To me that whole royalties spiel was always just marketing to bait non-technical people into adopting the NFT system.
I’ve never seen anyone build and use an enforcable mechanism for a multi transaction chain to pay out to one original address repeatedly. I think at the very least you would always have to hold the NFT in a multi sig wallet between the artist and the current owner, for the artist to have a mechanism to keep enforcing their royalty claims. That would also require involvement of the artist in every further transaction.
Maybe I’m missing something like a smart contract that can fabricate new multi sig transactions on demand with pre-approval of the artist somehow… If anyone knows of something like that I’d be interested in the technical details.
It could theoretically be done by implementing a covenant system in contracts, but it never got built despite all the talk about it (probably because of the extra complexity it requires in validating new transactions). Otherwise, like you said, multisig is needed so one side can simply demand the new transaction to be signed use the same contract before agreeing on transferring. Which requires this second signer to anyways be available online…
Who could have seen this coming? Who could have foreseen that all of Web3 was a ponzi scheme that would say anything to get people to pretend hashes on a blockchain is worth 100s of 1000s of dollars. Who? WHO?
That was just many parts of the grift. Also when that feature was very rarely used, it was ironically a regular web 2.0 feature that was pushed between participating centralized MFT marketplaces. You know, because it was never actually decentralized.
How is this Web3 scam still a thing? I thought I would finally stop hearing it after the crash but it just keeps coming back. The only people who will get rich from this are the scammers themselves.
Mastodon and fediverse is more web3 than web2 (lest I’ve misunderstood). The problem has been shitty implementation.
I.e In reality, nothing is more valuable than the ground work it stands on. So just because it’s an NFT doesn’t mean it should’ve been worth anything. It has to provide meaning and value to the consumer. Like if all of steam would put their marketplace on a blockchain, those items would still be just as valuable as before. The value comes from the item implementation, not the “storage” technology
It’s a mindset. Once you know that the solution is Blockchain, all you need to do is to find a question that fits this answer to get filthily rich.
Casinos are also a known scam, but that hasn’t stopped them.
It sure sounds like that wasn’t a feature of NFTs, but a feature of OpenSea
“Web3” was supposed to enrich a bunch of assholes. It was never meant to do anything else.
Hard disagree, “web3” (defi) is meant to provide a decentralized alternative to our modern economic infrastructure, that doesn’t have huge institutional points of failure like central banks or investment banks. The only reason people piled into these speculative projects, centralized exchanges etc. is because probably > 60% of the population is into the idea of getting-rich-quick while < 1% of the population is into trying to build a better future with tech, or even just getting their head around how the technology work in the first place & what kind of potential it actually has.
I’ve been watching blockchain since Bitcoin was under a dollar and it really blows my mind how much people love to spout off about it without understanding anything about the space. You’ve got teams of hundreds, thousands of people working for years to solve all the problems in the space like PoS or scalability or contract security, but the general public is all just talking trash about the entire space because of NFTs.
Even this article, “Web3 was supposed to make sure the original artist always got paid”? Who said that? “A key feature of NFTs has completely broken?” No one who knew anything about NFTs ever said there was some universal “guarantee an artist would get paid”, particularly not if a contract to purchase an NFT didn’t guarantee that directly. If a given contract guaranteed that (or at least, the party creating the NFT on-chain), then it still does. If it didn’t, then it didn’t. Anyone actually learned Solidity and read a smart contract for themselves? Cause I’ll tell you, any smart contract where some institution has “god controls” over the state of the contract, that’s against the entire point of “web3”/“defi”.
Very well put. I’m so sick of people dog-piling on NFT/Blockchain because their only exposure to it is shitty Bored Ape images and manipulated crypto currencies. There’s so much potential there but lazy media reporting and people’s unwillingness to actually learn something about it has done some serious damage to web3 viability.
I think the Trump NFTs were my first time hearing of perpetual trade royalties. Most of the NFTs I own are tied to games though… maybe it’s more common in the art space and chains I don’t frequent.
I was into BTC before anyone really had a good place even check the value and would waste them on side projects and also gamble them away randomly like they were Chuck E Cheese tickets. It does not keep me up at night, in fact everyone constantly checking the price of crypto is almost the antithesis to Crypto in my opinion. The investing mindset is kind of nauseating, you can’t talk about any project without price being brought up.
