Nullian prediction: NFTs will disrupt the copyright mafia, by creating new business models that respect the rights of both content creators and content consumers. In the course of time, NFTs will make copyright economically irrelevant.I have not seen anyone else mention that. It is my own original thought, or at least my independent thought. And I have spent a
lot of time thinking about this.
The Internet has been wracked with copyright wars for over two decades. Where are we now? After years of “fix your business model!”, the copyright mafia said, “OK!” Bittorrent is being replaced by Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime, Apple Store,
et al.—and
EME makes it infeasible to build an independent web browser. The copyright mafia is
winning.
I am a content creator. As you may have noticed, I am quite protective of the integrity of my work. But I hate copyright; I do not want any legalistic prevention of the mere
copying of my own work. (Consider my forum posts to be public domain, like Shakespeare. No, you are not allowed to plagiarise Shakespeare.) —But—well, ideally, I would like to get paid.
NFTs will solve the copyright problem, because they create digital scarcity without restrictions on the mere copying of content. This the solution that people on
both sides of the copyright wars have been seeking for two decades. This will be the foundation for new business models that you probably do not foresee. Just wait...
Nullius,
There is perhaps something a bit unhinged about talking some LOL April first thing and turning it into some argument about how wonderful NFTs are.
That is an incorrect characterization of what occurred here.
For about the first 12 hours of this thread, I played along with the game. I made
at least a full page worth of posts about the game—either commenting on it, or playing along with it. (Some of those posts are now deleted for nonobvious reasons; but they are all in various archives.)
When I later returned, I discovered that
someone had raised the spectre of “money laundering” in a way that I would expect from 2013-era (or even current-year) mass-media articles about Bitcoin. You wouldn’t be surprised at
my reaction to seeing that same nonsense tossed at Bitcoin, CoinJoin, CoinSwap, mixers, Lightning (although it seems that only Craig Wright is paranoid about Blockstream helping drug dealers launder money off-chain in Lightning—anyone else?), Tor, or PGP.
—By the way, what would
your reaction be if someone alleged (quite incorrectly!) that CoinJoin is “
is really 90% cover for money laundering, graft, and pump and dumps”?
After the game was over, that line of thought converged with another. I dislike purely negative arguments.
X is not bad is weak. Thus,
I added something positive: X is good! As, indeed, it is. Aren’t you, of all people, at least a little bit intrigued by my above sketch of how NFTs could make copyright
economically irrelevant? —My prior post already mentioned some applications which should interest anyone who has ever been a party to a real estate transaction.
Maybe you should consider that this massive insecurity you seem to be showing is a sign that you know or fear deep down that it's not all it's hyped up to be.
In my experience, when somebody replies to a rational argument with
ad hominem armchair psychoanalysis whilst avoiding the substance, it means that that person is losing an argument.
Whereas based on your suggestion, I realize that maybe you should consider that (cough) some Bitcoiners have a massive insecurity about seeing other applications of similar technologies.
Most criticism in the world is right [...]
Indeed:
Most criticism in the world is
right. Please apply that principle my criticism of bog-standard Four Horsemen FUD about “money laundering”.
[...] and repeating that sometimes similar sounding criticism was wrong -- doesn't change this.
Care to address the substance of what I said, beyond some general observations that I address below about non-fungible, non-commodity assets of any kind?
In any case, if you want to work yourself into a foam about some grand idea that I think is a bunch of hokum-- knock yourself out! People get off on all kinds of weird stuff, ... whips, chains, dressing up as sexualized foxes---- who am I to judge? I suppose blockchain fetishism is no different.
This is the key point. I will put it in technical terms, without the trigger word “blockchain”.
Do you see any practical use cases for applying a trustless (or at least, trust-reduced), Byzantine fault-tolerant distributed consensus protocol for globally resolving the state of
non-monetary asset ownership, and facilitating the transfer thereof between mutually untrusting parties without risk of double-transfer?
