I’ve never heard of a way that NFTs are actually useful, I’ve only heard of people saying things we can do today, but with blockchain (and much less efficiently), or as a way to form a speculators market (ie: a con)
I am a big proponet of blckchains, but speculative nfts have no purpose. Using a blockchain to establish who authored tome work, thats a an actual use.
Blockchains are public ledgers of information. It’s neat. It can be a practical way to keep a ledger. Apparently some banks use a blockchain to validate transactions now.
It’s the whole hype about how it would change the world, and the incredible amounts of grifting that poison Blockchain for the public. For far too many people, it’s just another get-rich-quick scheme.
Block chains do not need to be, and most real applications are not, public. Signing signed work has existed for decades, and almost every single use of it is in a private application.
Copyright isn’t the same, but moreover, it’s not that it didn’t exist. It’s that blockchains remove a class of failures that exist in centralized beauracracy.
and replace those well-known, well-understood, workable failures accounted for by decades/centuries of law, with a brand new class of failures! and hurt the environment as a fun side effect
An important part of changing and doing new stuff is recognizing how the change impacts the wider space. Just changing and disrupting things for the sake of change is likely ignoring all the details that went into the original system. Often, those details aren’t even understood or known at the time, but someone 70 years ago encountered a situation, put a system in place, and it worked ever since.
The past 15 years of big tech disruption of existing systems is a good example of this. We changed so much about so many institutions, and so so much of it turned out to be for the worse.
During the pandemic I had a few friends that endured severe mental health problems due to the fact their GPU’s died in the middle of the height of bitcoin bullshit. One couldn’t do their job, and neither could socialize through the games we typically loved to play together. They became further isolated during a time of physical isolation.
Ever since then I’ve been completely against bitcoin. I understand they allegedly made the process less GPU heavy now, but I won’t forget that human suffering took place for literally no good reason other than a pyramid scheme preying upon ignorant and stupid people.
So yeah, fuck crypto. People need to find another way to do that shit.
I’m not a block chain defender in any sense, but you don’t have to do the idiotic proof of work crap to make block chains actually usable. You and I can sign something with a key, for instance. And the signing of signed data creates the “chain”. No worthless CPU usage, no idiotic “proof of…”. You know it’s my key, I know it’s your key, we know the order of signing. Done.
All the hype nonsense was just grifters trying to steal money. And crypto currency has absolutely no purpose whatsoever.
How does it establish who authored a work? The only thing the blockchain can be guaranteed to prove is who first registered it on said chain, which absolutely doesn’t necessarily mean the author. Immutability doesn’t do anything to solve the garbage in garbage out problem.
I imagined it used for trading rare items. Imagine games like the classic Diablo2 where you can fight random characters and collect rare items. If each were an NFT, the ownership could be traded to other gamers for real money. In that aspect I see real value.
But that’s not how it’s been implemented.
Also for reference, Kodak actually patented a blockchain technology to provide IP rights to photographs taken on special cameras which actually could be extremely beneficial if properly implemented.
You can do that without nfts and blockchain. And have been able to do that in other games, and again it’s just about funding a speculators market which is of no use to anyone aside from people conning other people.
Gotcha, I stopped gaming a long time ago - life keeps me too busy. I swear I’ll start/finish Skyrim when I finally retire - maybe by then it’ll be ported to some holographic virtual reality game system lol.
They’re pretty good for getting rid of ticket touts but the company doing that is based in the Netherlands and it’s slow to spread elsewhere. The protocol’s rules mean you can’t resell for more than face value and they’ve sold over 4m tickets that way.
NFTs have absolutely no effect on ticket reselling. Instead of selling the token you sell the wallet at whatever price you want. And to do that you’re giving up refunds & easy online purchases.
Looking at “your ticket provider” who I think you’re talking about they claim they’ve sold 4m tickets, but their NFT integration involves making copies of tickets sold traditionally. They haven’t sold 4m NFT tickets. Doesn’ t even look like they even mention NFTs on their site.
They mention the protocol prominently but don’t make note of the token standard they use (ERC-721, maybe ERC-1155 these days - aka NFTs).
You can’t really sell your wallet as easily as you think, it’s tied to your GUTS account which you’ve verified on your phone along with all of your personal details so the new meta fantasy you’d have to imagine is somebody selling tickets with phone or selling a GUTS account with maybe a burner phone number but also your actual personal details attached (this hasn’t been happening…at all), it’s not like selling somebody a BTC private key. Different protocols can have different rules built in.
One of Netherlands largest comedians uses them and was delighted with the eradication of scalpers after they sold 50k tickets in a few hours for him. Ziggo Dome partnered with them (big 17k concert venue) and has also extolled the virtue of a scalperless ticket seller/reseller.
