It's astonishing to me that people will just buy into any success story that involves crypto and NFTs. People don't question why poorly drawn pictures are being bought for thousands of dollars, don't question why there are hundreds of altcoins on the market and some "cryptocurrency experts" are supposedly "offering free tips" on investment. The whole space is rife with scams and embellishments and yet there are so many people just blindly buying into it, including the damn BBC!
Every person I've spoken to who's told me they're interested in crypto literally only care about it to make money, and have no interest in learning how it works. They all treat every last crypto-based use as investment like stocks, and not as a normal economic choice (e.g. "I want $3000 worth of bitcoin to buy a car" is not something people are doing, instead it's all "I want $3000 worth of bitcoin because the internet told me it'll be 3 million in a year").
NFTs also annoy me because it's literally the worst part of art industry - "buying" the "rights" to a piece of art so you can turn it for more cash later on, and not as an appreciation of the work. Bored Apes might be one of the few exceptions where people are doing it for "bragging rights", which is infinitely better because you're buying it to say you own it, much closer to normal art purchases.
I thought the most annoying thing about NFTs is that you're basically buying a hyperlink to a website that you do not control.
I checked out the Doctor Who NFT thing after Team 17 was teaming up with the people behind that thing, and the domain where the NFT metadata and images are being hosted was due to expire next summer. They didn't even splurge on a five-year registration for the domain. Hopefully auto-renewals don't stop working.
I looked this up the other day and I might be wrong but it seems like in most jurisdictions even if you buy a meatspace piece of art you do not own the actual copyright on the work.
While I’m not a fan of NFTs this does somewhat weaken the proposition that any “rights” cannot be sold with NFTs because IIRC this is the status quo in meatspace art purchases too.
I'm not sure it's true that something being algorithmically generated means it's public domain. Plenty of assets for things like video games are procedurally generated, but that doesn't mean they're public domain by default.
Going by this definition of public domain, I don’t see how this could be the case:
> The public domain consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply[0]
Think of it this way. Imagine I wrote some code, and when I ran it it generated a piece of art. Surely I would have IP rights over the artwork? Otherwise you could make the same argument about art made with a somehow automatic paintbrush I built.
I hope I’m not talking at cross-purposes here and using a completely different definition of “public domain” was was intended, apologies if this is the case.
There is a difference between the concept of a computer being a "clever pencil", which you are referring to, and the computer generating weapons and gear to generate a drop from a selection of "$ELEMENT $LEVEL $WEAPON $MODIFIER" (e.g. fiery epic hammer of orc skull crushing) which is equivalent to generating all of them (not copyrightable).
Now, the individual visual components of the weapons could have a copyright but the computationally assemblaged work based on the components would not because they've just run a job to "generate all the permutations".
For something like No Man's Sky, which is extremely procedurally generated I reckon it's very grey and they could try to make a case but the actual world they generated for people to play in would not be protected by copright. I don't think it's well tested in court.
In the case of the monkeys the hat, the basemonkey, and sunglasses could have a copyright but the assembled monkeys generated by a computer with no creativity would not. But it's a derivative work of things with copyright so that aspect becomes super grey.
As you say, it seems like there’s a significant grey area that needs to be resolved, and I could see it being quite difficult to figure out where to draw the line in practice.
I am aware of the legal discussions around the hypotheticals, but has that actually been tested in court?
Define algorithmically generated? There are certainly tools for randomizing the mix of image elements that are present in a piece of art, and combining them, but does that only apply if I used a computer to do it? What if I draw 300 reference images, photocopy them, cut them out, and sit down with a set of dice and tables, and make collages using glue?
Does the inclusion of random noise as a processing step in creating digital art count as algorithmically generated?
What if I use a custom programmed brush that simulates the randomness of physical brush bristles to simulate in a digital painting?
The US Copyright Office notes that "Similarly, the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author.", and lists in its examples:
> A claim based on a mechanical weaving process that randomly
produces irregular shapes in the fabric without any discernible
pattern.
That is so specific that I have to believe there was a court case where someone attempted to claim copyright for that kind of process.
