Didnt they say NFTs were like smart contracts?
They're almost all literally built on smart contracts.
Wait, so even with legit NFTs, not pirated ones but ones sold by the actual artist, there's no transfer of copyright at all?
There is, you have been bullshitted to. I said this earlier but contract law doesn't care what an agreement is written on (except for real estate usually) or if it's written down at all, technically, if you can prove it happened. When it comes to copyright, traditional registration-related stuff is just a form of evidence. (It feels condescending to point out because you're supposed to learn this in kindergarten but trademarks work differently, which seems to confuse people.)
Actually the contract can confer and reserve any rights you want and even define arbitrarily complex resale algorithms (like royalties back to the originator which is the point of hype for game developers) but if people are buying and selling tokens that are nothing but a hash I haven't heard of it and don't know why anyone would, the whole point is ownership.
The rest of your post is good, bu that one point is you essentially diverting to worse problems. You ar essentially saying 'Since we are ruining this Earth with fast fashion, factory farms, and plastic, then we shoul destroy this Earth with blockchains.'
His point was more the move to proof-of-stake though. But I agree that it doesn't really matter. If we had a gold standard we'd be spending energy on extracting gold. Without it, we generate incredible economic waste (which all translates to energy waste in the end) by burning imaginary cash and lives and resources on stupid bullshit to generate more incestuous value loops and nothing else, a shameful nigga. And proof-of-work isn't even inherently bad if we were using it to fold proteins or something instead of pointlessly crunching hashes.
Probably rate me late for it, but isn't NFT just a rerun of the comic book/trading card crash? where everyone's dad wasted their money on a reprinted X-Men #1 thinking they'll sell it back in a decade for a million dollars only to discover it's worth jack shit because Marvel printed a million of those things.
The art NFT fad is basically this, yes. But NFTs in general are highly versatile, and it kind of sucks that people cashed in prematurely with this bullshit because it undermines the whole idea a bit leading to endless retards who can't google something before talking about it repeating dumb shit that I have to read.
And that's gonna mean another repeat of Bitcoin where people were tripping over themselves to shit on it which is basically why none of us nerds who should have been early adopters are rich. I look at my old wallet logs where I once spent several million dollars on a quarter of weed and it makes me slightly sad. But
I still own zero NFTs though lol; I'm more interested in coding stuff with it that I'll never get around to.
As a person who ocasionally does character design and art, I feel really confused about this whole thing.
1. As far as I am concerned, blockchain can trace where token was assigned, but I am not sure how it proves that you initially have a right to own it. You can just take someone's stuff, asign token to it and sell it and system will assume it's yours. Does this mean authors are soon gonna be forced to copyright or convert all their stuff to NFT to protect it from the same NFT grifters (assuming this buble won't burst any time soon) ?
2. Is NFT even = full copyright? Because if no, and it's just cost in money attached to a file you can literally change one pixel and technically it's a different file and there is no legal grounds to claim it's stealing. And you can resell it as NFT too...
3. Physical paintings and art pieces are sold for rediculous prices mostly because there can only exist one original copy (Unless artist himself makes more of them). Making it somewhat valueble exactly because it's unique and other copies are visually simmilar reproductions. With fully digital art it's kind of hard to understand where the line between original and reproduction exists, mostly because digital images can be copied 1 to 1 as simple as pressing a few buttons.
1. It's a more robust and convenient record for transferring intellectual property, but it can't do anything magical that a paper contact couldn't do to stop scams. But as a buyer it gives you a solid timeline for doing your due diligence before buying and defending your ownership if you ever need to. Nobody's going to be forced to use NFTs because it's just a medium for doing things within the existing legal framework, although I guess as a creator if you do so it might prevent other people being scammed (if they do their fucking research) and save you headaches.
2. You always have full copyright over a work at the moment you create it, and the right to transfer ownership to someone else. How many pixels you need to change falls under ordinary fair use in terms of law which NFTs don't define; changing the hash to avoid detection is a technique for scammers though yeah. Generally speaking tweaking a couple of pixels doesn't make it a legally distinct work. Someone beating you to register your own work as an NFT doesn't undermine your claim either. Defending it is just as expensive either way... apart from distributed ledgers streamlining the research and evidence part a whole lot. Like I also said earlier, they'll never be worse and will generally be stronger in terms of proof when a rights conflict occurs and do not require any special legal recognition to do that (despite some countries and states making it explicit in law for some reason that they're fine).
3. The explosion in art NFTs is because there's suddenly a practical way to sell digital stuff that was pretty hard to sell before, which is neat apart from how abused it's been. But in this case it's all IP ownership which is totally different from the appeal of owning a physical artefact. You can own a painting but not be able to sell t-shirts of it, see. And that's the same thing that stops you having the right to sell duplicates of the painting (or a game or movie you buy). They're distinct markets. You could hypothetically sell an original painting to one person and a token representing the rights to someone else.
Personally I wouldn't bother with NFTs unless you plan to sell t-shirts or something and have an actual business reason to defend your ownership, or know what you're doing with speculative trading of them (probably missed the boat though). I've also considered using versions of this tech in structuring collaboration on projects I work on. Everything else is basically bullshit.
Longer-term it's possible that we could trade all kinds of contracts, NFTs included, as part of a parallel economy. Actually it's probable that this will happen at some point (probably not any time soon, fuck off) since it's a logical extension of how we already treat value in a way that bypasses currency that's paradoxically simpler in a networked future where we can trust the overhead to be resolved for us, but it's kinda blue sky to talk about now and doesn't make the current bullshit any less stupid. It also takes hours to explain so don't @ me.
Also there's some code leaks and tweets from (ex?) employees on the project which imply that GameStop NFT thing might actually be an NFT-based stock market which is wild. A big corporate adopter selling game licenses was already a big deal for a not-dumb application to move things forward, but that's really nuts if true.
I've been holding off for confirmation to post about it but whatever, it's interesting and illustrative that it could actually be
both. Technically speaking it's all pink on the inside and there's no reason you couldn't use a single platform to exchange your used copy of Skyrim for shares in a foreign cum factory.
