“Imagine if you gave up on the Internet in 2000”. This again.
This is how distorted people’s perceptions become when they live their whole life in echo chambers.
Leaving the obvious aside, It genuinely seems like a lot of those still pushing this are utterly unaware of the harms their whole mess has caused.
Also, they’ve made it way harder to teach non-techies how to stay safe online in the future by co-opting the term “crypto”. They immediately think any use of the term crypto is related to this stuff. Your Digital ponzi scam != cryptography.
The worst part is how the public now thinks if you’re involved in software you must be a massive believer in cc/NFTs because they keep hearing about it so all techies must think it’s awesome, right!?
I agree with your general point, but suggesting non-techies should learn about cryptography in order to stay safe online is pretty ridiculous; if people need an understanding of cryto to be safe we might as well switch the Internet off.
And that's how you get people that think that every website starting with "https" is secure and legit, even though it's trivial for malicious sites to use TLS.
Fundamental cryptographic primitives (encryption, signatures,...) don't require any advanced math to understand if you don't go into the concrete instantiations. The technical community should really try to better teach these concepts to the general public as we move further into the digital age.
I think people need to understand what's protected. Something like "https guarantees that your are connected to the website displayed in the address bar and that no one can see the content of the communication"
It's important because for example it makes it clearer why they should still check the url in the address bar (and not get phished) or that the communication with the website itself is not hidden (only the content is), etc.
what do you think you're teaching, then? Just general good practices?
A teen can be told and taught to wear a condom without explanation of the virology and biology behind the things that it helps to avoid -- similarly Grandma can learn the importance behind https without memorizing the cypher suites; it's still an aspect of cryptography.
The important point is that TLS is referred to as crypto in some cases, and I believe that's what the GGP was referring to. Were I writing an expository piece, sure, I might use different language, but that's not really what my reply was about.
To give another example where this comes up: keeping backups of your data is prudent. Encrypting those backups is a good idea in a lot of cases to protect your data in case of device theft. While most modern systems make this as simple as possible for the casual user it still helps the user to have a basic understanding of what’s actually going on and the implications.
If it were up to me every person with access to a computer where other people's personal or financial data is handled should be required to get a security certification stating they have a basic understanding of digital signatures, certificates, HTTPS, encryption and how to protect against common threats (phishing, social engineering). If people can't do that they might as well go back to typewriters and FAX machines.
In banks (and similarly regulated institutions) there's mandatory security training to educate employees. Sadly, in my experience, this "training" is essentially like those kids rides at an amusement park where you're stuck in a trolly till the end – it's slow and mostly tedious but sometimes there's one bit of trivia that might delight. In the end, there's a very simple multiple choice test that is worded to make it more or less obvious what the correct answers are. If you do get it wrong you get infinite retries and there are only so many questions...
I'd love to see mandatory education in basic cryptography and such, but in reality I'd assume that even that would end up being security theater for the sake of ticking a box on the compliance score sheet.
This sounds like the OSHA 10 class I recently had to do. I think the issue here is that if a business wants workers it is incentivized to make the tests as easy as possible, not to make sure their employees know what they’re doing.
Agreed. On top of that, everyone who owns a car should be required to learn how to change their serpentine belts, oil, replace spark plugs, and alternator. They should be required to sign a paper saying they will change their tires with a spare on the side of the road and carry a jump starter with them at all times. The roads would be a safer place if people knew what was going on inside their cars and how to operate them.
> I agree with your general point, but suggesting non-techies should learn about cryptography in order to stay safe online is pretty ridiculous
I think it's about understanding concepts and uses, not the inner workings. As an example, Glenn Greenwald (despite being a reporter handling sensitive topics) didn't know how to use encryption when he was contacted by Snowden, and learned it later. [1]
I think it would be very useful if the general public could use encryption to the same level they drive cars.
Well yeah, there was a time when the title song for the Flintstones could contain the verse "we'll have a gay old time" without anyone questioning Fred and Barney's sexual orientation. Those times are gone too...
Come on, I'm sure that before bitcoin was invented, no one used the term "crypto" to refer to "cryptography"; doing that would be more cringy than this article itself.
Cybersecurity is also much more accurate description of the skills/work required to stay safe online.
Most computers are not compromised because of flaws in cryptography or the application thereof, they are compromised because of operational security (opening suspicious email attachments, reusing passwords, running systems with default admin passwords, etc). These things have little to do with cryptography and are much better understood as "cybersecurity".
> The worst part is how the public now thinks if you’re involved in software you must be a massive believer in cc/NFTs because they keep hearing about it so all techies must think it’s awesome, right!?
This used to be the case about a year ago, now I see the trend shifting towards AI.
Nah, they go too far in hating it beyond the bounds of actual reality. I hate cryptocurrency as much as the next guy, but I got banned from that sub for pointing out that credit card transactions don't actually settle instantly and chargebacks exist.
Every tech friend I know is deeply cynical about NFTs and pretty much everything else now because anything that happens is immediately turned into some sort of grift by ravenous capitalists.
