Ymaxi

Video games use 50+ terra watts of energy just in the USA alone. Highly damaging to the environment.

No just The Verge doing it’s job as a tech publication and reporting on the various aspects of a new technology/cultural movement.

Find me an example of an artist creating artificial scarcity for a purely digital work prior to NFTs.

Example the Rhein II or any original photograph

if I buy an NFT album, there’s nothing stopping me from selling the NFT to someone else and keeping a copy of the MP3s (or FLACs or WAVs or whatever). The NFT doesn’t add anything to the purchase. Any pristine copy of the underlying data is as good as any other.

But now try selling that copied digital file and you will see that the market will reject it, since it’s verifiably not part of the original collection. Anyone can make a copy of Once "Upon a Time in Shaolin", a perfect digital copy, but unless you have the receipt it’s worthless.
Art can and should be copied and enjoyed by as many people as possible, but NFTs provide a way for the provenance of the original. Shakespeare’s poems are printed a million times and read by hundreds of millions, but there is only one original manuscript and they are worth millions.

CDs have intrinsic properties that make them valuable. NFTs do not. CDs require a one-time expenditure of resources/energy to create. NFTs have cumulative effects on resource/energy use for as long as the blockchain exists. This is not an apt comparison.

Actually this statement is what doesn’t make sense. Why does a "one time expenditure of resource to create" make it more valuable?

I am sure The Verge will be fine as some of the 46 million US adults who hold Bitcoin (and other crypto, NFTs) come back to as readers

I was talking more generally when I said TOS (including licensing/copyrights in there).

And courts absolutely enforce licensing

You are correct, technically, and it leads perfectly to what I am going to say next.

There has always been a market for collectibles, even ones that could be duplicated perfectly (see digital music, photography etc). The NFT just codifies it into a new container that is verifiably authentic and easily moved around (also traded in a trustless way).

So yes, you can use any screen to display a right-click saved NFT (in fact that’s the only way you can even use the one I recommended, the Samsung Frame TV), but these NFT specific screens give those who want to directly pull it from the blockchain a way to do that.

Some people listen to lossless streaming, some people get the CD…it’s the same thing and the CD is definitely "more environmentally damaging".. but still some people do it and that’s ok…. to me this is the same.

video games use more energy and kill the environment than NFTs.. Do you want The Verge to be writing articles against video games too?

ha ha, that was funny

but at the same time where else would a project looking for a quality illustrator go? Fiverr?

wait what? all the articles have been at best 50/50 supportive of NFTs and more like 75% negative.

The only thing that has changed in the last few days is that The Verge has been covering a lot more of the nuances of the industry (legal, artist impact, displaying NFTs etc)

Great read.

Seems like he is pretty happy about the outcome as the artist for the project, even moving to Miami to work on the project.

The Samsung Frame TV is also an option.

It’s probably got a display that is tuned for displaying art which is probably better than all the options mentioned here.

The downsides are that it can’t display video/GIFs, and doesn’t have any specific web3-based functionality.

I wouldn’t talk in such blanket absolutes.

There are plenty of NFTs that are completely on-chain (so not just a "receipt"), and also confer the buyer full rights.

That is like saying "if you like a song/singer you go buy the album on iTunes. That’s the ONLY way to do it! If you are collecting limited series CDs or merch then you aren’t really liking the singer, you are just gambling"

Could it be possible that there is more than one way to "like the art/artist and collect"?

For example, If someone likes the art, and they also like the exclusivity of owning something from a limited series, they can buy the art (in the form of an NFT).

Relevant

https://twitter.com/AnthonyHopkins/status/1534576219458375680?s=20&t=HB9duwBUnFkrqpB6flqh9w

Quite a leap of judgement there to assume everyone who buys an NFT is looking to "shill" it so he/she could sell at a higher price.

At a basic level all kinds of fandom is about "shilling". You like a song, you shill it to your friends.

If you like a restaurant chain or a food (say Impossible Burgers), you will "shill" it to your friends.. you might even buy the shares of that company…

Got to say that I’ve been impressed with the coverage in the last couple of days tho

This and the NFT Legal article are both pretty good.

You can say that for anything… is "streaming a new medium though? Digital music has been around before that"….

Enforcing TOS for digital goods has been done by courts for several decades now, no need to reinvent the wheel on that enforcement part.

Another great write-up.

Really really good to see The Verge move away from a blanket "NFT BAD" stance to actually explaining the nuances of the industry and starting genuinely interesting discussions.

Bravo!

True for most current NFTs, but this is about to change.

What if explicitly accepting TOS is part of each NFT transaction? What if NFTs can’t even be moved without the other wallet explicitly accepting the Terms?

These things are being developed right now and should be out in months.

This is great.

Pretty much all the fields (music, paintings, sculptures, video) have a lot of low effort copy-pasta that is neither inspiring nor legal. But they are there, and there is an audience/market for that.

And a lot of this stuff is up to interpretation.

For example someone might say that most "pop" music is the same thing recycled over and over with slight variation… Or (say) all of Enya’s music is as if it was auto-generated… or COD and Battlefield (and Rainbow six….) is the same game with minor tweaks…. Mostly it’s up to the subjective interpretation of what is "real art".

NFTs are the same… it’s not an outright "scam"… it’s also not the best thing since sliced bread…. it’s another format/medium for artists to create and collectors to collect.

Very nice article.

All industries have legit players and scams. Good to educate the market on how to navigate the intricacies.

I am no Elon fan but it’s fascinating to see the hate/spin

Sure, Musk does deliver on some of his promises. He makes cars, some of which can reliably handle some of the driving tasks, but not at the expense of the driver’s attention. He builds rockets that can land themselves and be reused.

Why is this tagged as Tech / Transportation? It should really be tagged as Opinion

Very very good.

Good to clean the space of the bad actors (and there are quite a few)