oh, hi Marx
he/him
DSA ✊
Ally 🏳️🌈
Seriously, what is your endgame here?
They just really really really hate NFTs/crypto for some reason. I can’t imagine ever getting so worked up about a technology like people do today about crypto. I want to support an artist so apparently I need to have a PhD in contract and IP law in order to do so.
I think we need to define “ownership” here if you’re going to argue semantics and then try to pretzel-logic your way into disproving NFTs (or whatever your goal is)
ownership = rights (human law, rulings/opinions, enforced top down. i.e. titles)
possession = control (physics laws, math, enforced bottom up i.e. car keys)
One is disputable (who owns this dollar bill lying on the street?) but the other is not (indisuptable who has it in his pocket). One is reversible by ruling of a governing body, the other is not (lost cash has to be willingly given back, or taken by force). Sounds familiar…
You usually posses what you own and that’s why these words are often interchanged. But sometimes this is mutually exclusive (You own a car but do not possess it - ex: impounded, keys withheld…)
crypto IMHO was never about the former. “Ownership” will always live in the layer of social agreement. What crypto gives is “possession”: control above the TOS and paper rights that web 2 gave us. The first time the user can possess the keys to his stuff on a database that’s shared with other people (and not just the illusion of). This distinction is the reason why eventhough you do “own” your digital song/videos/game loot on amazon or PS5 via their TOS, you cannot trade it, swap it with a friend, resell it… The key never left your digital landlord, they just let you in to play. You had the papers for your car, but not the key. You never possessed what you owned.
I think what most people call “ownership” when they buy an NFT is actually possession, not the legalese of “owning” something dictated by contracts and social aggreements.
Why does this matter? There’s clearly advantages to ‘possessing’ something via an NFT:
easy access to markets to buy and sell
access to liquidity (have you ever tried selling a piece of art in meatspace?)
real time list of all ‘possessors’ by the artist; Sabet can see in real time everybody who has bought or traded his art work, and give unique benefits (discord access, ticket drops, additional arty drops, etc) to those holders). this is not possible with traditional art. I cannot see the provenance of my photography pieces, for example
democratizes art buying. I no longer need to go to an art show or bid at an auction. I just need to go to OpenSea
uniquely provable possession (concert tickets, passes, etc)
So your chief complaint is mainly a semantical one related to the terms outlined, and not the underlying platform. Got it. Thanks for the responses. ☺️
It’s having a legal contract that passes the intellectual property to your name and a Legal System backing that contract with the power and willingness to enable the use of Force to confiscate the property of contract breakers, that give you de facto ownership rights.
Here’s an excerpt of the “Holder Rights” explicitly outlined from a very very very large and well known music artist who released music NFTs:
“[Redacted] token holders have full commercial rights to their unique version. They can remix and release it, play it publicly, or use it in other content like videos.”
“[Redacted] includes the ability to render full quality audio files and to render individual tracks as Stems to make edits and remixes easy.”
“Holders do not have exclusive rights, meaning they cannot remove their version from [redacted] or stop it from showing up in NFT marketplaces like OpenSea.”
“If you do use a version commercially, you should not sell the token. If you do, you will transfer the rights and may need to obtain permission from the new owner to coninue your use.”
“Every buyer will be responsible for their own copyright claims.”
Do you think this would hold up in a court of law?
There is undoubtedly a huge number of rugpulls, vaporware, empty promises, and outright scams with NFTs. But this is true of any nascent technology, any sort of project like this. The reason so many people know about it and are aware about it is because of the permissionless and open nature of crypto which allows people to see these projects in realtime.
IMO it’s neither good nor bad. It’s just nascent tech. For an artist like Sabet, it’s obviously good! It gets people exposed to his art, with a low entry barrier, and allows people to support him. For people like Trump, it’s pretty clearly bad, and it just allows him to scam/rugpull people easier and faster.
So if somebody buys my digital photos off Deviant art, they didn’t “purchase my photos”? Geez, I better go call that TV studio that used some of my work and let them know they got scammed.
