pull down to refresh
100 sats \ 40 replies \ @quark 20 Aug 2023 \ on: I was a well-paid blockchain / web3 dev for years, but became disillusioned. bitcoin
There will be good and bad NFTs as everything in life. Don't feel bad. You always gain experience and the most important thing is your inner voice telling you what is the best to do. We can all change and evolve.
There will never be any good NFTs. They're 100% scam by definition, number hashes are not scarce and they can't be worth anything.
reply
That's a bit black and white. First of all, what do you think makes a thing "worth" something? Scarcity? I have a very exclusive fart coming up, should I go to the market..
Things are worth what people pay for them. Simple as that. Saying number hashes are not scarce also makes no sense in this context. In a smart contract — which cannot be modified after creation— if I write "upon payment, write payee down in list as Owner, IFF number of owners is less than 10000", then that is a scarce amount of ordinals, there can never be "owner #10001".
Finally, let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. NFTs have a lot of use cases besides "trying to fool speculators to buy this new updated monkey picture".
That said, im in no rush to bring them to bitcoin (or to use Ordinals). Yuck :)
reply
The dividend use case still doesn't justify NFTs. It depends on you paying other people, if you don't explicitly pay they don't get anything. So why pollute the chain with these contracts? Keep a regular Postgres database of people who bought your shares and spread the money among them, it worked for decades before and it still does. The value proposition isn't the scarcity of the shares themselves but the dividends that you promise to pay. I don't see why 1 share out of 10000 would still be valuable if you stop paying for whatever reason. Even if you burn 9990 shares and leave just 10, each one of them would be just as valuable as before (i.e., it would be not) despite the supply shrinking by 1000 times. No payments, no value.
There might be an argument that with blockchain they can trade without touching your database, in a decentralized fashion. It doesn't really hold because there are no real benefits (as I said above, the value comes from you paying them, not being able to trade the tokens) and the big downside is that it's much more expensive to store this data on a global database, because no one else cares about these shares except those 10000 people who bought them, but everyone has to store this data forever.
You can resort to assets like RGB or Taro if you absolutely need it for whatever reason, but in reality 1 local database per company is much better for the task because these payments fully depend on that one company (and as such the value is inherently centralized) and nobody else is interested in storing them. If, or rather when, the company disappears and these shares become worthless it's much better to drop the database and forget it ever happened, rather than download this sad story of a dead company every time you setup a new node and do an IBD. It doesn't apply to the regular bitcoin transactions because you absolutely need to verify all money to make sure you get paid with real bitcoin and not something conjured out of thin air or doublespent. So no other option but download and verify everything, you don't know in advance which UTXO will be used to pay you.
Other than that, see my other reply above. There are no real useful use cases, only scam, spam, and delusions.
reply
Apologies for this 2 week late reply, I was confused by what you wrote, confused by "the dividend use case" rebuttal, which seemed like a complete non-sequitur to my own text (which didn't specify any use cases at all, only saying "they exist").
But I reread your comment now and see that maybe the dividend-confusion arose because I wrote
Things are worth what people pay for them.
So I want to clarify this, I didn't mean anything like "NFTs have value only when their contracts include payments to the owners [or shareholders, as you call them]".
I meant the sentence completely literally: In the context of pricing, there is no such thing as intrinsic value. If I am willing to pay 5000 BTC for an NFT, then that NFT is worth 5000 BTC. The value of a thing, the price it "should" have, is exactly equal to what a free market sells it for. (this btw is the Austrian view of value).
But as I wrote in my original post, I don't believe the NFTs I made were worth what they were sold for, I valued them at ZERO DOLLARS. So I think we have agreement in this, at least :)
I've looked through your discussion with @dieselbaby and @notgeld as well. It doesn't look to me like you are arguing in bad faith (that's why I'm replying and trying to steel-man your case as best I can), so I'm not going to repeat their arguments (which I agree with completely).
