NFTs, why do people hate them?
I was just thinking and wondering why people are so incredibly anti NFT. I recently posted about my art here and someone was compelled to post an angry comment about NFTs. I have come to expect this and just wonder why?
It is a strange thing to collect digital items, I get that. Personally I find it hard to understand most of what people do including collecting stuff. I'm try to get rid of stuff.
We know some crypto is bad for the environment. This is why I didn't buy bitcoin in the first place, it seemed like a huge waste of energy for nothing. Many companies support this now though. If you invest in Tesla, you invest in bitcoin. You may not even know or care that your 401k hedge fund is investing in crypto.
But some crypto like Tezos (which is what I use) is in line with energy use you would expect from credit cards and the like.
The other thing is that some people are making huge sums of money from crypto and maybe there is jealousy involved. I've felt it too! Then I remind myself what life is all about, that I am happy where I am, and that fame would not help me create better art, in fact it would likely work against it. Money is much so much easier to make then art, it's not even close.
Thoughts?
There are a couple reasons imo. I think the concepts of NFTs / crypto / blockchain are somewhat interesting, but in practice have been quite bad.
NFTs are enclosing the digital commons and introducing artificial scarcity for the purposes of a market. This is a direct parallel to how capitalism and property rights (real and intellectual) have consistently shifted previously public lands, resources, and ideas into private control. I think this is a bad trend that causes a lot of harm.
The "value" of NFTs and most crypto is artificially inflated by people / a culture who treat it as an investment vehicle rather than simple proof of ownership or currency. This makes it unstable, prone to huge fluctuations, and rife with scams especially when considering the lack of regulation.
NFTs, while purported to help artists make money and enforce copyright, encourage widespread copyright violations where the only remedy is for an artist to pay money to mint their own art first, which they may not want to or have the funds to do. I think NFTs also open the door for large corporations (like disney) to severely lock down the free expression of images on social media platforms. Youtube ContentID is tech with a similar purpose which has only benefited large rights holders and made it near impossible for many smaller creators to use the platform.
Most blockchain tech is a collossal energy / materials consumer, contributing to climate change and also driving up the prices of common computer hardware.
Almost all blockchain mining strategies reward those with more resources more than those without, leading to severely unequal distribution of wealth.
Most NFTs only hold a link of some sort to a different page that says you own that image. That different page is centrally hosted and not under your control, so if it goes down so does your NFT.
I think something really interesting to note is that we are already seeing something similar to this in NFT land. If you steal someone else's artwork and sell it as an NFT, OpenSea doesn't care, and has been actively trying to avoid acknowledging this as of late [0]. Meanwhile, if you can raise enough of a fuss on Twitter, your stolen NFTs (which, by basically every cryptobro's definition I've ever read, means it's no longer yours since that's what the blockchain says) will be blacklisted from the major marketplaces, thereby "ceding de facto censorial power to the marketplaces" [1]. I'm sure that major corporations have taken note of this behavior and will use it to their own advantage.
And the idea that artists should pay to mint their artwork before the thieves is laughable when you consider that a) anyone else can mint duplicates later on (there is no uniqueness requirement for creating an NFT) and b) it's not just a matter of doing it once... [2]
This is honestly my favorite part about it. People think "oh, it's on IPFS so it's good" when IPFS means you need to actively pay a pinning service unless you want your files to disappear. It's marginally better than hosting it on a domain you don't control [3], but it's not great, either. Every time someone touts them being "decentralized," just remember that the vast majority of NFTs are stored on centralized systems with no incentive to maintain them once sold and the purchases take place on just a few marketplaces.
[0] https://twitter.com/NFTtheft/status/1471640210588852227
[1] https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/1455275001045684226
[2] https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/1472476159166144512
[3] https://arweave.news/nft-404/
7. NFT's have limited, if any, consumer protections - something that NFTs/crypto enthusiasts try to spin as a 'positive' and a 'fight against the system'. NFT's have no method of cancelling transactions, returning rights, federal requirements for processing, hacking, identity, or insurance guarantees, limited transaction fees, and many many many more consumer protections that have made life somewhat livable inside our capitalistic hellscape.
The attitude that crypto-enthusiasts have with this is more or less "git gud". Lost your wallet? Tough luck. Paid a scammer? gg.
For reference: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Rules_of_Acquisition#Official_rules
Scarcity of art. art we are talking about art here, not anything people need. Are you angry that other types of art have limited editions also? limited run comic books, so evil right? these poor people need their art and cant get it.
Value can change, just like the stock market, scams can happen just like real life. The good thing is you don't need to buy anything to enjoy nfts.
Minting costs pennies on the dollar depending on which currency you use.
No it isn't Tezos for example is orders of magnitude more efficient then bitcoin.
Yes, the rich get richer, this is just how the world works. But also with NFTs the more creative get richer and people who invest in good art get richer.
Everyone that said this I asked "would it matter if the nft held the image?", of course it doesn't matter to anyone. why would we care about that? you. can. download. the. nft. back it up. your ownership of it is stored on the blockchain which will not go down because it is distributed. Do you care that your email is on stored Google's servers?
NFTs adds nothing to the art itself. Environmental costs of crypto are real.
Like cashing out future value for a discounted present value to make a quick buck. How will the NFT artists of today be viewed in a few years when the current generation of kids starts looking at who sold their climate out?
NFTs add nothing to art. Maybe so. Does paper add to art? Oil paints? Do computers add to art? What about museums? What really adds anything to art other then human beings making stuff?
Hopefully when our climate is destroyed we will blame the people actually responsible and not artists.
NFTs are just receipts for art ownership. They are not a medium for the creation or viewing of art. At best, they add the ability to verifiably sell and resell the equivalent of a certificate of authenticity. Do you really think that's comparable to paper, paint, or museums?
NFTs are just receipts for art ownership. That's like saying the mona lisa is just paint on a canvas. Sure it is technically correct but missing the entire point.
NFTs can be a medium for creating and viewing art. They make generative art possible in a way that was never possible before. They inspire artists like myself to think in new ways and try new ideas. NFTs make normal people interested in art in a way they haven't been before.
As an expert on generative art and abstract art history I truly believe that NFTs are not only comparable to paper/museums but will overtake them. We've already seen digital art grow by leaps and bounds in our life time, give it 30 more years.
They're not necessarily.
Anyone can make and sell an NFT of anyone's art. And as @Akir pointed out, the vast majority of them don't bother to embed the art itself.
So you're trusting:
You can easily verify that the art was signed by the author. in fact you should do this before buying an nft.
It doesn't matter what happens with the blockchain if you just want to buy art and support the artist. But in reality the blockchain isn't going anywhere. You might as well worry about the stock market crashing, at least we know that's happened before.
You can download the image and sometimes even the program that generated it!
Don't be hacked, that's got nothing to do with nfts.
In that case, if the blockchain doesn't matter and you need to download the image to prevent linkrot, then there's no difference between an NFT and just donating to the artist. But I think the appeal of NFTs (other than as an investment) is that they're supposed to mean something. Which I'm trying to get across, is very conditional and perhaps better recognized the normal way, with banks.
(the stock market crashing is actually a good example of how banks are backed by governments)
there is a key difference between buying an nft and donating... you can sell an nft.
Or in a world where NFTs didn't exist, the other guy would buy another copy from the artist and then there'd be more money in the artist's pocket and two copies between the two of you. I fail to see the improvement by making it scarce. It's not actually scarce (ownership of the token is not ownership of the art, and anyone can still access the art freely), and it's not actually worth more when it's tokenized.
