"investing in NFTs"
Can I just be the first to say that buying cryptocurrencies isn't investing; it's gambling.
When the expert speaker at an NFT tech panel goes rogue
How can you save the world's oceans? By investing in NFTs of course! A global network of campaigning filmmakers, Ocean Collective, hopes to drive up awareness about declining marine biodiversity by developing a digital Museum of Extinction. Items of artwork from the museum will then be sold as NFT purchases to raise cash to …
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Saturday 16th April 2022 11:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
They won't sell many...
They won't sell many if they are as plain as the examples in the video.
This is more like it: https://www.popsci.com/animals/new-fairy-wrasse-fish-identified/
[Icon: blue background means he's underwater!]
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Saturday 16th April 2022 11:22 GMT JassMan
Items of artwork from the museum will then be sold as NFT purchases to raise cash to fund a documentary series on the topic along with other environmental awareness projects.
Anyone who reads yesterday's story about NFTs will realise that:
A) It may raise cash for the documentary series but the NFT is totally Fungible when it comes to crooks selling off you toss-pot asset, so will never see the supposed rise in value.
B) If they are interested in environmental awareness, they would not be using NFTs in the first place owing to the computing power (and concomitant waste) involved.
And...
Don't you just love boffins. Especially the ones who tell the truth instead of what they may or may not have been paid to say.
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Sunday 17th April 2022 05:48 GMT Joe W
More common than you think. Many (most serious ones) are highly critical of their own work. They know what's good about it and what is shite. There are counterexamples, sure.
But I loved those comments and insights! Just cause he knows how the stuff works doesn't mean he doesn't talk about the problems, especially in those get yourself rich schemes (he won't get rich anyway), and there are some things that could benefit from a chain of signed and verified transactions. This is not a good use case.
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Monday 18th April 2022 09:32 GMT Tom 7
TBF a small NFT setup wont actually take much power. NFTs generally consume power in an exponential manner - the first few hundred or so use miniscule power, the next thousands or so it starts to get noticeable, once your in the millions you have to run it at work, any bigger than that you have to use other peoples machines...
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Tuesday 26th April 2022 18:32 GMT sev.monster
Unless by "a small NFT setup" you are implying a new from-zero blockchain, you're wrong. As the complexity of the blockchain increases, so do the computational and storage costs, and those costs are spread throughout the entire ecosystem—they don't magically lessen by keeping the number of transactions you are adding low.
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Saturday 16th April 2022 16:24 GMT Crypto Monad
Note that with an NFT, all that you actually own is a *URL*. The NFT doesn't even include a hash of the content at that URL.
The server hosting that URL can go away; or the server owner can replace the content at that URL with different content, or even remove it entirely. At that point, all you own is a 404 error message.
The URL, of course, also allows anyone else in the world to look at or download a copy of the content there.
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Sunday 17th April 2022 15:56 GMT marcellothearcane
Not even - the only unique (and non-fugible) thing about an NFT is an ID in the blockchain of choice. I could make an NFT pointing to exactly the same metadata/URI as yours - see the Ethereum NFT schema standard RFC here: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721
> Every NFT is identified by a unique uint256 ID inside the ERC-721 smart contract. This identifying number SHALL NOT change for the life of the contract. The pair (contract address, uint256 tokenId) will then be a globally unique and fully-qualified identifier for a specific asset on an Ethereum chain.
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Tuesday 26th April 2022 18:38 GMT sev.monster
You can still embed the data directly instead of using a URI, but the costs for doing so are incredibly high. Even the shitty pixel images that people were minting—which used little storage space thanks to their small size—have mostly switched to centralized servers due to how cost-prohibitive it is.
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Monday 18th April 2022 23:14 GMT Antron Argaiv
Yes, but you see, the problem is they *don't* own it.
What they own is a blockchain tagged image of the artwork, which is pretty much identical to the one I have on my PC from doing a right click and "save image". Theirs does, of course, have a blockchain tag permanently associated with it, for which they paid a considerable amount of money, but that means nothing to me.
So, NFTs are perhaps even more ethereal than bitcoin. And much more useless. Unless, of course, you happen to be selling them.
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Saturday 16th April 2022 11:27 GMT oiseau
Opinion
... an unfair and totally unfounded opinion that NFTs are a load of horse-puckey.
I have a different opinion, albeit along more or less the same lines:
NFTs are a load of bullshit whipped up by the usual shysters to con gullible idiots with too much money in their pockets.
Unfair?
Maybe, my opinions sometimes are.
Unfounded?
Well ...
Ask the AH who put up 2.9M last year to purchase one to see if he could shaft someone with it further on to make some easy money at their expense.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/14/twitter-nft-jack-dorsey-sina-estavi
Unfounded indeed.