When I hired a wedding photographer 15 years ago and got the digitals, did I get scammed?
Are you against people buying anything digital or just the underlying technological platform?
I quite enjoyed supporting artists like Ame72 and Sabat by purchasing their digital artwork. 🤷♀️
I don’t see how it’s much different than Patreon. You pay creators that you enjoy, you get a digital collectable, and access to discord of you care about that sort of thing. NFTs allowed many people to do art full-time.
Nah, don’t really feel like doing that
No. You can’t do that because it’s not possible.
Keep pretending your bullshit tech isn’t smoke and mirrors, dipshit
Ahh there’s the ad hominem! Classic crypto-hater retort when you know that you’re wrong and you’re too stubborn to admit it. It’s not smoke and mirrors, it’s literally open source. You can check everything onchain. You can check the code.
Ethereum currently uses 0.0026 Annual Energy Consumption in TWh/yr. That’s for everything that’s on the network: all of defi (lending/borrowing, CDPs, insurance, mortgages, payday loans, exchanges, derivitives, etc), real world assets (RWAs, Blackrock’s BUIDL fund alone is up+364.65% YTD), NFTs/collectables, social media, gaming, identities, etc. This energy consumption is less than orders of magnitude less than netflix, paypal, gaming, etc.
Get blocked troll.
Both of those reasons are valid and fair.
That said. MAN, you must hate the kind of company you end up stuck with. Crypto as far as I know is MOSTLY very weird AnCap types
Crypto indeed is a weird af place. I hate 99.99% of the projects and the people here. The culture is insufferable. But there is space to build projects that actually help working people.
imma h8r
Why though? It’s just tech. It’s neither good nor bad. It can be used for good (public goods funding, donations to causes that might otherwise be blocked, paying artists a la patreon, governance voting via DAOs, etc) or bad (speculative markets, BAYC, memecoins, rugpulls, etc).
Ok show me every single holder of an Ame72 piece and the respective market in real time.
Read Blockchain Radicals, there’s more of us than you think. Dozens!
Make no mistake though, I view crypto as simply a technological tool to get us from A to B. From the cryptoleftist subreddit:
Bitcoin or any other specific crypto / blockchain project will not get us to socialism. This is first and foremost an ANTI-capitalist community (this should be the bare minimum to calling oneself a leftist), so please, we don’t want to encourage some of the worst aspects of both capitalism and crypto currency like speculation and trading. We don’t care if you do it, but there are other communities out there for that.
That said, there’s some cool work being done on Breadchain for coops and workers: laborDAO, the ReFi (regenerative finance) movement, etc.
Crypto can be an important tool to:
protect the unbanked,underbanked, and even banked from the exploitative financial system: we’re making progress
remove US hegemonic power by undermining the dominance of the US dollar: we’re making progress, but some like USDC are actually reinforcing American dominance
move away from capitalism and asset speculation to collective ownership (governance tokens), trade of useful goods (digital or physical), and savings protocols: we’re not making very much progress and are actively moving against this
Of course people think crypto “doesn’t do anything” when most people don’t even understand how investments or tech in general works.
There is actually a lot going on with crypto. It’s just that people who aren’t plugged in won’t really care… : https://ethereumadoption.com/
Ok, show me every single holder of an Ame72 piece and the respective market in real time.
(by the way Ethereum, the largest NFT chain, uses less energy than your dishwasher now)
These arguments always make me smirk. Yes, of course I could use the slow, expensive, and exploitative financial rails that currently exist. But it’s fucking fun to buy NFTs. And easy. It’s as simple as that. I enjoy collecting these art pieces. I don’t give a flying fuck of a shit if it’s not actually “owning” it by some armchair lawyer’s abstract definition of “owning”. I support cool creators, the image appears in my wallet, I get perks associated with the token sometimes, and I have some prints of the art on my wall. I don’t care, like, not even a little bit, if I actually “own” it or not from a legal contract point of view, which is just a social layer anyways. I verifiably possess it, and that’s enough me.