NFT Discussion
Greetings one and all.
Ive opened this thread here to discuss things NFT.(non fungible Tokens)
Ive been looking into the space for quite some time and watched it's progression with interest. Since their inception, NFT's have been met with mixed reactions from many creators. Some for the idea of Nft's, some against, for a number of reasons, all be it personal, practical or both. Id like to discuss those reasons here, and see what creators think what sort of effect it will have/has had on themselves, positive or negative.
There are other points i want to look into as well, but lets start here and then il steer the conversations on from comments left. Remember to keep your comments clean, and be respectful please.
I will respond to comments over time. anyone wanting to comment but remain anonymous are free to PM me.
Creating artificial scarcity into something that is basically endless? no thanks, nft´s are just another money grabbing scheme. If you think about it, why do they try that some bytes inside a bitchain are as inviolable as a painting inside a museum? it´s just giving the illusion you buy something unique, normally that is a ugly monkey with a slightly color variation than the other nearly equal millions ramdonly created(or something stolen and claimed as their own). Oh my, won´t I screenshoot it if I want to...
Patents and copyrigths already exists, nft´s are totally shameless and only benefits a tiny amount of people who speculate while expending unholy amounts of electricity in the process.
Just search for the tulip bubble:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
Basically people went absolutely crazy buying tulips types at huge prices until at one point they realized it was just an useless plant and the market crashed and burned.
I think about it quite a lot. lol.
Good points there. 'artificial scarcity', 'IP violations', 'Licensing' & 'enviromental impact'. interestingly you didn't mention 'fraud/scams'. It would say that your comments seem more directed at collections of images. would that be fair? What about NFT's as Utility's? Trading cards or in game purchases as an example.
'benefits a tiny amount of people'. :) so there is a benefit to NFT's you would say? If its the creator that benefits that surely a good thing?
Chasersgaming | Support | Monstropolis |
NFT´s about images are all the rage at the moment, but it can be applied to many digital "goods". For example a few games have been created with nft´s as the base, so, what makes a basic iron sword you get different than the one you buy from some other dude? same damage, graphics, everything... the only difference is that there is "only one" stored on a blockchain with an unique identifier.
That´s just stupid, same with everything else, utilities, cards... those people just want to milk some persons misplaced greed for possesing uniqueness. Remember "unique items" were the base of Diablo 2 auction house? what´s the difference, being inside a blockchain? It´s totally unneeded and wasteful.
And then we get the big leagues jerks, some time ago some ass digitalized a painting from Frida Kalo into a nft and burned the original. Next he proceeded to sell the nft, does that benefit the autor?, heck yeah, does it benefit society?, hell no. Authors already have ways of getting benefits from their works, this is just pure scam, selling something utterly generic or unending as unique and making it scarce to everyone else.
Yep, i hear you there. thats definetely creating the 'artificial scarcity' that is suppose to give an NFT it's 'uniqueness' and/or appeal.(to some at least)
'unique items' and having 'only one'. There doesn't have to be only one, there can be muiltle numbers of the same thing. I would say that was a concious decision made by the author/team/board/corporate to implement them that way for whatever their reasons. (greed, sustainability) Would you agree?
As for the Frida Kalo example, yeah, a foolish act, and shockingly sad in my opinion, but a decision made by someone to 'push' the price up of thier NFT in hope it would sell making them a profit. Greed at its finest, a total disregard and unapreciation for the authors work. which is very sad to see.
Theres a lot of this 'behaviour' in the scene, including many other things, which dominates the NFT space, the 'jerks', but there is a small number of creators that are genuine, and genuinely believe creating NFT type of work will help them continue doing what they do as an added way to benefit from thier works alongside current ways. How do we feel about these creators? 'its a scam' is a phrase i hear a lot, and i often ask myself 'is it fair' to assume that every creator that enters the NFT space be tarnished.
Just so you know Danimal, i'm responding to your comments, (which are apreciatted by the way) and asking 'open ended' questions for anyone to jump in on, and i may be playing devils advocate on occasion as well, so i hope im not coming across as an arse. :) I'm not advacating NFT's, just trying to get a 'feel of the room' :)
Chasersgaming | Support | Monstropolis |
Normal proprietary digital goods (programs, art and other things) are actually artificially scarse. If you have an apple and you give it to someone you lose the apple. But if you have a digital good and give (a copy of) it to someone both have it.
Now NFTs take this scarsity even further. Not only that you have to buy a copy but you are the only one who owns it (legally).
Should NFTs be forbidden? No. Are they immoralic? Yes. Should they be avoided as hell? Yes.