Most of all my tech friends are skeptical about most things we encounter in life. We're just naturally curious and ask questions to learn more. Asking questions about NFTs and the benefits of cryptocurrencies has led to a consensus of it being mostly pointless in the case of NFTs or a way to skirt around regulations in the case of cryptocurrencies.
The people I've found that have embraced NFTs and altcoins are the ones that are much more focused on business and making money rather than the tech under it all.
Sorry but HN is just too biased against anything blockchain-related.
There are tons of reasons to use Web3. You typically do so when you want a community to manage some value without trusting a middleman. Here are a lot of examples: https://intercoin.org/applications
I don't find most of those persuasive, and the couple that would actually benefit from the blockchain are niche applications that most people would never use.
I worked at Facebook in 2021, and NFTs were like a honeypot for the most useless managers.
If I were Zuck, I might start another crypto project next year and ask for volunteers because it seems like a pretty good way to extract the worst performers into a neat org chart box that can be shut down without breaking anything else.
Anecdotally, as someone trying to hire, the vast majority of candidates with Web3/NFT or whatever on their resume can't pass our phone screen. It's a pretty good selector for finding better talent.
John Carmack publicly criticized the intentional pursuit of "the metaverse" at Meta while he was employed at Meta.
"I have been pretty actively arguing against every single metaverse effort that we have tried to spin up internally in the company from even pre-acquisition times."
This could be a symptom of Facebook and not software as a whole. I mean, you could say the same thing about what’s happening in AI and large corporations. Same for IoT etc.
NFTs: the thing nobody needed, let alone wanted, but which proved to be a sufficiently effective money laundering (sorry, "speculative") instrument that we all had to have it shoved down our throats for the better part of a year anyway.
Its a good idea to handle ownership of finite digital assets. Imagine buying a song or video game online, and then being able to sell it or give it to a friend later, without having to go through a central authority (and not be breaking copyright law). Just like with a CD.
Unfortunately, 99% of NFT projects have been essentially penny stock schemes, so now that's what everyone thinks of them as.
That's a nice oxymoron you have there. Digital assets are not "finite" or scarce, that's their biggest strength: that they can be copied and shared infinitely. I know that some people hate that, and would love to change it (see DRM). But to hell with that.
That's not true at all. Any deed of ownership can be finite, especially if they refer to a physical object where there is a natural limit on the number of owners. Just because you can make infinite copies of the document, doesn't mean the legal system allows you to do that.
And there we end up relying on a legal system again to verify the asset and we're back to square one. If my NFT needs to be verified when I sell it, which it will, because there will be fakes, then we still need a third party.
But why cram a finite-based system into a non-finite universe ? What's the point ? Haven't we understood that private property and ownership are not, in fact, better than sharing and common usage ? The digital world allows us to actually touch this, and we still import artificial restrictions that only benefit those who already have ?
You talk about consumers who buy a usage-license. But someone must create those content first, and holds the ownership on them. Which is usually the creator, or publisher, or someone who bought the ownership. And there are usually proof of this ownership, like contracts and such.
Even if ownership of digital assets or false scarcity were good ideas, NFTs never did any of this.
The spec was technically amateurish — basically just URLs in a bit of JSON in a slow database, with barely any connection to the asset. NFTs allowed regular non-IPFS URLs without any checksum, which allowed HTTP servers to change the asset at any time! And they had absolutely no uniqueness checks, allowing automating piracy!
You could literally copy an image, and make a new token for it, and there was no way to decide which token was the true one for any given image, except maybe if you trusted some central authority, haha.
> Imagine buying a song or video game online, and then being able to sell it or give it to a friend later, without having to go through a central authority (and not be breaking copyright law).
I don't have to imagine it. That's the reality right now without NFTs in the mix.
You would need a central authority (the copyright holder) to maintain a list of legitimate NFTs. However, you would not need to get their permission whenever you want to sell them.
How do you plan to sell some digital artifact is you either a) don't have a right do this, or b) have a right but the medium (NFT and blockchain) doesn't support transfer of the IP rights in any form? You would need the central authority to track IP rights and ownership in the centralised DB and which point why use NFTs in the first place?
> You would need the central authority to track IP rights and ownership in the centralised DB and which point why use NFTs in the first place?
You wouldn't need a single central authority, you could have multiple certifying agencies who would have their own reputation. Similar to how there are multiple ratings agencies that can certify a bond as AAA, or multiple art curators who can certify a painting as genuine, or different comic book graders.
The number of centralised authorities doesn't change the core problem in my question - how do you sell anything with attached IP rights when NFT infrastructure doesn't support this operation?
The NFT infrastructure supports buying and selling tokens. Attaching IP rights to that token can be done through the legal system, and third party agencies could attest on the blockchain that they believe the token has such a legal structure in place and properly set up (e.g. that the legitimate rightsholder has signed the release/deed/what-have-you in question).
