the right headline for once
Opinion: Melania Trump’s new NFT is the perfect holiday g(r)ift
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/16/melania-trump-nft-art-christmas-satire/
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Finally, the MERGE of elite grifting and gifting that everyone was waiting for.
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May have found someone that hates NFTs more than me. Ngmi
Redditor said
A number of reasons.
- the non-fungible (un-reproduceable) part of NFTs is usually just a receipt pointing to art hosted elsewhere, meaning it’s possible for the art to disappear and the NFT becomes functionally useless, pointing to a 404 — Page Not Found
- some art is generated based off the unique token ID, meaning a given piece of art is tied to the ID within the system. But this art is usually laughably ugly, made by a bot who can generate millions of soulless pieces of art.
- Also, someone could just right click and save a piece of generated art, making the ‘non-fungible’ part questionable. Remember, the NFT is only a receipt, even if the art it links to is generated off an ID in the receipt.
- however, NFTs are marketed as if they’re selling you the art itself, which they’re not. This is rightly called out by just about everybody. You can decentralize receipts because those are small and plain-text (inexpensive to log in the blockchain), but that art needs to be hosted somewhere. If the server where art is hosted goes down, your art is gone.
- NFT minters are often art thieves, minting others’ work and trying to spin a profit. The anonymous nature of NFTs makes it hard to crack down on, and moderation is poor in NFT communities.
- Artists who get into NFTs with a sincere hope of making money are often hit with a harsh reality that they’re losing more money to minting NFTs of their art is making in profit. (Each individual minted art piece costs about $70-$100 USD to mint)
- most huge sales are actually the seller selling it to themselves under a different wallet, to try to grift others into thinking the token is worth more than it is. Wallet IDs are not tied to names and therefore are anonymous enough to encourage drumming up fake hype.
- example: If you mint a piece of art, that art is worth (technically speaking) zero dollars until someone buys it for a price. That price is what the market dictates is the value of your art piece.
- Since you’re $70 down already and nobody’s buying your art, you get the idea to start a second crypto wallet, and pretend it’s someone else. You sell your art piece (which was provably worth zero dollars) to yourself for like $12,000. (Say that’s your whole savings account converted into crypto)
- The transaction costs a few more bucks, but then there’s a public record of your art piece being traded for $12k. You go on Twitter and claim to all your followers “omg! I’m shaking!!! my art just sold for $12k!!!” (picture of the transaction)
- Your second account then puts the NFT on the market a second time, this time for $14,000. Someone who isn’t you makes an offer because they saw your Twitter thread and decided your art piece must be worth at least $12K. Maybe it’s worth more!
- Poor stranger is now down $14K. You turned $12k and a piece of art worth $0 into $26K.
- creating artificial scarcity as a design goal, which is very counter to the idea of a free and open web of information. This makes the privatization of the web easier.
- using that artificial scarcity to drive a speculation market (hurts most people except hedge funds, grifters, and the extremely lucky)
- NFTs are driven by hype, making NFT investers/scammers super outspoken and obnoxious. This is why the tone of the conversation around NFTs is so resentful of them, people are sick of being forced to interact with NFT hypebeasts.
- questionable legality — haven for money laundering because crypto is largely unregulated and anonymous
- gamers are angry because game publishers love the idea of using NFTs as a way to squeeze more money out of microtransactions. Buying a digital hat for your character is only worth anything because of artificial scarcity and bragging rights. NFTs bolster both of those
- The computational cost of minting NFTs (and verifying blockchain technology on the whole) is very energy intensive, and until our power grids are run with renewables, this means we’re burning more coal, more fossil fuels, so that more grifters can grift artists and investors.
Hope this explains. You’re correct that the tone is very anti-NFT. Unfortunately the answer is complicated and made of tons of issues. The overall tone you’re detecting is a combination of resentment of all these bullet points.
Edit: grammar and clarity
Edit2: Forgot to mention energy usage / climate concerns
Edit3: Love the questions and interest, but I’m logging off for the day. I’ve got a bus to catch!
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I never know if the proper thread to discuss NFT is this one or the one with literally “NFT” in the title, but anyways, as my crypto portfolio continues to circle the drain I will always take comfort in the knowledge that at least I didn’t get caught up in this lol racket
https://twitter.com/nfttheft/status/1471640210588852227?s=21
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Well the good news is the rightful NFT owners can still do everything exactly the same as before this brazen theft, including brag about their purchase on twitter, or whatever the major use case is supposed to be now.
The odds of running into the owner of the identical fake NFT would seem to be pretty low, although I imagine would be annoying when it happens.
