A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
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Warning: auto-playing video
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@Carnage Maybe. Since I know zero of any Scandinavian language, I couldn't say, but all the þs and ðs and æs certainly make it look like a Scandinavian language, specifically Icelandic, which is the only language that still uses þ.
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@HardwareGeek it would make sense because England had been invaded by folks from that general direction prior to 1066 (I forget the exact timing, but my brain is suggesting somewhere around the 800s), long enough for it to take root in the language before being displayed to some degree by the next invaders.
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@HardwareGeek said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
all the þs and ðs and æs certainly make it look like a Scandinavian language, specifically Icelandic, which is the only language that still uses þ.
Once you know the pronunciation and have some of the Scandinavian languages (or knowledge of certain English dialects) to supply the meanings of words that have fallen out of use in standard English, then it's a lot easier.
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@MrL said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@LaoC said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
It's funny how some people can at once fiercely reject the labor theory of value, allegedly subscribe instead to the Austrian view that the price of a thing is a direct expression of individual preferences, hence a thing is "worth" whatever people are willing to pay for it, and pretend to know the exact opposite: that certain things are worth something completely different than the price at which they were exchanged in the market.
There's no contradiction. Things have different value for different people. Saying "it's not worth the price paid" means just "I would not pay that much".
OK. I didn't get the vibe that people regard NFTs basically no different than a Van Gogh or a Lamborghini, but maybe that's just me.
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@dkf said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
knowledge of certain English dialects
Insert Prof. Henry Higgens singing about Englishmen not learning how to speak.
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@HardwareGeek Not accents, dialects.
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@HardwareGeek said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Entirely separate languages that are completely mutually unintelligible?
What's often quoted as the oldest text written in a language that can pass for French is the "Strasbourg oath" made by Charlemagne's grandsons as they split the empire (basically two of the brothers saying "we'll help each other to fight the third"... ah, some things never change!), in... checks Wikipedia... 842.
It's probably not as far from modern French as Old English is from modern one, but it's still hardly understandable without knowing latin (as the precursor of French).
One brother says:
Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di en avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradra salvar dift, in o quid il mi altresi fazet, et ab Ludher nul plaid nunquam prindrai, qui meon vol cist meon fradre Karle in damno sit.
And the other:
Si Lodhuvigs sagrament, que son fradre Karlo iurat, conservat, et Karlus meos sendra de suo part non lostanit, si io returnar non l'int pois : ne io ne neuls, cui eo returnar int pois, in nulla aiudha contra Lodhuvig nun li iv er.
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@remi said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di en avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradra salvar dift, in o quid il mi altresi fazet, et ab Ludher nul plaid nunquam prindrai, qui meon vol cist meon fradre Karle in damno sit.
If you hadn't told us, I'd have guessed it's more likely to be medieval Portuguese or maybe Spanish rather than French.
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How it started:
Stalker 2 jumps on the NFT bandwagon, will make 3 players 'metahuman' NPCs, whatever that is
Stalker is a metaverse now, and so naturally that means blockchain auctions.
How it's going:
Stalker 2 developer cancels NFT plans following backlash
The so-called "Stalker metaverse" lasted one day.
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@MrL said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@LaoC said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
It's funny how some people can at once fiercely reject the labor theory of value, allegedly subscribe instead to the Austrian view that the price of a thing is a direct expression of individual preferences, hence a thing is "worth" whatever people are willing to pay for it, and pretend to know the exact opposite: that certain things are worth something completely different than the price at which they were exchanged in the market.
There's no contradiction. Things have different value for different people. Saying "it's not worth the price paid" means just "I would not pay that much".
Labor theory of value is insane.
Our attitude to NFT isn't anywhere near bounded to "I would not pay that much". It's "I would not pay that pay that much and I am appalled that anyone would." It's not merely about personal values, it's about the expectation of those values being shared.
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@Medinoc said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Our attitude to NFT isn't anywhere near bounded to "I would not pay that much".
I would take the view that it's not about how much people pay for it, but about the price being zero vs. non-zero. Unlike paying "too much" for an expensive sports car or a piece of art, there is no price at all here that isn't too much.
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@LaoC said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@remi said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di en avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa, si cum om per dreit son fradra salvar dift, in o quid il mi altresi fazet, et ab Ludher nul plaid nunquam prindrai, qui meon vol cist meon fradre Karle in damno sit.