But to answer your question to define algorithmically generated, the requirement is that “whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.”
Iirc cdpa 1988 in the UK holds it to be copyright of the authors of the program. But I'd be surprised if the law was a comfortable fit for practice 30 years on, or that it had been tested much in court.
Fairly clearly what you 'get' is dependent on the surrounding system. It's one for a legal-crypto startup but you can imagine selling some NFT being linked to a contract for transfer of copyright. Maybe nobody is doing this, idk, but they could. It's also irrelevant for some applications of NFTs, so it would be a design error to expect every NFT system to enforce copyright transfers.
I agree in principle I think you could (I'm not a lawyer). However, you run into the starting problem of needing a trusted authority to verify a rights holder is in fact the rights holder. Also if the right is exclusive, how is that managed, i.e. prevent them issuing the same rights to many people. All answers thus far seem to point back to a central authority, and then what's the point of it being on blockchain.
> However, you run into the starting problem of needing a trusted authority to verify a rights holder is in fact the rights holder.
Again, this is a different problem. One can imagine a service with a seignorage fee to verify such things when an NFT is minted after which that particular question is settled. The point of it being on a blockchain would then be subsequent ease of sale, transfer etc.
By service, I think you mean company, now I have to trust said company, also I need to check NFT is minted by company I trust, and that I trust the identifier of said company on the NFT. Now if it turns out the company wasn't doing a good job, what happens then, do the NFT's get revoked, by whom, what are the remedies and the compensation process?
All this gets bumped off chain fairly quickly with a hand wave whenever discussed, which quickly puts the block chain solution into question. If the NFT only works when minted and managed by trusted party, then is what we really need is data interoperability rather than blockchain. And even there, NFT's don't actually contain any on-chain or off-chain data expressing what the semantics of the NFT is.
> It's one for a legal-crypto startup but you can imagine selling some NFT being linked to a contract for transfer of copyright. Maybe nobody is doing this, idk, but they could.
What's to stop the buyer unbundling the property which is worth something (the copyright) from the pointless NFT?
That has changed recently, people in these communities believe that NFTs are only valid if verified by opensea. So you are now buying ownership as opensea is beginning the enforcement of copyright.
Opensea might be verifying the rights owner has attached their image to an NFT, but that still doesn't mean they have transferred any rights to the holder of the token. Correct me if I'm wrong I've not looked up Opensea's T&C's (have several other's).
Also whenever people talk about ownership in regards to copyright, it's a flag that they probably don't know what they are talking about.
For most of these people the NFT is the valuable part. If Twitter verifies your opensea nft and let's you put it on your Twitter profile that is the value.
Technically violations are determined by a court. If no one has accused you of a violation and no court has found you in violation then you are not in violation.
A separate question is would the copyright holder win a lawsuit or DMCA takedown request? I don't know
> Your not buying the rights, that's the most annoying thing about NFTs, that people don't get.
You are buying the rights, but they're rights that exist in a pseudo-legal system that has no enforcement and isn't recognized by any existing legal authority. Some kind of enforcement could exist one day though.
For instance, it's possible that your house in a "metaverse" might only display art for the NFTs that it verifies you own.
Buying an NFT is buying the right to the NFT. It's not buying the right to the art.
Even if NFTs were backed by law, so that if I use your private key to transfer the NFT to me you would be able to use the law to come after me for theft, what I stole from you wasn't the rights to the art.
What the grandparent post was complaining about was that it's not even the rights to the art.
If you buy the rights to the ape, then you can sell copies.
I suppose the holder of an NFT can sell a "copy NFT". Maybe that's the next thing. Selling an NFT of an NFT of an NFT of a Beatles song. With a holder chain making sure that whoever minted the NFT-of-NFT at the time did hold the parent NFT.
That last paragraph is of course exactly the kind of nonsense that is at the core of NFT, so you should expect these derivative NFTs to start becoming a product soon. If you can sell NFTs-of-art, why not NFTs-of-NFTs?