People might be more willing to pay artists if they think they're buying a thing they could possibly resell in the future, possibly leading to the artist making more additional money than they miss to reselling.
You know why PGP failed to gain hardly any adoption at all? I'm not going to blame it entirely on the difficulty of verifying keys but it sure didn't help.
As far as I am aware the vast majority of NFTs do not actually contain the content or even a reprise ration of them; they are simply URLs that link to a webpage with a copy of it.
The art has artistic value but NFTs as they are have questionable value as a receipt. The mere ownership over a piece of art is not of any artistic value - at least insofar as the opinions I have ever heard.
If the NFTs did contain the actual image would that change things for you?
It would change how I feel about them a bit if the actual medium was somehow the blockchain - but digital art is (generally) defined by pixels, and you can’t really get around this with NFTs. Even storing the data as a transaction on the blockchain, it would still just be encoded pixels. NFTs will only ever be pointers to a piece of digital art.
That's kind of what I'm getting at. The fact is that having the art on chain doesn't really matter for anything. Most people wouldn't even know or understand the difference.
NFTs are digital art, that is true. The thing is, you can't own a print of digital art. Once it is printed it becomes physical art. Most digital art will never be printed and shouldn't be cause it's a waste of ink and paper. The only way to own digital art is with crypto and nfts.
So I think what you are saying, correct me if I'm wrong, is that digital art can easily reproduced perfectly therefore it holds no inherent value?
How do you feel about movies, music, and videogames?
The ability to capitalize on art does not define what art is. Why does it matter if someone has an NFT linked to, which you call ownership of, a piece of art? There's a tendency for these questions to be answered with "it allows artists to make a living," disregarding that people could just give the artists money for the same end result, if they didn't expect some compensation. NFTs don't allow you to own digital art, they allow some artists to get paid by people who are more interested in getting rich than the craft itself.
I'll go one step farther then "it allows artists to make a living,"
It inspires artists to make more higher quality art.
I disagree. I think NFTs have considerably lowered the bar for quality and novelty of art.
yes, i typically link to the worst possible example of something. what kind of art do you think is good so i can show you some of it that is awful?
Honest question, how is the 'Top' selling artist (Yuga Labs' Yacht Club) on NFTMarket the worst possible example? Aren't they pretty much the gold standard of NFTs, given how successful they have been?
p.s. And worth noting is pretty much the entire 'Top' artists section is people folllowing the same formula too; they create a template and sell slight variations to it. None of which looks like very "high quality art" to me.
If you are asking why the most successful example of something is not the best and often close to the worst, well I don't have an answer for you.
It isn't a matter of poor taste or mass appeal being dull, though. You know that most people aren't buying those monkeys because they think they look cool, right?
This is what NFTs are to the majority of the market. The idea that NFTs hold value rests on these and the people who believe they'll make bank on 'em. They aren't just a separate example of bad art or just a bunch of people with poor taste. What you're looking at is the grift which all NFTs derive their value from.
It's simply the most famous example. And, judging from what I see on OpenSea, similar examples dominate the market. More apes, NBA-themed apes, cats, mutated apes, skeletons, accessorized 3d models...
(I like propaganda posters)
That's a bold and, as far as I can tell, entirely baseless claim. Please expand.
first, common sense answer. if artists can make a living easier they can spend more time making art. if artists sell their art together in a large market place, they will try harder to create higher quality work to get noticed.
second, personal answer. I would not be making the art I am making if not for sites like fxhash, there was no market for it. There was no one interested in it. There was no way to sell it and people didn't even understand what I was doing. Now they are starting to.
How have NFTs, as a technology, supplied these solutions? The hype around them is good for some artists, I'd never deny that, but why are they superior to nearly any other means of artistic compensation?
There's two options there: either your art happened to get more attention around the same time as NFTs came around and it's unrelated, or it has nothing to do with the art and people are buying it in an attempt to get rich quick. No one's gonna go "I didn't understand this art and it just seemed like weird shit to me, but now that the artist is trying to sell me a link to it, I get what they were going for! It's brilliant!"
There's often another option you hadn't thought of. Longform generative art is difficult to sell or even explain to people. There was no way for a fan or collector to mint a unique token from one of my generative art programs and get their own special one of a kind piece.
Theoretically something like that could have existed like with paypal, but it kind of couldn't because there would be no way to verify that a piece was unique. Also there would need to be a proprietary marketplace to buy, sell and trade which is just the blockchain itself.
Now it seems like people do care and I've never seen so many people interested in creative coding and generative art.
I seriously don't understand why people think I'm trying to sell them something. I am trying to give you something for free. Free code, free art, all you want. No need to pay a damn thing. I never asked for a cent from anyone. You can pay me if you want or don't, I really don't care.
I make digital art myself, because I enjoy it. I’ve written an extended implementation of A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style and trained my own architectures on ImageNet to use with it. I do photography to support this as well. I value art based on the aesthetic pleasure I derive from it, not the capitalistic value of the art. NFTs are not digital art - they just point to digital art.
So, what is something that is digital art as opposed to something that points to it?
If I wanted to see your digital art, not something pointing to it, not a print, where would I go?
I mean there are several answers to that, and I think it’s open to interpretation - the digital art, in my opinion, would be the combination of the data in the storage format and intended rendering pipeline displaying the data. A pointer to digital art, again in my opinion, would be the link to a webpage that contains it, the path in your file system to the file, or any various methods of indexing data. I personally don’t believe that an NFT is anything other than a new way to point to the data.
For your second question, I actually haven’t shown it online at all - I have a single piece at a google images link that I use to show friends what sort of thing I want to do when I ask if they want to model for me. The honest answer is that I’m working on turning the digital art I do into physical art (with more steps than just having prints done, but I won’t expand on that until I’ve actually pulled it off), because that’s how I’d prefer to display it. That said, sharing the link with someone would be a way to say, “here is where the data is, go retrieve it and render it on your machine.”
I want to say, I do appreciate your line of questioning; I think it begins to adequately address the way NFTs themselves may be viewed as art by others.
To be honest I am not 100% sure. There are positive and negative aspects. The truth of the matter is that i have a lot of thoughts and feelings about the ownership of art and how artists are paid. Artists should be paid to compensate for the effort they put into their work for sure, but at the same time the money that goes into so-called “fine art” is dirty for a number of reasons. And that’s why I generally don’t like the idea of NFTs; it just introduces more bad things into the mix.
Given that they are just receipts for art ownership, how can they be a medium for creating and viewing art? My understanding is that the NFT contains a url, and you access that url to view the image. The NFT itself seems completely separate from the process of creating and viewing the image.
In a sense yes but without the NFT the art would not have been created and not have been viewed.
It's like film. At first people made theater plays. Then film existed and you could make movies. It became a medium for creating and viewing that type of art. But the physical film itself isn't anything special, there are many copies of it. When you buy a copy of that film you don't own much of anything but a license to watch it with some restrictions.
The NFT maybe contains a url or maybe it contains the whole image, that isn't really the point because either way you wouldn't own the image itself.
Okay so rather than medium you mean a financial incentive? Or you might mean a sort of inspiration.
To be frank, from what I've seen of the current NFT market it seems that the art itself is mostly irrelevant as long as there's something there, and the value is determined via strategic use of hype and clout on social media. The financial incentives appear to favour large amounts of low-effort images.