I'm trying to understand why you are dead set against NFTs as a concept. What I'm thinking is, you don't like bitcoin Ordinals. Is that the root of it? They certainly pollute the bitcoin blockchain currently (increasing fees, and reducing the pseudonymity of the currency), I'm no fan. I think the bitcoin community will solve the problem though. It was good that the flaw was discovered.
I don't think you are against NFTs in general. For real. I mean, are you against receipts? Diplomas? These are tokens (i.e. "indications / signs that represent other things"). You can take your name off your diploma if you want to make it fungible. A physical US dollar bill is an NFT, since it has a unique serial number. But put it in a bank account and it becomes fungible. Just a number in a postgres database (or in this particular case, almost certainly it lands in a file on a mainframe running COBOL).
Do you agree with that? That tokens which are non fungible are not inherently bad (even though they might be for specifically Bitcoin)?
reply
I'm against all NFTs on blockchain because they simply don't work, same as shitcoins, same as PoS. You can say "but they do work" and it's only partially true, same as buying sand castles for candy wrappers works until a bully comes, stomps the castle and tears the wrappers. As I already said in that other branch, NFTs don't need decentralization. Feel free to store them in a database, replicate it between those interested in this shit and be happy. Polluting the decentralized timechain is a waste. Why should everyone store my receipt from a supermarket for eternity? For real, why? What's the reason? I bought some food, ate it, shat it, the receipt is now useless but it's still preserved in the most decentralized database for eternity. It's like shitting into that database directly.
Same about diplomas or anything you can come up with. This stuff only concerns a few people, I don't care about some Argentinian dude's diploma, for example, I will never meet him or employ him. Why should I waste my precious disk space and bandwidth on that? The dude dies, the diploma becomes useless and yet it's stored forever. Same about apartment ownership, the house is demolished, it's useless. The NFT hype goes down, the monkey is worthless.
Sats, on the opposite, will not become worthless because they're fungible. Any sat is as valuable as any else, so we need to verify all of them. Everyone is interested in every sat verification because we can freely exchange them and I can get those Argentinian dude's sats, sure I want to make sure they were created from the valid PoW and were not doublespent. See the difference now?
reply
See the difference between what? I do not understand you at all, and it doesn't seem like you are interested in trying to understand me.
I did my best to steelman your case, to consider the best possible thing you could be arguing. It is more interesting to understand others than it is to build a wall around your own view and shoot anyone who approaches.
Can you make an argument for using non-fungible tokens on blockchains? I can (and have) provided arguments for why Ordinals are bad news, why NFTs can be scams.
If you cannot do this, then you are not learning anything by writing long texts. What is the point of conversation if your starting point is that you have nothing to hear?
I disagree. I had a "good NFT", I am a fan of the band Avenged Sevenfold, and in the lead-up to the release of their latest album which came out earlier this summer, they had a big alternate reality game event that ran in a bunch of locations across the west coast of the US and online, where people could solve a bunch of sophisticated puzzles and riddles to find clues, which I was able to do and locate another clue inside of a park in downtown LA. Because of this, some other fans of the band gifted me one of their (the band's) "Deathbat's Club" NFTs, as a sign of appreciation I suppose.
While I absolutely agree that the vast majority of NFTs are cash grab scams and hideously ugly at that, these ones are something pretty different. For example, the people who have one not only get things like priority access to cut the line at concerts, you're able to buy tickets before anyone else guaranteed, there's special merchandise, meet and greets with the band themselves, a whole lot of stuff that appeals to people who are fans of the band. It's basically just a way of them keeping track of a fan club, more or less, in a digital way and making sure that the benefits of being in the fan club remain rare and contained to only the number of people who hold one of those NFTs.
