Blender Based NFT Community

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This is the continue discussion of NFT thread. We’re restricting the promotion of NFT’s on Blender Artists - #22 by X9Studio1

Blender org accepts donation in crypto, I came here looking for existing Blender based NFT community that gives back portion of proceeds via smart contract.

When Beeple’s $69 million jpeg news broke last year, my reaction was like everyone else, WTF?! Total scam! But my view changed after I learned more about blockchain technology over the holiday break.

“A JPG sold for millions!” is a great click bait. NFT is a piece of code in a smart contract that authenticates ownership of a specific digital data. Digital data can be anything, digital art happened to be the 1st to adopt the technology. NFT can be used for any digital data that authenticity is important, such as ID, medical records, and real estate title…etc.

Anyway, since the NFT media is stored outside of blockchain where anyone can download identical copy of it, then why pay money for it? I see NFT as autograph, let’s say Michael Jackson sold 100 million copies of Thriller vinyl album and he autographed 100 of them. Those 100 copies are worth a whole lot more than the rest (among the fan base), even though the music in the vinyl is the same in every copy. One can even throw away the vinyl, the value of autographed album cover will remain the same.

The power of NFT is the 100% transparency and immutability. Anyone can see the entire ownership history of any NFT, tracing it back to the originator. In that sense, NFT can’t be counterfeited like an autograph can.

Current NFT market is a mess, majority of them are in for the quick bucks. But there are collectors who appreciate the artistry and careless about the financial side of it. On top of that, there are those crypto-rich people whose gamble on crypto paid off. If you put in $100 in Ethereum 9 years ago when it 1st launched, that $100 is now worth $1 million. For them, spending a few thousand dollars of ETH is like a few pennies.

Another game changer NFT brings to the art community is that artists no longer need to rely on curators and art critics from galleries and museums to tell the public what the art is worth. With social media, artists can create their own fan base and let them decide how they want to support the artists.

Unlike traditional painting that is one of kind and must be sold for enough money for the artist to be able make a living out of it. With NFTs, digital art can be sold from a few dollars to thousands of dollars with multiple copies of NFT. Artist can make a decent living by selling NFTs to their fan base. I think one of the side effects of NFT is that gaming and movie industry will have problems hiring talents in the future. BTW, the gas fee (environmental impact) is being addressed; solution is on the horizon. High gas fee (intense power usage) will be a thing in the past soon.

Lastly, back to the community based NFTs. As we already know that there are many incredible talents in Blender communities, including many regulars here at blenderartists.org. Why not have a Blender based NFT that gives back to the communities. When the high gas fee is eliminated with Ethereum 2.0, I would support fellow Blender artist’s work that I like for $20+ for example, and portion of it goes back to the communities. For me, it’s not about hoping the art will increase value. As long as it brings me joy then it’s all good.

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There is a difference between:

  • crypto currency
  • non fungible thingy

World wide money transfer already costs resources… doing it the crypto way just adds a lot of electrical power to do it “safe” while you paying for it in the traditional way… (isn’t that somekind of contradictorily)
The last one is used to reference the artwork… and as you can read in here : What is NFT? or better in the article about vanishing art on vice… you can loose the reference to that artwork…

What excactly is better here? If you wanna support anyone then transfer money to her/his bank account.

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Traditionally can be prohibitively expensive and a lot slower than via BTC. And transferring money to some places is simply not possible the traditional way.
Even more so if either the reciever or sender does not have a bank account.

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Yeah… Pretty sure most people who want to send or receive money would get a bank account? Even criminals and conspiracy theorists using crypto to hide their money from the government usually have a bank account too. And I think you can still pay cash to load up a Visa gift card for your purchases you want to keep untraceable most places.

So best case scenario there might be a small number of edge cases where individuals would have difficulties with legitimate money transfers because of their respective countries, but that really doesn’t explain why anyone should believe jpg embedded in crypto token is worth hundreds, thousands, or millions of dollars, or why anyone should believe there’s a giant, secret population of rich people who want to pay that to support artists but just weren’t smart enough to figure out how to use patreon, gumroad, kofi, paypal etc (or perhaps they simply didn’t value artists work until the artists joined the crypto cult). Unless you’re arguing that most or all of these rich people live in countries that would make it impossible for them to pay any of the artists they like because of their country?