> Oh, how cool, I didn't know that NFTs had a field called "legal system" inside. You probably pack those pesky IP rights into megawumbo package, and pass it to the Rockewell Turbo Encabulator which neatly packs them into just seven bytes.
You do it the other way round; the token is a token, you would set up a deed or a trust or what have you that associates whatever rights you want to with that token.
> The bullshit you are describing is called a centralised system and NFTs are completely not needed for it's functioning.
True enough. But there are things that the current system handles badly, and it's not great at transferring things quickly or internationally.
> That "legal system" will need to have a centralised DB and store ALL information inside it to verify real ownership.
The previous owner would need to set it up so that ownership irrevocably rested with the token bearer. But that's doable. (I'm not saying it's wise, but it's doable)
> Imagine buying a song or video game online, and then being able to sell it or give it to a friend later, without having to go through a central authority
If I made $1M of bitcoin proceeds-of-crime and I put it through a coin tumbler then cash out, it can't be directly linked to the crime - but I also can't explain where the money came from.
On the other hand, if my legitimate account creates some shitty digital art and auctions it, then my proceeds-of-crime account buys it, I get slightly less money (auction fees etc) but a good explanation of where I got the money from: I'm an artist, you don't understand my work because you're a dumbass.
Of course, there are plenty of other ways to launder money - feed the proceeds of crime through a fixed-odds betting terminal and I'm just a lucky gambler. Anonymously buy fine art with a suitcase full of cash, then resell it as something I found in grandpa's attic. Sue my own anonymous tax-haven company, and report a big payment as an out-of-court settlement. And so on.
The price is more flexible. Any given coin pair is worth a certain exchange rate at a certain time, and an investigating entity could analyse historic coin prices, compare to the amounts exchanged as recorded on the blockchain, and deduce the actual value gained or lost.
With NFTs, each one is valued independently and the price is what you and someone-who-definitely-isn't-you-wink-wink traded it for most recently.
You can sell them to yourself (at arm's length, using separate entities) to establish a price, and then sell them to yourself again (using a different entity) to take the profit and launder the money. Crypto may be manipulated, but you can't just set an arbitrary price equal to the amount of money you need to launder.
The tech isn’t going anywhere. Perhaps the speculative bubble over gif NFT’s is behind us but I guarantee there will be uses for unique on-chain tokens for a long time to come.
When people say "good riddance" they don't expect all NFT code to vanish from existence.
They're just saying that it will be tucked into its own dusty corner of tech history, to be forgotten by the masses and especially by tech professionals.
I've got no illusions about NFTs, but I also think they're perpendicular to the real takeaway from this article: Instagram yet again tried to ape a competitor's (in this case Twitter's) feature, yet again did not check whether any of their users wanted it, and yet again shuttered it after wasting a lot of time, money, and goodwill. I am starting to wonder if it is Facebook's dumping ground for features that they don't want to test-in-prod on Facebook actual.
Totally agree, single projects on Blur have $3 million in 1D volume and a floor price above $100k (at time of writing, 66 eth), the copycat markets were a little silly to think they would catch the spillover of the popularity of the platforms that started it just because they made the same thing on their side of the fence. It's a shame that it was a feeding frenzy for scammers, it's just another protocol when you look under the hood [0]
Especially if they dont market to fraudsters and money launderers but to normal people who already pirate movies and wont start paying for monkey jpeg.
It's amazing the feeling of "what the hell is going on with all this apparently credulous attention being paid to a total nonsense" that one feels watching this stuff happen in real time.
It was always screamingly obviously a scam/sham/whatever, yet it was lapped up. Unreal. Critical faculties chucked enthusiastically out of the window, including by people and companies that should've known far better. And I appreciate there was of course some cynical deliberate bandwagon jumping, but still.
"I don't understand the first thing about what's going on with all this but smart people seem excited so what could go wrong" is a horrific basis for anything involving money and possible consequent loss of huge amounts of it!
If there is a future for crypto it is in the cyberpunk/pirate zone. The idea the institutional investors thought they could make a buck off all these folks is hilarious. Even in their delusional unrealized apotheosis the crypto/web3 crowd was building the anti Facebook. I think all the web3 investment was horrible BS and crypto is not a place for venture investing. If it has a future at all it should embrace the drug dealing ponzi scheming tax evading ransomwaring heart of itself. It’s not chase bank, it’s the Medellin cartel.
There were Gamestop true believers for Christ's sake, who knew they bought in high and would probably not get out before it crashes, but still let themselves convinced their disposable income that month was worth the price of sticking it to the man.
It was a fun time though, and watching hedge funds lose billions of dollars in value definitely was worth the 100$. The way I see it, the fun went on for months, way better entertainment value than movie tickets in that time. And I still have some GME and AMC to remember that glorious time.
If the value was real to you there is no arguing, likewise i spend more on inputs to grow tomatoes every year than the market value of what I get out, for similar reason. but I'm sure you are aware someone that repeated the line about sticking it to the man is still laughing about you believing it and getting left holding the bag.
