It can costs upwards of 200 dollars to mint an NFT, and it's quite common to see artists who have minted several NFTs but not sold anything yet. I'd say the likelihood that poor people are being harmed is quite high.
So you are saying there are "poor people" who are harming themselves (going without food, shelter, medical treatment) because they spent money on minting NFTs?
If that's true, I will be more than happy to retract my statement. But I think I have little to worry about.
Those are temporary growing pains as demand for Ethereum block space exceeds supply, and will be solved with the ImmutableX NFT-focused zkRollup, which will increase Ethereum's maximum throughput from 15 NFT transactions per second to 8,000:
No, it's a sign that some people have way more money than they need. Which is a waste as long as other people have to worry about getting food on the table.
Wealth is not zero sum. People having more than they need doesn't harm others, and redistributing their 'excess' wealth will undermine the private property rights that incentivize and sustain effective investment.
Generally interfering with social processes through top-down cookie cutter measures leads to negative unintended consequences, because the rationale behind said intervention is based on an overly simplistic understanding of a highly complex system.
There is no evidence for that. Markets don't randomly stop working because you tax people – they would be quite useless tools if they were that fragile.
> Generally interfering with social processes through top-down cookie cutter measures leads to negative unintended consequences, because the rationale behind said intervention is based on an overly simplistic understanding of a highly complex system.
If my understanding of the system seems highly simplistic, it may be because I wrote an HN comment two sentences long as opposed to a book.
And no markets will not "stop working". They'll work less effectively.
>>If my understanding of the system seems highly simplistic, it may be because I wrote an HN comment two sentences long as opposed to a book.
Every one's understanding of nation/global scale systems is overly simplistic, which is why it's impossible to predict what the market will do. In the absence of near-perfect knowedge, it's better to not interfere with spontaneously emergent bottom-up phenomena, like prices, or the market, via far-reaching cookie cutter rules.
EDIT:
With respect to below, I can't respond with a new comment due to comment rate-limiting, so I'll respond here:
It's not an opinion. They show the data, from 81 countries, over a span of decades, and show a pervasive correlation. The evidence speaks for itself.
This liberal think tank was instituted in a country that experienced 50 years of central economic planning, based on economically illiterate left-wing conspiracy-theories/economic-fallacies, so maybe they have legitimate cause to promote markets.
But go ahead and look down on them with your snarky derision.
>>Not really? There are other countries than the US which have had a significantly larger government (as well as higher taxes), or so called mixed-economies, that did just fine or even great?
Which countries? The data shows a strong negative correlation between government size and economic growth, within a dataset of 81 countries.
Look at Europe: the rise of social welfare spending as a percentage of GDP since the mid 1960s corresponded with stagnation in productivity and wage growth, just like occurred in the US.
>>As a side point, there's a discussion to be had regarding economic growth and GDP.
Per capita GDP growth, i.e. rising productivity, is the primary cause of improvements in quality of life. If ever you've lived in a country with low per capita GDP, and seen how ordinary people have to struggle so much more to afford to meet basic needs, you'd see why.
It's absolutely not the only factor impacting quality of life, it's true. GDP statistics are also not a perfect measure of productivity. But it's a very very good measure, of a very important contributor to quality of life, and if a particular way of organizing an economy is associated with this measure increasing at a slower rate, that is extremely important.
Economic growth rates, over longer periods of time, have a massive impact, because they have an exponential effect. A country with a per capita GDP growth rate of 4% will see double the income growth of a country with a per capita GDP growth rate of 2%, after only 35 years.
EDIT 2:
>>Which countries would you pick yourself as counter-evidence?
Norway, but it discovered oil in the 1970s, and was one of the top oil exporters in the world for decades with a population of only 4.5 million.
But anecdotes are not as important as large datasets, and large datasets show a strong correlation between small government (relative to GDP) and high economic growth rates.
>>feigned care of the poor
It's always good to assume that the person you're interacting with might be debating in good faith, and know things you don't. But I agree with the rest of that statement: it's anecdotal, just like the counter-examples you're searching for.
>>A GDP growth of 2-3% per year is also deeply unsustainable, doubling the economy every few decades can't continue.
It is sustainable for many many decades to come given returns from rising efficiency, and harvesting resources outside of earth, which are several orders of magnitude more plentiful than resources available on Earth.