Personally I see it like speculating on property markets. If a home is built with the sole purpose of being an investment asset, and it's bought and sold for years without anyone ever once living in it, is it even really a home at that point? If nobody building it ever cared to make it cozy or comfortable to stay in?
I don't think your comparison to film is fair. If you record a theatre play on film you're enabling people who weren't physically there to see it; it can reach an audience that wasn't possible before. If you make an NFT of an artwork, that artwork must already be hosted on a URL online. Being hosted online already enables anyone with internet to view it. Minting an NFT doesn't make it available to any additional people.
It's not the point, but for a different reason. It's not the point because it's still not the medium. NFTs did not enable the creation of the art, the marketplace did. But this marketplace is built on deception, environmental destruction, and the biggest tech fad/snake oil of the decade. You can build a marketplace without constructing it out of rugs just waiting to be pulled.
No, it's not. It simply isn't the same, at all.
Yes to all of those questions!
Do algorithms add to art? Does advancement of new fields of computer science add to art? Do new forms of social networks add to art?
Do new ways to buy, sell, trade view, and create art add to art?
Yes of course. All of those add to art, and so does NFTs. However, many of the things that they add are not positive. I don't see why NFTs would be any different.
Because NFTs are new, we feel that we still have some agency in determining how much influence NFTs should have in society. The other things you mentioned are old and established, so changing them would require much greater effort. That is one of the reasons why there's usually more debate about things that are new.
Recent thread which may be of use.
Don't be jealous of the guy who put a quarter in and hit the jackpot, because that guy probably isn't going to be doing so well in a few years from now. The worst thing that can happen to someone is winning a bunch of money, I wouldn't wish it on anyone. Instead be jealous of the guy who is happy with his life, doesn't care about money, and is pumping out art like there's no tomorrow.
"You can certainly make a lot of money from crypto"
No, not really. Some people made ton of money from crypto just some people made a ton of money from everything. It is just as hard to make money from crypto as it is with anything else. If crypto and NFTs were such a good investment the stock market would crash.
Creating art does make money though. I mean it is literally creating something of value from raw materials. It seems like NFTs are in fact more valuable then $100 bills because NFTs have art to back them up.
Code, equations, concepts, ideas, algorithms, etc.
I agree with most of this in a sense. How could binary data on a hard drive somewhere have any value? How can a bunch of paint atoms on a canvas some value? These aren't things I value in my life. I don't want that stuff.
But in reality value determined what other people think, not what you think. If someone was to say hey, I want to give you this NFT that is worth 1 million dollars, I think maybe you'd suddenly agree out that it has some value. (For the record I don't have that kind of money.)
Or another more common example, you want to watch a movie online. You pay netflix, amazon, or whoever. That money you paid is the value for you of that digital work.
Have you heard of sell-to-self scams?
As a programmer and game developer for my life I've spent 20 years making a mountain of bits. Maybe you don't consider these things to be raw materials but they are all I have.
I've used some physical stuff like a keyboard, mouse, etc but I wouldn't really call those the raw materials but just physical tools that I used.
I think you are missing my point entirely. Computers are a way to create things without using physical raw materials.
If there are no physically raw materials involved then we can only talk about virtual raw materials. Virtual raw materials are great because they do not get used up.
I could not have made the stuff I make with labor alone. I used other people ideas, algorithms, tools, equations, etc. I could throw labor at it all day and not make a dent without using these whatever you want to call them. I call them raw materials.
sigh. my whole point with digital art is that you don't need physical raw martials. it seemed easy to understand.
That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Art is not the paint the artist has laid down, it is the experience of beholding it.
There are different ways of thinking about it. One perspective is from that of the artist who feels like the art is more in the act of creation. Another is from that of someone that appreciates art, is the enjoyment and wonder of looking at the art. Yet another is from someone looking at it purely as an investment. Some believe that art is all around us in the world and in what people do and some of it just happens to be more popular than others.
In my opinion art is all of these things and much more. Certainly the scope is large enough to encompass that of purely digital creations and eventually, art created by artificial intelligence but I have a feeling this thread would explode if I throw that inevitability into the mix.
It's another attempt to force property and scarcity and other disgusting concepts into a digital space where they don't belong. While less directly invasive, NFTs have the same disdain for everything great about digital goods as DRM does.
I dislike NFTs for the same reason I think filesharing is beautiful.
What if I told you NFTs were like file sharing except better because anyone can easily download it for free but if you really want to you can also buy it to support the creator?
I can do that without crypto, without artificial scarcity, without the grifters, without any of the bad things that come with NFTs.
It's not like we didn't previously have mechanisms to pay artists for things obtained freely.
You can't though. NFT is art that pays for itself.
Where other forms of art try to make artificial scarcity like charging us 20 dollars to rent a movie on amazon. You can't download a game, or a tv show without paying it or doing so illegally.
NFTs are free art for anyone. There is no payment required, not even any advertisements. You can just download peoples art and pay them only if you want, it's amazing. The best thing about grifters is that if you don't care about making money you can ignore them. However they exist all over the place in real life too so it's hard to get away from. I think we recently had a president who knew something about that. ;)
So, explain to me how all this is possible without crypto.
itch.io offers creators the means to be able to offer their games, art, and software under the structure of "pay what you want", and that's only a modern example. Radiohead did that same process with one of their albums, In Rainbows, via their website. Anywhere form 0$ and up.
You don't need crypto to do this. The crypto side of it only allows someone to feel special that they are the "sole holder" of it officially. It also means that it can only technically be sold once, thus the point of Non-Fungibility. However, that's only under the premise that there's something expressly different than the image that the person bought and the image that the person right-click>save-as'd.
Do you think the "pay what you want" model is viable? Sure radio head can do that but well, if it was more viable I think we'd have more then 1 example of it in mainstream media. itch is great but I don't know of any game devs living off that pay what you want money.
NFTs on the other hand, are a model that seems to work. I can't say exactly why but it seems to have taken off as away for creators to get paid and their supporters to even sometimes turn a profit.
There are many other benefits to NFTS beyond that. being able trade and ell for example with the original artist getting a cut.
Bandcamp has been using "pay what you want" for many years. Patreon tiers are also a pay what you want of sort.
To add to that, Bandcamp's model is extremely sustainable and the definition of a model that works. The company has been consistently making a profit for years, well before any of the streaming companies came close, and pays out way more money to artists than any streaming service (unless you are a big artist who nets millions of streams).
Do I think it's viable? No, but it exists without crypto.
NFTs have worked because, as far as I can tell from a mainstream perspective, the market is manipulated and is promoted heavily by big name cryptobros and internet celebrities. I don't personally follow the scene, but people I do follow, do. That's obviously only one or two sources, but if it was an actual mainstream big thing, I'd suspect I'd hear more about it outside of that circle. NFTs just comes across like a big circlejerk for the internet elite to manipulate their fans or other netizens.
The other downfall, which is the downfall to all digitally owned things, is that if the service that hosts your proof of authenticity shuts down, or the place where your image (or other digital purchase) is hosted goes down, then your NFT is rendered useless. This cannot happen with a physically purchased item, unless you yourself lose your proof of authenticity/art or have it stolen.
Although it should be noted that, if a physical good is stolen, there is the hope that it will be recovered, and the state has the monopoly on violence to repossess it, while there is no technical way to guarantee an NFT will be returned if the thief (who actually has to be caught first, of course) is willing to be found in contempt of court and refuses to give away the keys/passwords that would allow it to be transferred from their wallet. And unlike in the cyrpto community, you don't need social media clout for people to agree that, even though it was stolen, it's still yours, and do something about it.