If you hadn't told us, I'd have guessed it's more likely to be medieval Portuguese or maybe Spanish rather than French.
It's almost as if all three languages were derived from the same ancient one.
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Oh, you know what would be deliciously awful in its shining hypocrisy? Captain Planet NFTs.
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@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@Medinoc said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Our attitude to NFT isn't anywhere near bounded to "I would not pay that much".
I would take the view that it's not about how much people pay for it, but about the price being zero vs. non-zero. Unlike paying "too much" for an expensive sports car or a piece of art, there is no price at all here that isn't too much.
It's not like I didn't agree, but I wonder why people think so.
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@LaoC because whatever artistic merit - or not - a piece of art has, it still has a value by being an expression of something by a person with a point of view. It might not have much value but it has a value.
An NFT, reductively, is not art. It is a link to art, not the art itself, that you are purchasing.
If I sell you a piece of paper that says “the person who holds this piece of paper owns the Mona Lisa”, I’m not selling you the Mona Lisa, I’m selling you a piece of paper, nothing more. It is not a thing of value being sold.
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@Arantor said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@LaoC because whatever artistic merit - or not - a piece of art has, it still has a value by being an expression of something by a person with a point of view. It might not have much value but it has a value.
An NFT, reductively, is not art. It is a link to art, not the art itself, that you are purchasing.
If I sell you a piece of paper that says “the person who holds this piece of paper owns the Mona Lisa”, I’m not selling you the Mona Lisa, I’m selling you a piece of paper, nothing more. It is not a thing of value being sold.
OK, but that's how every title or deed ever works. The only thing that differentiates the proprietor of a house from a squatter is that the former has a piece of paper that says they own it. Sure, a deed to a house has the force of a government behind it and an NFT doesn't, but does that really determine worth? You could still say the knowledge of having paid for it is part of the product's intangibles. Fans of a band for instance often want to own a copy of an album they bought instead of downloading it from BT, even if downloading was completely risk free.
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@LaoC the fact a government is behind it is why it works, for the same reason that a government backed currency is worth something and the bank notes in the Monopoly set are not.
If there is a dispute over ownership there are measures and protections to ensure the proper owner can get their thing, backed by ability to enforce those protections.
There is one other key difference: when you buy a house there is a paper trail establishing you have bought a house, of which the deed is essentially the receipt for it, just like what you get when you buy your groceries, you come away with tangible evidence that a transaction has happened.
Buying an NFT is not that, though. You’re not buying the good and getting a receipt as a by-product of that transaction, in the case of an NFT you’re buying the receipt itself. Any ownership or implied meaning thereafter is somewhat incidental.
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@Arantor said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@LaoC the fact a government is behind it is why it works, for the same reason that a government backed currency is worth something and the bank notes in the Monopoly set are not.
If there is a dispute over ownership there are measures and protections to ensure the proper owner can get their thing, backed by ability to enforce those protections.
There is one other key difference: when you buy a house there is a paper trail establishing you have bought a house, of which the deed is essentially the receipt for it, just like what you get when you buy your groceries, you come away with tangible evidence that a transaction has happened.
Buying an NFT is not that, though. You’re not buying the good and getting a receipt as a by-product of that transaction, in the case of an NFT you’re buying the receipt itself. Any ownership or implied meaning thereafter is somewhat incidental.
Is it only the government backing then? Personal preferences and subjectivity doesn't even enter into the picture there.
Just like with music, the tangible evidence simply doesn't exist in digital commodities. When I buy an album on BandCamp in Laos, I end up with an email saying "thank you for your purchase" and a bunch of FLAC files that are bit for bit identical to what I can (legally, as there is no copyright law) download for free. Would that be equally worthy of ridicule?
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@LaoC said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Is it only the government backing then?
Government backing means you can sue in the case of a dispute, and have the courts enforce (with a range of suitable remedies) the resolution of the ownership. The designers of NFTs have tried to do away with that, and hence have built a system where mistakes cannot be corrected and thefts cannot be recovered.
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@LaoC when you buy digital music, you’re not buying the files, you’re buying the right to have those files (copyright notwithstanding).
You didn’t buy the email that thanks you for purchasing. You get that on the side.