Your pessimistic outlook reminds me of this:
"It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object: in those most advanced, what is economically needed is a better distribution"
-John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 1848, said at a time when the per capita GDP of the UK was the same as Kenya's today, i.e. 20X less.
Not really. NFTs give 'ownership' to things that were already online and widely shared, sometimes for decades (first tweet, nayan cat gif).
The Louvre can still NFT all the images as they please at millions for each one. If anything, it makes it easier now that people can start valuing the items before deciding to make a 'purchase' vs the museum starting auctions immediately.
I know you’re joking but lots of people still struggle with the reason why NFTs exist, including Apple’s unofficial PR department John Gruber. But it seems he finally understood it now thanks to this article: https://jackrusher.com/journal/what-does-it-mean-to-buy-a-gi...
That explains why original signed artworks are valuable, not really why NFTs are valuable
after all if I wanted to buy a Jack Dorsey signature tweet for two million dollars or a Beeple collage for 70 million I'm sure Beeple would have gladly put it on a usb stick, signed me a card, printed it billboard sized and driven it to my house while taking me out for a steak dinner
It's absolutely nebulous what the 'digital' part adds.
I tend to view the NFT craze as just that, a craze. It started as a massive and intriguing stunt that spread far and wide because of how absurd it all seems. It’s the perfect storm of “I don’t get this at all” combined with “you just don’t understand how revolutionary this is”. You also have the appeal of “why don’t I just make a few of these NFT things and make some money too?”
Additionally, I’ve read that the supposed $69 million dollars worth of ethereum used to purchase that famous NFT isn’t actually a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain. So there’s a good chance this whole thing was a farce to jumpstart interest in the NFT market itself.
Ultimately a few whales, famous people, and early adopters have already made out like bandits while the vast majority of people are barely going to make any money in the NFT market and it will sizzle out rapidly.
You're missing an important use case here: Money laundry. While regular cryptocurrency is quite useful for this, it comes with the drawback of having a well-defined market value at any given point in time, making it harder to cook the books since there is some "ground truth" to get audited against. NFTs don't have that limitation - the price at any moment can be as high or as low as you need it to be to shift any amount of money, instantly, from anywhere in the world to anywhere else in the world. Regular art has historically been used for this too, as has high-end real estate (basically anything where rich "eccentrics" can pay whatever they want for something), but these come with the hassle of needing to also move a physical good, sign deeds, set up companies - plus there is a limited supply of these, limiting the bandwidth with which you can shift money around. NFTs overcome all these limitations, it's an entirely digital, global, endless supply of goods with no fixed marked value and a plausible cover story of why it's worth millions. If you're in charge of bookkeeping at a cartel, NFTs are probably the most exciting thing that has happened this decade if not longer.
I have no problem believing this. Nonetheless, I'd like to see a good hypothetical example to really understand how it would work. Would the seller have to be in on the deal? Probably, or not?
One hypothetical where the seller _is_ in on the deal:
Let's say I want to send you money for something illegal. You, however, don't want the government getting suspicious about how you're spending $large_amount on $small_salary.
I could gift you the money, but if we don't have an existing relationship or reason to do so that looks mighty suspicious, and additionally gift tax can end up being more than income tax.
The next option is for me to "buy" something from you. This needs to be something you can obtain for a low price but sell for a high price. You could sell me a loaf of bread for $1million, but that's going to look equally (if not more) suspicious than the gift.
Enter art: Art can be produced for extremely low cost, but sold at massive markups (and often is so). The value of art is almost entirely subjective (i.e. "what is someone willing to pay for this"), so unlike with a piece of bread it's not obvious that I'm paying for something I consider near worthless. Each piece of original artwork is unique, so there's no market to prove that nobody else would be willing to pay such a sum for your art.
Therefore, with art you can receive the money, pay taxes on it, and claim to the government it's totally legit. NFTs have similar properties to art: they're unique, can be minted at very low cost, people are willing to pay large sums for them, and nobody really has any way of determining their "true" value.
Kinda reminds me of steem (steemit.com), when it first caught on in the media, there were (still are?) some huge whales on the platform, and some people made some serious money doing not much.
But now a few years later, profits have leveled out allot.
