All that crypto stuff is rather volatile. Might be a burst bubble might be just a regular swing.
We wil see in a couple of years.
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Because I’m slow and stupid and still don’t understand…
So, I can buy an old, used, Jaguar or Tesla, clean it up to look real nice, take a photo of it, mint that as an nft and sell it, change the color of the car in photoshop, mint that as an nft and sell it, actually paint the car a different color, mint that and sell it, then do an nft of the actual car itself, sell that nft, but still retain possession and ownership of the actual car, put some rims and a spoiler on the car and repeat all of the above, and actually expect somebody out there to pay cash for this?
This example inspired by several NFT that look like scans of magic the gathering or pokemon cards imported into blender, an iridescent shader was added to them and then a 360 spin animation and then they were put up as NFT.
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You perfectly understand it. Yes, it is stupid 
.
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You summed it up perfectly.
the buyers of nfts can prove they are one of the 1/1 owner of the infinite 1/1 originals you can make.
Buyers argue that it’s all about trust, and that you can see if someone is making multiple copies. (Like with fake traditional art someone’s who is an expert can see it’s fake) but then nft solves nothing and adds nothing to the table, except introduces more problems and accelerates environmental problems…
I double dare any nft collector that they would not buy a single piece of art even if there were non - crypto ways of proving it’s a digital original/ traded with fiat money , because it has never been about the art in the end. It has always been about flipping it to the next idiot in line, and hoping you are not the last idiot, and doing all that is so much easier with crypto.
Yep, it’s actually a very simple scam. And they ran it, selling tickets (for cash) all the way, until eventually it peters out. Then, they walk away with their legal tender and leave the suckers to figure out they’ve just been fleeced.
But, you know, “the suckers did it to themselves.”
If you actually want to make money, you secure the copy- right. And the key word here is “copy.” You want there to be lots and lots and lots of copies, and for you to get paid a royalty for each one.
For instance: Every single time any song is played on the radio or on sattelite, anywhere on this planet, someone’s out there tabulating every single time it happens, and the copyright owner will be paid. Every time you buy an album or a download, money goes to the copyright owner. It’s just a fraction of a cent but it adds up. A “hit” song makes more money because it’s played and downloaded more often. So-called “PROs = Performing Rights Organizations” are in business to do this on behalf of artists. Look on the back of any record that you have, and you’ll see: ASCAP, BMI, or SESAC. I myself get a check from them several times a year. Accompanied by a detailed statement listing the names of countries I’ve never heard of.
I don’t want to sell a single piece of art one time for $100,000. I want to sell a million copies and get paid ten cents each. Then, ten or fifteen years from now, the checks are still dribbling in. I want to see a licensed copy of my work on every street corner. That duly-registered copyright certificate is to me pure money, and in the USA it cost me $35.00.
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I don’t know what part of my brain thinks, I want this to be my first (and possibly only) contribution to blender artists, but NFTs are real frustrating to read about. If this bubble hasn’t burst for the last time, and if somehow this idea continues to attract the imagination of artists, it is worth connecting it to the correct real world analogy. NFTs are not selling the art, they are selling the certificate of authenticity. They do so with the explicit and agreed knowledge that the actual artwork being certified is not included in what is being sold. In fact it is expected that the digital original will be copied and distributed freely.
NFTs also operate without any respect to the actual owner of the artwork. NFTs can and are created certifying ownership of works that the NFT creator has no legal authority to without and against the legal owners wishes.
It is nice to wax poetic about how everything is meaningless in financial systems, and it is all about what we agree has value… but we typically don’t agree to something as awkward as this for very long. If you realize that you cannot appropriately use metaphor or simile about how this is like some other moment in art history, because you are not selling the artwork, you are selling the certificate of authenticity without the artwork.
This is not like selling limited edition prints, it is like selling limited edition certificates of authenticity… with a url linking to the original artwork. It’s inherently weird.
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Well, you can mint it. If you can sell it is up to the buyer. Just like with any normal art. You can throw paint at a canvas and try to sell it. It has worked before. But for most people it does not.
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There seems to be some confusion what NFTs are: NFTs are nothing more than fancy environmentally destructive receipts with a unique identifier, and some metadata, NOT the art itself. The art is not on the blockchain. NFTs are not proof of ownership of the art - the minter may not even be the artist. They are not even proof of provenance of the artwork itself, only the token - even the creators admit their experiment didn’t work. Buying an NFT is less like buying the Mona Lisa, more like buying provenance papers, by themselves without the painting, with no guarantee the earliest owner listed in the provenance ever legitimately owned the painting, maybe they just cooked up some fake provenance papers.
They are proof of ownership of nothing but a Non-Fungible Token that usually points to artwork (or some other data/digital asset) on a server somewhere, but only until someone stops renewing the hosting fees or moves or removes the artwork for any other reason. The pointer goes one way - if you download the artwork that is a copy with no value, and your token will not point to it (though at least then the no-value copy of the artwork can’t disappear). I’ve heard you can buy land on Mars as an NFT, not sure what meta-data the NFT contains for that, but pretty sure their “ownership” won’t be recognized by the powers that be if they live long enough to colonize Mars.