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@dkf said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@LaoC said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Is it only the government backing then?
Government backing means you can sue in the case of a dispute, and have the courts enforce (with a range of suitable remedies) the resolution of the ownership. The designers of NFTs have tried to do away with that, and hence have built a system where mistakes cannot be corrected and thefts cannot be recovered.
No doubt about that. That sounds like "it's risky" though, rather than "it's worth exactly zero".
@Arantor said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@LaoC when you buy digital music, you’re not buying the files, you’re buying the right to have those files (copyright notwithstanding).
You didn’t buy the email that thanks you for purchasing. You get that on the side.
What do you mean by "copyright notwithstanding"? Is there a right not codified in copyright law that you're buying?
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@Arantor said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@LaoC when you buy digital music, you’re not buying the files, you’re buying the right to have those files (copyright notwithstanding).
You didn’t buy the email that thanks you for purchasing. You get that on the side.
Is "the right to have those files" anything more than a row in a db on Bandcamp's server with your user id, a timestamp, and "Rick Astley - Greatest Hits"? Nobody but Bandcamp knows about that, except when they send you an email. The NFT is just like that record, only on a blockchain.
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@hungrier said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
"Rick Astley - Greatest Hits"... The NFT is just like that record
The NFT rick-rolled you?
on a blockchain.
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@LaoC said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
When I buy an album on BandCamp in Laos, I end up with an email saying "thank you for your purchase" and a bunch of FLAC files that are bit for bit identical to what I can (legally, as there is no copyright law) download for free. Would that be equally worthy of ridicule?
When you buy that album, part of the money goes back to the artists.
Now, if you bought the album from someone who downloaded it from a torrent? That'd be ridiculous.
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@hungrier So you buy an album from Bandcamp and you get files. What you have purchased is a licence to consume that content. The fact that you get an email record of it as a proof of purchase and whatever rows live in their database is not what you have bought - you have bought a licence to consume some content which is distributed to you electronically.
It is not relevant how it is distributed to you, nor is it relevant what records you or they keep on the matter, your purchase is for the licence for that content, no ifs or buts - check the T&Cs sometime. The fact it is intangible is also not relevant.
In the case of an NFT, though, you are buying a token. There is a record of you buying the token on the blockchain (= the email from Bandcamp and the row in the database that you bought an album). The token can say 'this copy of this image is owned by hungrier' but that is literally all it is - you're not buying the right to a thing here, no licence is being granted, no access is being inherently given, you are buying a token that says you own a thing.
In some contexts it might even be accurate: today I had McDonalds, the kiosk spat out a piece of paper with a barcode on it - this is, really, a non fungible token. Presenting it to the desk, they handed out the food as itemised on the receipt. The food is now consumed, the token remains - but it now has no value. If I were to sell it on eBay, I am selling an NFT that points to a now invalid physical asset, but in reality this is no different to any other NFT: it is a token that points to a thing where the token is notionally owned by an account. It does not demonstrate that the account owns the thing - it demonstrates that the account owns a token that says they own the thing, which means precisely nothing in this context.
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@Zerosquare said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@LaoC said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
When I buy an album on BandCamp in Laos, I end up with an email saying "thank you for your purchase" and a bunch of FLAC files that are bit for bit identical to what I can (legally, as there is no copyright law) download for free. Would that be equally worthy of ridicule?
When you buy that album, part of the money goes back to the artists.
Now, if you bought the album from someone who downloaded it from a torrent? That'd be ridiculous.
Disregarding the fact that the latter is how 95% of SE Asian DVD stores work: this is neither necessarily true of an album you buy—you could buy an original second hand for instance—nor necessarily different from an NFT. The NFT, too, could be (and as far as I know, these days it usually is) issued directly by the one who created whatever that URL points to.
@Arantor said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@hungrier So you buy an album from Bandcamp and you get files. What you have purchased is a licence to consume that content.
Why are you saying "copyright notwithstanding" and then proceed to explain how copyright works?
There are not many places like this, but Laos is one of them. Copyright law doesn't exist there. That license is nil and void. Makes as much of a difference as a lease to a lot on Alpha Centauri.
The question is: does that make music worthless? Does it make buying that music equally ridiculous as buying an NFT? If so, it boils down to "no digital good has any value whatsoever if not for government-enforced artificial scarcity", doesn't it? If not, where do you see the difference?