There were trading cards mentioned. I already had the idea of creating and running such a game. I think they could be (only perhaps!) a good usecase for NFTs. But my game would make the cards art and rules and server software open source. I would run my own server and players would have to buy virtual cards on my server. But they could host the cards on their own server or print them on paper and sell them. No need for NFTs for me personally. But some (probably greedy) folks could use NFTs for this.
Edit: I just had the idea that some goods lose value if shared. These may be good usecases for NFTs. Like
- info for making money or access to money
- status symbols
- collector objects
- probably there are even more cases
- event tickets?
NFT's have a fantastic potential, but I personally believe that potential is not as broad as internet culture thinks it is:
The Good: Creating artificial scarcity in an artificial economy.
In the real world economy, scarcity handles itself. You do not need to destroy an apple every time someone eats an apple; the consumer destroys it themselves by consuming it. In artificial economies, like in video games, the items and resources in the game NEED to be scarce for the game to even function or be interesting, but there is no real reason the resources are scarce. In StarCraft, if all players automatically got infinite minerals with which to build infinite buildings and infinite units, it would destroy the gameplay. But it doesn't cost the players or the developers any actual resources or money to simply generate infinite wealth, infinite items, infinite units. The only thing stopping that from happening is an artificial limit in the code.
If you've ever played Old School RuneScape (OSRS), you may remember various seasonal items becoming highly sought after. These items often fetch a price thousands- or even millions- of times higher than their original market value. Having an item like a Purple Party Hat was a sign of prestige in the game. Why, though?
Only because of scarcity. The seasonal items were only generated by the game engine for a special holiday, then never produced again. That means you can't grind monsters hoping for one more of them as a rare drop. The only ones in existence where the ones already in circulation. In fact, such items became the ONLY items that obeyed the scarcity rules of a realistic economy. All other items were effectively renewable and ultimately infinite. If the demand for copper ingots ever went too high, you could just go mine more of them from the game server's infinite supply of them.
The demand (and therefore price) of rare seasonal items in OSRS abruptly plummeted when someone found, and exploited, an item duplication glitch. The finite supply of certain Party Hats became infinite. It didn't cause any sort of real-world recession or something, but it did hurt a lot of gameplay and piss off a lot of players. The games we play may just be for play, but we all take our fun seriously. No one wants to play a game that isn't fair, and a thriving community of friends can quickly become an abandoned wasteland due to scams in an artificial economy.
If an item is intended to be scarce in an artificial game economy, there is no better way to enforce its scarcity than with NFT technology. If the party hats had been on a block chain, there is really no way that an item duplication glitch would have worked. 'Oh, you now have two Pink Party Hat #23 of 100?' That is an obvious falsehood easily detectable by both players and developers. The NFT can only belong to one item, not two, so the ownership of the item would collapse back into a single player's inventory and the duplicator/scammer would be found out and punished immediately. Without associating the seasonal "unique" items with an NFT, the game engine has no way to tell the difference between an illegally duplicated item, and a proper copy of the item that was fairly created by the game and legitimately owned and traded by players.
Magic: The Gathering (MTG) did something similar to this when they digitized a card game that previously had physical cards. The Physical cards of MTG are tangible items that just can't be magically duplicated. Scarcity handles itself so long as MTG chooses not to print infinite cards. When they ported the game to a digital format, there stopped being any real reason they couldn't duplicate cards infinitely. No player is going to invest in a $10,000 digital copy of an ultra-rare card unless they can be sure the game company won't just print millions of them for a quick profit and at the same time devaluing the player's investment. Making the digital versions of the cards into something like an NFT, the rarity of cards is assured. Players can see the public ledger of cards, how many are in circulation, and rest easy knowing that
The Bad: The thieves are self-righteous and the buyers are falsely entitled.
In my opinion, NFT's don't even make sense outside of the kind of micro-economies outlined above. There is a place for them in specific environments where they provide something those environments couldn't otherwise have. But placing artificial scarcity in a real-world global economy isn't leveraging an untapped market, it's creating an artificial market, with artificial demand, and drip feeding the demand from an infinite supply. It's begging people to donate to your heroic cause to stop the orphan-crushing machine to nobly save the orphans! It only works so long as no one asks why you created the machine in the first place, or why you can't just stop using it to crush orphans that were already safe before you came along.