Not only that but that's a big market too. Drugs are like what, a $2 Trillion/year economy? Tax evasion? A few trillions? Money laundering and scam? Another Trillion?
That's trillions of $$ transacted and in value. Will put Bitcoin price at $250-$400 Thousands of dollars.
Dollar for dollar, institutional LPs have lost way more on crypto than they have made. Multicoin is down 90%, rumor is the 2nd A16Z crypto fund (the 6b one) is deep in the red and a full write off
The pirate zone is very much against private property and ownership, it is probably the last place crypto will work. Cyberpunk is the denunciation of the ravages capitalism does, I don't think you will sell them NFTs in the next 1000 years.
The future of crypto is much more boring. It’s in the accounting world. It’s in AP/AR. It’s the backbone between accounting systems at different firms transacting with each other, who are collaborative but also trying to make money from each other. Think contractors and subcontractor.
Instead of double entry accounting, where each firm keeps a separate ledger for a project, they can all transact off one record of truth.
That kind of paradigm change won’t happen until oracle and sap etc agree on standards and interoperability. Give it another 40-50 years to displace current databases.
NFTs to me felt from the start like stereoscopic film: Sure technologically it has some interesting aspects, but I couldn't really see how the results are worth the extra effort. And anybody kept telling me it is the future.
That being said, with NFTs I have never met any truly technologically knowledgeable person who could explain me in detail why it solves the problems it (wrongfully) claimed to solve.
The killer app of Ethereum already exists, and it is the set of standards being built on it that allow you to easily interoperate with other financial applications. NFTs are basically what the name implies, whereas "tokens" represent something fungible (e.g. stocks in a company), NFTs are a new standard (ERC721 or others) for representing non-fungible digital goods (deeds for houses, collectibles, game assets, etc.).
Suppose I'm a small indie game studio. I create a game, and this game has skins for characters, weapons, what have you. I want to build a real money economy around these assets, but don't have the manpower to deal with payment processors, build a marketplace, etc. My company could just represent the skins as ERC721 tokens and instantly have access to the wealth of infrastructure that already supports the ERC721 standard. People can buy and sell on a marketplace of their choosing (Opensea, Blur, etc.), they can manage their assets using a wallet of their choice (Metamask, Rainbow, Frame, Coinbase Wallet, etc.).
This is just one example, but can be applied to literally any non-fungible asset that be represented digitally. And although the application I mentioned is primarily a financial one (because Ethereum is the internet of finance), there are certainly non-financial use cases for having a fully interoperable, decentralized representation of a digital good.
It's important to understand that NFTs didn't invent digital scarcity. This is an idea that's existed for a long time. Downloading a song I have to pay for, League of Legends issuing a limited edition skin, even the notion of a privileged role on a website (e.g. moderator) implies some sort of digital scarcity. People value having status, people value having scarce things, NFTs didn't invent that idea, they just make it much easier to represent these things in a very standard way and plug into mechanisms that allow for price discovery of these things (which I repeat, already are deemed to have value, but have extremely high friction to trade).
Maybe you don't understand because you aren't a digital native. I grew up playing World of Warcraft, and even from a young age I understood the power of having something other people didn't have. When I saw other players with their Naxxramas gear and I'm sitting there in normal Uncommons, it implied a difference of status. There was value in getting this gear because it made you feel special and important, or part of a certain community. The entire premise of the game revolves around the idea of scarcity (people have to work to get the best gear). If people had the best gear from the start, they wouldn't show up to raid every week, they wouldn't spend hours and hours farming materials or gold. That's digital scarcity, it's always existed.
> "I want to build a real money economy around these assets"
It's not a real money economy when you're asking your customers to first convert their money to crypto magic beans. Dealing with crypto exchanges has been shown to be a great way to put your money into scammers' pockets. Customers will blame you when that happens.
If you want to sell skins, why not let customers pay with real money via Stripe or another payment API? It's certainly a much easier integration task than reconciling your game database with the Ethereum state of those assets, and the end-user UX is lightyears better so you'll probably sell a lot more skins.
This Instagram NFT shutdown demonstrates again that the mainstream has no appetite for crypto despite the breathless claims of the past ten years.
"why not let customers pay with real money via Stripe or another payment API"
Because stripe takes a massive cut?
"the end-user UX is lightyears better so you'll probably sell a lot more skins"
for now
"This Instagram NFT shutdown demonstrates again that the mainstream has no appetite for crypto despite the breathless claims of the past ten years."
Everybody in the community already knew this. Like you've said, the UX isn't there yet. That's obvious to anyone that is in the space. Nobody was sitting here applauding Meta for their obvious bandwagoning onto the latest thing. Maybe if they actually wanted people to adopt NFTs they should work on improving the UX or build some fucking infrastructure instead of just leeching off the community trying to make a buck. If you want people to display their art as NFTs on instagram, then create an Oculus App that's a virtual art gallery, allow people to display their instagram NFTs in that gallery. Interface with other technologies that already exist in the space. Use your billions and billions of dollars to make the experience better for everyone. They didn't even fucking attempt to build anything.
