• breadsmasher@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Conceptually NFTs could be useful.

    The use case of “buy funny pictures” was the stupidest grift yet

    • echo64@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’ve never heard of a way that NFTs are actually useful, I’ve only heard of people saying things we can do today, but with blockchain (and much less efficiently), or as a way to form a speculators market (ie: a con)

      • hglman@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I am a big proponet of blckchains, but speculative nfts have no purpose. Using a blockchain to establish who authored tome work, thats a an actual use.

        • echo64@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          we already have that feature in our society, without nfts or blockchain. it’s worked for hundreds of years

          • Spiracle@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Blockchains are public ledgers of information. It’s neat. It can be a practical way to keep a ledger. Apparently some banks use a blockchain to validate transactions now.

            It’s the whole hype about how it would change the world, and the incredible amounts of grifting that poison Blockchain for the public. For far too many people, it’s just another get-rich-quick scheme.

            • Dr. Dabbles@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Block chains do not need to be, and most real applications are not, public. Signing signed work has existed for decades, and almost every single use of it is in a private application.

          • hglman@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Copyright isn’t the same, but moreover, it’s not that it didn’t exist. It’s that blockchains remove a class of failures that exist in centralized beauracracy.

            • echo64@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              and replace those well-known, well-understood, workable failures accounted for by decades/centuries of law, with a brand new class of failures! and hurt the environment as a fun side effect

              • hglman@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                Yes, never change, never do new stuff. Also, human bureaucracy uses more energy than proof of stake systems.

                • echo64@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  An important part of changing and doing new stuff is recognizing how the change impacts the wider space. Just changing and disrupting things for the sake of change is likely ignoring all the details that went into the original system. Often, those details aren’t even understood or known at the time, but someone 70 years ago encountered a situation, put a system in place, and it worked ever since.

                  The past 15 years of big tech disruption of existing systems is a good example of this. We changed so much about so many institutions, and so so much of it turned out to be for the worse.

                  • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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                    1 year ago

                    During the pandemic I had a few friends that endured severe mental health problems due to the fact their GPU’s died in the middle of the height of bitcoin bullshit. One couldn’t do their job, and neither could socialize through the games we typically loved to play together. They became further isolated during a time of physical isolation.

                    Ever since then I’ve been completely against bitcoin. I understand they allegedly made the process less GPU heavy now, but I won’t forget that human suffering took place for literally no good reason other than a pyramid scheme preying upon ignorant and stupid people.

                    So yeah, fuck crypto. People need to find another way to do that shit.

            • Dr. Dabbles@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I’m not a block chain defender in any sense, but you don’t have to do the idiotic proof of work crap to make block chains actually usable. You and I can sign something with a key, for instance. And the signing of signed data creates the “chain”. No worthless CPU usage, no idiotic “proof of…”. You know it’s my key, I know it’s your key, we know the order of signing. Done.

              All the hype nonsense was just grifters trying to steal money. And crypto currency has absolutely no purpose whatsoever.

        • gloog@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          How does it establish who authored a work? The only thing the blockchain can be guaranteed to prove is who first registered it on said chain, which absolutely doesn’t necessarily mean the author. Immutability doesn’t do anything to solve the garbage in garbage out problem.

        • SlopppyEngineer@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          It might be useful for artists to register all their work so grabby AI companies can’t just use it as training data because it has digital ownership.

      • Hitchie_Rawtin@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        They’re pretty good for getting rid of ticket tours but the company doing that is based in the Netherlands and it’s slow to spread elsewhere. The protocol’s rules mean you can’t resell for more than face value and they’ve sold over 4m tickets that way.

      • theneverfox@pawb.social
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        1 year ago

        It’s fantastic for things like game characters and cosmetics - it would be awesome if, say, clearing or 100%-ing a game let you use assets from that game in compatible games… like an open protocol for gamertags.

        Imagine how much more people would be into events if you got to use the unlocks in other games. It could provide a safe and easy copyright framework for developers using such assets in other games (since only the owner could issue an nft), and encourage compatibility which would drastically increase the ability to reuse character models

        There would even be room for monetization later on - if this system grew to any size, artists could sell assets, and could even make money by charging in coin for transfers (like it happens now)

        Instead, they over monetized it from the start. Integration never became popular for developers (because why would it? Without good libraries, free default assets, and a copyright framework, it’s just a niche feature that might make it in as an afterthought).

        What they needed was basically anyone to champion this kind of system in exchange for a payoff down the line. Any publisher could have released some libraries and given away old assets, and they could have become an exchange for assets…a few groups independently did this, but they focused on making money immediately without offering anything for developer adoption

        Instead, it started to be used for money laundering, artists and collectors saw dollar signs, and it exploded without anyone building the foundation

        • echo64@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          All the things you describe either do not need nfts or blockchsin, or are just speculator marketplaces and thus of no actual use to anyone but con artists.

      • cassetti@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I imagined it used for trading rare items. Imagine games like the classic Diablo2 where you can fight random characters and collect rare items. If each were an NFT, the ownership could be traded to other gamers for real money. In that aspect I see real value.

        But that’s not how it’s been implemented.

        Also for reference, Kodak actually patented a blockchain technology to provide IP rights to photographs taken on special cameras which actually could be extremely beneficial if properly implemented.

    • jherazob@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Been paying attention and haven’t seen a single use case for them that isn’t covered better by other less wasteful and more standard technology

    • gloog@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Only if you stretch the definition to the point where you’re calling someone’s Steam inventory a set of NFTs - yeah, it’s a digital record of unique(ish) games & items, but the “on the blockchain” part was the whole thing that defined NFTs. Every single supposed use case I saw for them relied on pretending that a legal problem (licensing, mostly) was a technical limitation.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      What’s bizarre is Seth Green thought he could make a TV show based on the one he bought. Then someone stole it and he had to pay $300,000 to get it back. Since then, no sign of a TV show.

      • HipPriest@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        It’s probably more likely he’s realised how embarrassing a show based on NFTs would be in 2023 when they’re a complete laughing stock and so are people who bought into the hype of spending huge amounts on them. He’d probably rather everyone forgot