Anyone can sell copies of the Mona Lisa (because expired copyright). Anyone can make NFTs of it, too. Why would NFTs minted by the Louvre be more real?
To me, NFT is performance art. It makes you think about intangible ownership. But outside of being performance art it's worthless.
How are you going to get a picture of the Mona Lisa?
Take a photo? Your not allowed.
The people who own the Mona Lisa, prevent people from taking photos of.
They instead they take a photo of it themselves, which is a new creative work and has copyrights. Now they have controlled the market on photos of the Mona Lisa and you need to license photos of it from them.
The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that "faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain".
This photographic reproduction is therefore also considered to be in the public domain in the United States. In other jurisdictions, re-use of this content may be restricted; see Reuse of PD-Art photographs for details.
To be pedantic, though. Just because the WMF (through its counsel, presumably) "takes a position", doesn't infer that "therefore" this piece is public domain.
It may well be, but unless the WMF created the piece, it has no standing to declare this. I may well be reading too much into things, but I know also that the WMF has taken "interesting" legal positions on art (a famous recent photo set up by a wildlife photographer where a curious primate, IIRC, wandered up to the camera and depressed the shutter).
Fair enough. And until courts have ruled, we don't actually know. WMF has vested interest in normalizing it, but on the other hand they do have lawyers so it's not a completely bonkers idea.
And the monkey selfie you mention was actually not obvious legally one way or the other. I believe the human eventually won, but it was down to the details.
In order for something to be copyrightable it needs to have minimal "threshold of originality" to it. In the monkey copyright case the photo clearly had. In the photo I linked to? Much less clearly so.
The EU (because Mona Lisa) is summarized as "The test for the threshold of originality is in the European Union whether the work is the author's own intellectual creation".
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality).
One would have a hard time arguing that framing a painting perfectly in the viewfinder is "the author's own intellectual creation".
In the US it's "at least some minimal degree of creativity".
But yes, both could be circumvented by injecting the painting equivalent of "paper towns", I suppose.
But in any case any of these people could start selling copies:
But of course we could then worry about what a court would say about a "no photos, please" sign and whether it's a binding contract that signs over any copyright over photos in the place (uh, doubtful).
It's an interesting legal area, and I don't reject the idea you mentioned of de facto re-copyright as a whole. I just don't think it applies to Mona Lisa specifically, for these reasons.
But you should also remember that there's a difference between "You're not allowed" and "You are not able" to take a photo.
Unless you have a contract signing away the copyright to the photo, all the establishment can do is ask you to leave after you've already taken the photo.
And I highly doubt a checkbox ToS when you bought the ticket will be considered informed consent of reassignment of copyright.
> And the monkey selfie you mention was actually not obvious legally one way or the other. I believe the human eventually won, but it was down to the details.
Sorry, you're right there - my phrasing was definitely ambiguous. Like you say, there was a lot of nuance. But Wikipedia (initially contributors, then I believe, the Foundation itself) was very aggressive from the outset with "Screw you, no copyright to be found here!" which is an "interesting" stance to take when it's not at all so clearcut.
You're right to point it out. WMF does have a point of view and that case does show that their opinion on copyrightability is not necessarily unbiased.
What I've heard is that photography of a painting is considered to be a form of reproduction and not the creation of a new work. It might be different if you were to photograph the painting from a funny angle with a shadow falling across it in an artistic way but that's not what we're talking about in the case of a typical Mona Lisa image, like the one the Wikipedia page uses.
> I truly hope we do not let technology be used to create this kind of artificial scarcity
Aren't virtual economies old news by now? Plenty of games and game networks have accomplished this with virtual goods.
The 'metaverse' stuff doesn't scare me personally (where this concept could become widespread). I don't buy for a second that it's going to be a big deal where it will be anything more than a niche glorified game lobby.
No, you are not granted copyrights on the image attached to the NFT in all cases I've looked at, spoken to the people behind them and they also agreed.
Doesn't mean this can't be done, but in each case I've looked at, granting of rights (and which specific rights do we even mean?) is not happening.
Further more there is no obligation for anyone to do anything with the image linked to the NFT your the holder of.