Stripe's cut is less than what the ETH-USD rate can move in a single day.
With crypto prices trending down, your game skin business is probably going to lose more money just to the crypto exchange rate than they'd pay out to Stripe... And meanwhile you didn't get any of the convenience of using Stripe, so your revenue is probably a lot smaller because your players just aren't using the feature.
What you said about price action is basically completely wrong, but regardless it's not like you're forced to pay in ETH. Any asset can be represented digitally.
I bought an NFT last year so I could understand how they worked in practice. It was an absolute ballache - it took me over an hour or so to get everything set up and I had to throw good money after bad to cover gas fees which were only revealed after I'd converted my real money into eth. In the end I think I spent a similar amount or even more on fees than the NFT itself cost. The gas fees certainly cost way more than normal card processing fees would have been for a transaction of that size.
2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction, sure, but after that you have actual fiat money that you can use to pay salaries and suppliers.
Ethereum isn't free, either. You gas fees, withdrawal fees, and the volatility in selling. Probably comes out to a little less in total, but is a 0.5% saving worth adding all that attrition to your sales process?
Ethereum isn't free, but L2s and L3s will cost cents or even fractions of cents. 2.9% + 30 cents per tx is a MASSIVE amount. Consider that a profit margin of 10% is considered good for a business.
I'm old enough to remember Microsoft points for Xbox live.
People want to pay in their local currency with their local bank account not jump through shady hoops. I want to play videogames not chat with little girls in the Philippines.
Microsoft Points were a dark pattern to obscure the actual cost of games and to leave customers with partially-depleted point counts. They're not a good thing to look back at. Microsoft wisely stopped their use about a decade ago, and Xbox purchases are done in fiat currency instead.
I don't see how any of this is better using NFT. You have had digital tokens for a very long time without Blockchain. If I make a game with skins I have 2 possibilities: the first one is to only use the in game money system (no real money) at which point there is no point using Blockchain, or use real money to buy skins, at which point I will also have to implement refunds, KYC, reverting transactions, because that is always needed in the real world, and there the convenience of an NFT just disappears.
NFT seems only useful if there is a zero trust situation and irreversibility is wanted, but I see nearly no situation where this is the case.
All of those things you mentioned can probably be solved with Account Abstraction and Application Specific Rollups. These technologies are still in the early stages but are moving along. Not trying to attack, but like a lot of people here, it seems that most people's understanding of Blockchains is stuck in like 2014. There are levels of trustlessness, and levels of irreversibility. None of the things I mentioned (when fully implemented) are going to be happening on the main Ethereum chain.
???? I'm not sure what you're implying but look up the idea of the modular blockchain and educate yourself. Ethereum won't be the main execution layer for most transactions.
> Ethereum won't be the main execution layer for most transactions.
Then there's no need for Ethereum.
I mean, knock yourself out, and build your tower of Babel where every next layer is an increasingly complex patchwork of workarounds, but don't pretend that this is somehow good, great, fats, amazing, better than grilled cheese etc.
NFTs are a new standard (ERC721 or others) for representing non-fungible digital goods (deeds for houses, collectibles, game assets, etc.).
One look at this line and all further delusional house of cards falls down. There are no technical possibilities for NFTs to represent anything, it is technically impossible for current chains. There are only two exceptions - punk pixel art because they live fully on chain, and ENS records which are somewhat useful but only inside tokenbro industry.
> My company could just represent the skins as ERC721 tokens and instantly have access to the wealth of infrastructure that already supports the ERC721 standard. People can buy and sell on a marketplace of their choosing (Opensea, Blur, etc.), they can manage their assets using a wallet of their choice (Metamask, Rainbow, Frame, Coinbase Wallet, etc.).
But doing all the work to integrate ERC721 into your game might take the same time (or more) than a simple centralized payment system (not to mention that transacting these ERCshits is costly, more than 5USD per trade most of the time). So why bother?
Most L2 developer experience is pretty easy nowadays. I would say a lot easier than Apple app development & distribution experience, for example. L2 fees are a fraction of the cost of industry standard payment processors.
The DX can continue to get better, but that’s not what is holding game devs back from choosing an L2.
What L2 are you talking about? If lightning, I agree. But that doesn't support NFTs.
If another, which one? Take in account that L2s are based on a network of channels. You can only transfer value atomically among a network of channels if the tokens being transferred across the channels are fungible, otherwise what you transfer from Alice to Bob is not the same than what you transfer from Bob to Carol.
Most Ethereum L2s (rollups) follow similar patterns; once you learn how to build on one with tools like Hardhat + Alchemy/Infura + Solidity, you can easily transfer these skills to other L2s. zkSync, Scroll, Optimism, Arbitrum. Most of these aim to be EVM compatible, so NFTs and other contracts can be built on them.
So the only thing that nft solves is game designers not having to build their market. That does not solve anything for the player. If anything, it exposes the player to a complete loss of his asset, due to mistake or theft. No value in that at all.
