Remember when NFTs sold for millions of dollars? 95% of the digital collectibles are now probably worthless.::NFTs had a huge bull run two years ago, with billions of dollars per month in trading volume, but now most have crashed to zero, a study found.
They started out worthless. That never changed.
I still think NFTs could be used to make a form of DRM that is actually fair to the consumer, by maki g it so you can resell your digital goods and also make it so your digital rights don’t vanish as soon as the seller gets bored. But nobody in a position to make that happen wants that.
NFTs or blockchains are not needed for this. You could just implement selling or transfers in the content platform.
I do think using contacts for escrow and having the sale being independent from the vendor are cool features, bit not at all essential ones.
Okay but what happens when the platform goes away, or decides to change the rules? That`s the only part I could see NFTs actually potentially answering. If the ownership verification was all done client-side via a blockchain it could potentially survive the shutdown of the store you bought it from.
Don’t get me wrong, I can see problems with this. And potentially this could also be done with simple public key cryptography.
Yes, but that’s a different, independent problem.
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DRM =/= fair to the consumer.
DRM as a concept seeks to limit your digital rights. Any DRM of any kind is a form of punishment to the consumer. You bought it, it should be yours to do with in perpetuity as you please.
What about the rights of the creator and fair compensation? That argument alone is driving the entire backlash against AI and AI created art whereby people’s work was read and incorporated in some level without restriction, why not here too?
You bought it, it should be yours to do with in perpetuity as you please.
You can’t buy a book, print off a ton of copies, and then sell those copies. You can do whatever you want with your book, lend out, give it away, but you’re not allowed to profit off it.
Sure you are. You’re allowed to sell it to a book store, and if it’s somehow more valuable than what you paid when you bought it, you profit.
You can’t make copies and then sell those copies to the book store
Legally I cannot, but physically the book does not come with a device that prevents me from doing so.
So you’re pro-DRM then if it helps content creators sell one copy per customer?
People can buy multiple copies if so they wish to. Most digital sellers are perfectly happy to charge you multiple times for things you technically already own. Artificial scarcity by way of limiting a digital good is unethical.
I was under the impression that the main point of DRM was to prevent blanket copying of a product and sharing with others who haven’t purchased said product.
If I buy an e-book I should be able to read it on any device I want. If I purchase software I should be able to install it and use it on as many devices I own that I want.
We should worry more about what corporations are doing with people’s work, than what individuals are doing with what they’ve paid for.
Or simply, if someone’s profiting off of someone else’s work, then worry about the rules.
I guess this is kind of my point. The general left consensus on copyrights, creator’s content, DRM, and AI is not founded a position of principles, it’s foundation is seemingly only what serves the end goal which is whatever is perceived to help middle/lower class the most.
Which of course I can totally get down with, but I just resent that everyone covers their arguments as if it’s coming from a principled idea when in actuality they hold little principles on the matter and just want an end goal.
Copyright only exists to serve society, to promote the creation of content. It’s not about restricting anything, other than as far as it helps more people create, more creation happen. Corporations stomping on individuals does not promote creation.
What about the rights of the creator and fair compensation
That’s why you get paid up front for your work.
DRM could be fair to the consumer, it just isn’t in the interests of the publishers to make it so, and as a result the versions of it we have are not fair to the consumer.
DRM certainly can’t be fair as long as it’s illegal to circumvent.
How would that be fair? There would still be drm running on your computer to verify you have the nft. That would have all the issues of DRM already. And those who want information to be free could still just make illegal cracked copies and distribute them.
Video game ownership rights have been going downhill for years. Most games can disappear from your account at a whim, and you can’t sell them on when you’re done anymore. At least with blockchain-based DRM, you’d be able to sell it when you’re done - and if the thing is hosted in a decentralized manner (IPFS, Pinata etc) then the creator can’t simply delete it or delist it. You’d own it without permission.
In theory it could be a good idea. If done right.
Hmm, kind of an open source Steam client that shares game files in a secure and verified peer to peer manner and only lets users play that have the corresponding NFT in their connected wallet. Now you’d only need an incentive for someone to develop something better and way more complex than Steam without making anything close to the same profit from it. Also you’d need a reason for publishers to sell their games this way, if after half a year they won’t sell a single copy anymore, as there is always someone that offers their used license cheaper.