I heard it varies. Bored Apes for example give you the rights to the underlying photograph, I think that's why you see them pop up in ad campaigns now and again.
If everyone you've spoken to is only interested in the money, maybe you should speak with different people?
Or if this is just hyperbole, perhaps accept that Sturgeon's Law is valid even for human behavior in relation to finance and economics?
People were making unbelievably stupid decisions and came up with the most ridiculous rationalizations for "investing" in the dot-com bubble. Same thing with real estate a decade later. It is not just because a market is overheated that we should dismiss the industry entirely.
(I am not saying that those with better judgement should just go and exploit the irrationality of the masses. What I am saying is that there is no way to argue anyone into making rational decisions.)
I wonder if the VCs have fallen prey to the siren's song or if they have joined the choir?
I have a hard time believing they don't ask the questions that get to the heart of the long term viability of the projects they invest in. Yet as a tech creator, I don't see much use for the game theoretic additions for the extra complexity and waste from adding blockchain.
I've only seen one example of nfts having some kind of soul and that to do with ensuring collaborators on musical projects get a kind of transparent split of the proceeds. where the token is the music. Make a remix, then it also tracks what part of which source you used etc. Open royalties when the tracks are sold.
The 80's stock market was a pimer for this kind of culture. The era of excess led people to normalize bad behavior, enthusiastic marketing of assets, and a culture of greed at any cost. Within markets where products are essential, it creates chaos, and to the lay person, it creates a false impression that success is tangible, and that because it's backed by celebrities and corporations that it is all credible.
We're hurling towards an era of false economy, the results are likely to be harsh if we allow it to continue without being reigned in. The celebrities that back scams, as well as corps need to be held accountable because the main problem that it's growing in popularity is all of the glossy polish on the lies of phony payouts.
What I find even more frustrating is that even your average retail broker is more knowledgeable, relatively speaking, than their crypto counterpart (not that crypto’s inherent dark forest helps).
The reason NFTs annoy me is because the majority of them seem to be stolen work, yet the people who buy them seem to believe that they now have rights to the work.
This is largely because there is almost nothing you can do with crypto apart from speculate and gamble. The more I learn about stuff like defi the more I understand just how fractally useless crypto is.
You can bypass the de facto ban that VISA and Mastercard put on the existence of some websites, for example Gab or the other similar one which now I can't remember. If I recall correctly, you can currently donate money to those sites only using cryptocurrency. This is kinda important, in my opinion, because "only offensive speech is free speech" (this doesn't mean I like those sites, but I don't want the credit card companies to decide what can exist on the Internet)
You can buy drugs and other illegal things off the internet (tor), that's very useful for some people. Basically crypto allows for transactions that could otherwise be blocked or easily tracked by central parties (1). It can also be used to bypass gambling laws.
For legal purchases and activities crypto is useless, regular money is much more practical.
[1] depending on which crypto and how it's used tracking is possible, so care is required (especially) when converting dollars to crypto.
> You can buy drugs and other illegal things off the internet (tor)
Can you? After that huge bust a few years back, I figured that particular usage was marginal at this point. Seems like the only use for crypto is ransomware, dodging taxes or smuggling embezzled money out of your country.
Yeah, there are still plenty of drugs on the darkweb. Busting a few dealers doesn't eliminate demand, and in-person dealers don't have a "reviews" page for their products and behavior.
The idea is it's not beholden to a government (though still somewhat centralized somewhere). Crypto is helping people in Turkey store value. With current inflation and economic conditions in the US and Europe more may need it in the near future.
How can crypto be a store of value when the market price fluctuates so wildly?
Bitcoin, etc fell much more in one day recently than the Turkish lira fell over many months. And one is supposedly using Bitcoin to avoid inflation in the lira?
Ok, got it. It's not that I want to pick on you, just that we should use Tether and USDT as an example only when we are talking about scumbags who contribute to make the whole crypto community look like irresponsible frauds.