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That is at least 1.6 billion edge cases as that is the amount of people who have no access to banking.
Additionally there are severly underbanked people as well.
So these people have to rely on Western Union and similar services which are really, really expensive if the recieving party has no bank account. This is often the case when relatives in rich countries want to send money back home to poor countries. Western Union takes a gigantic cut.
A BTC transaction costs next to nothing and only requires the receiving party to have a smart phone and an internet connection. The latter are quite a bit more common than decent banking.

Oh, I think NFTs in their current form are silly, so no disagreement here.

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Nifty Gateway does just that, members have to link account to their bank accounts. They accept both ETH and US dollars, I think most of sales are in dollars and buyers can just use credit cards. I thinks buyers pay cc company for exchange fees if they are outside of US. No such fee with crypto wallets, except for gas fee which will soon be a thing of past.

Decentralization is one of the main reasons Bitcoin was created, by pass the unfair banking systems. If I have $100 in my pocket, the max amount I can lend out is $100. Same reality doesn’t apply to banks. To keep it short, banks can lend money that they don’t have. Why? because they wrote the rules of the game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking

What is currency? It’s just consent value or perceive value. US dollar fiat, it’s just a piece printed paper that is back by the words of US government. Before the 1970s, one can go to US government to exchange US paper currency for gold. Not any more, now it’s just US government says “Trust me, it’s worth x amount of value”. At least over half billion people agree with it, therefor it has value among themselves. Outside of that group, US fiat is just a piece of paper.

Same applies to cryptocurrency, any kind of currency really. It only has value among the people who agree with it. The larger the group is, the more usefulness the currency becomes and its value goes up as demand increases.

Back to NFT, anyone knows how to create smart contract on Ethereum network that gives portion of proceed to Blend org’s wallet?

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So the crypto aspect is just bolted on top of a normal transaction? So way more fees, a completely unstable real world value, pointlessly excessive resource consumption, no insurance, and no recourse for fraud? I can’t wait for a client to suggest it as a method of payment so I can enjoy laughing in their face and then tell my peers about it so they can also enjoy the joke.

If you understood decentralization you’d know it’s a complete myth.

Was the username Mark already taken when you signed up?

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There is nothing stopping you from investing in gold though. It won’t provide the returns you get if you know when to buy and sell the digital coins, but it will remain a solid store of value long after the crypto concept crashes and burns.

Not only that, a gold bar can’t be lost into the ether with no knowledge as to where it went and with no chance of recovery (as we have already seen with various high-profile hacks). If you really need to make a quick buck on crypto, then note your risk of taking a big loss if you do not convert to cash (USD or another fiat currency) in a short timeframe.

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People in power will always want to stay in power, whoever controls the money printing machines controls the group. IMO ledger based blockchains Bitcoin will be banned by governments around the world. China has already done it, it’s just matter of time the rest follows.

Google how much money US government (more accurately, a private bank called Federal Reserve) has printed since pandemic. Since it’s no longer backed by gold like it used to, now they are printing money from nothing. How is that any different from any in-game currency or cryptocurrency?

We’re getting away from the topic. I’m not here to convince anybody, at the end of the day it’s the mass who decides what consent value of any object has, be a piece of printed paper, a shinning metal or a bunch 1s and 0s in the digital realm. BTW, the real universal currencies are foods, sex and big sticks. Happy blending.

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That’s the point. This is a national institution which measure the needed money, destroying to old paper money and printing new if needed. Printing more money is well considered because it drops the value (inflation) and yes the . You just believe your national money because it’s backed up by your government. Those countries where the government just prints money to pay there projects are all suffer from a great inflation rate… and in the crypto buisness those can control the chain who have the most computer power… and this are everytime the good ones… and you always trust their algorithms…
The funny thing is that’s there are almost everytime some people who want to make money in the money buisness and didn’t have a clue how this works (buying shares/stocks of corporations and not knwing anything about what they do… some just changed the name to corpName.com and went up in value)… but now with crypto it’ so easy and not dangerous at all… so let’s start a corporation realCoin.xyz ( ← with extra new HTTP namespace… yeah or realMoney.bingo)

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If you’re in the US, google Federal Reserve. You’ll see it’s a privately owned bank with undisclosed shareholders who get dividends from it. It is not part of the US government and can’t be audited like any government agency can. How the heck a private bank is in charge of printing national notes? Since it can’t be audited, you just have to take their words for whatever they say.