I have no issue with people seeking to make a fortune from the perceived scarcity of digital art. The problem comes when the people who are selling the digital art don't actually have any right to sell it in the first place. Even when the artwork is Public Domain, it is a problem. Public Domain allows all uses, even reselling it, though, right? Yes, but the problem is twofold:
If the asset were contained within a micro-economy (like in a game) it would remain scarce, because the enforcement of the uniqueness of that item is automatic and backed up by the bounds of the micro-economy. In the world wide web, though, there are no such bounds and the asset associated with the NFT is functionally indistinguishable from any other copy of that asset, which is STILL FREE and still in the Public Domain.
If the buyer knows all that and still wants to buy the NFT, what is the harm? Well, the problem comes from the tendency of bad actors to be rewarded for bad behavior. The kind of people who take art that isn't theirs, and sell it as NFTs, are the kind of people who portray the NFT as scarce, and imply the buyer is getting exclusive rights over the asset, like... copyrights. These aren't just isolated victims falling for these claims/implications. These are a huge portion of buyers who believe they have the authority to tell all others to stop using the asset, or that they are the only person permitted to replicate and license the asset for use. This lie, in legal terms, can be called fraud.
What's worse is that the people minting the NFTs often act as if they're doing the artist a favor by stealing their art and selling it. "You get tons of exposure!"
OGA has lost a significant amount of quality assets because the artists were so frustrated by bad actors selling their assets as NFTs that they decided to erase all sources of their art from the internet. If the artist wanted to make money from it, they could easily do so themselves. Minting NFTs isn't difficult. Perhaps that's part of the problem; there are zero checks in place to make sure the minter actually has the authority to use the art. Despite significant outcry, multiple NFT hosting sites seem to intentionally ignore that need and continue to promote the theft of art for minting NFTs. Why would they stop something that makes them money?
I'm not saying all NFTs are stolen or immorally used against the artists wishes, but that is a huge problem that needs to be addressed if NFTs are ever going to be more than a joke at best and an infuriating detriment to the reputation and livelihood of artists at worst.
The Ugly: Blockchains are Unsustainable.
Every time a piece of cryptocurrency, NFT, or other blockchain item is traded, the ledger for that trade is added to the blockchain. This means the older the NFT gets, the more it is traded, the harder it is to calculate the next transaction. The longer the chain gets, the more resources are required to process the same tiny token.
I don't know the exact numbers behind the resources being dedicated to crypto transactions, but I know it is way more than it should be, and only getting worse. There is a real, tangible energy cost to using blockchain technology. The framework behind the tech needs to be reworked on a fundamental level if we expect to use it for longer than the next 10 years. Otherwise, we will be dedicating so many resources to calculating the next set of transactions, that the value of the transaction itself will not even pay for its own cost. Kind of like the can't help myself robot spending so much time trying to maintain its own functionality that it has no time to do anything useful besides keep itself from dying.
--Medicine StormI didn't know that.
As far as I know NFTs are a very new technology. I think there will establish:
a) ways to tell if it is a scam. Like some websites with a high reputation who list NFTs.
and b) a common awareness about the possibility of NFT scams.
Medicinestorm, Thanks for your input there, some great points, and examples. I share your view on the 'attitudes' of users within the space. Peter said 'imorallic', which i would also agreee with in most cases.
This is, in my opinion, the most biggest problem in the space, very closely followed by its enviromental impact. A lot of the things negative, sort of go hand in hand par se, i find it hard to talk about a specific thing, when a lot of it stems from something else. 'Morality' & 'attitudes', bad players, actors that choose to use the tech in a way where most find it 'immoral', for violating IP's, or using creators work in a way that it wasn't intended for, creating 'artificial scarcity' to drive a selfish narrative, which becomes a benefit for the users selling art, and not the creator that created the art, which in the beginning, that was it was sold to us as. This just annoys creators and in most cases forces them to 'remove' their creations, or be reactive to a situation thet don't want to be a part, for their own reasons, or for the very reasons we have mentioned. The end result is bitterness and resentment for the NFT space in general, because of this 'culture' thats has driven it and continues to drive it.
I myself have changed my License to CC-BY-4.0, I didn't want to, i never wanted to create assets that gave any sort of restriction or insist on anything for its use, but i felt/feel that it gives me some protection, or at least a choice to be a part of, or not be a part of the NFT scene, should my work find itself on the platforms either through myself or someone else doing it. claiming it as their own, or assumptions being made that its acttually me, or an imposter, causing some reputational damage, given the feelings around the scene at the moment. With the CC-BY-4 licesne i can stipulilate a condition where no NFT's can be made with them, doesn't mean it might not happen, because its happening now regardless of licensed work, but i can make a DMCA claim. I shouldn't have to though, its a lot of unesscessry work, and is just another thing to drive hatred towards the users and the platforms that let them, the bad immoral players, continue to do it. It's certainly driven creators to leave and/or erase their assets from platforms as you say, which is a terrible consequense. :(
This problem could of been stamped out from the very beginning, if the powers that be, the platforms, such as Opensea, Rarible etc, did what they could to protect the creators, with better verifications, proof of author, punishments for offenders, better officiation, and not make it so easy, then we would have a very different NFT space right now, but sadly, it would appear the very people that plague the space with bad players, are the same people that are running and driving the NFT space, all in it to make vasts amount of money off the back whomever uses thier platforms, be them legitiment or not.