Generally speaking, the buyers are either in on or caught up in the grift. While there are plenty of well-meaning artists trying to sell NFTs, the overwhelming majority of people buying NFTs view themselves as investors in a new frontier. If that all fell apart overnight, all that would be left is an obnoxious and over-engineered alternative to pay-what-you-want which uses the language of physical ownership and technology they're unlikely to understand to trick buyers.
Imo, the real modern innovation for supporting artists who do freely available work is patreon and its clones. Where NFTs enable a bunch of people fucking around with generated pictures of monkeys to try and strike it rich, crowdsourced patron services have held up and made careers out of things which would never be sustainable as the ad-driven web falls apart.
"the overwhelming majority of people buying NFTs view themselves as investors in a new frontier. "
Where did you get this information from? I take it you have distanced yourself from the NFT community but I have not and I can tell you this is not the case at all.
It will be interesting to see where patron and NFTs go in the future. You could be right and NFTs will disappear as quickly as they came with you loling all the way. However I think the more likely case is that patron will go away as more artists move towards nfts and crypto.
Turns out fans of artists prefer actually getting something for their donation like an nft instead of just, you know, nothing.
Unless the top of every marketplace, the overwhelming methods of outreach across the internet, all the media coverage, the entire pitch by everyone I've ever seen interested in them before right now (besides a few claiming it's a necessary evil for small artists...immediately disputed by other small artists), etc are somehow entirely hiding a silent majority of buyers with entirely different values, I'm pretty confident in what I said.
You might not view them as "real" members of the community and draw your lines at a central core of people just trying to make cool art, but that doesn't change the reality that it brought in the same investor-types who stuck with cryptocurrency.
i love when people tell me something like "everyone says this thing is true"...
well, I don't and I'm part of everyone. I see many other people who agree with me and they are also some of everyone too. it seems like your mind is already made up though so what can i say.
Those perfectly viable solutions that have exited for not decades have turned out to not be so viable and NFTs are a much better way for artists to make a living and get noticed.
Also, unlike the solutions you mentioned NFTs directly inspire the creation of new art that everyone benefits from.
As artist I would love if people just give me money for free but it's a whole lot easier to just sell stuff.
Maybe my dislike is of an ontological kind. When it comes to how NFTs are often used for art, moments, thoughts, whatever, I don't think they're much of anything. They're an abstraction sold to people that don't understand what it entails. A glorified link to a file which may or may not remain on a server, but that is sold as something rather permanent or at least more persistent than it really is. Ultimately, art NFTs are just certificates of status which are not embodied in any actual artwork. People like to compare NFTs to collectibles, but Action Comics #1 is not an abstract token that points to an entry in a database which is not unique and may or may not be there. It's a bundle of stapled pages that I can actually own, touch, and read. I find it odd that this distinction doesn't come out more often, and when it does the counter arguments are both weird and predictable.
I understand fully that it is strange to collect non-physical objects. However to me it's almost more strange that people collect physical objects to clutter up their homes.
How would you know the difference between action comics #1 and an exact replica of it? Getting past the fact that comic books are extremely difficult to make forgeries of. The fact is if you actually owned that comic book, it would be in a safe somewhere with a really nice reprint of it on display.
I guess my point is that people put so much emphasis on owning things they often forget to just look at the art itself. They focus too much on popular and valuable things and tend to ignore that that the best things in life are free, and that includes art.
You can, of course, criticize the very human tendency to accumulate physical objects. However, the issue that we're discussing here is why does some people hate NFTs?, and showing how other kinds of collections are questionable as well will do very little to answer that question.
I'm not criticizing anything, I simply saying I don't understand people collecting things, huge difference. Your point seemed mainly about how a physical item is different from a virtual item.
I'm saying you are not seeing the forest for the trees. You could own a near replica of Action Comics #1 for a tiny fraction of the cost. A real physical item that for all intents and purposes is identical to you. In a way it's even better because you don't need to worry about something happening to it.
People put too much emphasis on value and not enough on the actual art. For example you choose Action Comics #1, not your favorite comic book but just the most expensive comic book there is.
Owning a copy of Action Comics #1 printed by DC in 1938 is revelant for the same reason as the 1787 Constitution of the United States, Babe Ruth's 1930 Jersey, or the ball used in the final of the 1970 Fifa World Cup: they are historical artifacts. They possess historical value precisely because they are not tokens. They do not link: they are.
If I buy a Renoir, I wanna see the strokes.
NFTs are often an attempt to artificially inject aura into something that lacks it, by its very nature.
I'm not a fan of NFTs (for reasons better phrased by others in the thread), but I think the strongman view is that they address the problem of provenance in a digital medium.
Not containing the artwork seems like a weak criticism to me because having a digital copy of something is not a problem. Storage is cheap and cloud backup solutions are bountiful. The ease of obtaining/preserving a digital copy of artwork you own a digital certificate for is trivial compared to preserving the ink on superman chucking a car.
"Seeing the strokes" of historical items is usually a very good fingerprint of their provenance, but it isn't perfect and it probably is increasingly easy to make near-perfect forgeries. Digital art has that problem baked into it with zero cost, and that's the problem that's trying to be solved. (there was a movie about a painter who donated extremely good forgeries to museums that might be a good watch?)
I think you require both provenance and artwork. If you owned a certificate saying you owned the constitution, but over time it had eroded to dust that wouldn't be meaningful. Similarly, if you owned a forgery of some art that was indistinguishable from the original it would lose its value if it became known it was made by a 3d printer instead of a sculptor.
In a perfect world NFTs would be an extra source of income for digital artists who want some way of saying "you were the #1st-100th person to support this" like numbering a print, sold to collectors (which is pretty human). In practice that doesn't sound like what happens.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned explicitly in the thread is that people speculating on NFTs aren't buying art for how much they value it; they're buying it hoping they can get more from others. Their goal is to underpay the artist.
Good thoughts.
One small thing. There is a massive difference between NFTS that are like 1 of 100 where they are all the same, and nfts where each of those hundred is a unique work generated from a pseudorandom seed.
I'm mostly interested in longform generative art and nfts really fit into it perfectly.
I haven't posted any of my own work in this thread yet but take for this recent piece by me. Every one of these is different. People that bought it didn't even know what it looked like until after the transaction was complete. I didn't know, no one did because the seed wasn't generated yet. I did my best to create a program that would produce a pleasing variety of results.
Here is broken flows by me... https://www.fxhash.xyz/generative/4376
Yes I agree with that but I also have to accept the world as it is and I can't help but predict that some NFTs will one day be regarded in a similar manner as these physical objects you mention.
My career is making video games. They are essentially just large files you can pirate a torrent of for free and have no physical presence except a box with a disc in it. Almost all the time that disc holds a slightly unfinished copy of the game that you muse download a patch from the company's servers to play the correct version. That was a few years ago though, digital distribution has now taken over games and the majority of games sold have no physical presence.
Generative art by it's nature is a mechanical reproduction, it is given birth on the computer and is easy to reproduce with perfect accuracy. To make a physical print of it, in fact degrades the work in the same way that scanning a physical painting degrades it.
So what we have is some of the best artists of our time creating art in digital form which can not be owned physically by definition. NTFs are the only way that art can be bought, sold and traded.