While I generally agree with your sentiment, some of the most iconic art in the world seems to me to be poorly made and I have no idea why they are valued or admired. I don’t just mean the usual go-to controversial examples in modern art like Serrano’s “Piss Christ”[0] or Emin’s “My Bed”[1], as even some older stuff like Klimt’s “Der Kuss”[2] give me this confusion (the woman has always looked to me like she has a broken neck).
(If it was just “I don’t like it” I would also list Cubism, but I can get that there are well-made examples of Cubism without liking the style).
I'm so used to The Kiss being a masterpiece out of the sheer force of its qualities (the passion, the reluctance, the dresses, the gold...) that I honestly struggle to see it from your point of view - she doesn't have a broken neck, she's "turtling" away from him. But i guess the eye of the beholder is what it is.
I do agree with your view of contemporary work though, it's hard to see the value of a lot of it (diamond skulls, broken mattresses, etc etc). Art has become an investment vehicle with a veneer of cultural education, so now the rulebook has gone out of the window.
>> It's astonishing to me that people will just buy into any success story that involves crypto and NFTs. People don't question why poorly drawn pictures are being bought for thousands of dollars
> While I generally agree with your sentiment, some of the most iconic art in the world seems to me to be poorly made and I have no idea why they are valued or admired. I don’t just mean modern art like Serrano’s “Piss Christ”[0] or Emin’s “My Bed”[1], but even some older stuff like Klimt’s “Der Kuss”[2] (the woman has always looked to me like she has a broken neck).
I don't think "Serrano’s “Piss Christ”[0] or Emin’s “My Bed”[1]" are in the category "most iconic art in the world." IIRC, most iconic art is such because of it's place in art history, and sometimes what looks poorly made actually required quite a lot of skill (e.g. if you try to flick paint on a canvas like Jackson Pollock did, it won't turn out). Sometimes skill requires skill to appreciate. Can someone who can't code appreciate the difference between good code that works and some spaghetti codes that also works?
I think the issue with NFT "poorly drawn pictures" is there's nothing special about them: not innovative, not influential, not especially pleasing, not made by anyone with any reputation (for art). Just common stuff that doesn't stand out from the crowd. Like a sibling comment said about modern art, NFTs are "an investment vehicle with a veneer of cultural education," without the veneer (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30285259).
Anti-art is more like a sort of trolling meta commentary on art. The "performance art" of the art world, really. People who like it like it for the iconoclasm and/or humor of it, I think.
I mean small-m modern, not the art style Modern. Synonym treadmill for words which mean “now-ish” being baked into specific periods, reminds me a bit of the meme of files called “Report_final_FINAL_2_feedback_final.doc” :)
Well, you just burst our family bubble. By random chance I clicked your last link and saw... the painting my wife has had hanging prominently, horizontally, for years and neither of us questioned that it was an original work by a local artist. It looked just... "meh" enough for me to believe it. Also, I don't know much about art.
Many people dream of getting rich quickly, by windfall.
Buying index funds is a great and easy way to enhance your personal financial situation – over time. But you will not get rich quickly. So people still seek out alternatives that are incredibly risky and unsound.
I think it doesn't help that the "normal answers" for "normal people" are essentially broken right now.
We were looking at somewhere to park €50k while we hunt for a house. Growing up we're always told about savings accounts. We should have a savings account, we should be contributing to savings accounts, blah blah blah. So we asked our bank about a savings account, and they offered an annual return of €78. And I don't even mean 0.0015%, but the return is capped so it's not allowed to compound.
Many people are teased and abused, for year after year after year, working hard with obvious threat of termination, while a different system of money that they have no access to, grows and grows (investments) every day in the newspaper headlines for everyone to see.
I think this is quite important; many ‘normal’ people simply struggled while others got money ‘for free’; while of course this (with stocks, houses, inheritance etc) happened all the time before crypto, that was for the rich mostly. Now it appears you can put the little money you ‘have’ into crypto and make a nice living like a rich person; make so much interest that you can live of it.
Even the careful people I know now are saying; yeah, you keep saying it’ll crash for years but it doesn’t so I am going in. And that effect is spreading. I have, in my circles, way too many people who are living off crypto interest fully.