I have been one of those people that is angered by all the stolen art and thrown mud at some that have involved themselves with the NFT space, and i have regretted some things, and feel somewhat embaressed about it, now that i have taken the time to take a step back and look into it a bit more with a different set of eyes, ones that arn't blinded by the hatred, and so far i have to ask myself that "do i really hate the tech that NFT's are, or the people doing immoral things with the tech that is"
I can definetely for sure say it's the latter currently. The tech though isn't without its problems of coarse. there is still its environmental impact, which is well documentated these days, and no secret that a lot of people around the world hate it for this reason. But like most things in its early days, start off bad, then improve over time and get better, thats development. In this case, the 'Blockchain'. There are many blockchains now, some are still gas guzzling machines, but there are now less enviromental impactful Blockchains(i.e Etherium 2.0), which i would say is a good thing, (im not going to go into all that here), but for those that were against NFT's for the enviromental reasons, now have options to consider NFT's as a option, without potential backlash from haters? I say potential, as NFT's are now very stigmatised, and it still leaves the question of receiving payments in cryptocurrency form, which is a whole other segment itself, which brings in the same arguments to a degree becuase of its 'history'.
Chasersgaming | Support | Monstropolis |
"OGA has lost a significant amount of quality assets because the artists were so frustrated by bad actors selling their assets as NFTs that they decided to erase all sources of their art from internet"
This is a good point, so how do most creators here feel about their assets hear being used for NFT's? but not neccessarily in a Jpeg/Png collection with scarcity, but used and included as an NFT game project?
has anyone been approached here or outside OGA to be involved in such projects? Either commisioned or editing thier already made assets.
Chasersgaming | Support | Monstropolis |
Wouldn't distributing something as an NFT violate most of the licenses on OGA?
Are people providing appropriate credit for OGA stuff that they NFT?
My question with NFTs has always been, who is the market for this stuff?
Is it all just a speculation bubble?
From a technology standpoint, it seems like there ought to be someway for OGA to use NFTs to protect artists. Not sure how that would work, but my guy says some kind of unique, unassailable identifier has got to be useful for fighting off art theft.
"Wouldn't distributing something as an NFT violate most of the licenses on OGA?"
It depends on the licenses. CC-By with stipulations or any license that allows stipulations ,and is stipulated 'no NFT use' or something like that, I believe would be in violation, at the same time, even if the license doesn't say it directly would/could depend on the license that is added either by default of the marketplace platform user agreement(if there is one) or stipulated inside a 'smart contract', with or without contracted negotiations of users/authors/contributions/commisions. Public domain assets is different story as you know, but with 'artificial scarcity' being a thing, to say something is RARE, when it isn't could/does constitute a 'fraud' bearing, if selling something like that. It may be rare when you first create it, but theres nothing stoppping anyone from creating the same thing, using the same PD assets, so claims of rarity loses its appeal, and so does the 'uniqueness', as it becomes devalued as a result. Think medicinestorm did a good write up in the links on the front page.
"Are people providing appropriate credit for OGA stuff that they NFT?"
I have no idea, I haven't seen any OGA assets on any NFT platforms thankfully.
What we have is yet more misconseption that owning an NFT gives 'owners' the copyright to that particular image/sound/film to do what they want with, BUT that isn't true. What they own is the NFT, what ever that may be. It doesn't give them the rights to edit it, make copys of it, re uploaded it, print it on t-shirts etc. thats ONLY allowed if the creator grants that permission within its license(smart contract). Owners of the NFT are only really really allowed to sell it on as an NFT, as it is.
That is my understanding of it anyway.
"My question with NFTs has always been, who is the market for this stuff?"
Good question, and one that i would say is 'subjective'. It should of been a way for artists to sell their work and go someway to proof authorship in a digital capacity, no matter how many people copy and paste someones image/work/asset, there is now a way to say what is 'official' and have some legal stand point, proof of ownsership and license agreements. Also creators have a say in their work being resold and can collect 'royalties' each time, another way for artists to support their work and be supported by fans. BUT, this isn't what has happened. Instead, what we have is a space that has been filled with users exploiting the system and turned it into something else, so now it is seen as nothing more than users trying to get rich quick schemes, asset flippers & scammers. so right now, the market for this stuff is those people. IMO.