Whatever you celebrate these days, have a good week-end.
O.
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Tuesday 19th April 2022 09:40 GMT Coastal cutie
Re: Opinion
You're quite right - they can't, possibly to stop them being sick when galloping at full speed, when the stomach comes under repeated pressure from the intestines, which would force the contents out if they were put together the same as other vertebrates including humans (apologies to anyone eating whilst reading this)
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Sunday 17th April 2022 22:04 GMT PRR
Re: Opinion
> ....the expression "horse-puckey". I had never heard or read this expression before.
I'm shocked that a well-read widely-traveled literate person like you has never stepped in horse-puckey.
I remember it back to the 1960s, albeit from the middle of the US. It was in general circulation in the East by the 1970s. Indeed Google Ngram (word history) finds it in print right about 1970; and more in American than British.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=horse+puckey&year_start=1960&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=0
Google Books finds much horse puckey:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22horse%20puckey%22&tbm=bks&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1800,cd_max:1984&lr=lang_en
Notably a 1953 book The Streak:
"The record aint official the way it is." "Horse puckey,” Feona said. “If you cut the lap off , it's the record ! They pay off bets on that.”
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Tuesday 19th April 2022 18:28 GMT jake
Re: Opinion
"In my original copy, I wrote "bollocks", which is no longer acceptable."
No longer acceptable to whom, pray tell? Were the commentardariat polled?
"I'd just like to add my congratulation to our sub-editor for the expression "horse-puckey". I had never heard or read this expression before."
It's kind of a middle-American variation of bollocks. Close enough replacement, at least considering the origins of the folks ElReg probably had working over the bank holiday weekend.
"Is it similar to "monkey tennis"?
No, that phrase-equivilant would be "horse hockey".
This cross-pond translation service brought to you by the number e and the letter O.
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Saturday 16th April 2022 23:35 GMT Fruit and Nutcase
Re: Available online?
I recorded the audio but for some inexplicable reason 57 minutes of the hour-long event was recorded as complete silence on my phone
May be there is an explanation... icon -->
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_American_film)
"...although Arroway's recording device only recorded static, it recorded 18 hours of it"
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Saturday 16th April 2022 23:22 GMT Fruit and Nutcase
Re: Available online?
...mention of the KLF - This review was published a few days ago
Who Killed the KLF? review – Chris Atkins’ entertaining guide to true pop mavericks
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Saturday 16th April 2022 12:42 GMT tezboyes
The what happens when is no longer hypothetical...
One of the first NFT games "F1 Delta" shut down with a days notice last month.
The company behind it are apparently going to offer compensation in the form of similar NFTs in another game. And that's a best case scenario, they could easily have just shut down totally.
As for resale value, well good luck with trying to sell any of that on!
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Saturday 16th April 2022 12:59 GMT Howard Sway
Selling NFTs is a new way to fund environmental film missions
I think the key to understanding this is to look at the nature of the environmental film missions that they will be funding themselves to go on, once they've publicised their worthy cause enough for sufficient numbers of
mugsconcerned citizens to have purchased their NFTs.Will "Ocean Collective" be braving the rough Winter seas off Greenland to make documentaries about the damage being done to some rare species of brown seaweed that can only be found there? Or will they perhaps conclude that their cause is best served by heroically sacrificing their time cruising round the Caribean for a couple of years filming the brightly coloured photogenic marine life there, subsisting on little more than sweet rum cocktails and other such deprivations?
NFT in this case surely stands for Numerous Free Tickets.
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Saturday 16th April 2022 13:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
I work in a very big university. I am a lecturer - a senior lecturer, no less, in STEM. I do not understand cryptocurrencies or NFTs. I do, however, have very smart colleagues on the computer science side of things sho do understand these things, and say, with a single voice, that they are useless scams.
A few years back some people who know even less about it than me said that we should put all our student records on a blockchain. When asked how this would improve on the database we have been running, in one form or another, for a hundred years, they went very quiet.
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Saturday 16th April 2022 13:59 GMT Nick Ryan
I full on laughed at a guest speaker at some event I went to a few years ago where he was standing there extolling the virtues of "the blockchain" (that's what he called it), how the blockchain can perform iterative functions, how the blockchain can have triggers in it to trigger external events and processes and lots of similarly wonderful total bullshit.
He was not amused when I stated that "the blockchain", or more accurately a block chain, was nothing more than an algorithmic approach to storing data and had no advantages but lots of disadvantages unless there were a large number of distributed systems holding the entire database. Adding to this that there no concurrent controls over such a distributed database and almost no security either. He was not even able to describe what "the blockchain" actually was, nor able to argue when I got fed up with his bullshit and just told him straight that he had no idea what he was talking about.