Are you saying that this era of amazing digital art is essentially worthless to history because all that matters is physical artwork which does not exist for most pieces? Or would you agree that in all likelihood things will change as humanity marches into the future.
Sure, that may be the case. My bet? NFT will remain useful, but it's not going to be the revolution some people think.
But not everything works like videogames (sometimes not even videogames...).
Why would anyone do that? I think we're in agreement here, that makes no sense.
I don't think that is true. I mean, it is great that artists are getting paid, but there are other sources of revenue besides NFTs.
No, of course not! A lot of amazing art is not unique in the sense that there are multiple copies of it, and no singular copy is more authoritative than the others. Think, for instance, about Half-Life. It's a wonderful game and no reasonable critic will argue against its artistic value due to its reproducible nature. None of its copies possess any auracity (roughly speaking: a certain kind of uniqueness), but that doesn't reduce their value one bit! They relate to us in a way that is very distinct from the logic imposed by objects which are, by their very nature, unsuitable to mass production. However, at this moment, it would be unreasonable to argue that tangible and unique historical artifacts share the same ontological status as digital/reproducible counterparts such as computer programs, television shows, or NFTs. Hopper's Nighthawks was actually touched by the artist, it carries it's imprint, the physical impact of his strokes. That is not to say that any art which does not share these features is without value. They work in different ways. People are selling glorified Google Drive links as if they were original Rembrandt's, or Beatle's master tapes. They're even selling things that barely exist as objects in the first place, and for which a certificate of ownership cannot and do not mean anything. It's absurd.
Before NFTs, how was digital art being bought sold and traded? That's really the heart of the matter and the fact is it wasn't. Yes you can get paid for other things, of course, but to get paid for selling your art directly to a fan/collector is another thing entirely. I was just thinking about it earlier, in a way buying NFTs are like buying stock in an artist.
That is absolutely 100% untrue! Commissioned digital artwork, most often sold through DeviantArt, Etsy, and Fiverr, but also through artists' person sites, was and still is incredibly commonplace. I have commissioned several pieces myself (for myself and as gifts for others) from various artists over the years, as have a bunch of my friends. Several of my friends are also artists themselves and regularly take commissions through those sites as well. And there are also sites like Patreon, Kickstarter, Indiegogo and GoFundMe which are all commonly used to support artists' and their projects as well. All of which existed well before NFTs, and all of which will likely continue to exist well after the NFT bubble inevitably bursts.
IMO the only new thing that NFTs have brought to the digital art marketplace is the ability to sell low-quality garbage that wouldn't have sold in any other form because nobody in their right mind would buy it for aesthetic appreciation alone. And the only reason it all sells as NFTs is because of its "investment" potential, with people either hoping to flip it later for a profit, scammers pump & dumping it, or those using it for money laundering purposes.
And TBH, blatantly misinformed statements like you expressed above, and the hyperbole you have expressed elsewhere in this topic about NFTs and their supposed benefits, is precisely why I am so wary of NFTs (and cryptocurrency in general) and the people who promote them. It all feels like self-serving hype generation from people that have either drank the Kool-Aid themselves, or those who are simply trying to scam people.
I am aware that it was possible to purchase art pre nft. This is not new information for anyone. Perhaps it is you who are uninformed?
You can buy art on etsy sure. But what you can't do is sell that art to another person and have the artist get a 10%-25% commission of that sale. Sure it is theoretically possible to do so, but would be an extremely unlikely occurrence pre nft.
You don't seem to understand the difference of having a digital marketplace to buy and sell art.
That's a fair distinction, but IMO the only artists looking to get paid for every single transaction after their initial sale are those who treat their own artwork as an investment, first and foremost, beyond all other consideration. And IMO that ideological shift taints the process, which is why so much absolute garbage is being released as NFTs, and why there is so much hyperbole and hype surrounding it all. That's one of the reasons I questioned you on your claim that Yacht Club was the "worst" example, to which you dodged. IMO it's not the worst example at all, it is the very heart of what NFTs represent, and the type of art it ends up promoting most. NFTs make it so that artistic talent, effort, and aesthetic appeal aren't the primary consideration for judging the value of artwork anymore, it's purely about who can hype their product the most, and whose work is the best investment.
Stocks are acquired under the expectation of profit. They're tools to facilitate speculation. Stocks can also serve as a way to determine ownership and control over a company. They're similar to NFTs in more than one aspect. For example: their value can reduce or increase very rapidly. But what are the differences?
NFTs are not under the scrutiny of regulatory agencies, both private and public. They don't grant any control over the assets it links, and owning an NFT does not give you any say over the management of its "properties" (for lack of a better word). Additionally, because NFTs do not entail ownership of any kind, they lack robust standards, either social or political, which might guarantee their stability and legal standing. And you're not entitled to a share of the profits.
It is worth stressing that trading, absurd and abstract as it is, is, ultimately, speculation over fluctuation in value of tangible assets. The trader may never look at the commodities they acquire, but that doesn't mean they're immaterial. The numbers in the spreadsheet have value not just as a consequence of the abstract psychology of the markets, but also because they reference concrete states of affairs. Of course, there's a great degree of abstraction in all aspects of our lives. But we are entitled to distinguish between those which are inescapable, beneficial, or more or less acceptable.
Given the choice, I'd be more inclined to greatly restrict and regulate the stock market than being seduced by the idyllic promises of NFTs and cryptocurrencies.
If there was a children's cartoon where someone created a form of art that other rich people threw money into at one end and out the other end released black exhaust that killed the environment it would be a stereotypical comically evil throwaway plot. Yet here we are.
And the punchline is that isn't the case at all but it's just been vilified by the mass media through various forms of propaganda targeted at people like yourself to divert attention from much more important and fruitful efforts.
Is that too complex for a children's cartoon? Maybe a netflix movie?
I've gotten really tired of this common line of argument from promoters of cryptocurrency.
for the record: I'm a software engineer. I have more than 10 years of experience working on databases and distributed systems. I've been interested in cryptography (the original "crypto") for as long as I can remember. when I was assigned a research paper in 5th grade about "anything related to WW2", I chose the Enigma machine as the thing I wanted to write about. I first heard of Bitcoin on the Security Now podcast with Steve Gibson, sometime between 2010-2012 (based on the apartment I remember living in when I heard it). I was already familiar with the problem of "digital gold" / 2-party transactions over the internet. and I was aware of proof-of-work systems in other contexts, such as Hashcash. I thought the "public ledger, but full of anonymous identifiers" was an interesting and novel approach to the double-spending problem.
originally, I thought Bitcoin had a lot of promise for allowing unregulated transactions through the internet - for example, for buying drugs, or foreign workers sending remittances back home without Western Union et al extracting a cut.
if that was all Bitcoin was, all it was used for, I'd mostly have no problem with it. (with the caveat that I believe all drugs should be legalized and international borders as we know them today should not exist - so even in that limited view of Bitcoin, I view it as a solution to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place)
so I understand Bitcoin and cryptocurrency just fine. my opinions about it have not been shaped by mass media propaganda.
and I still I think 99.999999% of the current uses of "blockchain" are dumb. (also, actively harmful, given its environmental impact, but even if you waved a magic wand and made all the environmental problems go away, NFTs and ICOs and DAOs and the rest of "web3" would still be dumb and pointless and overwhelmingly scams)
this "the only way you could not like cryptocurrency is if you don't understand it, or you've been fed lies and propaganda about it" mentality is really cult-like. Scientologists will tell you the same thing about Scientology.