Now you’d only need an incentive for someone to develop something better and way more complex than Steam without making anything close to the same profit from it.
Uh, yeah. GameStop is making it, from what I hear. They can’t keep selling old physical copies forever and the new board knows it. They’re already partnered with some blockchain firms to build it. Means + motive on a platter.
As to why a developer would go for it? This kind of token can be sold on any such marketplace, but can have a royalty baked in so that no matter who sells it or where, they get a perpetual revenue stream. I usually hate rent-seeking behavior, but in the case of software you need a way to pay for continued support, and this solves it.
You’re adding another person to the equation (the player that sells their game) and everyone is supposed to profit? Someone will make a loss compared to the status quo for this to work out and it’s never the marketplace operator.
When we buy a game, there is already an intermediary. The GoG, Steam, Itch, whatever. This would be the same number of middlemen. The unique selling point would actually be disintermediation, since buyers would be able to resell the game and creators would be cut into the ‘used game’ market, giving them an incentive to maintain its quality long-term. There are other useful angles as well, but that’s the one I like best.
At least with blockchain-based DRM, you’d be able to sell it when you’re done
Or not. The company could choose not to honor that sale.
In the situation I’m referring to, the issuer has no control over the asset once it’s been bought; it would be sold to another buyer, and the transaction could be done on any third party marketplace. In return for loss of this discretionary power, the issuer receives a cut of the secondary resale - that is baked into the token when it is created.
It’d be as close to mimicking the rights of owning a DRM-free physical copy that I know of, with the added bonus of cutting creators into the secondary market, which incentivizes them to care about long term support. I like that bit, and it is too rarely mentioned.
Why not instead imagine a future without DRM where there’s no artificial scarcity for digital goods?
If I’m in the mood to fantasize, I can do a little better than that.
I would say that wouldn’t solve the main problem with DRM, the fact that it locks you out of your own computer. I don’t settle for any DRM.
I prefer physical DRM-free copies. If the industry as a whole is going to try to move away from that model, as it appears to be, I’m not going to walk away from gaming; I’d rather be at the table and talk about viable compromises rather than be left out of the conversation.
How is it unfair? To me fair means making sure the creator gets paid without stomping on the rights of the purchaser; in particular, the right to keep the thing after the publisher has gotten bored of selling it, and the right to sell it, though that last one is a difficult proposition with digital goods, seeing as they don’t devalue.
I would say any DRM is unfair, because it works by locking down your own system from yourself, and you should have a right to use your system unencumbered by any restrictive DRM, which tries to take away your right to use the system. Check out Securom and the Sony rootkit. You could buy discs from the publisher, and resell them. But your system was still locked down by the DRM.
Who is going to buy those digital goods?
And which developer is going to implement the digital goods of an other developer instead of creating their own which makes them money?
Not talking about that kind of thing. When I say digital goods, I mean things like games, things we currently have DRM for.
Of course, there being no reason to buy a game new if someone is selling it used, that part would never work.
At what point do they turn the servers off?
Anyone with the ability to read who bought one deserves what happened to them. The sellers are probably still laughing.
99 times out of 100, it was the seller selling it to himself to artificially inflate transaction numbers and nudge the price up.
Yeah, but that’s the thing with scams. They make thousands of attempts, but they only need that one sucker.
Does anyone else think that NFTs are an allegory/miniature version of how art is easily commodified by capitalism? IIRC, NFTs were there to help finance artists who work on a purely digital medium, but then grifters coopted the NFT space and try to sell sets of same-looking artwork. Complete with “fandoms” and drama, as well.
Nah, NFTs were always about the grift first and the art second.
After all, all an NFT token is is a digital receipt which links to an image hosted somewhere off-chain, not the image itself. All the “art” does is help to persuade people that the tokens are actually worth something and hype up the price even further.
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NFTs are simply a straightforward con, without the financial hullabaloo of cryptocurrency. The con is simple: convince someone that something is valuable when it’s not. Selling a brass ring as gold to a mark too naïve to check, has been around as long as there have been gold rings.