I bought a bunch of skins in League of Legends. I no longer play the game. As a former player, I would love if I could sell those skins on the open market.
Many times while playing the game, I changed my main character, but had skins for other characters I no longer played (maybe they got nerfed or something). It would be great if I could exchange those skins for other skins of equal value for the character I switched to.
Yes, the company itself could implement all these different features, but at that point you're re-inventing the wheel. We have a set of standards regarding digital assets, and the technology already exists to do the things I mentioned seamlessly. The only thing the company needs to do is implement their assets as part of that (ERC721) standard.
We don't need NFTs for that, though. We could have an old fashioned Web 2.0 site for a digital skin marketplace. We could have SDKs for game devs that allow them to integrate with it.
The NFT spec doesn't even guarantee the basics of what it needs to support.
How hard can it be to keep a many-to-many mapping between account ids and skin ids, and then make a way to transfer those between accounts, potentially for some fee? Steam has had it for a decade without any issues.
The game publisher still has the final authority on whether a skin is displayed in game or not, and no blockchain is going to change that.
The reason Riot doesn't do this is that it would reduce profits. If they would make more money otherwise, they would be doing that already.
I am still regularly contacted by recruiters trying to peddle Web3/NFT startup jobs - how are these companies still existing and how are they making money?
IMO, some investors are just slower in recognizing a scam. I know a few Web3 people that are still raising funds - it might be harder, but still happening. Some investors know very little about technology and are buying into the big promises of this new (now old) religion.
To make it clear, this doesn't mean that these companies are actually _making_ money.
Most artists using NFTs for revenue are not using IG, so are unaffected by this news. NFT is in many ways anti-Meta, just buy/sell/mint directly with your wallet.
It is now dead in the water in any app, unfortunately. Apple charges 30% fee on all in-app NFT sales, and on top of that Apple ToS strictly prohibits any “functional” use of NFT tech in their apps.[1] As you’d expect, NFT markets have moved to web in general, outside of app space.
Recently https://tychomusic.com/ released some old vinyl record as digital music for the first time.
You'd think a market place like https://bandcamp.com/ would make this a trivial event: create the release, set the release date, let people pay, once the release date hits everyone downloads a ZIP with some FLAC files and a JPEG cover.
Instead, this was an "NFT" release: took 15 tries (and several credit card charges) to "reserve" my spot. My purchase is now on some confusing website with random ID's all over the place, and I need to "mint" a "ticket" to log into it.
If ever there was a solution in search of a problem, NFT's are it.
Maybe there was some special badge or indicator that showed up before but has now disappeared since Instagram got rid of the feature.
I don't use Instagram either but a Google image search shows a "digital collectible" checkmark in the bottom left corner. I hope this wasn't the whole thing as I don't see what would stop you from putting this checkmark into the image.
Was also wondering the same thing, but it seems to only show up in-app. If you're not a user and just viewing on the web I don't think you see anything.
And yes it says "Digital Collectible" and the image animates back and forth in a partial spin before settling into place.
It's just token ownership. What ties tokens to actual physical assets is the institutional framework of laws, contracts, courts and law enforcement. Not a glorified pointer in a glorified ledger.
Common problem for many corporations, especially in times like these. They basically put it on life support the moment it is released so it never has a shot
the crypto tech cycle was one of the stupidest things a bunch of supposedly smart people bought hook line and sinker in a REALLY long time. The sweaty FOMO was incredibly real for something that never withstood an even cursory amount of scrutiny.
NFTs didn't hold up to even the smallest amount of scrutiny. You'd have people say we will all be trading land as NFTs but can't answer what happens when hackers steal your land NFT. Obviously it makes no sense for the police and government to respect the stolen NFT but there is also no mechanism for correcting this mistake so the blockchain is now out of sync with reality.
And in the end, people care about reality a lot more than they do about blockchain data.
So you're telling me that this thing is going to have value because of artificial scarcity... but anyone can create their own new NFT (including one that links to the exact same image) at any time?
Oh, and many of the people involved are going to stay anonymous, and attempting to prove the authenticity of one of these things by deferring to off-chain authorities goes against the intended spirit of the entire thing.
There was a joke "It's obvious now in hindsight that NFTs are a scam, but to be fair, it was also obvious before, and in the middle too"
I'm not sure anyone at any point thought they were legit, it was crypto chuds hyping their next scam, and the media willing to join in for extra clicks. The real losers were the the ones who bought in thinking they would find a greater fool to off load their magic beans to later.
I think the media went bananas with NFTs because images are clickbait and NFTs are primarily a way of trading images. NFTs allowed news organizations to write a bunch of both positive and negative articles about cryptocurrency and include unique images. Entire narratives could be created and gained traction based on who the artist was and "why we do (or don't) like them". Previous articles about the weird cryptocurrency thing didn't have images or only had the same tired Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. logos or Getty stock images.