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@LaoC I deliberately phrased it that way since the vast majority of purchases of music are made in regions where copyright exists.
If copyright is not a factor, that would tend to suggest the creator will have a harder time getting recompense, even if “contributing to the creator is a normalised part of culture” - I don’t know if it is or not. I assume it would have to be to ensure that the creator gets money for producing content that there is limited legal requirement to purchase in order to consume. Or that distribution without payment is so rampant that it’s a wonder any artist can make a living being an artist.
Of course piracy exists in the rest of the world, as that’s literally copyright infringement rebranded, and some people will go out of their way to purchase music to remain ethical as well as legal.
As to the debate on whether this values music less… partly this depends on your localised culture (see above) and partly the fact that societally we value music in particular less than we used to - the existence of Spotify demonstrates that we consider “access to a vast library consisting of all genres of music” worth a mere few bucks a month, or free with ads. That tells me that we don’t value music highly at all. (Netflix et al have a much smaller collection on offer and regularly rotate content in and out of circulation unlike Spotify)
But all of this is irrelevant. Let’s even drop the equation of copyright and still compare them.
On the one hand you buy some music. You exchange money with an artist so you can take home some of their music, they get money so they can carry on producing music. Everyone’s a winner.
On the other hand you buy a token. You exchange a virtual currency for a token. This token, inherently, does nothing. It’s just a blob of binary data. Many of these tokens are basically URLs pointing to an asset of some kind. Whether that link does anything is basically up to the whim of some other body.
In essence, buying an NFT really is the same as buying the receipt I had for my McDonalds last night - at one point it was a token that meant something and thus had some indirect value. It was also non-fungible.
Now let’s look at buying an NFT of an image. I purchase an NFT of the image. I own a link to look at my image. But for a great many of these, I’m not buying ownership of the image. I’m not getting its copyright, or any of the associated legal rights such as reproduction in other forms, I’m getting a blob of data that points to an image and the blockchain asserts I own that blob of data. Nothing here asserts I own the image - indeed many of them are not legally transferred so the artist can make more NFTs.
Have I bought an image? Of course I haven’t, I have bought a digital piece of paper with “I own this image” on it which is not legally recognised. Unless the artist wants to recognise it as such, which often they do not (in the same way McDonalds recognised my NFT as good to give me one small bag of food, and once done, have precisely zero obligation to give me anything)
This is the same as blockchain gaming, where you buy an NFT which has meaning in the context of the game but literally nothing else and if the game closes the next day, you’re left with a digital blob that means nothing.
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@Placeholder said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
The sale was capped at a max of 2 items per person and it sold out in less than a second
One person was able to purchase 330 in a single transaction using a custom smart contract
So someone bought more of the worthless shit than he was allowed to, spending a few 100k? Good for her, I guess.
It does make me a bit curious about how programming these “smart” “contracts” (
) work. Not sure where to learn about that (for someone who already has technical background in programming), or if looking it up will cause brain cancer.
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@Zerosquare said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
That's the current meaning, yeah. But it could have meant something different back in 1275 - there are definitely words in French that significantly drifted away from their old meaning in much shorter time frames.
Filed under: things that are like WTDWTF threads
Like "stoked"?
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@Arantor said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@hungrier So you buy an album from Bandcamp and you get files. What you have purchased is a licence to consume that content. The fact that you get an email record of it as a proof of purchase and whatever rows live in their database is not what you have bought - you have bought a licence to consume some content which is distributed to you electronically.
It is not relevant how it is distributed to you, nor is it relevant what records you or they keep on the matter, your purchase is for the licence for that content, no ifs or buts - check the T&Cs sometime. The fact it is intangible is also not relevant.
In the case of an NFT, though, you are buying a token. There is a record of you buying the token on the blockchain (= the email from Bandcamp and the row in the database that you bought an album). The token can say 'this copy of this image is owned by hungrier' but that is literally all it is - you're not buying the right to a thing here, no licence is being granted, no access is being inherently given, you are buying a token that says you own a thing.