Crypto has to periodically 10X though for this to happen.
The narrative has a type of theta/time decay as there is just no way for the majority to 10X their investment periodically.
I think it is also very hard to think about the global entertainment dollars that have been locked up for the past 2 years. It is an enormous amount of money and as the pandemic fades people are going to splurge on the non-digital services and goods that they have not been able to for the past two years.
The pandemic fading throws the whole process that has pushed crypto to these levels in reverse.
The fact crypto has continued to make new highs is basically meaningless as far as the future is concerned.
You also can't separate that this all became popular during a global pandemic and people love to gamble.
I think its easy to underestimate the amount of global entertainment dollars that have been on the sidelines the past two years.
It is a fashion trend that will turn to dust as the pandemic fades. No one is going to want to be reminded of the pandemic in two years when people were so starved for entertainment they were buying these stupid ape pictures.
Yes. That there's no hash of the underlying "art" is astonishing. It really is purely, as far as I understand, the URL, and as such depending on DNS and the hoster.
I dunno, I am not really questioning why some limited-run sneakers are being bought for thousands of dollars. Or why people spend 50k on their bathroom. Or why old Nintendo cartridges go for enormous prices. Or diamonds.
I don't see the difference here.
Now, I also don't get why NFTs have taken off AT ALL. But I don't see how they're really different than anything I listed above, except maybe more unstable or even more useless than a 2000$ pair of sneakers, which you could still wear if you ever ran out of shoes.
People never stop buying tulips. There is always a new breed that create a new self-propelling market rush of doom.
Crypto assets have one rational thing behind them - as an asset class their value seems to fluctuate more or less randomly, hence (as long as the value fluctuates above zero) they provide a nice asset class that is detached from every other asset class - which means they are a nice way to pad an investment portfolio.
>People don't
question why poorly drawn pictures
are being bought for thousands of
dollars
I'm also mystified by the prices that modern 'art' can command.
>It's astonishing to me that people will
just buy into any success story
'get rich quick like him' is as old as the hills.
I'm not being snarky i'm just pointing out that the underlying principles behind your complaints have always existed to some extent. I think it's just a symptom of 'post truth' and and cynicsm at the system that allows the illusion to be even more blatant.
Why limit it to crypto? People don't question why the value of houses seems to magically rise globally despite no tangible value being added to the assets in most cases. People don't question why Wall Street traders get rich by trading second derivatives of mortgage backed securities with each other all day. What makes a mortgage any more "real" than an NFT?
People question it all the time. And a house has obvious utility. It's also kind of a share in the city's future. It can be mispriced but it's not entirely based on hype.
I'm not talking about the houses, though. I'm talking about mortgages. Have you ever wondered why you can't just save up for a house and buy it with cash? Why do you need to first acquire this thing called a mortgage? What part is the bank actually playing in this transaction? You'll pay tax to them for 30 years but what exactly are you getting in return?
Houses are acquired in cash all the time. There is no legal requirement to tie oneself to a mortgage, if you already have the means to pay the price in full.
Practically speaking, not really. A tiny fraction of people might earn enough to save enough to buy a house, but most will be priced out at every stage by people taking mortgages. Some people inherit existing property and trade it for other property. But if you are starting from scratch it's virtually impossible. Do you know anyone who has done it?
> They're lending you the money.
Are they? If I lend you my car, I don't have access to my car during that time. But money is just made up. There's nothing moving around. Banks aren't losing anything when they lend you something. They just create a deposit and a liability and get on with it. As long as they are all doing it at roughly the same rate nothing stops the economy filling up on debt, as it has done and continues to do.
Remember, banks lending money is nothing like you or I lending money. The banks control the ledger. They don't play by the same rules as us.
Yeah, states usually do grant banks a limited right to create money. But once again, this is not based on hype. These states often have sovereignty, land, allegiance of their citizens, recognized legitimacy, police force, serviceable tax regimes, tanks, etc.
I'm not sure are about states granting banks the right to create money. Do you have a source for this? As far as I can tell they do it simply because we all use them and trust them to keep the ledger. The state (meaning, the US or UK) doesn't seem to have much control over it.