Bunch of words about people working hard on a ponzi scheme doesn’t make it not functionally a ponzi scheme.
Fundamental difference between a currency accruing value due to superior characteristics over its competitors, and a Ponzi scheme where a truly worthless good that only has transitory value because it’s “the next big thing” is passed along from original entrants to new entrants. USD has no “inherent” value (not even the “full faith and credit of the government”) either, and critical issues where the broader institution responsible for its issuance is a corrupt war-mongering police state. If we’re being honest here.
USD had value in that it is how i pay my taxes. I can either use USD to pay taxes or go to jail. That’s about as concrete as value can get.
Yes, the value comes from ADOPTION.
So, you’re claiming that you need a constant new stream of people buying into it, to make it work? Man, that’s almost like the definition of a ponzi scheme. Weird.
Another “I know you are but what am I” class comment. I’m talking about actual adoption, usage, cyclical exchange, not buy low sell high, that should be obvious from what I wrote.
If a currency were a superior currency it would not necessarily increase in value, it would increase in acceptance and (generally) velocity.
Stop using Economics terms. They’re definitely made up and not at all a description of how people actually act. Seriously though. It’s obvious that Bitcoin is just a Ponzi scheme. Otherwise, people would actually use it as currency instead of a speculative asset.
Notice how people who buy bitcoin get really happy when the price in USD goes up. That’s because they don’t value Bitcoin except as a way to get more USD. Do you get all excited when the dollar is worth more in foreign currency? Or if you’re European, the Euro? Not really because you are not holding onto USD or EUR as a speculative asset.
Nothing is priced in Bitcoin just like nothing is priced in baseball cards or beanie babies. No one uses it as a currency because transactions take forever and there’s nothing backing it. With USD or EUR you are guaranteed to be able to pay your taxes in it. Bitcoin is complicated Venmo and its backers want to hide that fact.
Its not even complicated Venmo because transactions are barely done in it. People just buy it hoping it will go up in value.
Well no, I’ve bought “a lot” with bitcoin. Through bitpay I could buy confuser parts, VPN. And I’ve bought a lot of games for btc too
Paid maybe 30-50 cents per transaction, which is nothing compared to traditional banking. If more had support for either btc or bitpay-like-services, it’d be easier to use.
The issue is not much effort is put into developing price stability in cryptocurrencies, this is because it is counter to the incentives of the creators and early HODLers. They do not want price stability, they want significant price decreases, this causes people to speculate on the “currency” not use it as a currency. Until a cryptocurrency implements some form of MV=PY it will not really be successful as a currency.
How does one “implement” the equation for calculating GDP? All the (descriptive) variables in the equation are already present. IDK how that got 4 upvotes.
Several major cryptos are already used as media of exchange. That’s the actual criteria for “success of a currency”, relative usage. They haven’t overtaken USD, but let’s not pretend it’s just a speculative vessel, Ethereum sees over a million transactions per day.
You cannot, but you can increase money supply money supply more stably when following average GDP growth, and increase money supply more when velocity decreased- and atrophy the supply when it increases. And a currency is much more than just what people can spend at a store. It is what people keep their savings in, what companies pay their employees in, what banks lend.
This cannot be done with an unstable currency- you cannot have a debt that will either go up or down 20% in value in the same year. I do not think fiats are inherently more stable, but some fiats have proven to be somewhat more stable because of responsible central banking- its not a good idea to count on central banks being responsible for ever. But essentially all widely spread cryptos continue to have a significant amount held by speculators and therefore they cannot be stable currencies.
The simple answer is that fiats are only more stable because their relative worth is more settled. For the same reason small stocks are unstable while big blue chip stocks are (relatively) not. If you look at logarithmic charts of any big crypto over time you can literally see the volatility tapering out as the market cap increases.
Yeah, I’ll just unlearn all the monetary theory books I read because, trust me bro money is worthless. I got this new money, it’s worth more money. I see now.
Didnt you know that a 27 year old technobro is smarter than generations of monetary systems built upon since the dawn of man? Lol
The society built on those monetary systems is literally destroying the planet. The history of those monetary systems is of the ruling class debasing currency and seizing as much value under the eyes of the law as possible for their private benefit going back thousands of years. Our entire legal system grew out of the Roman Empire, European feudalism, British Empire and then the slave-built corporatist state of the U.S.