I similarly squashed a suggestion about converting an in-house database into a blockchain data store: absolutely no advantages but lots of disadvantages.
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Saturday 16th April 2022 13:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
It's scams all the way down
The physical art market is a scam which relies upon artists and art critics developing a 'reputation' for their art which looks like a child painted it.
The electronic art market is a scam where artists who can't create physical art try to get money for their photoshopped work.
NFTs are a scam which promise resale value for screenshots.
NFT providers are a scam who get into and go out of business without any regulation.
Just look at Sina Estavi who bought Jack Dorsey's first tweet for $2.9m, offered it for sale at $48m, and got a high bid of $277.
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Saturday 16th April 2022 14:13 GMT Terry 6
Re: It's scams all the way down
Thing is, OK art (or Art) will never have much intrinsic value. And much of the value it does have is fashion lead (anyone who's ever watched a few episodes of Bargain Hunt will have seen one of those times when the auctioneer will be saying of some beautiful object "10 years ago that would have fetched £900 at auction, but now it's only worth about £3.50). But a physical object does have some intrinsic value and some possibly subjective but real intangible value (aesthetic value if you like).
This is considerable less so if it's a piece of art designed to shock or incite you. Think Banksy, who's stuff is clever graffiti,stencil sprayed on a wall. Even less intrinsic value if it's a digital design that can be endlessly reproduced. But if it's just an NFT, knocked out because it's, well, saleable the intrinsic value is nil. As to the aesthetic value, hmmm. There seem to be a lot more NFTs than there are talented creators wanting to produce actual Art in the form of NFTs....
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Saturday 16th April 2022 15:37 GMT Neil Barnes
Re: It's scams all the way down
Given the amount of art which is either forged, faked, or simply made in a style similar enough to the alleged original artist that it can't be told apart without extreme investigation into its materials, age, previous owners, sales history and in some cases final appeal to a self-appointed panel of experts in that particular artist;
and given the difference in 'value' between such articles if they are pronounced 'original';
it's clear that the art market is nothing about collecting art, and everything about collecting artists.
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Saturday 16th April 2022 20:31 GMT tezboyes
Re: It's scams all the way down
Sadly no opportunity to both Up and Down vote !
Banksy is clever, but his work at best is meant to be street art. We visited Bristol a few years ago, and completely by chance noticed one high up on a wall, it was a lovely little surprise - then move on.
Hence his absolute piss-take of the establishment art world and collectors with that picture that got shredded when purchased.
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Monday 18th April 2022 09:48 GMT Tom 7
Re: It's scams all the way down
Banksy is just a cartoonist and not as good as many professional cartoonists but his (her?) message is completely destroyed by the art world tearing the sides of buildings to own something that was left in a public space. If Steve Bell had taken to vandalism he's be a billionaire by now!
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Saturday 16th April 2022 22:24 GMT Terry 6
Re: It's scams all the way down
Some of his (possibly earlier) Banksy stuff was quite funny. A better class of graffiti. I was genuinely amused by one such that I saw before I knew who/what he was and long before I realised that it was by him. Most of it is (IMAO) self-righteous crap. Schoolboy leftism of the Corbynista/SWP sort of political sophistication. But he can draw. And he came to the attention of the fashionable types. Especially the ones who wanted to seem to be be down with da yoof, because he stands out from the other anonymous paint sprayers.
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Sunday 17th April 2022 14:37 GMT Giles C
Re: It's scams all the way down
Well with art I take the following view.
If I like it and the price is (to me) fair then I might buy it.
I am not bothered about the potential resale value as I am purchasing it to keep as I am not a dealer.
I have a signed by the artist and participants numbered print (it is of Mike Hawthorn racing at Le Mans) cost me about £150 I think. But it is tangible and hanging on the wall.
Don’t care what it will be worth in resale but it is mine and nobody can take it away unless they were to break in and know what they are looking at.
The orginal was for sale but the artist wanted about £2k for it so out of my budget.
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Monday 18th April 2022 09:10 GMT Man inna barrel
Re: It's scams all the way down
To be fair to some forms of art collection, it is about history. A fake Picasso, even if it is physically indistinguishable from a real Picasso, says very little about the history of Picasso's work. I am talking about art in public museums, rather than locked away in some bank vault. It is unfortunate that museums have to fork out so much money for worthwhile works, because of the actions of art speculators.