It is an allegory for the whole financial system … it’s all made up imaginary money, funds and amounts that don’t exist and never will … it’s all based on trust, faith and belief. If enough people wake up tomorrow and stop believing in a segment of this entire system, it can all quickly collapse.
I remember reading about ten years ago that if all debt was stopped all over the world and all of it was to be repaid … it would take the world several million years to do so.
There is wealth in the world but we’ve created very complicated, imaginary ways to make it seem that wealth is worth millions of times more than there actually exists.
I see it as a modern day religion … it exists because we all believe in it … if the faithful ever lose faith, the religion dies.
God I cannot wait for the religion of capitalism to die. Markets are rough enough without greedy fucks institutionalizing their greed.
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Really, it’s impossible. Most children are very selfish. Only some never grow out of it. Distinguishing between the two would be a very good way to appear to be far worse than a few greedy pieces of sh*t to the uneducated who do not realize the grief greed brings to others.
Yeah it was huge in the art world, all the art magazines had articles about how it was the next big thing and how to mint your own nfts - which of course all turned out to be ‘pay my buddy $200 and we’ll turn your jpg into an nft!’ which was a scam within a scam.
Artists generally aren’t tech minded and honestly often pretty surface level in their understanding of things because that’s where their focus is, they’re looking at the visual not the mechanical. There’s nothing wrong in that because life needs a wide range of people.
NFTs were there to help finance artists who work on a purely digital medium, but then grifters coopted the NFT space and try to sell sets of same-looking artwork.
I’m curious if you have a source for this. I haven’t heard it anywhere else…
IIRC, NFTs were there to help finance artists who work on a purely digital medium
That’s not true at all. They were a con from their inception. The “helping artists” bit was something they made up to further that con. Just like when they claim cryptocurrency is an actual viable currency alternative to fiat.
pushes glasses up I believe what you meant to say is that its a buyer’s market. /s
Whomever named them NFTs instead of grift cards missed an opportunity.
Good.
I find it fascinating that NFTs were supposed to be a proof-of-ownership technology, but because people are stupid & greedy made pictures to sell with it
What confused the fuck outta me as someone who has been in the crypto space since 2010 is that it wasn’t new or novel in any way. Colored Coins was virtually the same thing and it flopped in a similar fashion and there were several similar projects that did the same or never made it off the ground. Then, some shitty monkey drawings come along, are backed by virtually the same thing I had seen before and suddenly people I knew from my hometown who barely had two brain cells to rub together were claiming to be financial and tech gurus while peppering “block chain” into conversation. The one thing that brings me solace is that they all lost their investments
Right, when NFT’s we’re going crazy, the pictures and shit didn’t make sense to me at all but there’s a huge opportunity for digital ownership of physical materials like cars or houses. It would make private sales/transfers easy. All title information on the house would be recorded and attached in the blockchain so when you go to sell your home, you can prove there aren’t any liens against the home and once financing has been approved, transfer the ownership on the blockchain and done. That’s where I always saw the practical application going but now nobody will take NFT’s seriously until it’s named something else and rolled out with government approval and systems in place or nobody will feel safe transferring such a large investment digitally
All title information on the house would be recorded and attached in the blockchain so when you go to sell your home, you can prove there aren’t any liens against the home
Don’t we already have state or local databases for stuff like houses and cars? How does the blockchain stuff add anything?
The difference is that you can’t retroactively edit the block chain, and the block chain contains all the data in it.
Databases can be edited, deleted, corrupted, poorly maintained, etc.
Think of the block chain like a permanent audit log of all transactions with it.
Edit: the NFT exists as a value in the block chain as the “point of origin”. As this value is carried forward, the blockchain will always point back to the original.
That’s why the whole pictures thing fucked it all up and we missed out on powerful tech. It could have essentially saved lives in critical machines and made PII tracking easier.
Block chains can also be edited, deleted, corrupted.
They aren’t as secure as tech bros claim. Nothing possibly can be.
Blockchains already have been hacked multiple times.
This is the Web3 you are simping for: https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
No, they can’t. The article you point to mentioned stolen crypto. Crypto can be stolen if someone has the private keys to a wallet.