Is your argument that “tradition must be right”? Slavery is traditional, war is traditional, pollution is traditional, animal agriculture is traditional, oppression is traditional, class hierarchy is traditional.
Thinking cryptocurrency is just a new dollar built on a ponzi scheme has nothing to do with supporting modern capitalism. New money has all the same issues as old money. Which it will be exchange for and values with. This entire circle jerk is ridiculous.
You know who owns a ton of the Bitcoin? Hedge funds and investment banks. You’re supporting a system built on burning a whole bunch of fossil fuels to create a few lines of code that can be horded by the same people who horde all the wealth. You aren’t changing shit.
Want to change something? Got get a gun and become a domestic terrorist or something. You aren’t changing the world by buying crypto.
They’re all anti-capitalist until they want to bitch about cryptocurrency.
Hey, the guys who never took an econ class know more than you. Trust me bro. It’s amazing. It will change the world.
Public has started to realize what a joke the entire concept is. The true believers are all so mad now. Hopefully new investors dry up soon and the entire clown show can collapse with no new money flowing in (you know how a ponzi scheme goes bust).
Am I supposed to treat this like a good faith comment? Let’s assume you’re wrong, how would I even reply? It’s basically “no u”.
If you really know so much about monetary theory I’d expect you to lead with what you actually know, not just vaguely allude to how much you know. Right?
I’d expect that I wouldn’t want to waste time trying to convince a brainwashed crypto bro or that I give a single fuck past making fun of you.
Here’s some super basics of almost all monetary economic theory. Currency is a medium of exchange. It’s velocity (or rare it moves through the economy) is a vital measure of the health of the economy and effectiveness of the currency. How easy is it to go buy something with Bitcoin, and how fast is it moving through hands in an economy? Oh, it’s a joke as a currency you say? Description of how it is being used sounds exactly like a ponzi scheme for some reason.
See to everyone else, it’s very, very obvious why it’s a ponzi scheme. It will collapse someday. As it’s only real use is as a very ineffective currency. Somehow people like you have made that worth tens of thousands of dollars to each other.
See, this is the classic bad faith anti-blockchain argument. Article we’re talking about is about NFTs, which are based on Ethereum, an extremely sophisticated blockchain with proof-of-stake, smart contract capability, and a huge infrastructure of people who’ve built economic machinery on top of it and are using it actively. But you want to prove your point, so you cherry-pick Bitcoin, the very first “proof of concept” blockchain which has essentially had active development halt because the creator wanted anonymity, vanished into thin air, and the developers working on it largely refuse to hard-fork it, so which has no real smart contract capability, still uses wasteful proof-of-work, etc.
It’s not “obvious” that it’s a ponzi scheme, it’s the point you want to make so you’re just bending the facts and cherry-picking things to try to prove it. I’m not impressed. And tossing “monetary velocity” out there as a term isn’t making me think you’re some brilliant economist - if anything, monetary velocity is an overstressed concept in modern econ because the government sits around trying to manipulate it via interest rates instead of letting people’s actual spending priorities dictate how the economy works, leading to a consumerist frenzy and catastrophic boom/bust cycle.
Yeah NFTs themselves don’t guarantee royalties, but most publicly advertised NFTs are based on unique or limited run graphics that include such contract terms. When artists started getting sketched out by the idea, one of the biggest arguments in favor of them was that artists could receive royalties on every sale, something that became a major selling point for marketplaces aimed at laymen who didn’t really know anything about crypto.
It’s not surprising, then, that this feature being taken away seems to negate one of biggest supposed benefits that NFTs provided. This was supposed to be the thing that balanced concerns about art theft and the value of quantity over quality that haunt NFTs to this day.
The general opinion of crypto isn’t going to improve until people feel it’s stable and safe enough to actually trust their money with, and moves like this certainly aren’t helping that image of volatility.
I don’t know much about NFTs, but can’t the “give original artist a cut of royalties” clause be coded into the smart contracts? Why does it depend on a particular platform?
It doesn’t depend on the platform, but the venn diagram of artists trying to get paid and people who know how to write a smart contract doesn’t overlap much. Marketplaces were built to ease the former into the space by taking care of all that for them. The artists, for their part, just had to trust that the contracts actually did what they said they did and watch for the money to hit their accounts as proof.