If he did that, it would be hard to then sell it in the future because now you have to verify if the signature is real or fake. The frequency of art forgeries demonstrates the issue.
With an NFT, Jack just has to say that this one NFT is the original. Every subsequent transaction can verify the NFT's validity just using math.
There's a basic problem with that argument. There is no telling whether you're actually buying an NFT from Jack himself. In fact the NFT world already seems to have a fake and forgery issue of people who claim to have rights or be authors of creations they aren't even affiliated with.[1] Crypto just shifts the goalpost of what's being faked. Which is why the Beeple NFT sale didn't happen somewhere in the nether of the internet, but through Christie's, a 300 year old seller of art, after buyer and seller had communicated personally. They buyer didn't just fork over millions to a pseudonymous wallet-address. The actual verification of the transaction happened in the real world.
Also as a sidenote, you have actually no idea whether this particular blockchain will still be around in the future. In fact given the volatility of tech that's not really that likely to be honest.
> There is no telling whether you're actually buying an NFT from Jack himself
It's fairly easy to verify the origins of statements here, especially since Jack is on Twitter announcing his NFT on his timeline. What more than that do you need?
Same as you verify any celebrities selling movie props on ebay or whatever, if they haven't announced the sale via some other channel where they are already verified, don't trust that it's the real deal in the marketplace.
> Which is why the Beeple NFT sale didn't happen somewhere in the nether of the internet, but through Christie's, a 300 year old seller of art, after buyer and seller had communicated personally.
This is a feature, not a drawback. You can make the sale however you want, via bank transfer, cash in hand or actually transfer Eth to a wallet. What matters in the end is who stands as the owner in the blockchain, but how it gets there, is irrelevant.
> Also as a sidenote, you have actually no idea whether this particular blockchain will still be around in the future. In fact given the volatility of tech that's not really that likely to be honest.
This is a separate issue from NFTs and applies to the whole cryptocurrency space. For now, the $1.5 trillion market is disagreeing with you that it can disappear in the future, as otherwise people wouldn't put so much money into the ecosystem.
> It's fairly easy to verify the origins of statements here, especially since Jack is on Twitter announcing his NFT on his timeline. What more than that do you need?
Now you rely on a tweet being durable. The entire blockchain history is based on something not on the blockchain that can be edited by people with root at Twitter.
Doesn't that mean that in the future Jack can just mint a new NFT and say that the new one is in fact the canonical NFT for his first tweet? The only way to do it would be for NFTs to support non-repudation, but they don't.
The trust layer is in the physical world either based on hearsay or a physical contract with two parties. In any case, it's off-chain.
Just as it's not the same if a random person tries to sell movie props from famous movies, compared to if the person actually being in that production in the first place.
It’s the creator certifying that this file is the definitive copy, and having an instance of it to get paid for.
In an age of trivial copying, editing, recompressing, and other alterations, “original” can get lost. This gives means to identify, transfer, and prove originality.
> The most expensive autograph ever sold as of the writing of this essay is John Lennon’s signature on a copy of Double Fantasy that he signed the day he died. It fetched $900,000 at auction in 2010.
People imho buy the "uniqueness" of an item. This is why a poster of "the Kiss" by Klimt costs $10 and the original costs a $gazillion. The article mentions an autograph of Lennon. Not just any autograph, but one on the day he died. That means "no more after that". Maybe one will resurface, but
A friend who is a painter was telling me that one of the reasons painters become famous after death is because they don't dilute the value of their works by creating more. Imagine they paint one bridge, and it is great! Someone buys it for $10k. Then they go ahead and paint 50 more bridges. Now they will sell for 2k. So the $10k-buyer just got screwed. And we don't know if one day thay paint 50 more bridges, or that was it (dilution ends).
Now, she could be a bit bitter because she wasn't selling as high as she would wish, but she does make a good point.
Uniqueness is only one part of the equation though. Hand made + beautiful + unique = amazing. Ugly pixelated jpeg generated by 300 lines of python + uniqueness = ???
It's kinda like playing all the notes from a Mozart piece in a random order, you could argue all the ingredients are there, but it won't be a masterpiece.
People are delusional, they want all the fame and rewards while putting less and less effort in their craft, if we can even call that a craft anymore, I mean, look at that shit: https://opensea.io/collection/the-anime-girls