If you think that my positive answer to that question constitutes a “fetish”, then—sorry, but not sorry: I will not waste my time with that. Though I
will admit that I have a Bitcoin sexual fetish—indeed, I invented the concept of a Bitcoin sexual fetish. Specifically, a
Bitcoin fetish. At odd times, I have made various posts about this;
e.g., recently:
Fuck merits. I’m a merit whale. And what is a forum merit worth? Fuck merits—I want bitcoins! Preferably all of them. For I have a sexual fetish for bitcoins. It
thrills me to hold them. Days and nights and in the wee hours of the morning, I find myself staring at my UTXOs on the blockchain,
ogling them,
mesmerized by their beauty... If you send me your bitcoins, then I will take them away to a secret place where I will hodl them and cherish them and perform with them erotic
crypto-rites involving the deflowering of virgins beneath the full moon. Yes, MOON. BITCOINS. ME. HODDDDDDLLLLLLLLLLLL..... mmmmm...
My puns about elliptic curves were first seen in 2018; they even
have an old thread in Off-Topic.
(Several threads; I don’t want to link to the others.)
Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong-- it's not really anyone's concern but mine one way or the other.
Publishing your thoughts on a public forum is a means to concern others with them.
Some here, however, may find it eye opening that I was able to simply paint the list of highest priced fNFT to list whatever I wanted it to list.
I never denied that the current markets in NFTs are rife with large amounts of pure, unadulterated bullshit. Indeed, I acknowledged that—as I acknowledged that early use of Bitcoin (including on this forum) was rife with bullshit. On that particular point, much of the early criticism of Bitcoin’s community was
right—albeit shortsighted; and much of that criticism was made by very smart people who, for whatever reason, just could not see what Bitcoin would become in the future.
You were one of the people who
did see it—to the extent that together with a few others, you yourself devoted a terrific effort to refactoring Satoshi’s... *ahem*,
less-than-ideal codebase into a software engineering masterpiece. Something suitable for more than toy money. The implementation of a network that can safely, securely handle
a trillion dollars in value—to begin with.
Would you have spent the effort, if you didn’t look beyond all the early Ponzis, pyramid schemes, scams, hype, etc.? Not to mention the early use of Bitcoin for a notorious drug market—
Aww yiss, motherfucking free markets!!!
(I contemplated trading merit for the service of making other people's NFT's very "valuable", but I didn't want to irritate theymos.
)
I actually tried that. Fun game, eh? LOL.
As an empirical experiment in
forum shitcoin economics, let’s use one forum token to screw with another. [...] I myself think that this is a bad idea; however, someone
will do it, so I may as well be the first.
Had Theymos had a tracker for total value transacted up or transaction volume, I could have painted those just as easily. The same applies to other systems, not just joke ones. You can't credibly do this with liquid fungible assets: I couldn't make everyone think the price of BTC was $10m/BTC today or whatever.
Tell that to all the small-cap altcoiners who do exactly that, even with at least a moderately liquid order book. Market manipulation
is a thing.
Non-fungibility is not very compatible with transparent market pricing. Does that mean that the idea is useless? No (at least not for that reason
) -- but it's something people should keep in mind. A lot of the liberating power of markets depends on the general fungiblity of commodity goods.
The same issues exist in other systems but the actors have a lot of incentive to not be particularly frank about them, in that sense this joke system was extremely liberating.
That unavoidably reduces to a general criticism of non-fungible, and even non-commodity goods of every kind. —Including non-fungible physical goods,
i.e.,
most things which actually exist in this world. I don’t buy it.
I think that the problem here is a common confusion: Perceiving an NFT as a thing. An NFT is not a thing in itself. It is an abstraction of ownership of a particular instance of a thing. The thing itself may be of most any nature whatsoever, virtual or physical—just as long as particular instances of the thing can be distinguished from each other (or there is only one instance).
The hype about “investing in NFTs” commits the same error; as I pointed out, the concept is nonsensical. It is like saying, “Invest in ownership of title!”—title to
what?
Edit: Fixed typos, and made some small tweaks to phrasing.