Chasersgaming | Support | Monstropolis |
-As I heard from some Shamans from Venezuela, NFT is last try by black forces to implement mark of the beast(666) among us. When that happen by Bible you can`t trade and most important thing, you lose GOD protection. I suggest that we have to found our own parallel trade system. After all, we are Free beings right .. Uuuuhuuuu, yeee ... StarSlave out ...
@Commander It's nothing to do with Bible, God, 666 or bloody Shamens. Unless you talking 'Morallity' values, in which case just say so mate. Your 'scriptured' type comment leaves me baffled, is it a real point of view or are you just mocking? This is a serious topic for me matey. :)
Chasersgaming | Support | Monstropolis |
-Yes it is serious, but step by step we are close to frontier where simple people can`t be in situation to express self. It will be reserved only to those with some kind of Bill Gates numbers.
Be or not to be question is now?
:)
@Commander: mocking or serious, that is a bit close to breaking the "no discussion of religion" rule.
@withthelove:
Insofar as repurposing an asset into an NFT counts as relicensing it, yes. Yes it does. Doubly so if the NFT itself does not indicate proper attribution and a link to the original. It could also be fraud given the way most NFTs are presented. Thus this: https://opengameart.org/content/warning-taking-art-from-opengameartorg-t...
However, I don't know of any specific examples of assets being taken from OGA and minted against the author's wishes. As I mentioned elsewhere, some OGA users removed all their art from OGA after a huge NFT scandal, but the NFT scalpers didn't burgle the assets from OGA, as far as I can tell. They were taken from twitter or other sources.
--Medicine Storm-OK my apologize to Chasersgaming opinion, I`m just saying that material has to be free, and result is up to programmer. OK, thanks, if you know what I mean .. final product is whats matter .. right , Knight way ..
thanks, just a misunderstanding.
"Final product is what matters" - Yes, i suppose thats right, if an NFT has been created for a purpose, what ever that purpose may be, by design, to benefit the artist, programmer, project or end user, i suppose it comes down to what we perceive that 'purpose' to be, on a 'moral' stand point.
Chasersgaming | Support | Monstropolis |
-Yes, there always has to be two or three ways, or some kind infinite ways of tracks which indefinitely void to passages who is in right, and then start inquisition as result, our final product, very nice resolvent, did`n it.
Hello :)
I am new in this Forum.
Some things I read in this discussion are pretty sad, the people scraping their art from the public eye is one of the worst.
I am part of a small team who wanted to build gamificated features for customers in pixel art style. I grew up in Kanto and I would love to have a pixel art style for our upcoming project.
We were trying to get in touch with artists but it is not really possible to get in touch with the guys we wanted to. NFTs are also always seen in combination with avatar pictures. It is sad also for some of us coders...
If I can help increase awareness of legit usecases by providing legit technical answers to any of your possible questions, go for it.
PeterX, you mentioned Tickets, Tickets is one of the more easy to grasp usecases of nfts which are a lot more useful than ownership of profile picture avatars, They dont have to be printed, they can be scanned, they can be numerated. You could say a QR Code is able to do this, but I could take a photo of it and use it for entrance. NFTs you can also photograph, but you cant use them without your private key. Which is a small but very impactful difference.
In case anyone already lost documents like school certificates, this is also a thing which could be done. My passport, I have to renew it every couple years, for money. Why? So its less easy to fake them. Put them onchain, there is hundreds of possible ways to do this without problems like big energy usage etc. People would have passports who are eligible forever and cant be faked.
Contracts, especially governmental or public available ones, dont need to be on paper.
The usage of nfts for the sole purpose of owning a specific piece of art can be useful, I just dont agree that the average 10k profile picture avatar collection without further implementations is doing that.
Also they scared of every single good artist for people who would like to implement legit products. The people who are replying to inquiries about possible collabos with a project who is related to blockchain, even if its not even nfts, want to have around 1300$ for a character spritesheet which has around the same amount of animations of the lpc character gen 1, without any traits whatsoever.
After I read that a lot of people scraped their whole art from your platform here, I am pretty sure, there is almost nothing I can do to heal those wounds and open up talks.
Edit:
Just to make it clear, we have no intend to sell art itself as product whatsoever.
I also dont want to make advertisment, there is currently nothing online anyway.