most of is Star Citizen backers.

I'm going to copy paste an answer from reddit. It explains it best.

This answer gets copy-pasted everywhere, but it's completely terrible. It spends tons of words trying to explain what the individual words mean and why it has value but completely fails to explain what an NFT actually is.

If you think this copypasta is a good explanation, you probably don't understand what an NFT is either.