NFT's - New Economic Frontier?

Post Reply New Topic

I haven't seen this guy's channel before tonight but he started beating up on NFT's, it was hilarious, particularly his quip about hucksters selling people on the idea that the equivalent of buying Neopets could be worth millions:



I still think there's a bit of a chance for it to become a thing if we go Ready Player One, just an open question as to whether that dystopia will come to pass.

It's funny how he mentions several problems NFTs could solve and at the same time mixes in NFTs as part these problems.

Imagine buying a "full access" NFT of a new movie, then going to a movie theater and paying just for your seat and snacks to watch the movie. Or when it is released on BluRay, using the same NFT to get a discount when you are buying a disc. Or when it is released on a streaming platform, using a cheap subscription that lets you watch movies you own as NFTs and paying just for data and storage, excluding royalties. Imagine being able to resell it and some royalties from this transaction automatically transferred to creators as part of smart contract.

That's one of the troubles with either physical assets or sanctioned presentations of the like - the move theatre pays a certain amount to show the film, businesses are okay with people doing things like selling/redeeming gift cards so long as the money is still in their pockets where as in the case of an NFT it would be in someone else's.

Back to music for a second - I noticed that Roland started something called 'Roland Cloud' where a certain number of their vst remakes of vintage analog synths can be bought outright the most interesting ones can't be and they're requiring a yearly subscription of something like $99 for access to those.

Where I do understand the plight for the need to go from ownership to subscription in some areas - there's this really awesome electric piano plugin called Neo Soul Keys, it's $250 but probably worth considerably more. Watching the guy at Gospel Musicians give a presentation on it and testing all of the different versions it's clear that they were visiting collectors, recording all of the sounds, doing their best to get internal vs mic'd versions, trying to get as many 'new and interesting' EP's as they could in the plugin, building an impressive amount of sound-sculpting in to it, and toward the end when he was talking about how they don't skimp and how almost everything he was demonstrating was new to the plugin the thought occurred to me - now that they've done this what's next? They'd have to stop making new EP plugins or improving this one and go on to something different because there's only so many brands and varieties of EP's out there, and yet if they made a one-of-a-kind quality product there should be some way where being prodigious doesn't cost them future earnings.

This is where I really don't want to see anyone get screwed - buyers, sellers, creators, etc., and the question is something like - how do we run a capitalist economy without planned obsolescence. It seems like part of that trick would be having some degree of rent model but then not having that become the sort of power grab where people say 'Jeff Bezos gives... and Jeff Bezos taketh away'. I understand his complaints about the issues of power dynamics that come with these kind of rental schemes and maybe the trick is having third parties that manage subscriptions, keep them front and center in your attention, something like how there's already password management software out there which acts as a cheat sheet for all of your different user names and passwords for different sites you visit and shop at).

I suppose time will tell if we find better ways of doing things but I can see where - in a lot of cases - we're stuck between rental and planned obsolescence, neither are particularly exciting.

That's the whole point of NFTs, you can track what should be in whose pockets and proof ownership easily. That was technologically impossible or too expensive up until recently. Some middlemen entities in this business would lose opportunities to make double/triple profits from selling the same IP several times and would resist these changes, say this is bad for the industry, etc. But creators who would be able to be funded and paid with smart contracts and mint NFTs as rewards to their backers, their backers, who would be able receive interest and make profit from subsequent sales and their consumers, who would not need to pay for the same rights several times, and would be able to resell these rights would win.

In that top example though - you're really paying to see it on a giant screen up close and the only thing the theatre could do, if they chose to, is remove the portion of the ticket cost that's related to licensing and then go back to the company who gave them the film and apply for a rebate on the licensing for all partially-waived charges. That story would replay itself everywhere as a cascade of rebate requests hit the original creator of specific content.