People who were depending on the platform to sort that out are now stuck with either finding another platform or figuring out how to write the contracts themselves on top of their other business duties. Even if they do so, they’re likely going to lose a good portion of their following and brand precense in the move.
Ik the technology is useful, but selling shit I can screen shot is fucking pointless. If you want to buy shit from the artist, just buy their shit.
What you’re buying when you purchase an NFT is a link to a website. That link shows the image. If the link ever breaks because the website goes down or out of business, it’s pretty worthless. I would have thought the implementation would be based on something more enduring like the actual content and not a link.
Storing a full JPEG on the blockchain would be way too expensive. It’s not a bulk data storage system.
There are alternatives like storing a hash of some sort
A hash still isn’t the file itself. I think that the ones that use ipfs even have a hash in the URL.
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The whole “web3” bs has always just been a shabby scam, and people fell for it
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Even the name “web3” is stupid. Isn’t it supposed to be the next step after “web 2.0?” Shouldn’t it then be “web 3.0?” They couldn’t even include a space between web and 3!
There actually is a Web 3.0, and it predates the cryptocurrency-oriented conceptualisation of “Web3” by quite some time.
Web 3.0 is otherwise known as the Semantic Web, a set of standards developed by the W3C for formally representing (meta)data and relationships between entities on the internet, and for facilitating the machine-reading and exchange thereof.
Did they though? It might be my filter bubble, but whenever I saw web3 being pushed I saw a small refraction of responses of people who also thought it was a great idea (typical salesbros - so a good idea for others to do, just not for themselves). But the vast majority of people reject it for being a scam.
So how many people fell for it, really?
More than 0, which is all the comment said.
If we’re just going for semantics, don’t you mean more than 1 for them to qualify as “people”?
Damn it lol
Have a good weekend ;)
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Did the average person/average internet user fall for it? No.
Did the people who fell for it get sucked into what was basically a cult that sucked the money out of a decent amount of people? Yeah.
The numbers for some of these scam projects were honestly insane.
Ah, probably my filter bubble then.
I’d like to read more about this, do you know of any specific cases?
If you have time, I would suggest CoffeeZilla on YouTube. He basically just get into crypto scam, which isn’t hard to find these days. One specific case I would look at is the influencers taking on pretty much any scam projects to get money. The series is with Oompaville. A great watch.
Yeah, I have only a little sympathy for the people who got pulled into the get rich quick scheme, particularly younger people who hit some money only to get caught in what was basically a gambling addiction.
I have way more sympathy for their friends and family who either tried to financially support them when they hit rock bottom, or those who got scammed or stolen from just to pump more money into this bubble.
I don’t think it’s even possible to calculate how much real money was lost to this stuff.
The confidence of people commenting here that have little idea what an NFT even is kinda funny if not sad. You’re on the anti-NFT bandwagon just as much as tech bros are on the pro-NFT bandwagon.
The fact is blockchain is a technology that can hold value, why would people think it’s somehow immune to being used by bad actors? Does the blockchain enable more fraud than the dollar?
It’s broken now? I’d say that’s a bold assumption that it ever worked in the first place.
Edit: to be clear, I mean that it is and always has been an impossible problem. The only reason it ever worked is because some broker company wanted it as a feature, not because anything compelled them to give original artists a cut. And that’s before you consider the question, “but how do you know the NFT was made by the original artist?”
Obligatory rather funny If NFTs Were Honest | Honest Ads https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG_v4bb2e4k which sets this out, a year ago
I know i’m really late to the party, but this video gave me an idea how blockchains could actually be useful for art. Not to sign a digital image to your name, that’s bullshit. But to link an actual piece of art to you as a certificate of ownership. So in case it gets stolen, you can prove you’re the real owner. This requires first time entries to be verified by certified experts, but after that you’re good to go. You would need to solve a bunch of problems, like what happens when someone dies and the objects are inherited, or what if you buy it, but the owner doesn’t update the chain or makes a mistake, etc. You would probably need a group of mods/experts who can amend the entries. But then you could more easily contact the owner, manage reproduction rights and in general make art theft less attractive, because all art dealers can easily check the current state.
