It is not easy and cheap if in the background for one “tokenizing” electricity is consumed a person spent in a month.
added: Sorry i missunderstood the context, you already said that.
1 Like
After watching a couple of videos it seems that NFT does this. Except for the cheap transactions. Transaction cost on the Ethereum chain are absurd at the moment.
Ethereum is being upgraded to Ethereum 2.0 which is supposed to address this issue (among others), though. One of the things that are supposed to make it cheaper is something called “sharding” basically meaning several chains running in parallel isntead of a single chain.
So if this works out you’d have what you want.
Do NFT even concern themselves with copyright law? I don’t think the copyright changes hands just because you buy a token. It is more like buying a signed copy saying that you bought the first print of a book or sometting like that. In some jurisdictions it isn’t even possible to transfer a copyright and it allways remains at the author.
Well, the fees for buying Ether on an exchange are negligable. The “minting” process appears to be a single transaction on the Ethereum chain (or is it the execution of a smart contract?). This is expensive at the moment because of the current Crypto Currency boom.
Open Sea which appears to be the largest auction site takes 2.5% for a successful sale.
So all in all, if the Ethereum transaction price goes back to normal, the fees are pretty decent.
Is this a new Tulip mania? Same was told about crypto 10 years ago and hey it’s more than alive, so who knows.
The whole another question is the quality of art. After some research on the most popular platfroms I was shocked that 90% of works were lazy and generic at best. I know that art is subjective but the most selling pieces were something that I could slap together in 30-60 minutes using some sketchfab models, put astronaut with a skull, add purple light and render it in eevee. Also, there are some suspicious huge sellings from unknown artists which made me think about money laundering but recently I read somewhere on twitter that apparently Nft’s are a new source of income for some “celebrities”, so now it kind of makes sense.
Would I try it myself? I guess I will. But I am skeptical about it. It seems like you need to be either a huge popular artist with a fanbase or follow a trendy “selling” current. Not fitting to any of these categories.
I have to say that from my point of view, this whole thing is an absolutely terrible idea. If all that was at stake was a few millionaires deciding that they wanted to waste their money on something with no inherent value then it would be ok, but the fact that this has not only a very real monetary cost but also an astounding environmental cost makes the whole thing morally reprehensible.
The fact that validating one of these “things” can potentially use the same amount of energy as an EU household does in years, is just appalling to me. All of that while we are trying to stop a complete climate collapse just makes me lose hope in humanity a little more.
I don’t think that is true.
After the first ArtStation’s intention to support NFT art, a lot of artists suggested on Twitter to quit ArtStation to go back to other portfolio-websites (like DeviantArt or else).
5 Likes
While it is rare for a single NFT to cost that much energy, it definitely happens. According to this article on NFTs (It is notably one-sided, but that doesn’t change the facts), The average energy use for a single NFT on the site Superrare is around 340KwH of electricity, or roughly the same as an EU households energy consumption for 1.5 months.
That on its own is pretty bad, but then you have to remember that Superrare only sells single NFTs. Other sites also sell “editions” of an artwork (basically just copies), which can further increase the energy cost by hundreds of times, depending on the number of editions (it can easily be in the hundreds).
Over the course of selling a few artworks then, with a hundred editions each, it is easy for the footprint of an artists works to reach into the hundreds of MwH, or the equivalent of many decades of an EU households energy use.
The environmental costs of this industry are staggering.
1 Like
I can think that this is more like a marketing scam, that want to bring fresh blood into cryptos. As for example first it was for miners, then traders. Now the new customers should be artists perhaps, later can be music or movies.
And then in a few years, there you have it. A totalitarian private network with no freedom at all, where resources are scarce and prices skyrocket.
Just give more power to the sharks.
It is a public, open source network, though, not privat.
The code is open source, but the blocks are privately holded.
https://twitter.com/edent/status/1006248586395508737?s=20
CLICK THROUGH FOR THE ENTIRE THREAD BELOW
https://twitter.com/isyourguy/status/1366537888226152449?s=20
https://twitter.com/isyourguy/status/1366176796996112385?s=20
1 Like
The blocks are on a public, decentralized ledger.
They use another site to estimate how much energy the blockchain consumes and divide that by the transactions.
Now, the site itself states that it is not possible to know for sure how much energy is spent.
Furthermore, dividing total trasnsactions by the number of transactions is a bit silly imo. After all the energy is not spent on transactions but on mining.
So, if transactions double then energy consumption does not double as well. Energy consumption does not scale linearly with total transacton numbers.
So minting an NFT does make the miner use up more energy than it would use anyways.