In some contexts it might even be accurate: today I had McDonalds, the kiosk spat out a piece of paper with a barcode on it - this is, really, a non fungible token. Presenting it to the desk, they handed out the food as itemised on the receipt. The food is now consumed, the token remains - but it now has no value. If I were to sell it on eBay, I am selling an NFT that points to a now invalid physical asset, but in reality this is no different to any other NFT: it is a token that points to a thing where the token is notionally owned by an account. It does not demonstrate that the account owns the thing - it demonstrates that the account owns a token that says they own the thing, which means precisely nothing in this context.
I want to make NFTs of old receipts and see how much they go for now...
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@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Not sure ... if looking it up will cause brain cancer.
Yes. At least in California.
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@Arantor said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@LaoC I deliberately phrased it that way since the vast majority of purchases of music are made in regions where copyright exists.
That doesn't help here though. I think we agree being able to have a contract enforced by the police makes a big difference for what people consider to have value. So does that boil down to "nothing has any sort of value if not for the police"? If that is it, you should regard the value of any other digital commodity you can have for free as equal to an NFT. So we have to take copyright out of the picture.
On the one hand you buy some music. You exchange money with an artist so you can take home some of their music, they get money so they can carry on producing music. Everyone’s a winner.
If that determines value, does that value vanish when the artist dies so they can't carry on making music?
On the other hand you buy a token. You exchange a virtual currency for a token. This token, inherently, does nothing. It’s just a blob of binary data. Many of these tokens are basically URLs pointing to an asset of some kind. Whether that link does anything is basically up to the whim of some other body.
What if I told you (insert picture of Morpheus here) what you regard as an "image file" is really just a disk block that holds a name and a "Resource Locator" in the form of a pointer to a list of disk blocks that, taken together, form a blob of binary data that inherently does nothing?
In essence, buying an NFT really is the same as buying the receipt I had for my McDonalds last night - at one point it was a token that meant something and thus had some indirect value. It was also non-fungible.
Now let’s look at buying an NFT of an image. I purchase an NFT of the image. I own a link to look at my image. But for a great many of these, I’m not buying ownership of the image. I’m not getting its copyright, or any of the associated legal rights such as reproduction in other forms, I’m getting a blob of data that points to an image and the blockchain asserts I own that blob of data. Nothing here asserts I own the image - indeed many of them are not legally transferred so the artist can make more NFTs.
Have I bought an image? Of course I haven’t, I have bought a digital piece
of paper with “I own this image” on it which is not legally recognised.OK, so are we back at "it's the government that makes all the difference"?
Edit:
This is the same as blockchain gaming, where you buy an NFT which has meaning in the context of the game but literally nothing else and if the game closes the next day, you’re left with a digital blob that means nothing.
This is actually interesting. You usually pay real money for a game, so if they decide to shut down its servers unreasonably shortly after they sold it to you, you have traditional contract law on your side.
Now within the game, the game company is the government. If they say the NFT belongs to you, it does. So if you recognize the fact that any game purchase is necessarily ephemeral (after all who would give a flying fuck about the custom items you hacked into C64 Donkey Kong using a freezer cartridge in the 80?), this should be completely rational, right?
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@LaoC said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
If that determines value, does that value vanish when the artist dies so they can't carry on making music?
Did I say it determined value? No, that's just me trying to frame the fundamental basis of compensating artists in an environment where no compensation is apparently required, meaning that artists must have a hell of a time being artists.
I don't know how the industry works in your part of the world. The only context I have is how it works elsewhere and you're telling me 'it doesn't work that way here' without ever trying to give me anything about how it does work so we can meaningfully incorporate that into the discussion.
In short, this feels like you're arguing in a way that is
worthy. Perhaps a moderator should move the debate there and I can then completely ignore it. But in the interim, let's continue.What if I told you (insert picture of Morpheus here) what you regard as an "image file" is really just a disk block that holds a name and a "Resource Locator" in the form of a pointer to a list of disk blocks that, taken together, form a blob of binary data that inherently does nothing?
That sounds awfully like trying to turn what I'm saying out of context (see above). I may be a PHP programmer but even I understand that all files are binary blobs with resource locators and pointers to disk blocks.
However, it's also a distraction from the real issue at hand. The file is not 'inherently doing nothing', because it's a file that contains your media/content. The file has meaning, it has context and it has inherent value even if the value is valued differently by different people.
That's not the same as a token that references the content.
You buy an image NFT, the NFT is not the image in almost all the cases. It's litlte more than a fancy bookmark.