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Monday 18th April 2022 16:31 GMT Eclectic Man
Re: It's scams all the way down
The art critic Brian Sewell was being interviewed on some TV program or other, and I recall him describing the 'art world' as "a bunch of shits who are only interested in money". Which was how fakes got to be so 'valuable'. The price was never about what it looked like, but who had created it.
Although I have to admit that the da Vinci exhibition I saw at the UK's National Gallery years ago was easily the best I have ever seen. I couldn't buy a ticket online, so got in the queue at 6:00, got to the ticket desk at 12:00, bought a ticket of 18:00 entry and spent over 2 hours in the exhibition.
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Sunday 17th April 2022 09:51 GMT Terry 6
Re: It's scams all the way down
I'm sure there is an element of scarcity value in this when its craft or antiques. But also the element of changing fashions. Stuff that will have been fashionable when first sold, or it wouldn't have sold, (avocado bathroom suites?) but returns to fashion or becomes part of a new fashion. Stuff my parents threw out in the mid/late 20th C. became "delightfully retro" in the early 21st. And some of that was horrible. Some was quite decent though. Cue cries of "100 quid for that. My parents threw out six of them!"
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Monday 18th April 2022 19:44 GMT Terry 6
Re: It's scams all the way down
As to that, a lot of people do use, and more to the point actively choose to retain a landline. They're independent of signal strength and for the time being at least, mains electricity. Usually the sound quality is better and they're easier to hold too.
Apropos of which, this is by and large also a matter of fashion; landlines are so 2017.
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Monday 18th April 2022 11:48 GMT Terry 6
Re: It's scams all the way down
All money is imaginary really. But it's backed by big banks and nations. That banks create money isn't sufficiently well understood by the public. One of the major scams works by telling people that their money is at risk and has to be moved to a new secure account. It works partly because people think their money physically exists as a big pile of cash in a vault.
In fact it only exists as numbers in a ledger. Banks hold cash to meet day to day withdrawals and legal requirements. But they can create money as a multiple of that cash simply by loaning it as a credit- it's just numbers. It's why run on a bank is such a disaster. Suddenly they have to find actual cash to give to desperate customers. But the cash isn't there. It doesn't exist.
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Saturday 16th April 2022 14:46 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: So it's not just me.
It's the same with shares, every month I supposedly bought an ownership stake in America's 500 biggest companies. But when I went to the supermarket and asked them for my bit of Kraft-Heinz they looked at me like I was mad.
I'm beginning to think this joint stock company stuff is all a big scam.
I think I'll stick to investing directly in ventures, some chap has a scheme for extracting sunlight from cucumbers - but the details are all a bit hush-hush at the moment
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Monday 18th April 2022 09:31 GMT Man inna barrel
Re: So it's not just me.
"I'm beginning to think this joint stock company stuff is all a big scam."
Not really. Shares tend to pay dividends. These days, interest rates are so low that your savings are losing money due to inflation. There is a good chance you could beat inflation by putting some of your savings into stocks.
Investing directly in new ventures can be seriously risky, but the rewards are high when you pick a star. This is the venture capital model. You invest in a diversity of ventures, without really knowing whether they will succeed. Most of them will probably flop, and you lose your investment. If you pick a star performer, then the profits from that pay off the losses, and leave a good deal to spare.
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Monday 18th April 2022 11:36 GMT Terry 6
Re: So it's not just me.
In that sense it's like the difference between being a bookmaker and a mug punter. The Turf Accountant is betting on most of the Mug Punters losing. With odds adjusted to make sure they do OK themselves. The odds aren't about the chance of the individual Mug Punter's selection winning. They're a measure of the bookmakers' risk exposure.
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Saturday 16th April 2022 20:33 GMT Flocke Kroes
Oversimplified explanation
An NFT for a some digital artwork is roughly similar to provenance documentation for some physical artwork but with some added bonuses:
1) Maintaining the documentation wastes enormous amounts of electricity.
2) A Scammer who knows more about computing than you can create a transfer of ownership document for "your" digital artwork that the NFT community will say is authentic.
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Saturday 16th April 2022 20:33 GMT gbchew
Art is just this guy, you know?
If the ecological impact genuinely concerns you, then choose a low-carbon chain for your NFT, and compare it to the cost of physically manufacturing pretty art widgets in meat space.
If the economic impact genuinely concerns you, take a hard look at all the other pointless crap in your house, town, country, etc.
Every commercial product is a scam on some level. If someone paid to make you want it, you got played. At least an NFT (probably) won't end up in the landfill, the ground water, or in your lungs. As artifacts of capitalism go, the NFT can be comparatively harmless when it's built on decent infrastructure.