Back to the example, if I only have one dollar in my pocket and I tell you that I can lend you $100 for 20% APR. You would laugh your ass off, but we’re not laughing our asses off when banks are doing the exactly the same thing with their issued credit cards, are we?

With blockchains, everyone can see everything. That’s why it’s a threat to the current system and they will try to come up with excuse to ban cryptocurrency.

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Don’t just search in the internt also read the articles you find. Example Wikipedia or maybe any book about it:

The Federal Reserve System is composed of several layers. It is governed by the presidentially appointed board of governors or Federal Reserve Board (FRB).

But it seems to be you are one of the type of people who wander from the suspect to came back to say how fantastic there initial belief is… okay… then this is no disscuccion anymore.

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Fiat currency has its flaws, but its value does not gyrate to the tune of doubling in value followed by a 50 percent drop in less than 6 months (that is unless your country has financially illiterate maniacs in power). It is actually safer (for the sake of purchasing power) to quickly convert the coin you collect to your nation’s official currency, since the instability of the former actually prevents most stores from even accepting them for starters.

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People bought into cryptocurrencies like Ethereum when they were just starting… investing relatively small amounts of money.

These are the people buying and trading stuff like Beeple’s NFT.

For the value of their magic beans to keep going up, or to allow them to cash out, they need a lot of people pumping real, new money into these cryptocurrencies and marketplaces. That bubble ain’t gonna pump itself.

Desperate artists and people who have swallowed the NFT and crypto cool-aid provide that money… lured in by the prospect that you can seemingly sell any old rubbish to someone more gullible than they. Most find that they make very little money after the gas and transaction fees.

And since the blockchain is so transparent, perhaps one of the NFT fans can provide a link to the transaction which shows Beeple actually being paid 42,329.453 ETH?

If you have a couple of hours to spend this is a well worth a watch:

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It’s irrelevant how real the money was. The Beeple sale served as a marketing exercise to validate the concept. The price isn’t outlandish when seen as an investment in a ‘legal’ money laundering scheme.
That Folding Ideas video is my favorite of it’s kind and absolutely essential watching.

And here’s my new favorite website on all this nonsense.

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You can google Beeple’s wallet address and then use etherscan. Hmm…actually, it’s a lot easier to find the NFT contract address and see which wallet it went to.

FBI just caught a couple who stole a bucket load of bitcoins via hecking 3 years ago. The couple couldn’t do much with it as everyone knows which wallet the stolen coins went. I guess it look FBI 3 years to figure out the owner of that wallet address. I would think it’s a lot easier to laundering fiat than crypto.

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The highest amount of ETH that’s been in Beeple’s wallet was 463.97382317883955 ETH on 1 April 2021 . The sale was in March of that year. That’s little over 10% of what it sold for. Something smells fishy:

The auction was concluded with a payment of $69 million worth of Ether cryptocurrency. However, nobody has been able to find this payment on the Ethereum blockchain, the money was probably transferred through some private means.

I bet Beeple got rewarded with little over 10% of the amount it “sold” for. The buyer probably kept the remainder. He’d have had hefty fees to pay to Christies but it was probably worth it as it did what it was intended to do: Pump up ETH and NFTs to new heights.

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I googled it too out of curiosity, there is no such transaction in Beeple’s address. Christies official listing states ETH must be paid to Christies and buyer’s wallet must be from a regulated crypto exchanges. Perhaps search in Christie’s wallet will find your answer.

IMO there are NFT pumpings for sure. But after the bubble burst and dust settles, NFT is here to stay. Not just digital art, but all sorts of legal digital docs.

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About all of this, I can only say: "Caveat Emptor." If something sounds too good to be true, it definitely is.

If you actually want to try to sell your work in this way, first spend your $35 on-line to secure a US Copyright. This, like the title-certificate for your car, is legal proof that you, under penalty of perjury, claim legal ownership of your property and that you have the legal right to sell or license it however you choose. Even if “the NFT thing” completely goes south … as I fully expect that it will … you still have secured your legal rights such that a Government will help you protect it until 75-or-so years after you are dead. (Copyright goes into effect immediately when the web site gives you your receipt. You can register many works simultaneously for one fee.)

If you want to peddle a song commercially, for instance, they will ask you for the copyright registration number, and they will check it first. It’s called, “due diligence.” (a.k.a. “Cover your a*s.”)

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