What we NEED, apparently, is to get Congress involved.
https://twitter.com/luna_waffle/status/1471762984393449477
Also this:
https://twitter.com/NicoleW24521819/status/1471672901128503299
Only $1000 or so for one of these babies!
Love always makes people throbbing. Even Cupid, the god of love also blushes shyly when he meets someone he likes. Therefore, every Cupid has two red cheeks. This is a common characteristic shared by all Cupids.When you own a Cupid, not only do you have a unique love token in the world, but also a digital artwork that can prove its rare value. Besides, you will also get the privileges of Cupid Love Metaverse. You are gaining membership access to the CLM whose benefits and offerings will increase over time. Your Cupid can serve as your digital identity to open the door of love metaverse for you.
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imagine taking financial advice from a guy who rides the bus
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This kind of gets to the heart of it, like goofy has referred to NFTs as being like poker in terms of being a sort of skill game that you can make money at, but what they actually are is the new MLM. The “ngmi” thing has shades of the “GUYS YOU JUST HAVE TO THINK POSITIVE AND KEEP HUSTLING, F THE HATERS” vibes you always get in MLM communities.
This is not to say that NFTs (and I’m talking here specifically about NFT art, not NFT technology in general) are quite as much of a scam as MLMs, I’m sure more people are making money even though they’re ultimately a zero sum game for everyone except people minting tokens. But it has the same bullshit “communities” where everyone is constantly hyping and pretending that everyone is going to get rich trading NFTs even though that is literally impossible. I find this sort of atmosphere to be, for want of a less melodramatic word, degrading. I read stuff in the discord for about 30 seconds before concluding that I’d rather die than have an opinion on whether coloured squiggles are the new hotness or on the way out. I’d rather scrub toilets for a living.
This is not a prediction of NFT collapse, Herbalife still has a $4.5 billion market cap despite being even lamer, more annoying, more degrading and also having far less people who win at the game than NFTs.
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theyre not :(
the morality of profiting off fat fingers is also questionable at best, but i would 100% do it myself if i had the capability.
If I had to involve myself with NFTs to the extent goofy does for a year and got guaranteed money at the end of it, I would most definitely say no for $50,000. For $100,000 I’d think about it.
Edit: It’s not a question of morality, it’s just that I find it repulsive.
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Not sure you know what i mean but maybe
It’s really nothing like Mary Kay at all though. That implies a layer of salesmanship and “converting” people that does not exist here and also requires a large number of gullible* end users for the product. It’s more like scalping tickets and art prints. The people who are in it to hold because they like the “art” (whales for whom the money is meaningless) were always going to buy and hold and everyone else is just flippers.
Gullible is too strong b/c Mary Kay is decent quality for all I know, but my point is that at the end of the MLM scam chain there are users of the product. Who are the “users” of NFTs if we constrain it strictly to the fine art (lol) projects that provide no other utility? I am a buyer and collector of physical art which I hang on my walls and look at. That isn’t an actual use case for NFT art* unless the plan is to purposefully become celibate or something.
**There is some digital art that is absolutely good enough to display and should be displayed but it sure as fuck isn’t cartoon apes, humanoids puking rainbows, or any of the myriad dime store rip-offs of those things that comprise 85% of this space.
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Profile pics could actually have a ton of utility, it’s just dependent on a platform to make them that way. For example, if [insert popular social media platform here] banned the ability to upload profile pics and instead forced you to own your pfp (with the proof being an NFT verifiable on blockchain), then the value of pfps goes way up. They would sort of become skins / camo from FPS games at that point.
i’m with you. art isn’t a compelling use case for me, i’d need like $200k to consider playing with those chips. art as a store of value itself feels like an angle shoot.
however i do think nft has potential to solve some transparency problems for assets that require verification, like real estate registers, corp tax records, maybe even budgets, government loans. but the whole anonymity bit would have to be gone, and it won’t solve the trust issue for libertarian types anyway.
are you all just baiting goofy and beetlejuice to laugh at your numbers?
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neither am i
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i don’t believe “ngmi” is encouragement to be more bullish. ngmi is like a feeling of being bummed that someone doesn’t see the tremendous value in this technology. like imagine stockholders for cell phone companies in the early 2000s. there was a big cultural backlash to cell phone use. people were like, “all cell phone users are douchebags” and then it was, “people who use cell phones indoors are douchebags” and now, if you DON’T use your cell phone all the time, you’re the fuckin weirdo.
and with the way people are, how everyone gets angry about stuff and dig in if their views are challenged, you gotta figure they’re gonna end up being those kinds of people who lag behind the times culturally and technologically. so it’s sad, it’s like, “oh no. grandpa’s not gonna make it”.