In an "art market" context it makes sense. I can print a copy of Warhol's Campbell Soup labels, but that doesn't devalue the original, nor is my copy as valuable as the original.
It's not about copying the pixels, it's about showing provenance.
But surely, the thing that makes Warhol's soup cans more valuable than a copy is the fact that Warhol (or his studio, anyway) actually touched the original. Being able to show provenance isn't what makes it valuable, it only shows that the particular thing in question is the valuable one.
I can paint something right now and show provenance for it, but that won't make my childish scrawl valuable.
The problem with electronic art is that there's nothing special about the original over copies in this sense. You can't hold it and know that you're holding the very thing that the artist was working on.
And the fact that a painting is not reproducible. The best you can get is close to the original, but it will still be different because its the real world. Copies of digital assets are exact replicas. Thus, the only real value is, as you say, provenance, but I think much fewer people care about that than we all seem to think.
The thing is though, no one cares about digital signatures. Tech bros can't even be bothered checking signatures for ISOs they are about to deploy to production. You think normies are going to check the NFT metadata, track down the original sale, find the artists public key and validate its legit so they can think "Oh no this NFT is a clone, I will now revoke my enjoyment of this picture"
Most of our interaction with digital signatures is indeed transparent.
You are viewing a website right now with a certificate stating this is news.ycombinator.com signed by someone in your OS trust store.
I can just make a certificate saying a different website is news.ycombinator.com. What I can’t do (hopefully) is get it signed. You will have a very different UX when I do this.
Even though I can easily make an unsigned document, the digital signature in the certificate still has value, just like the NFT.
You can’t automate checking NFT certificates because they are all “real” and valid NFTs. The fact that the one you have wasn’t signed by the person who created the picture isn’t something cryptographically or even technically possible.
I worked for a company that made NFT character skins for their games; of course when the game checked your wallet for game skins, it only looked for NFTs that were signed by the game company. As you said, impossible to clone or forge.
Of course anyone could (and did) clone the ARTWORK associated with the NFT and create fake/pirate NFTs; but they had no in-game value. That's still a problem for players who might get duped by the fakes though.
In the end, though, using the blockchain didn't enable any functionality for the users that couldn't have been accomplished using a plain database of ownership. In theory the blockchain would grant some permanence to the asset, but once the game company shut down the market value of the asset cratered anyway.
No one is talking about this because it doesn't matter. If there is a centrally trusted and approve key, then blockchains and NFTs add nothing. When there is no centrally trusted key, then clones are trivial.
NFTs are simply crypto scammers trying to find a problem to their solution they have.
There are many non centralised cryptosystems including PGP and Signal. It’s potty hard to convince someone you own a fake beeple. On the internet there’s token gating, in person it’s going to look weird when you pull out Apple/Google photos instead of a wallet app.
Or that the average person would care about these internal details beyond their understanding. Sure, you can't copy an NFT with the creators signature, but the average user has no idea how to validate this let alone even cares to validate your shitty profile pic isn't a clone.
Personally I think the only one that really makes sense is Monero - and thats only becuse it has a solid use case (and is being used a TON). And interestingly enough its not really used as a speculative currency (the price is not nearly as volatile - meaning you will probably never get rich form it either).
NFT's I think potentially had SOME initial interesting tech (mainly the early talk about being able to track photo copyright for photographers for example) but quickly evolved into the crypto BS investment crap.
> the crypto tech cycle was one of the stupidest things
Same was said for the user-generated content that lived in the community forums on the fringes of the web back in 2000s. Big sites and 6-figure columnists even suggested that these were 'littering' the Internet.
15 years later, content is user-generated, and now there is even something that is called the 'creator economy'. And even those 6-figure, out-of-touch elite columnists who derided it are jumping on the bandwagon.
...
Crypto is a technology. It does things. We observe that it is able to do things and it works. Its just missing a widescale use-case. The moment someone finds that use-case, it will explode like how the actual web exploded back then. Solely the DAO concept is revolutionary by itself, enabling large-scale, democratic economic organization for the masses, which was not possible or difficult and totally non-transparent before. That a few people here and there used it for dumb reasons or failed in accomplishing various objectives like buying the constitution etc does not change what potential DAOs provide.
Of course, there is also the problem of crypto space and all the features and applications within them being WAY too out of the average user's league in terms of user friendliness. Just like how it required knowing what a 'forum' was, knowing how to 'register', and then even knowing the right people who could refer you to the forum so that the administration would approve your membership back in early 2000s.
> The moment someone finds that use-case, it will explode
True, but it's entirely possible that such a use case will never materialize. People haven't even been able think of plausible theoretical ones except in niche applications. That's not to say none are possible, but they're hiding pretty well.
My personal hypothesis is that the interesting tech in crypto will eventually find a real, solid use -- but it won't be one resembling what anyone thinks, and won't be sexy.