All this web3 cruft is, yes, very silly. That said, it's a lot less silly that all the physically manufactured cruft we're already swimming in. If we're going to keep consuming and by-producing, (which we are), then we're going to need to do it in a context that doesn't kill us. That context will have to be virtual.
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Sunday 17th April 2022 20:59 GMT nintendoeats
Re: Art is just this guy, you know?
I bought a hamburger so I could eat it.
I bought a car so I could go places.
I bought a stereo so I could listen to music.
I bought a print so I could look at it.
I bought a power drill so I could make things.
I bought a camera so I could take photographs.
I bought a couch so I could sit on it.
I bought a lamp so I could see things.
I bought a graphics card so I could play video games.
I bought an NFT so I could say I owned it.
Are you seriously suggesting that the last item on that list is not significantly stupider than the others?
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Sunday 17th April 2022 23:35 GMT Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch
Re: Art is just this guy, you know?
Yes.
The fraudulent genius of the invention of NFTs is that it invents a class of "ownership" where an owner's title to what they paid for is entirely dependent on someone else's infrastructure that might disappear overnight.
As if anyone who bought great art in the last two centuries would lose their property if Sotheby's were to go bankrupt.
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Tuesday 19th April 2022 22:13 GMT jake
Re: Art is just this guy, you know?
"when the visitors from Ophiuci get here, their archeologists are going to be scratching their head organs"
Those aren't head organs, and they aren't scratching. It was a long trip in close quarters, and they don't float that way ...
"while they try to work out why a society died out with no-one owning anything at all..."
You may jest, but I know Millennials who seemingly own nothing. They lease their car/home/furnishings/clothing/shoes(!!)/knick-knacks/books ... name it, it's all somebody else's. They don't even own the food in their fridge ... because there is no food in their fridge, just water. They eat out every meal.
These people pay far more money per month to rent "stuff" than they would if they owned it outright. Makes absolutely no sense, but it seems to be the way kids are doing it these days ... Might be part of the same marketing campaign that sold the plebs on "clouds", no? Or maybe that was just a happy artifact ...
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Monday 18th April 2022 09:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: an owner's title to what they paid for is entirely dependent on someone else's infrastructure
Seen the title deeds to your house recently? Hmm?
It seems to me that it is the reliability and likely lifetime of the infrastructure that matters, not some abstract argument as to whether it should exist or not. HM Land Registry are presumably quite reliable; but some new startup offering NFT's perhaps not so much.
So I think that if I did happen to want to buy some sort of NFT [1] for any non-trivial sum of money, I'd be wanting to know who verifies it, and their level of integrity and persistence.
[1] Not very likely at all, but for the sake of argument let us pretend...
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Saturday 16th April 2022 21:42 GMT Claverhouse
Right-Click Defeat
Personally, I barely understand computers, except how to use them, so am no expert.
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But ever since I first got on the Internet, I have been deeply amused, and dumbfounded by websites attempting to stop viewers from copying 'their' art.
Even back then I could think of half a dozen ways --- cache, screenshot, various download tools, etc.; even website copying at the last --- to seize the art were I devoted enough to want it. The paranoid time spent on futile protection is time better spent on improving both the site and life.
When it comes to Coastal Protection versus the Ocean, I will always bet on the Sea.
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Monday 18th April 2022 09:58 GMT John Riddoch
How NFTs work
I still think this is the most accurate explanation of NFTs:
"You sell an idiot nothing and give them bad art as their receipt"
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Monday 18th April 2022 16:19 GMT Eclectic Man
A NEW OPPORTUNITY JUST FOR YOU!
HELLO Everybody!
I have an exciting new opportunity just for YOU.
Yes, YOU could be the owner of a custom designed NUMBER.
For small fee I* will personally craft a NUMBER and sell** it to you, and promise that I will not sell the same number to anyone else.
Unbelievable I know, but YOU could be the owner of your very own NUMBER.
Please note that NUMBERS are not all equal, some are BIGGER than others, some have SPECIAL PROPERTIES, and you could OWN a NUMEBR that is just as 'SPECIAL' as you are.
HURRY! HURRY! HURRY! There is only an infinite amount left!
*I am a mathematician with not only a B.Sc. but also a Ph.D. in MATHEMATICS - the study of NUMBERS.
**I accept cash***, gold, diamonds, other precious gems and metals
***No Roubles, sorry :(, but a multi-million property in central London will do nicely.
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Wednesday 20th April 2022 06:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
screwed
"Hang on, they were thinking, I bought some "exclusive" NFTs and now you're saying there may be millions of identical duplicates out there and I'll have to hire cyber security firms and lawyers to track them all down?"
The beauty of gullible idiots realizing they've been royally screwed. Priceless.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