This was actually the original idea of non-fungible tokens, but because you need special legislation to tie an object to this digital receipt (there is nothing legally tying one thing to the other), they just skipped over it completely and said the NFT itself was the commodity, which is why they could only do it for digital art with the a web link. (we could, for example, see this more useful for a title to a car or house)
In fact, many NFTs don’t even contain any language about copyright or licensing, they don’t even attempt to pretend that the NFT holder owns the copyright. The owner of the NFT in these cases only owns the NFT, and not the copyright. Of course, you have to transfer the copyright separately from transferring the NFT, which makes this whole thing redundant for buying/selling on secondary markets, but they could have at least tried to pretend they could.
You don’t need blockchain, coins, or NFTs for any of this to be possible.
Yes, legally notarized documents like proof of purchase has been used for this in the past
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NFTs have a place but it isn’t central to the Internet. That was hype to separate idiots who didn’t know better from their money, aka grifting, and that kind of grifting has used literally everything to do that same thing in the past so NFTs are not a unique tool to that end.
NFTs have no place at all. There has yet to be any good suggestion on what they should be used for that isn’t served by something else just fine. Or if not “fine”, then at least solves no problem that would make it better. Not in-game items, not ticket sales, not silly ape pictures.
The games themselves. Proof of ownership of a digital copy. It creates a secondary market for digital games.
Why would a game company prefer to distribute their game that way instead of Steam.
Why would a game company prefer to distribute their game with Steam instead of as shareware? Also nothing about having an NFT-based ownership license to a copy of a game precludes it from being on Steam except Steam not wanting to have a secondary market. Outside of a bean counters ledger there is nothing incompatible with them.
I thought the whole point of NFTs and the blockchain is that it’s decentralized, and you can use “smart contracts” for things like this. How is one company able to decide to change it?
They can only change it for their instance, but they can’t impact all NFT marketplaces. This is only significant because this company is the largest broker so it will impact more people.
Anyone can set up their own blockchain and build it however they want. Hell, they could make it centralized even.
That’s not the question
The post you replied to was saying, “shouldn’t it be inherent to the entry on the Blockchain, regardless of market”
You’d think it should be, but their contracts never enforced it in code
Apparently, smart contracts are not contracts at all… they are friendly suggestions. Unsurprisingly a contract needs a mechanism to enforce it, which makes decentralized contracts redundant at best (as you still need institutions outside of the blockchain to monitor and enforce the contracts), and or worse, completely useless if there is no legal way to enforce them.
The idea behind smart contracts is that they contain code to verify that the contract is fulfilled (that’s the “smart” part of the name).
This of course also means that you can only use it for stuff that happens on the same blockchain, because the contract can’t verify anything outside of that.
Which is why this isn’t relevant for the real world, it’s just eating its own tail.
Yeah I was tempted to add a caveat, it does technically auto executive, but because it needs to interact with the real world it will always run into the oracle problem. The only solution to the oracle problem is courts and tort law, which makes the blockchain contract redundant and unnecessarily expensive.
This is the funniest use of NFTs I’ve ever read about:
As a self-described “fartpreneur,” however, Matto may have girlbossed a little too close to the sun. On Christmas, she says, she went to the ER with what she describes as heart attack-esque symptoms, which doctors promptly diagnosed as severe gas pain as a result of her diet. Matto’s visit to the ER, which she recounted to a journalist from the U.K. outlet Jam Press, was aggregated across news outlets across the globe, prompting fervent social media debate as to whether Matto’s fart-selling enterprise was a savvy business move or a cultural death rattle resounding from the bowels of late-stage capitalism (pun very much intended). Yet Matto is unruffled by such critiques, and has harnessed her newfound virality into promoting her newest venture: selling fart jar NFTs for 0.05 ETH (a little less than $200) each, though she has significantly reduced sales of her physical fart jars following her ER visit.
This is now a recurring feature of tech vaporware. Claiming something that is clearly shit is okay because it does some good, or something that is uselesslt frivolous and speculative will have and important function and use-case in the future.
My condolences to those that have been made fools by this - we all need to keep an eye out for these patterns going forward.
I wanna add: prosecute and sue these thieves. Sue the people who took money to promote these lies. They all deserve to have those ill-gotten funds ripped away.
