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by thrwn_frthr_awy 1610 days ago
> the genuine and useful innovations that are now possible (yes, there are many)

Not trying to troll, but can you explain some of them? Not in the abstract, but in end-user/product terms.

3 comments

My favorite example of late is http://royal.io. You can purchase a token (NFT) that represents fractional ownership in the licensing rights of a musician's song or album, and also comes along with other perks (such as free or discounted merch and concert tickets). The proceeds from the NFT sales help fund the artist's project, and then you participate in the upside by receiving a share of royalties for holding the token.
Thanks for the reply. Royal looks interesting, but I may be missing why an NFT is needed for this. Fractional ownership was existed for a long time before crypto. What does the part NFT provide?
NFT for this use-case provides

- the uncorruptible chain of custody. While it's well known for decades that "just a database" would solve ASCAP/BMI robbing countless artists because "it's too hard to track them down", they're not going to do it. A royalty is meaningless if there's no mechanism to enforce it, and an autonomous one is simply superior. If you're then going to say "but I could do that with XYZ" then now the rhetorical burden is yours to explain to me why it NEVER caught on.

- fractional ownership is a doodad, but a particularly hard doodad to set up, especially alongside a royalty mechanism. Once again "but you can do that with" -- what? A Delaware corp? With specialized technology? Some combination of buggy lambdas on AWS? And _how_ are you going to offer this to artists and still make money?

NFT for royalties just makes sense. It's no wonder it's not making anywhere near the money that art NFTs do -- but that's art: you'd have to look far and wide to find a more contemptible and corrupted marketplace than fine art. It's no wonder they like crypto :)

Where else can you go purchase the rights to the work of an artist you like as a consumer?
You’ve described a share in a private company. Not only do you not need an NFT for that, using an NFT provides you no additional guarantees.
Cool! How would you like to open a private company and manage that, including accounts and taxes, for every song?
An NFT is just a receipt, it doesn't do any of the above. It's only better than a paper receipt in that it can be transmitted electronically.
NFTs don’t do that for you. The company linked still has to do that.
NFTs can absolutely do that. They're programmable tokens that can be coded to do anything.

When people purchase songs though the smart contract, part of the value can be automatically sent to the wallet of the person who owns the NFT that corresponds to that song.

The problem is most people, even on here still think NFTs are just some dumb pointer.

You're begging the question; you are assuming all transactions will happen on chain. That's not reasonable. Most transactions will happen with normal currency, using normal means. This company then needs to track all of that and do the distribution on chain.

And if they only allow people to compensate artists through cryptocurrency, then it's not viable for artists.

Please point me to a musician who has created a private company and sold shares in order to compensate investors for royalties from their work.
That’s beside the point. This company does not need NFTs to do it.
As a crypto critic, monero is basically the only useful innovation to come out of crypto. Unfortunately, most people buy crypto on exchanges so the idea of decentralised, uncensorable etc are really oversold
> As a crypto critic, monero is basically the only useful innovation to come out of crypto.

I sort of agree with this assessment. I think it depends on what you mean by useful. Unfortunately, the only real-world, practical use of Monero is money laundering. I wouldn't want to trade a currency or work on a technology whose best use case is helping violent drug cartels conduct their financial transactions.

Can you explain that more? I'm not familiar with Monero. What apps couldn't be made without it?
Monero is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency. It obfuscates transactions while keeping the technical perks of a decentralized ledger.
Thank you. Would it correct to compare it to using cash in person, but online?
Yes! It’s a currency that’s probably closest to peoples intuitive ideas of what a cryptocurrency is. It absolutely can be used for criminal transactions but people who are very pro-privacy also argue for it.
Yes, it is the international cash for drug dealers and the like
Perhaps an even more germane example for the crowd would be the use of blockchain to manage cap tables: https://balajis.com/mirrortable/
Maybe I'm just too old, but I just don't understand what stuff like this is saying:

> A mirrortable is a way to take a legally compliant cap table held in a system like Carta and mirror it on the blockchain. It consists of an on-chain smart contract and a bidirectional interface that syncs changes made on-chain to the off-chain cap table and vice versa. In this it is similar to a stablecoin, which similarly links an on-chain asset like USDC to a legally compliant set of off-chain USD bank accounts.

It's basically saying the cap table is held 'offline', that is off of the blockchain, in a legally compliant digital place. There is then a copy of that cap table on the blockchain with a smart contract - an API if you will - to modify the cap table on the blockchain, which will then update the legally compliant one or vice versa. Not sure what the perks are here, but that's what it is.
Why is this useful? I assume it is, but I don’t know why…