This is actually interesting. You usually pay real money for a game, so if they decide to shut down its servers unreasonably shortly after they sold it to you, you have traditional contract law on your side.
Nope, not even that. The contracts/T&C you generally agree to when playing such games means that you get precisely squat if it closes.
It's also why engaging in purchasing anything in MMORPGs is questionable because you're not buying anything, you're buying 'access' to something, for an indeterminate time. But this is another matter and a distraction.
If they say the NFT belongs to you, it does.
And here's where the complexity comes in. We're not talking about who is authenticating ownership of an NFT, whether it is the game company or a blockchain ledger. It's not relevant to the question of NFTs themselves.
What is up for debate - and to my mind the core of the problem - is what is changing hands. The NFT changing hands is a bunch of numbers that may, in some context, have some value. It doesn't inherently have value in itself unlike your example of an image or a media file.
There are plenty of times that this is a transaction that feels acceptable - I give Humble Bundle some money, in exchange I get a bunch of Steam codes. These are NFTs (they are potentially not-unique Steam keys, but they're NFTs by any definition of the term). I can give them to Steam in exchange for access to a game being part of my library.
Thus, for one context, that token has value. But outside of that one context, they're without value. That is different from an image that is still an image, or a media file that is still a media file. (Let's not make this even more complicated by suggesting DRM encumberances, which are also irrelevant to the debate at hand.)
But here's the problem that you seem to be wilfully avoiding looking at: if I buy an NFT of an image, what have I actually acquired?
We looked at the music industry, with or without copyright, where money changing hands may grant a licence, and will compensate the artist.
So if you recognize the fact that any game purchase is necessarily ephemeral (after all who would give a flying fuck about the custom items you hacked into C64 Donkey Kong using a freezer cartridge in the 80?), this should be completely rational, right?
Are they necessarily ephemeral? In the modern context of Steam and co, yes, I think we can argue that they are somewhat ephemeral.
But thus it has ever been. At no point did you ever own a game, not in the physical realm with cassettes or disks or CDs or DVDs or cartridges. You own a physical media that the content resides upon and your purchase covers 1) the physical creation of the media and 2) the licence to consume the media. This is how it has always been. Ditto for music, ditto for books, ditto for all the things copyright covers.
It's historically been much easier to demonstrate or imply the ownership of a licence for such because you can just hold a physical book up, and a book that is an authentic product will be somewhat different to one typed out or scanned, and then printed (which is copyright infringement). Ditto for an authentic published cassette vs a homebrew copy. Ditto again for vinyl and CDs and everything else.
The transition to fully digital has made the issue of ownership vs access much more complicated and why the DRM argument has never gone away - you can buy a product for Kindle and Amazon can (and has) taken the product away again. Ironically the first big case where Amazon did this was a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four. But that's the deal made with that particular devil: you don't buy a product with an implied permanent licence by dint of owning a physical object, you buy a licence, which is only as valid as long as the company is still around to honour it.
If Steam disappeared tomorrow that would be problematic for many people. If Amazon disappeared tomorrow, same problem.
But all of this is still a complete irrelevance to the question of an NFT and it's frustrating that you seem intent on dragging the debate back here when it's honestly not relevant.
Since we are here, however, let's go over it yet again.
You give Steam some money, you get access to a game. How this is recorded is irrelevant, whether it's a row in a database or an entry in a blockchain. A transaction has happened of which there are records, and you now have the right to use a thing you did not before.
If and when trading an NFT on the blockchain will be honoured in the same way, great. However that is not what the talking heads are talking about, nor is it what the market is actually doing.
If the market were actually behaving the way you seem like you're trying to imply, I think fewer people would have a problem, as in if an NFT sold via cryptocurrency actually was a transaction where something meaningful changed hands, that would be less problematic.
The problem is what is currently changing hands is a many-layered set of abstractions that, boiled down, mean you are selling a digital piece of paper with words on it saying 'you own this'. What is not changing hands is anything that actually confers this change in ownership, or granting a licence or anything like that.
Remember: a Steam key is an NFT. But I can exchange it for access to something. What can I exchange a cryptocurrency NFT of an image for? Because I'm not exchanging it for the image.
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@Zecc thread.
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Makes sense.