I'm making the argument or maybe just an observation that the current financial system has a basis in hard reality whereas blockchain/NFT/metaverse/digital ownership seem to break away from that.
The banks are obviously granted the limited right to create money by the government. Whether it's through regulation post facto or a charter a priori, by now virtually all modern states have a wide control over their banking systems, including setting required reserve rates.
I paid for physical goods with Bitcoin. That seemed to have a basis in hard reality too.
> by now virtually all modern states have a wide control over their banking systems
This doesn't seem to be the case.
> including setting required reserve rates.
Can you find what the required reserve rate for the US and UK is? From what I can find the US does have a required rate but it's 0% and the UK doesn't have one at all.
The reason people aren't buying a home in cash, which is not necessarily common but completely doable and not illegal or anything, is because almost no one can afford to do so. Saving for 30 years and then buying a house in cash all while paying rent somewhere in the meantime I think is pretty undesirable.
The magical value of houses has been a concern for decades (see numerous housing crash episodes) but there is a difference: the payment stream from a mortgage is enforced by laws and backed by the ability to take ownership of the mortgaged property. Perhaps a better comparison would be NFT vs mortgage _insurance_.
Not sure it's so magical. If you own a home in a city whose GDP is increasing every year it makes some sense that property in that city would also increase in value.
Not really in a lot of cities, most scarcity is based on government regulations (=not allowing more of them to be built, or not allowed to build larger ones). There are a few locations where there is no actual usable space to build more, but mostly, that is not an issue.
The scarcity of land is physical. And to supply more housing you need to pay for the ownership of physical assets, and then for people to physically demolish them and physically build bigger structures, which is a lot of expensive to take if the demand for property doesn't already exceed its supply
Or you could create more "limited edition" monkey pictures at essentially zero marginal cost.
There are a lot of places where there is enough land to build more and more, but the governments don't allow it. And there are also places such as san-francisco, where replacing single-family houses with apartment buildings would solve a lot of the housing crisis, but the government (and NIMBYs) don't allow it.
Even in a world with zero building regulation you're still running into constraints though. Sure, people could build more apartments which would slow growth in accommodation prices and maybe directly hurt the value of the neighbours' properties they overshadow, but land is still limited amd expensive (more expensive if you're allowed to build tenement blocks on it) and construction still physically intensive and expensive, so there's still no incentive to drive prices down by supplying more apartments than the market demands.
cf NFTs where digital art itself can be copied and viewed infinitely, and the NFTs themselves are just tokens issued at near zero cost by providers which could happily issue infinitely more tokens referencing the same art (even though at the moment, for the sake of trust and collectibility and not dampening the hype yet, it's more lucrative to issue finite numbers of additional tokens referring to more low-effort variations on the original art instead.)
I was born in a socialist country, where people built houses. Literally, you built first, dealt with papers later, and pretty much everyone had a house or an apartment. Government and companies built apartments for their workers, people built private houses themselves, mostly literally (every weekend, wheelbarrow, few sacks of cement, a bunch of bricks, a few friends, a case of beer,...).
After a bunch of regulation, now, the "papers" cost more than materials to build, and most of the area is zoned as eg farming area, even though there has never been any farming there. Of course, prices have gone up A LOT, there is a lot of NIMBYism, by people who already build their house, and don't want another one next to it, and young people are basically fucked.
We might disagree, but in places with available land (and there are many), the only thing that stands between housing and non-millionaire people are (local) governments and regulations.
I mean, it depends. If you live in Tokyo, the scarcity is real-real. If you live in a city, where just a re-zoning solves a lot of problems, the issue is atleast mostly solvable, even if it means shaking down a whole pyramid of government officials, and in some places, the housing crisis is bad enough, that they're aproaching the critical mass of people to make this happen.
You're playing semantics. If there aren't physically enough homes in NYC for the number of interested buyers there is Scarcity. Talking about that source of that scarcity is irrelevant. Re-Zoning fixes nothing in the short term and scarcity will remain. Even if you re-zoned you need to physically build up inventory which takes years.