A block chain is algorithmically verified by members of the network.
but because people are stupid & greedy made pictures to sell with it
Can you blame them? If I gave someone a photo and then they offered to give me $1,000 if I also would write down a unique number, then I would without hesitation write down a random number and get my grand.
It always reminds me of those certificates for owning a piece of the moon.
Because it’s pretty much the same.
At the very core ownership that isn’t recognised by the state is meaningless. So that ape picture? No one really cares about some guy claiming to own it because they have control over the token. As long as it’s on the internet everyone can just copy it and there’s no authority caring about it one bit since NFT isn’t recognised as for example copyright is.
Even when it comes to stuff like items in games, these also are only worth anything as long as the publisher of the game recognises your claim to it! And even if they did recognise it, there’s absolutely nothing preventing them from changing their minds later. Simply because they create the game however they like and have 100% control over it’s development.
Except it’s not ownership, it is digital rights management. Right now DRM is handled by private corporations, not the state, and it generally is anti-consumer. NFTs could be used for DRM in a more pro consumer way.
That all hinges on a pretty big “could”.
Absolutely, companies are not going to just decide to implement NFTs in a way that gives more control to users unless it means more money for them. Does change the fact that the technology has that potential, even if it remain unutilized.
NFTs could be used for DRM in a more pro consumer way.
Only if the companies in charge would allow that. And they really have zero incentive to do so. The way it currently is, is way more profitable for them.
Out of the top collections, the most common price for an NFT is now $5-$10.
Still overpriced!
I’m honestly amazed they’re worth anything at all.
I’d pay $10 to clown on some tech bro if I cared enough. $10 doesn’t even buy you a sandwich these days
It’s just a “Save picture as…” with extra steps, and money!
They’re still not
Things only have a price when two people are willing to do the transaction.
Say 99% of NFT owners have given up and mentally written off their NFTs as a complete loss. If the remaining 1% are selling at a 90% loss and some sucker is still buying at that 90% discount, the “average price” will be whatever those two agree on.
This is a bit different from physical goods because those can’t just be deleted out of existence. If someone had a warehouse of beanie babies they might choose to give them away (setting the price at zero) or maybe there’s some tiny value of the cloth so they sell them for a few cents per kg.
We have been attributing a huge value to a metal that’s mostly remarkable for being yellow and shinny for millennia, one of the biggest investment bubbles in history was over a flower, and people thought that using a loophole to profit from the arbitrage of international reply coupons was going to last forever. Hell, people paid for fake property titles for land on the Moon and Mars. It’s not that surprising that some people think that buying a random number in a distributed database is an investment.
Don’t forget the beanie babies, which just like NFTs were created to be scarce and be seen as an investment.
Turned out the same as well.
I didn’t get the “arbitrage of international reply coupons” reference. What’s that one?
That’s what Ponzi told people he was doing. And in the beginning he was, and it was working, but then he started paying investors with other investors money.
And in the beginning he was, and it was working
I might be wrong, but to my recollection, he never got it to work; in the beginning, he merely believed that he could eventually get it to work, and that the first fraudulent payouts to early investors were originally intended as a temporary way of buying time without losing investors.
The OG ponzi
remarkable for being yellow and [shiny]
Yes, but also very rare, and effectively impossible to create or destroy.
Yeah, the really smart people bought whole stars!
Yellow, shiny, and untarnishable/non-poisonous. The latter are very nice properties to have for jewelry, as your skin will eat away most metals over time.
People like looking pretty, that has consistent value other than using it as a medium of exchange/ store of value.
True, but to be fair, them shiny metals for the longest time were reasonably rare and couldn’t be made, and served well for a means of currency. NFTs are pretty ridiculous all things considered. People also “bought” stars too, so yeah, many will buy dumb shit.
If you want to give me an NFT, I won’t accept it unless you sweeten the deal with an additional 20 €.
I’m sure they were a great way to launder money at the time.
That’s why it’s at the time. I made a quick $600 and never looked back cuz I knew it was unstable, but I wasn’t ignorant to the idea like many people who just wanted to bandwagon hate.