I'm not saying that couldn't happen, just that you'd see that rebate chain everywhere and the question is could sellers still turn a prophet if lets say I grab a free Blu Ray of a given movie, watch it in the theatre, and they have to eat the cost of both because I originally bought it on DVD and what they got was income for one DVD (their shareholders would be apoplectic).

Actually tagging ownership as one-time purchase in the physical world could only apply to data itself and not media, or sale of experience, because those have fixed production costs.

No, that's the point, NFT is a smart contract. Using NFT as an entity in these manipulations would remove the need for tracking these rebate chains and sorting out who owns whom. Every transaction can include all the ledger records to keep all the balances. That's the beauty.

That's fine I guess in some contexts, just that I think the movie theatre example is not a great one because there's too much overhead wrapped up in the process.

Also please don't get me wrong - I can see you're trying to think progressively about this sort of thing, I'm just considering the other end, ie. the trip-wires it can hit if it gets applied in a way that buyers or sellers would consider unjust.

Getting rid of this overhead would be the main reason if switch to NFTs or to something similar would happen. Movie theaters are losing money on movies, they make profit selling drinks and snacks, but they carry the burden of collecting the money for the distributors, they would be happy to simplify the whole mess of buying movies, settlements with distributors and the rest of headaches and just get permission to display movie with some schedule and let anyone with some easily verifiable pass from the copyright owner to get a ticket free of charge or for a small fee. There were attempts to disrupt this model, like MoviePass, something similar might reemerge soon and have universal ownership with blockchain tokens as one of selling points.

i recently had a conversation which ranged from crypto over nfts to incels. nfts, we agreed, are this magical ownership of something that can't be iwned, sonething that has no original - a piece of art in the age of digital (re-)production. the art piece has no aura of the original to it,but the nft claims to recreate that aura. Aura as a term in art tgeory, it basically refers to the fascination, the magic of something being "the real thing".
then the conversation went on to incels and their fetish of virgins. a fetish os also a magical object (before Freud adopted the term for his "sexual fetish", which then became the main meaning if the word. but it used to mean something like a statue of a deity or any sort of ritual object)
At one point, I came up with the idea of auctioning off girl's virginity as an nft. So incels can buy it and sell it and pride themselves in owning it - but since an nft is a payment receipt and you're buying and selling the receipt, not the thing itself, the girl could go and do as she pleases.

I have since been looking for a flaw in that thought, but I really can't find one.

I just posted this interview in PPR, pretty much goes to the heart of what I was saying in my OP (particularly when he gets to where this goes now). Sounds like he's really seeing Metaverse and the like as that new domain for us to exercise economic activity as we increasingly end up on UBI.

Yeesh. We'll need a lot of safeguards in place for sure, not to get an insane form of totalitarianism creeping up around that but he's saying pretty much what I thought this was - ie. if there's no new contents to discover you create new virtual ones.

Personally, i am never going to use the metaverse willingly.I prefer real life to virtual reality or whatever it is but I hope it makes a lot of money for my retirement in the form of the tech companies in the stock market.

This whole web 3.0 thing is wild. Listening to Naval Ravikant on Tim Ferris - both he and Chris Dixon are incredibly bullish on NFT's. The glee over NFT's has a very MMT-like zeal to it. It could be that power and wealth really are about being the first person to the next bubble to dispense it's goodies and be out of there before it pops, it's just not something I'd enjoy (I've got that awful learning disability called integrity).

My guess - having picked up something like $4500 in various mainstream cryptocurrencies in the last few weeks I'll probably want to start playing with staking and liquidity pools, just have to hope that there's enough there for it to be a second stream of income within reason of future investment (ie. I'd probably be throwing in $1000 a month for a while whenever it's an available option).

As for NFT's and meme coins - I can see it with artist royalties and things like that but past that it feels like trading in ponzy scheme futures, I'm sure there's money in that like there's money in betting when the next time Biden or one of the Kardashians will break wind on camera, however that's a case where I'd gladly hand over victory to my betters.