Only the token itself is “scarce” or “unique,” not the art, but any number of “unique” tokens may exist. Any other method of digital sales would have resulted in an e-mailed receipt with an equally unique order number that would serve the same purpose as an NFT, just minus the usefulness to speculators since instead of reselling it, other buyers would need to go to the artist to get their copy. But if the artist wants scarcity, they could choose to sell a limited number.
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All I know is that if the worlds second largest economy is banning all “crypto” transactions then there may be light at the end of the tunnel for those wanting new graphics cards, at a reasonable price and time frame.
I think all crypto’s have lost about 1/3 of values after announcement.
What I find amazing is that a unit of something that is nothing more than bits and bytes (ie. completely virtual) can potentially become more valuable than a physical ounce of all of the precious metals on Earth combined.
At its peak, 1 Bitcoin was worth more than an entire bar of Gold, a lot of people bought into it because it appears to be the ultimate “get rich quick while doing nothing” scheme (though people actually did get a lot of real money from it if they jumped off the train at the right time).
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I am not an cryptocurrency expert, but isn’t it that crypto is more than bits and bytes? Namely a lot of energy (graphic cards to mine consuming electricity) went into it. Compare this to gold what is something worth just because we say so / agreed?
Not that I am a big fan of crypto; I got the impression it’s a bubble. Tough, A lot of things are bubbles.
i can at least make jewelery out of gold. If i wanted to use some NFT art in a lazily photoshopped collage I don’t actually have to buy it, I can just google for a jpeg of it and find thousands of copies. Actual crypto I don’t really know anything about but what I understand about NFT so far is the silliest thing I’ve ever read about.
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Not only that, but there has been reports of crypto-wealth disappearing because of a hack or even because the guy who knew the password (to allow people to access their ‘wallets’) died.
The reasons Gold is superior: It is genuinely rare (ie. it can’t be “created” by someone who knows the code, the existence of thousands of different digital coins now should tell you something), it is physical and tangible, it can’t just vanish into the ether (ie. indestructible, even though it can get lost), it has no need for anything like a blockchain, it has both consumer and industrial uses as a material, it has been relatively stable for 1000’s of years, ect…
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Now that the NFT gold rush phase is behind us, here is an interesting topic about NFT’s pros/cons, where we are now, and where it’s headed.
“A Fool and his Money are soon parted.”
The NFT con-game was inevitably based on several things:
• “Human Greed.” Of course.
• The notion that “scarcity” equals “value.” That “currency units” must be “hard” to get.
• A very-fundamental misunderstanding of copyright.
• The notion that “this venue” was somehow special – versus any other way that “buyer meets seller.”
“Copyright” is the all-important car title which declares to the world that “you actually own that car, free of all leins and encumbrances.” And, any potential buyer can satisfy himself online that this claim is actually valid. Nothing else but copyright makes this claim “legally perfected.” Perfection of that claim “entitles you to sell it – any way you please, and as often as you can.”
If you “[say under penalty of perjury that you …] own something,” it costs $35 for you to solidify that claim. And then, armed with that legally “solidified claim,” you can strive to sell it any way you like. But, your rights to make that claim have nothing to do with the venue(s) in which you now might try to choose to sell it.
"Ownership has its Privileges!" 
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I guess it will come back in a while just like this “rush” was just a come back from 2017.
In theory you probably could sell copyright with NFTs, and then it might actually have some kind of intrinsic value beyond the shared delusion that NFTs are valuable (like tulips, the original NFT, way back when). Just a couple problems:
- NFT marketplaces don’t really care about who has legitimate ownership of the intellectual property pointed to by the NFT, only the sacred token’s ownership matters, so verifying that the seller has the legal right to transfer the copyright to another person could be problematic.
- There’s money to be made letting people who don’t legitimately own the image sell NFTs of it, and as long the NFT is just a pointer to data on a server somewhere, it’s likely a legal loophole that does allow scammers to profit off real artists’ work, and the crypto market powers that be to profit off everyone who buys in.
- Crypto as legally binding contracts - not sure that’s been tested yet, especially since the whole crypto community is opposed to the kind of regulation and oversight necessary to provide legitimacy to these sorts of things (your “crypto as contracts” crowd people seem to believe crypto will obviate the need for lawyers, judges, and any other middlemen or outside authority, without recognizing why those exist). This creates the problems in 1) and 2). Caveat emptor, folks.
- sellers should only be able to mint one NFT for the copyrighted instead of the several you currently see some sellers doing. You could not count on the NFT market to self-regulate and prevent someone from selling multiple copyrights of one image because they do not believe in regulation.
- it’s all a moot point since even the sellers with legitimate copyright over their images or other digital asset/data, generally aren’t selling the copyright to NFT buyers.
NFTs are the kind of idea audiences would reject in cyberpunk fiction - the idea of shallow rich folk buying a * fancy * link to an artwork just because it has a unique ID and shared delusion of value would be such an over the top critique of consumerism and rich folk’s wastefullness that only works in parody or satire, it’s not grounded enough for realistic fiction.
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