Ignorant to the idea? The idea was basically a spreadsheet with links to PNGs and “”““owner””“” of that PNG. Blockchain only means nobody owns the sheet itself, but that doesn’t make it any less ridiculous.
not f’n there
Yes, I do remember when Russia came up with a new money laundering scheme after crypto died out.
… crypto didn’t die out
The great Tiny Tim has a comment about this digi-swindle.
So it was like we thought all along, cool.
Depends what they are. I have a bunch of NFTS and they have all mostly held their value or increased. The difference is they are all related to games, and the most I have ever paid for one was probably like $15, with the average being like 50 cents. This only seems to be looking mostly at art NFTs on ethereum networks. I don’t have a single NFT that uses ethereum, although I know that was the craze, especially for “investments”. Which anyone with half a brain should have been able to tell someone an NFT is not a good investment plan.
Why did you even buy them though? Surely you could have just downloaded them for free?
Because they are tied into the game. The NFTs contain information about the game asset. And a lot of the NFTs weren’t bought, they were generated from aspects of the game. I don’t know how else to explain it, without detailing the entire game or subset of games this falls into.
I will say, that I am lucky, picked a good project and didn’t spend too much.
Are we talking about CS:GO skins? Because I never got a knife.
Frankly that says more about the gullibility of gamers than the legitimacy of NFT. Gamers will pay for the chance of getting access a fictional character in a game that will eventually close its servers and take everything down with it. They can’t seem to differentiate the value of something within the fictional ludic context and the value of something as a piece of media or an entertainment product, and gaming/tech businessmen these days take full advantage of that oversight.
What about the enjoyment they get before the game indeed does shut down? That’s gotta be worth at least something right?
It is worth something… a refund.
Have you ever ate something enjoyable? Absolutely worthless
Definitely less than it would be from having a game which they can keep playing, and getting that content permanently.
Is the enjoyment of getting a single instance of a single character, sometimes not even having full access of their abilities, worth as much as an entire other game? Maybe even a console or more, as the price surpasses hundreds of dollars? Not to mention any other practical things that they could use that money for.
However much one might argue that value is subjective, what isn’t subjective are the conditioning tactics being used. Habit-forming mission and reward structures, content being put in gambling formats to incentive compulsive spending. The fact that the game is bound to private servers is itself generally only done to enable monetization, and even more cynically, to force players to move to the next thing once that one ceases being sufficiently profitable.
I see enough people ultimately regretting how much they spent to question if they ever got that value out of it.
I don’t disagree, there is a lot of shady shit going on, but the state of gaming is what you’re describing. I’m having a lot of fun with BF2042, but it’s a live service game with servers provided by EA. It will get shut down, which is retarded, but I’m still enjoying it while I can.
There are of course exceptions, like Baldur’s Gate, but overall, not a good vibe unfortunately
For all my criticism, I do enjoy some live service games too, but I’m of the opinion that any live service game would have been better off without those conditioning tactics, without a balance marred by Pay2Win and power creep, and if it was hostable by any player. Not all them are fundamentally bad, but they are made worse by these elements.
But unfortunately, games keep being made that way because it’s more profitable.
Honestly these games are so crude that most regular gamers would never even think of them as games. There are a lot of failed projects, that really just did become click and play, but there are a couple good ones on WAX. MoM is a part of WAX and has turned into something interesting, albeit they had to add extra revenue models, although I think the Devs are mostly Ukrainian… so they are likely going through some shit.
(The easiest way to describe MoM, is as a trading and crafting game. It’s definitely not for most, but I enjoy playing around in the real life economical ecosystem thay has developed. There are arguably other points to it, but I think those arguments are weak…)
At first I thought you were a clever advertisment for that game, but as it turns out searching “mom wax” does not garner any results about games at all, so if you’re not pulling our legs and they game actually exists could you post the full name? It sounds interesting
Yeah same here. I’m a Solana dev and have collected a handful. I’ve spent maybe $50 total the last two years and all together probably worth $3k or so
That’s actually one chain I have some NFTs on. One of the games uses a dual Wax/Solana system for it’s NFTs.
You keep talking about the games, which games?
