There is also,
"I am an idiot with too much money, and I have never bought an NFT before!
In my limited imagination this counts as an exciting new experience!"
Bubbles don’t last forever
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That is how some have pitched NFTs, but it is absolutely not the case. An NFT is just someone encoding data in a block chain, either directly by including text or file data, or indirectly, by reference such as a URL pointing to a photo or video. There is no authentication of copyright, IP or authorship. It is not a title company, there is no vetting whatsoever. It’s the wild west where anybody can create and sell an NFT of any IP, regardless of whether they have rights to it.
A big part of the issue is the false assumption that “do it with a blockchain” magically authenticates claims. It does not. It merely encodes them in an immutable, ridiculously inefficient to update, shared database.
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Can I trade in this NFT for a tulip? I hear they are back.
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That was the original idea behind the technology, but the creators admit that it failed at that entirely. Provenance needs to be established separately, and most people don’t care about it, except perhaps for really big-ticket items - it seems most of the NFTs being sold are not being sold by whoever created the content associated with the NFT. Whole sites are set up under that premise, in fact - there’s at least one that sells NFTs based on (links to) other people’s tweets; another that sells NFTs based on… celebrities. In neither case do you have to be the owner of the Twitter account/celebrity in question to sell these things - they explicitly don’t care (though the celebrity NFT business claims they’ll give a “portion” of proceeds to the celebrity in question… if they sign up with the site). You just have to be the first to try to monetize them.
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Better yet, I’ll trade you this NFT of a picture of a tulip. More meta == more better. Cash only, though. :-/
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So…Just go to the Internet Archives to view it?
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I’m going to take a picture of the next particularly remarkable scat I produce, and sell it as a NFT (completely devoid of any information at all) just to make a point, and hopefully a few $ off of some idiot who “gets” the “deep statement” I’m making…
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I’m confused, though. What difference does being the first make? Can’t someone else just be thes econd to sell an NFT of the same thing? I mean, we’re talking about a screenshot of a tweet. You can take a screenshot of a tweet and sell an NFT of it. I can take a screenshot of the same tweet and sell an NFT of that. Apparently someone is going to buy it because the price of oil went negative and at least it doesn’t cost much to store this worthless junk.
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I think you need to be first because these can essentially be replicated by other people. Anyone can copy the idea. So if you’re the first one to do it, you’re probably going to get the most money, because right now NFTs are selling based on novelty and publicity, not any actual intrinsic value.
Or to put it another way, you want to be first because you want to be able to get in and out before the market for these things collapses because they’re based on blockchained unicorn farts.
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There’s a couple of apropos sayings on Wall St:
- “They don’t ring a bell at the top.”
- “Trees don’t grow to the sky.”
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A lot of people wag their fingers at NFTs now, but you won’t be laughing when NFTs become sentient and take over the world a la Skynet.
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No, I get this. When I say “the whole point of an NFT” I mean “where it theoretically derives it’s value from.”
I could create an NFT of a link to a famous artist’s piece of work, and absolutely no one could stop me. If I sold it for enough money, they may take it to a judge, but even then it’s a hard case to prove. In practical terms, I could put an NFT up of Jeff Koon’s Rabbit up and not a single person would stop me.
Indeed the blockchain in currently littered with such NFTs.
But the point is, it would be worth absolutely nothing. No person in their right mind would pay even ten cents for “SamSam’s NFT of a famous artwork.”
The only ones that are with anything at all, the only ones that get sold for more than $10, are the ones where the artist is selling them. And the provenance of those is known. And if it gets resold, the provenance chain is there.
(Potentially if the selling itself were some kind of performance art – Shia LeBeouf selling something plagiarized – then perhaps that could also be worth something.)
But is anyone actually buying them for any kind of money without provenance? I don’t think so. I could be wrong.
Point being, I agree that this whole thing is crazy. I don’t think anyone should pay a penny for an NFT, especially if they’re confused and thinking their buying the thing itself. But I think that the fact that it itself is a referent and not the thing itself is already established, and so whether it’s a hash of the video or a hash of a dead url doesn’t make much difference at that point.
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Who the fuck actually buys these and how are they still rich enough to afford them by now if this is how they spend money? Also, how do I get them to spend a million dollars on my old bottle of Crystal Pepsi? Do I have to take a photo of it and make it widely available for free first before I can sell them the image?
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I imagine most of the creators of these images are barely owners anyway, given the ludicrous terms of use internet sites reserve for themselves.
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Indiana Jones and the Lost NFT
“Okay, we found the ancient NFT, now we just need a copy of the blockchain.”
“And then what? Does it have great magical powers?”
“Uh, no. It’s just a representation…”
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Just more of humanity running headlong to its end. The well of human stupidity has no bottom; it’s seemingly unending.
Indeed. Rereading what I wrote I think I left out the core of my idea, which is that you don’t need to be the first to make the NFT, you have to be the first to get lucky enough to sell it.
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Richard Prince is drooling right now.
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For some of these - e.g. the tweet and celeb NFTs, the tweet/celeb itself is the “link” that can only be referenced once, so whoever mints the NFT first gets to make the money off it. (Of course, that doesn’t stop anyone from setting up their own service that also uses tweets/celebs as the basis for NFTs… which is why there are multiple services that do so.) For NFTs based on (links to) images and videos, they’re endlessly usable because every NFT can point to a different instance of the image/video - you don’t even need to do the screenshot thing, unless you’re selling all the NFTs yourself and claiming each is original. (You could also just change one pixel and still be technically correct.) And even that is if you’re not actively scamming, which many NFTs sellers are.
Right. I was just saying, that was the original idea, but as you rightly state, in reality most of these derive their value from absolutely nothing. I think what’s motivating people to spend money on NFTs not being offered by auction houses/the artists themselves is the buyer a) not understanding how NFTs work and/or b) expecting to find a bigger sucker willing to pay more later. (Although the whole thing got started as a way of inflating the cost of Ethereum, so many people knew they were throwing away money on a scam just in the hopes of pumping up the value of their digital fake money holdings.) It is totally absurd.
Hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars rather than millions, but yeah, absolutely. (To me, spending dozens, much less hundreds of dollars qualifies as “any kind of money” given how totally worthless these things are.)
There are a number of services that mint NFTs explicitly based on the idea of tokenizing other people’s content/personhood/physical property/street address - their whole (successful) business model is entirely about selling things without provenance or scarcity, so they’re doubly worthless. (Hell, is there such a thing as anti-provenance, because these things have them.) Jack Dorsey “sold his first tweet” for millions, but it’s been turned into NFTs and sold by a number of other people as well, for lesser amounts.
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This definitely surprises me.
I do find this ecosystem quite hard to explore. But when I go to https://v.cent.co/ and look up sales, all sales appear to be by the creators. I also tried searching https://opensea.io/ for sales of tweets, and can’t find any, but I may not be searching well.
But yes, the sale of an NFT from some rando, not the artist/creator, does absolutely confuse me even more than the whole NFT thing to begin with. Are there any good examples of sales in the hundreds/thousands from a total rando?
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