Lots of comments here already, but I'll leave this good comment from r/OutOfTheLoop here :)
There was also a good thread on Twitter from the Blender Guru guy with lots of replies.
So much misinformation here, I don't know where to begin. I'll just point out one simple factual non disupatable thing to demonstrate this person actually has no clue what they are taking about.
No. I've never paid more then $1, I think it's more like on the order of 15 cents to make a few hundred nfts. Sure it is much more if you use bitcoin, but that's in no way a requirement for nfts.
While your personal experience may be different, the statistics show that that is largely not the case for most artists.
First of all that is from April of last year.
Secondly of course it is true that most sales are less then 200 bucks, that's a lot of money!
Thanks for sharing, useful comment to have saved away.
I'm going to throw in an adjacent sentiment. Crypto currencies, NFTs, blockchains, are all for the most part (almost all of them, very few potential outliers) are dumb. Proof of Work is a waste of energy for what it provides. NFTs are certainly "a concept", and the implementation of them is very dumb. It's apparent and obvious that it's all money making schemes and people trying to get rich, maybe mixed with people who actually do not understand that it's a scam -- the rubes buying in to it.
But more than I don't like that entire space, I'm also so tired of hearing people ranting about it. Bitcoin has been around for a decade, I've been hearing about it for a decade, people (for the most part) have been calling it stupid for a decade, it's been stupid for a decade. I'm tired of waking up and seeing some new article about how bitcoin is stupid, everyone who was inclined to think it was stupid probably already knows it's stupid. It's the same arguments each time, and they're mostly correct, some complexities and nuances that they don't capture, but for the most part it doesn't matter -- the reason these articles keep coming out is just people being angry about these things existing and being dumb. And I'm angry about seeing the constant stream of retreaded arguments that only appeal to the people who already agree with it. Bitcoin (the 99% of it that people engage with) is dumb. People (for the most part) aren't engaging with bitcoin because they don't think it's dumb, they're doing it because they think they can make money off of it, and if they can make serious money off of it then why would they care how dumb it is.
We're going to keep having crypto and NFTs and blockchains floating around for as long as people can attempt to make money off of it, and no longer. It doesn't matter whether it's dumb, or if people think its dumb, all of that will disappear when it stops being a way of catching a buck.
That is a fair asessment. However, the title of this post literally asks for negative criticism.
Why do you continue to engage with articles and discussions about blockchain if they upset you so much?
I get that you hate bitcoin but I am surprised you aren't more supportive of cleaner crypto currencies like tezos.
I think maybe you've bought into the spin that they are all the same. There is a lot of money right now being invested in making people think that proof-of-steak currencies are no different so that bitcoin and eth can retain their stranglehold.
To me it seems to take a good thing (art) and add a bad thing on top (greed). So your question is like asking why adding dog shit on top of a vanilla ice-cream is a bad thing.
That said I also think traditional speculation in art is crap, NFTs are just worse because of the scams and energy issues, but we should also stop the legal tax evasion system linked to art.
The main reason I would disagree that it being a good thing for art is: people spend thousands of dollars on an NFT of a piece of art to say that they digitally own the artwork, but are not willing to spend 50 dollars on a custom art piece that they can physically own.
People aren't buying art NFTs because they like the art, they are buying it to feel superior. It's basically the same scandal that the rich "buying art" scene is. They trade it around between their alt wallets or friends for thousands (or millions, in the case of the rich's art) to artificially manipulate the price, make it appear to be worth the purchase, and then sell it for more. But this tends to be at the expense of the artist, who gets pennies on the dollar, compared to the cryptobros.
How many people do you think spend thousands of dollars on an NFT versus people who spend 50 dollars on physical art?
I ask because in reality way thousands of times more people are buying real art for 50 bucks but the way you say it makes it seem the opposite.
The same you describe doesn't work as well in reality. First of all with crypto you can view a token's full history, every wallet it's been in and how much it was paid for. Secondly artists get a cut every time it is resold, usually 10% minimum up to 25%.
I don't know. Probably more who buy physical art, since it has a much longer history at the current state. I'm merely referencing the anecdotal situations that artists present where many people get upset having to pay so much money for art. I cannot remember if it was on Twitter or where exactly, but an artist made a point that they'd be more than willing to send the physical art for the price that people are allegedly buying art NFTs for.
I'm comparing the most talked about utilization of NFTs for art to the wealthy buying and selling art between themselves in their self-contained bubble. All I ever heard about are the monkey images, or before that was some face sprites that were all slightly different than each other, which were selling for thousands of dollars, allegedly legitimately.
You can, but there's no concrete way to indicate who the person is. There's talk about the sellers trading the NFTs between wallets to artifically increase the price of the images.
So is this on top of the original sale of artist to reseller, or is it provided to the reseller with a royalties stipulation? Obviously, I'd imagine it's going to be different with every case or service provider. But if it's solely royalties based on sales, why should the reseller get the majority of the sales cost?
And then overall, this isn't taking into account the impact that NFTs, along with other crypto, have on the environment in its current state. I don't know about most services, but just bitcoins energy usage in 2021 was ridiculous, and it's really put a taint in my mouth with any form of blockchain anything.
It seems like most things that make a lot of money in this world are driven by greed, that's kind of the point though. Corporations like Amazon and Walmart aren't so good and are built on top of greed.
The vast majority of NFTs (99.99%) are by poor artists who are trying to make a few bucks on the side to get noticed. Unfortunately the .01% of NFTs that get the bulk of the attention are often the very worst of the bunch.
I think there is some confusion also with different types of crypto and their energy usage and illegal tax evasion. Yes, this exists but it also does without crypto, many times over.
Emulating things that "aren't so good" is pretty much not so good. If you see people being greedy, that's not a license to be greedy yourself. Do good, don't do bad.
I think poor artists struggle because they don't have an audience, and not because the payment system they use. Not too sure what the solution is, but for example in France there is a tax on big TV channels to finance independent movie production. Not sure GAFA are financing anything, in fact they don't even pay their taxes like you and me.
I just realized that defenses of NFTs often amount to whataboutisms.
Replace "fiat money" with any feature of economy or trade with a salient abstraction built-in, and you'll have successfully anticipated a lot of those arguments. The hidden premises seem to be "NFTs may be unreasonable, but X is also unreasonable and it is widely accepted. Therefore, NFTs should be widely accepted as well".
no, not really. maybe you haven't read anything i've said in this thread.
i don't agree. you are starting from an incorrect assumption.
your obsession with money has nothing to do with it. i'm taking about art here.
I'm sorry if I gave the impression that my comment was personally directed at you. I have been following the discussion surrounding NFTs for some time, and I'm using this post as an opportunity to elaborate some of my thoughts. It is quite possible to disagree without escalating into conflict, and I clearly failed to make that clear. I apologize, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to further my understanding of such an interest subject.
no worries, I feel I am getting a bit rude because I have been replying to comments about nfts similar to yours and basically have given up.
from what i gather, most people in this thread think of nfts as gifs or images that people buy with bitcoin. nfts can be that but they can be many other things too.
when i think of nfts, i am currently thinking of limited edition generative art seeds to a small JavaScript program that creates art that is free to view for anyone but fans/collectors/investors can purchase if they want. also with tezos which is orders of magnitude cleaner then bitcoin, it's not even an issue.
for example (i am not shilling here because it's already sold out and that's not really the point) here's a link to the gallery of 128 of a recent piece i released.
https://www.fxhash.xyz/generative/4376/collection
the key distinction that interests me is that of those 128 pieces, no one knew what they would look like before they bought them. i didn't even know. because it is randomly generated. once it has been purchased it becomes a real boy in a sense. anyway, i hope that helps explain where i am coming from.