Yes, and new york (and san francisco, and many other places) are in a housing crisis for years now, and have not started any major building projects nor liberalized building larg(er) apartment buildings (in case of san francisco).
The best time to start building was 10, 15, 20 years ago, the next best time is now.
Mortgage means somebody is going to pay somebody else regularly for 30 years, or bank gets a valuable property. That is more reliable wealth guarrantee than NFTs are.
This seems like a classic whataboutism. Mortgages being bad or good has absolutely no bearing on the quality of cryptocurrencies or NFTs. If crypto was actually good, you shouldn't need to deflect criticism with "but the existing financial sector also sucks!"
It's not a deflection. I'm saying the whole thing is a disaster. Crypto and NFTs are just the surface and are quite rightly causing people to question the meaning of it all. But if you dig a little deeper you'll find it's just an extension of what's been going on for a long time behind closed doors.
I thoroughly recommend the book Other People's Money by John Kay. In it he reminds us what the actual value of the financial system is and talks about what it has become. Bitcoin was an attempt to get the actual value of cash (just one facets of finance) without paying tax (interest) to the banks.
I guess NFTs are being used mostly for money laundering. No one in their sane mind would buy NFTs with their hard-earned money. Not sure if regulatory authorities get bribed secretly with bitcoins to keep quite and not do their job.
Yeah. A friend the other day put it like, 'Yeah, internet conmen are charismatic'.
I would guess that many people are well aware that 85+% of NFT hype is based on scams, money laundering, and bagholders. But their voices get drowned out.
I feel bad for the people who fall for it; I do. And I even feel a little bad for the conmen who have to live with themselves.
However, the BBC have no excuse for letting such a documentary get so far without doing basic checks on a scamcoin that was so scammy it actually got shut down, four months ago. That's egregious.
Not supporting illegal wars for oil egregious, and not quite smearing Corbyn for years egregious, just ordinary "this is what happens when you put terrible Tories in charge" second order effects.
The BBC were not especially in support of the war - in fact, much of their problems stem from questioning the "dodgy dossier", resulting in the events of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton_Inquiry and it being made clear to them that the government and security services would not accept this criticism and would take revenge for it.
> smearing Corbyn for years egregious
This really has been egregious.
> internet conmen are charismatic
Half-baked theory, but I wonder if the prevalence of voice comms - Discord, Clubhouse and its twitter ripoff - in this space is used to enable charisma to ensnare victims.
The word conman comes from the phrase "Confidence Man". They generally use charisma to gain the confidence of others and then exploit that confidence for personal gain.
It could also have been more of a "hit piece" by the BBC on crypto/NFTs, and perhaps the controllers are financially incentivized/aligned with Bitcoin et al's success - so they pulled it? A possibility exists in the direction opposite to what you suggest.
Did you read the article. Absolutely nothing says it was a 'hit piece'. In fact, it appears to have been pulled because of poor editorial oversight. The documentary as filmed made no mention of the fact that this guy set up his own coin and crypto fund, which was shut down and left investors in the lurch.
> The Guardian asked the BBC if it was confident in his claimed financial returns and questioned why the programme’s promotional material did not mention that Hassan’s cryptocurrency Orfano was abruptly shut down in October, with many unhappy investors claiming they were left out of pocket as a result.
In any open market you are going to have the whole spectrum. You fail to mention the positive transformation and liberation of millions of people by crypto. From Nigeria, to Turkey, to Argentina millions are being saved from decades of financial isolation or straight up robbery by their corrupt institutions. You look at the glass half empty my friend.
Look at Turkish Lira inflows into crypto in recent months. You'll see the value. Also check out the inflow of USD as the Federal Reserve printed trillions of new dollars
Any evidence that this represents the common man freeing himself from the economic authorities and not just the privileged class using it for capital flight and tax evasion?
Any evidence this is the privileged class using it for capital flight and tax evasion and not the common man freeing himself from the economic authorities? In my opinion it doesn't matter. Good for all involved who are taking back control of their wealth