To understand this scam, and to see why it is a scam, you only need to watch where the legal tender comes and goes. Someone is collecting legal tender money at several strategic places in the scheme. That’s where the “perps” are making their legal tender profit, and kindly notice that they don’t accept bit-coins at those points. "Just watch the actual money." Nothing else matters. Everything else is simply there to get you to part with legal tender while you are greedily chasing those “paper roses.”
The mere fact that you used a peculiar market to buy and sell the work does not take the place of copyright. The market cannot enjoin you from freely distributing something if it is “in the public domain,” and it cannot authorize you to freely distribute something that is copyrighted. This market cannot do anything more nor less than any and every other “market.”
The entire scam really has nothing to do with “crypto currency,” which is merely a barter token in the eyes of the law. You are bartering for the artwork, using a hard-to-compute number as the token. You believe, because you have been led to believe, that these tokens are “fantastically valuable,” and you can continue to believe that … until you actually try to turn your “vast wealth” into: legal tender.
Try to turn your “quarter of a million dollars’ worth” of bit-coins all at once into "a quarter of a million dollars" and you will discover that you can’t.
“Legitimate money” is anything but(!) “scarce.” They make it quite-literally “by the ton” at The Money Factory. There must always be enough “money” available to denominate any transaction that needs to be conducted. You can’t find that you are unable to buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks because you haven’t “mined” the money that you use to do it. Money is an agreed-upon instrument of exchange which has no intrinsic “value” itself, except that all of us agree to honor it as such. Trillions of currency-units change hands every day. Tons of paper money are shredded while more tons of paper money are printed.
5 Likes
By the book you are correct. But more of what I mean is this.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-08/the-bitcoin-whales-1-000-people-who-own-40-percent-of-the-market
1 Like
“Bitcoin” is, as I said, a barter token. An unusual one, yes, but nothing more or less than that. It is acceptable to those who are willing to accept it, and “worth” whatever those who accept it decide. If anything at all. They could all change their mind tomorrow and the “value” would by definition immediately vanish. And, right now, to me, these most-unusual tokens are worth nothing.
Incidentally, “legal tender” is a somewhat technical term. It does not mean, as is commonly supposed, that the parties to a transsaction are obliged to accept it. Instead, it means that creditors are not allowed to refuse it if offered as payment for a debt. If you owe me $1,000 USD and you present me with an authentic $1,000 bill, I cannot refuse it – even if I had asked to be repaid in some bit-coin – and the debt has been paid. But if you instead offered me “$1,000 worth of some bit-coin,” I am not obliged to accept it. If I do not, the debt has not been paid. If I do, then it has. Except in the case of “legal tender,” it’s up to me, the creditor.
I cannot refuse to accept legal tender in payment of a debt. But if you have “$100,000 worth of bit-coin” and you want me to give you one hundred thousand US Dollars for it, I don’t have to do so. I can tell you instead (and this is entirely true) that those hard-to-compute numbers are not “worth” even one red cent to me.
As the lawful owner of my artwork, if you want to buy it, I can stipulate that you have to give me the requested amount of US Dollars. (I can also stipulate that I won’t accept US Dollars – because this is a sale, not a debt – and that you must pay me in a specified bit-coin. It’s entirely up to me.) When you pay, you obtain the right to possess a licensed copy, and I can’t repossess it without giving you back exactly what you paid in the form in which you paid it. Meanwhile, the copyright itself remains my intellectual property, and this transaction did not alter nor transfer it.
5 Likes
Long Story short, as long as you made “art” for a long time (past couple decades), you have a strong following, AND you are still alive, chances are ppl will buy whatever cr*p you make on these crypto art websites (which they will resell later on for even higher prices because of the uniqueness of the thing)
One of the many “crypto punk” transaction history:
“A Fool and His Money …”
“If it sounds too good to be true – it is.”
The amount of money that “a willing buyer” will pay “a willing seller” is not dependent on the marketplace in which the transaction takes place. If a JPG file would not sell for $3.5 million United States Dollars at a public auction house … then, it didn’t sell for that amount here, either.
Someone is trying to lure you by an old-fashioned appeal to human greed. When you sail near Sirens, either stuff your ears with cotton or have someone tie you to the mast. Change course immediately.
2 Likes
I think you may be drastically underestimating what the current financial system consumes. Not only in power, but in personnel. I personally think some ASICs and GPUs eating geothermal/hydro power might be an upgrade. Matter of fact, a lot of power companies have been experimenting with using crypto mining as a load balancing tool since it can be scaled up and down relatively easily compared to other methods of consuming/storing excess power
I think it’s a lot more complicated than “power consumption bad”
3 Likes