I really don't understand why you think that this is the impression people have. This thread is discussing NFTs as digital receipts in a global ledger, and that's been explicitly said by multiple people.
Some people don't like NFTs because of the culture of theft, the blatant disregard for current environmental damage (yes, Tezos and some blockchains are better around this, but NFTs as a concept are deeply tied to Ethereum 1.0 due to the largest transactions so far happening there), and NFToids on Twitter being absolute jackasses.
Mostly, though, the reason people don't like NFTs is because their only advantage over non-blockchain-based collectibles is that they can be traded after the fact without regulation. That is objectively their only advantage, and it's essentially replicating the worst parts of the art market: wash trading, money laundering, and at best gambling on the value of receipts for, frankly, mostly butt-ugly artworks.
You yourself give an amazing example of this:
What is the point of buying a receipt for a piece of artwork that you have never seen? Either you feel that the artist is so good you know you'll be proud to be a collector of that work, or you are gambling on its future price. NFTs enable the latter; non-blockchain cryptographic collectables would enable the former just as well.
So, fundamentally, the problem with NFTs is that they turn something which is not scarce - digital art, perhaps the most freely shareable thing on Earth - into something scarce. NFTs are not about making art accessible, they are always-online DRM that doesn't even successfully protect artists, and it sucks.
Have you never opened a pack of baseball cards? Have you never pre-oredered a videogame?
Can you explain how nfts are scarce when you can download them for free? sure "ownership" of them is scarce but they are free to anyone that wants one. what if i told you that i could sell you the mona lisa for only a thousand dollars but it needs to stay exactly where it is in the museum. this is how nfts are. it's like saying paintings in a museum are scarce because they are too expensive to buy.
So, I do see where you're coming from with this, but let me ask a question as well. If we want to define NFT art as not being scarce, where does the value come from? This is my main point:
I'm happy to go with NFTs not being scarce, and thus not valuable. Personally, I don't understand why people value them, so we can definitely agree that the scarcity isn't real.
However, you are contradicting yourself here. Your response to "why would you pre-order an NFT" is "why would you pre-order a video game?", but people pre-order video games in order to get access to them, and to extra content. If, as you say, NFTs aren't intended to control access to art, then the two are not the same at all and my original point:
stands.
I mean, you understand that the criticisms made on this post are towards NFTs, not you, right? ;)
true that, i am not taking it personal but just gets tiring when I get slammed with so many half truths. it starts to spin out of control.
It seems likely to me that you might feel personally attacked because you have a personal financial interest in NFTs as a concept and the NFT visual art market specifically.
What is, in your opinion, an excellent article, video, essay, etc, which makes a strong and sound argument in favor of NFTs?
that isn't the kind of thing because i don't often read articles or watch videos about that sort of thing. I've also been incredibly busy for months and have trouble keeping up on even my most favorite things. im sure something like that exists though.
That's cool. Let me know if you find anything.
Hi @killedbyapixel, thanks for this interesting post.
I think you've done a thorough job of replying to everyones comments. One of the reasons I think you might feel the entire world of Tildes is against you, is because your title is asking for a certain type of discussion.
Titles are kind of self selecting. Titles will attract a certain type of comment. I don't really hate NFTs. I don't know anyone who does. I dislike million dollar NFTs, but I dislike most million dollar things, and so that isn't the same thing as hating NFTs themselves. So I didn't comment.
I think your title deliberately attracted people who already have a negative opinion on NFTs, perhaps because you hoped to change their opinion.
A more inclusive title would have likely encouraged me, and perhaps others like me, to share. All the best.
i agree, but only after the fact, i was not prepared for this amount of one sided hate!
i think there really is a lot of hate there though. if i titled it like "what is good about nfts?" or even "nfts are not the evil monster you think they are". people will gloss over what i wrote, and insert their own opinions. though the title certainly didn't help but i am generally more interested in why people dislike and i learned a lot from the discussion about common misconceptions. nearly everyone that commented was partially to completely uninformed.
i really though there would be a higher level of discussion on tildes but it quickly devolved into a dumpster fire of nft hate. this is why i gave up talking to republicans about politics. they say one crazy thing then you are like well tezos are not an environmental problem like bitcoin. then suddenly another problem pops up, oh, maybe the image isn't there it just points to it. so i ask, would it matter if the image was there? turns out it doesn't, they are just throwing out random strawman arguments. it is exhausting.
The top-voted comment in this thread currently lists off seven reasons people don't like NFTs. Nobody is moving the goalposts or being "crazy", it's just that there are a lot of problems with cryptocurrency-based artificial scarcity, and not all criticisms apply to everything that might be labelled NFTs.
Yes, it's frustrating when other people don't like a thing you like, but when your response is to call them crazy and complain that they're putting too much hate in a thread you titled "why do you hate this thing," that's just not productive.
How does this remember the human in any way? You're essentially arguing that it's okay to pile-on the OP because the OP asked for it! At some point, remembering the human is about realizing that humans are not to be treated like punching bags.
Can we define "pile on" for the purposes of this conversation, please? This doesn't seem even close to the level of a lot of Tildes "pile-ons" that go completely unremarked, and in this case the OP literally did ask why people don't like this thing; it's hard for me to see how people answering that question is a pile-on.
Furthermore, the OP has called people in the thread "crazy", blamed any and all criticism on people being brainwashed by mass media propaganda, and has said that everyone (including at least two actually very qualified distributed systems engineers) are "partially or completely misinformed" without actually offering the information we supposedly don't have or misunderstand. Rebutting that is not piling on!
Fine. We can discuss whether or not it's true, but the point I was making is actually (as I said):
You accused commentors of:
I pointed to that top comment because it coherently lists the same arguments most other comments are talking about. Those arguments were laid out succinctly and clearly, and are not in any way straw man arguments as far as I can see.
I think you are being unreasonable by labeling this discussion as "a dumpster fire", "crazy", and akin to "talking to republicans about politics." You cannot demand a level of discourse you yourself are unwilling to uphold in a thread you created explicitly asking about why people don't like something!
Seems to me you've been offered plenty of reasonable and substantiated arguments and you're trying to deflect, comparing people here to republicans is frankly ridiculous. Could it be possible for someone that being so personally invested into NFTs is biasing their judgment just a bit ?
Its stated intent is to introduce artificial scarcity to digital objects. Most people naturally consider scarcity to be bad. If NFTs are successful it could mean companies are incentivised to bake this artificial scarcity into online services, forcing it on everybody.
Its secondary effect is an environment where scams and theft are extremely common and there is no legal recourse for victims. Even now it's common, when most NFT owners are quite tech savvy. Imagine if it was mainstream, the general public all individually responsible for their own IT security or they could be cleaned out by hackers. Bloodbath.
It's being enthusiastically hyped up, publicised and even adopted by companies despite adding absolutely no value to the consumer.