> True, but it's entirely possible that such a use case will never materialize
Hard disagree. DAOs already exist, for example, and they are widely used even if the phenomenon is unknown to who doesnt have an interest in it or who is not technical enough. They are still way too technical for the average user, and even solely this use case could easily explode the moment everything is simplified and presented to the users with an intuitive and easy to use interface by a new service.
A lot also depends on the infrastructure improving - IPFS is great, for example. But its not as fast as a server, forcing you to store very little data using it. For the moment, any use case that will involve IPFS must fit into those narrow confines. Actually, same goes for most of crypto - Ethereum is a framework that you can literally, actually program on. But you wont be compiling any complex modern app code and serving it from there. One reason why the use cases still revolve around financial things, NFTs and other things that are built on the ledger functionality.
> but it won't be one resembling what anyone thinks
That's entirely possible.
> and won't be sexy.
And that totally depends. Anything that gets mass adoption ends up 'sexy'...
They're also a pretty niche application. And I'm not convinced they're something that requires blockchain to accomplish anyway.
> Anything that gets mass adoption ends up 'sexy'
Not if it ends up being an invisible piece of machinery, which I think is the most likely result. Different bits of the more interesting tech will get incorporated into larger systems to support their goals. The larger systems may (or may not) be sexy, but the bits of crypto they incorporate will just be background players to that.
But then, the surest way to be wrong is to predict the future. Who knows what will really happen?
Do you have any examples of DAOs that are doing something interesting that goes beyond just voting on re-allocation of tokens (or having their tokens stolen)?
To be honest even an example of a DAO that only votes on token allocations but has spent them on something more useful than a book about Dune would be interesting.
> Are there any DAOs that do something that's NOT entirely about crypto things?
That will be difficult until crypto is improved to have the user friendliness to allow non-crypto-savvy people to use crypto services. Even the very act of 'getting a wallet' is a high bar to entry for the majority of the population, leaving aside 'connecting it to something' then using the still-complex crypto features like DAOs.
Genuine question but does this feel like yet another nail in the coffin of cryptocoins in general?
I feel like the general sentiment is that cryptocoins have mostly been used to scam people out of money. The field seems full of manipulative tactics all for the purpose of feeding the early investors.
Blockchains are not a magic technology, they will probably have a niche use somewhere, but cryptocoins seem like a dead end.
After the 1000th "last nail in the coffin" I gave up believing that this will end someday. I see it becoming one of those ever-lasting scams that go up and down in popularity, like piramid schemes, tourist scams, 419 scams etc.
Oh it will absolutely be drawn out. I see that first hand because I know some people who write blockchains. There are still new "products" being launched that seem to be only for promoting the use of various cryptocoins.
So it might be like e-mail spam, it'll stick around as long as there are suckers born every minute.
But I'm hoping it will fade away from the mainstream at least.
Interesting reading through the comments here, everyone talking like it’s dead.
Is this true? Are NFT’s / crypto done? You know some people that are involved in it and they still seem to be hard into that world, so I was surprised to read all of this.
It's not done in the sense that people are still involved in it, but I think that public sentiment has shifted toward realizing that NFTs and crypto are not solving any problems better than existing alternatives, and the whole thing was massively oversold.
HN is mostly about statups, basically speculation of product and potential market value. Many of us make our livings on speculation.
I think you'll find it's more the case the people here are a) educated on how the technology literally works b) educated on how product as it applies adoption literally works c) able to think abstractly about market need.
NFT as a technology and product... use case is... incredibly small.
Uniswap does massive amounts of volume per day and their entire product is built on NFTs as liquidity positions. I would say that use case is far from 'incredibly small'.
That is the case with every market that is not (yet) fully governmental regulated. Full of scams, dirt and some people who are able to navigate these waters to get incredibly rich.
"The Web3 community responds" --- is it a community though? And is that really the expression of the "community"? Or just some selected few statements that "by coincidence" happen to be aligned to theirs?
Just because there are some people around the world doing similar things to you doesn't mean it's a community. I feel like people crave so much this feeling of "being a part of a community" that they try to apply this to everything, up to a point where the term is becoming meaningless.
Well the concept of something to be non-fungible was pretty cool to me. I was just thinking about tokens being interchangeable until the concept of NFTs was explained.
The fact that they've mostly been made to create bored apes and all that was a bit mind boggling unimaginative :')
And Sesame Street just announced its NFT, long after the hype has passed. I knew they were desperate for funding when they let HBO get first shot at new episodes, but I figured that solved things.
“Imagine if you gave up on the Internet in 2000”. This again.
This is how distorted people’s perceptions become when they live their whole life in echo chambers.
Leaving the obvious aside, It genuinely seems like a lot of those still pushing this are utterly unaware of the harms their whole mess has caused.
Also, they’ve made it way harder to teach non-techies how to stay safe online in the future by co-opting the term “crypto”. They immediately think any use of the term crypto is related to this stuff. Your Digital ponzi scam != cryptography.
The worst part is how the public now thinks if you’re involved in software you must be a massive believer in cc/NFTs because they keep hearing about it so all techies must think it’s awesome, right!?
It’s exhausting.