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@Placeholder The real
right there:This means that they'd need the price of the NFT to raise from Ξ0.2 (mint price) to Ξ0.28 to break even on the gas they spent.
As the time of this writing, the price floor has skyrocketed to Ξ0.8 ETH. Netting them a theoretical profit of ~$600k 🤯
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@HardwareGeek we should have been so lucky.
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@Arantor said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@LaoC said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
If that determines value, does that value vanish when the artist dies so they can't carry on making music?
Did I say it determined value? No, that's just me trying to frame the fundamental basis of compensating artists in an environment where no compensation is apparently required, meaning that artists must have a hell of a time being artists.
I think we're talking about completely different things. I was just wondering:
@topspin said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@Medinoc said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Our attitude to NFT isn't anywhere near bounded to "I would not pay that much".
I would take the view that it's not about how much people pay for it, but about the price being zero vs. non-zero. Unlike paying "too much" for an expensive sports car or a piece of art, there is no price at all here that isn't too much.
It's not like I didn't agree, but I wonder why people think so.
and I just stuck to teasing out the answer to this question.
I don't know how the industry works in your part of the world. The only context I have is how it works elsewhere and you're telling me 'it doesn't work that way here' without ever trying to give me anything about how it does work so we can meaningfully incorporate that into the discussion.
In short, this feels like you're arguing in a way that is
worthy. Perhaps a moderator should move the debate there and I can then completely ignore it. But in the interim, let's continue.No, let's not. I didn't want to fight, much less because because I don't even disagree. I thought this was a very civil debate and I was just making a thought experiment to find out what makes you think NFTs are bullshit, but if it's coming across as trolling it's not worth going on. Sorry about that.
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@HardwareGeek said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
Did it break?
It's elastic and still jumping along.
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You know how crypto eliminates having to deal with banks and other intermediaries, not to mention avoids the prying eyes of the state? Yeah, the new infrastructure law kind of gets rid of all that...
My biggest problem with personally investing in cryptocurrencies has not been the arcane blockchain technology on which it is based nor the volatility of prices nor even some of the sketchy players that have popped up in the field.
I am kind of curious how they would enforce this. Even with cash.
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You know how crypto ... avoids the prying eyes of the state?
No, I don't, because it doesn't. A crypto wallet is only
anonymous, not actually anonymous. The state can find the real identity of the owner, and has done so in a number of criminal cases. His entire premise is faulty.That's not to say he's wrong that hiding this provision in a >1000-page, >$1T bill that is passed without anybody knowing what they're voting on is evil. But that's because passing such a bill is evil, regardless of the specific provisions in it. I have mixed feelings about this provision. I hate burdensome government red tape as much as anyone, but red tape that tangles not-really-money isn't entirely bad.
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@HardwareGeek said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
I hate burdensome government red tape as much as anyone, but red tape that tangles not-really-money isn't entirely bad.
Article said:
making "digital assets" subject to an old rule intended to combat money laundering by monitoring large cash transactions.
I'm not sure how that comes as a surprise to them. Their "cryptocurrency" will never work as a currency, but it does work as a digital asset used principally for crime and money laundering.
"You can't regulate us, we designed it to avoid being regulated like money while we advocate it as money!" doesn't make a lick of sense. What they're trying to do, money laundering, is exactly what regulations on cash where designed to prevent. They're trying to get around it with technical tricks, which probably works often enough, but now they're surprised and even outraged when their tricks get called out on.
Next thing I expect them to do is pay employees in bitcoin instead of dollars and then cry foul when that doesn't magically make them not pay taxes. "But we designed the system so we don't need to pay taxes!!1!" Yeah, that's not how it works.
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@Arantor said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
If I sell you a piece of paper that says “the person who holds this piece of paper owns the Mona Lisa”, I’m not selling you the Mona Lisa, I’m selling you a piece of paper, nothing more. It is not a thing of value being sold.
Except for the NFT metaphor, the only thing written on the paper are driving directions to the Louvre.
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@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
driving directions to the Louvre.
That's crazy. Nobody who isn't local enough to already know where it is should even consider driving in Paris.
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@HardwareGeek said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
@boomzilla said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
driving directions to the Louvre.
That's crazy. Nobody who isn't local enough to already know where it is should even consider driving in Paris.
Having been in smaller French cities, I'd expect it to be worse than other major cities.
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