Just to address your point about Tezos being more environmentally friendly than other crypto, that will only be true as long as Tezos is relatively unpopular. The nature of crypto is such that the more people using a cryptocurrency, the more processing power needed to verify transactions, so as soon as Tezos becomes more popular, it will begin using much more energy. This is an unavoidable characteristic of the blockchain; you cannot fix it, only mitigate it using things like proof-of-stake, which even then only kicks the energy consumption problem down the road.
More transactions on Tezos would cause the transaction fees to go up, but it wouldn't cause it to use energy at all comparable to proof of work mining. The number of validators isn't required to scale up with the amount of transactions, and validators can be normal or even low-power servers (raspberry pis even) rather than racks of mining hardware that take in as much electricity as they can.
The energy usage of proof of stake isn't just marginally better than proof of work. It entirely lacks the part where people are incentivized to burn as much electricity as they can with the protocol revenue. That part specifically is what makes PoW cryptocurrencies use infamous amounts of power.
but isn't that...the opposite of what you want?
normally, economy of scale means that the per-unit price of something goes down as the volume goes up.
if I'm starting a business and deciding on a payment processor, I can go to Visa, Square, Stripe, etc, and ask them what fees they charge. for example.
if I instead wanted to use Tezos transactions, I have to account for those variable transaction fees in my business model.
if my business gets more popular, then my overhead costs might increase, totally out of my control? again, normally economy of scale means that a business doing increased volume is an opportunity to decrease the per-unit cost.
or, if one of my competitors also uses Tezos, and they get more popular, that can also increase my costs?
or, someone decides to use Tezos as the hot new way of selling ownership of JSON documents containing URLs of JPEGs, and the transaction volume on Tezos increases drastically, in a way totally unconnected to either my business or any of its competitors...that could also increase my costs?
or, maybe I'm happy with Tezos running my business, and a friend asks me what I think of it, because they're thinking of using it for their business. isn't there a perverse incentive for me to say "eh, it's alright, but not great, you should probably use something else" because recommending more people use it will, yet again, increase my business costs?
Your understanding is mostly right.
Imagine if you used PayPal back when they were really small, your business exploded, and your customers overwhelmed PayPal. In the long term, PayPal will add more capacity and get better at adding capacity, and will be able to handle all the customers and at lower cost per user. But in the short term, PayPal's site will fail to handle many transactions and may go offline until they figure out how to start scaling up. If it's feasible business-wise, PayPal might decide to increase their fees or block new user registration to push some users away from them for now in order to get back within their capacity.
Cryptocurrencies have exploded in popularity in the last couple years and are mostly still at the "figuring out how to start scaling up" step. It's not as easy for them to scale up as it is for centralized services. If you were scaling up a service like PayPal, you could add a second server to handle a portion of the transactions, and each server could trust that the other server is handling everything correctly without each one needing to double-check all of the other server's work. Cryptocurrencies are decentralized, so nodes can't trust each other and take each others' word about transactions. Cryptocurrencies originally dealt with this by having every transaction broadcast to every node so they can all verify them, but this means the global transaction rate has to be capped at the capacity of the weakest node. There's a whole active ecosystem of systems in development or production right now for solving this scaling issue, and there's work on figuring how to transfer those improvements into existing popular systems like Ethereum. The general concepts for improvements are known and being fleshed out. It's a situation that should be much better within the next few years.
No one should tie their business ideas to any single cryptocurrency system. Even if a business has chosen or is somehow in a spot where it must use cryptocurrency to function, they can choose to accept payments in multiple cryptocurrency systems (just like how many sites today offer to let you pay through any of PayPal, Amazon, Google Pay, Visa, etc).
Ah, so you are worried about something which might happen down the road. You are concerned about the scalability of the tezos blockchain? That makes sense.
It is not true that Tezos will only be more environmentally friendly if it remains unpopular. Proof-of-steak is orders of magnitude more energy efficient,
Also it is likely that there will be continued advancements in blockchain technology and physical processor energy usage.
Let's imagine a world where crypto is not bad for the environment. Perhaps even better then traditional money. (Do we really need all these pennies?) If that was the case, would that change your mind about crypto and nfts?
While proof-of-stake is more energy efficient, it still wastes tons of energy, and I don't see popular currencies like Ethereum switching any time soon. They've been saying they will for years, and it's just not going to happen. I am not just concerned about the scalability of the Tezos chain, but rather all chains. It's the technology that's the problem, not just the implementation.
No. The crypto environment is still overfull with scams and people who are just in it for the money (the tech leads itself to that sort of behavior). And even if it wasn't laden with scams, I still have philosophical objections to digital scarcity that I outlined in an earlier comment here.
I've never found an explanation good enough to convince me that proof-of-stake works.
(the randomized assignment of new funds, in particular, doesn't make a lot of sense to me)
Despite nobody else saying this, I'm thinking maybe people have a disgust reaction to it as a sign of inequality. Imagine the cartoon image of a rich person burning hundred dollar bills for fun. That disgusts most people. The high prices of some NFT's seems like a similar waste of money, because it seems like they're paying enormous sums for nothing, just because they can.
There is a milder form of this when people pay huge sums for art - or at least there used to be. Unsophisticated people seeing weird paintings in a museum will make fun of them. "My kid could do a better job than that." But you could have a different take on it: sometimes, an artist gets a big payday, so maybe be happy for them? (After the first sale, artists don't seem to benefit. But imagined resale value makes the first sale more likely to happen.)
Environmental issues aside, the money spent on NFT's is perhaps not really wasted, since the artist gets it. Even burning cash wouldn't actually waste anything real; effectively someone who does that is giving up their claim on the resources of society.
But it's a form of contempt for people that they could have helped with that money, if they wanted to. People spending money like this don't have the same relationship to money that a regular person would.
There are many reasons I dislike NFTs but honestly the biggest one is that the community is 90% grifters/hustle culture/hype bros who want to make a quick buck. That’s the same reason I dislike crypto in general and there at least the blockchain has some useful properties for currencies. NFTs are just hucksters selling snake oil. The worst are the people who know it’s shit but are capitalizing on people who are even thicker than the concept.
The big thing for me is NFTs aren't anything special these days. They're like digital Beanie Babies, but their value doesn't seem to be diminished by Anheuser-Busch or Coca-Cola selling them. I've got a tendency to buy a lot of similar physical goods in the name of "collecting," but I can at least justify a unique difference between any two objects. NFTs are as untouchable as they are non-fungible: They provide no value aside from a holding of value, and even that value solely exists because people believe it so, not because of any benefit it may bring. A $500,000 bottle of Coke could derive it's value from being the only existing bottle. A $500,000 Coke NFT can be copied, and the only thing the money did is proved you bought the NFT. The data the image contains is still free because it can be transferred with minimal effort or cost.
You could say this argument applies to any fiat currency, and even gold. And you'd be right, but we also have checks with our currencies, in general, to regulate local and international markets to hopefully avoid major booms and busts. There are agreed upon terms for what is allowable with this money. NFTs, as an extension of cryptocurrencies, are intended to circumvent these systems, initially justified as enabling private transactions across international borders, but it's now slowly evolving into a sort of unregulated black market. I wouldn't care, except for the effects this is having on tangible goods I would like to purchase, such as graphics cards, RAM, and hard drives, and the economic effects of crypto in general. NFTs, and the current rush around them, is also extending the boom cycle of crypto in general, exacerbating the issues of access to GPUs and potentially SSDs when show of storage becomes the predominant method of crypto mining.
Frankly, if this didn't lead to a physical market where a three year old graphics card sells for twice its MSRP, I wouldn't give two shits.