So yeah, there are absolutely situations out there where they are not "100% scam by definition", and this is far from the only such situation. You don't have to like it or want to take part in it whatsoever, but that does not mean that it is a scam.
reply
Those don't need to be NFTs, a simple database is more than enough. One can argue that NFT is "on blockchain" forever while any regular database might be gone but in reality it doesn't matter. Because for NFT to be valuable (and not just any other contract or tx output) you need to prove to other people (buyers, apparently) that it's real, and it's not possible without external sources of truth that reside outside the blockchain. Such sources might be blog posts, websites, twitter accounts, notary verified e-mails and so on, but the blockchain, any of them, can not attest the NFT all by itself.
So the only purposes of NFT are:
- scamming other people
- polluting the block space
That's it. Any other use case is fragile at best and a delusion at worst, only works until you can convince the others to buy it from you, otherwise it instantly loses any value and becomes just a random number. Which it is.
reply
What do you say about people that see value in provision, i.e. confirmed ownership history?
reply
Ownership of what? You can only prove that you "own" a hash. The history doesn't have any value without, again, an external source of truth that somehow connects the addresses/keys with real persons. Otherwise you can fabricate whatever history you want just sending between your own addresses, and that's how NFTs gained perceived value for the pump&dump scheme.
reply
The simplest argument here is about bytes stored onchain. But it is not really an object which has value but the mere substance of it originality. All copies which may be put later onchain will be just copies that are younger and not original. Imagine that any sculpture occupies some space, now digital art occupies some specific time interval in the past.
Blockchain itself is the history and I do not talk about whatever external history you mean.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how public/private key cryptography works if your comment above is any indication.
You can absolutely prove that you own a hash, it's deterministically generated as a result of the interaction between your key and the contract with which the token is from.
(edit: I jumped the gun a bit and misread your comment above as saying that you could not prove that you "own" a hash, so my bad...but my comment below still stands as it is accurate regardless. The external source of truth you speak of IS the blockchain. The same way that it works on bitcoin....just because you're sending NFTs which can contain any kind of arbitrary data within them doesn't make it any different than people sending sats to one another. Same goes for people inscribing ordinals on bitcoin, too. Fundamentally the same thing, at it's core.)
Also, you ignored the very real use case I gave earlier (because it doesn't suit your narrative that NFTs are all 100% scams, which is bullshit). Sure, you could use a database instead of having the fan club membership I spoke of function as NFTs. But in doing so, you'd miss out on the following features:
-
Token gating for access to their Discord server, a special website, ticketing purchases access (all of this with numerous levels of complexity beyond what you'd find in a standard database)
-
The ability for people to freely transact their membership pass (NFT) by listing it for sale or purchasing it on a secondary marketplace, at any time. If that right there doesn't align with the ethos of decentralization and self-ownership that many bitcoiners have embraced and constantly champion to others, I don't know what would...
Your comment about it being a "pump and dump scheme" is moot, as this is a world-famous band who have sold millions of albums, and plays sold-out arena tours all over the globe with bands like Metallica...they're certainly not hurting for cash and the value (though such a thing is subjective, of course) that the fans who hold said memberships is gained via a one-time payment.
You seem to want to be getting deep into the weeds and having some weird conversation about what denotes value or what constitutes ownership of something...there is absolutely nothing that is required to confirm that you own the membership pass (or any other NFT for that matter) aside from a computer with the right software and an internet connection.
The external oracle is needed not to confirm the ownership of the hash. It's needed to confirm that the original data (that is hashed) is the genuine first copy that the company or artist or anyone else created and that they did it first. As I explained before there are many tricks to create an NFT that's a copy of some earlier one but you can't verify it because it was slightly modified. For example, I want to sell you an NFT with a hash 9ebca060d1a1ef4544e33738f868c1fe1819737d50e9c43a95f3d2d4951cdda6. I show you an image that, indeed, hashes to this number. Since you assume you don't need any external oracles, you buy it and we part ways. Later you find out (from your friend) that the actual NFT you wanted to buy has a hash of 6d6e6a030355c851f7520e1a563ea3c75647a4f036ac18846fc27f2001cc7cc8 and it's one pixel different from what I sold you, it was also issued 1 block earlier. See the problem now?
reply