I get it, you hate shitcoins and anything related to shitcoins is immediately cancer - but this exists and it works and has worked millions of times.
The wallets aren’t stored by users, instead by the company tied to an account
You can thus only resell using their system
Tickets are issued and re-issued centrally, allowing for refunds on a system where that’s fundamentally impossible (by keeping a list of “invalid” tokens - or since they have control of the wallet they can do whatever)
Purchases are made through normal online payments, not crypto
So please explain to me how this system benefits from being based on NFTs. Looks to me like the only thing NTFs are doing here is adding overhead and a marketing gimmick.
The benefit is the protocol can be used by any other ticket resellers worldwide very easily without having to set up some kind of multinational co-op and that the protocol/smart contract enforces the rules.
Usually the argument I’d hear is “But couldn’t any company do this with a database?” and the answer is “Sure they could - now show me a company with shareholders who profit off of their consumers getting fucked over habitually that’s willing to do it.”
Ticketmaster thrives on being a law unto themselves, everybody complains about them, here’s something that fixes it, proven to work for years, millions of tickets sold with no sign of a scalping market and the people who hate shitcoins throw their toys out of the pram and insist on maintaining Ticketmaster’s dominance.
Congrats I guess, you get what you deserve.
Your conflating the idea of BTC or other currencies being decentralised with the needs of a specific protocol - not everything has to be shitcoin maximalism, it just has to be useful to the businesses and consumers using it. Purchases being made though normal money is a feature, not sure why you’d want it to be crypto since you hate it, you don’t want to force people to see the boring backend stuff that shouldn’t matter to them, that’s what smart contracts are essentially for. The protocol enforces a ruleset, that’s it. If it was designed to be transferrable wherever to whomever without using the protocol the original negative point you had at first (which you seemed to think is a bad thing, as do I) would now exist with people selling wallets and such.
I think there’s some confusion over how these systems work, so I’ll do my best to explain it and that should clear things up.
You create an account with GUTS. They keep your credentials in a database.
You enter personally identifying information, to associate your account with your identity. This data is kept in their database.
You buy a ticket to some event using your credit card or a bank transfer. This ticket is associated with your account in their database.
You find out you can no longer go to the event, so you want to sell the ticket.
The only way to sell your ticket is through the GUTS market. This is the case because GUTS is the central authority on GUTS tickets.
GUTS enforces that you can’t sell the ticket for more than you bought it for. They do this by checking their database for the price of the ticket.
When you sell the ticket, the buyer needs to have a GUTS account and pays using their credit card or a bank transfer.
After selling the ticket the money is then transferred into your bank account.
When a ticket is scanned at the event GUTS checks their database for whether that is a valid ticket tied to your account.
You might notice that absolutely none of that requires any interaction whatsoever with NFTs. That’s because they’re entirely redundant in this system. Here’s what GUTS also does on the backend in order to pretend their business is built on blockchain:
When you create an account GUTS also creates a crypto wallet. This wallet is kept on their servers and stored in their database.
When you buy a ticket from GUTS they mint an NFT using the GET protocol and transfer it into the wallet only they have access to.
When you sell a ticket to someone else they transfer it from the wallet on your account only they have access to, to the wallet in the other person’s account only they have access to.
When a ticket is scanned at the event GUTS issues a scannedTicket event on the NFT. (This is redundant even in the GET protocol, I really don’t understand why this exists)
(Note this is a simplification; there’s batching going on to reduce costs)
Here’s a couple important things to keep in mind:
The GET protocol is simply a smart contract(s). It can be minted, sold, resold,
scanned, checked, invalidated and claimed. that’s it. There is no
authentication, no money transfer, no identity checking, no refunds, no
customer support system. None of the things that are hard about selling tickets
is helped by the GET protocol.
The money a ticket reseller gets doesn’t go through the smart contract - it
would only be able to do that if the money was first converted to crypto and
then back. So when a ticket is resold that money goes straight to GUTS’s bank
account and then to the resellers. As such the only thing enforcing that
scalpers can’t sell at a higher price is GUTS’s servers. Not the smart contract.
The GET protocol in theory lets you be independent of the seller - you can sell
tickets with a simple transaction on ethereum or polygon. Not so with GUTS,
because they have full ownership of the wallets.
Now that we’re hopefully on the same page I’ll respond to some of your claims:
Usually the argument I’d hear is “But couldn’t any company do this with a database?” and the answer is “Sure they could - now show me a company with shareholders who profit off of their consumers getting fucked over habitually that’s willing to do it.”
GUTS is a for-profit private company. I agree shareholders can often make things worse, but lets not pretend the same profit motive isn’t there.
Ticketmaster thrives on being a law unto themselves, everybody complains about them, here’s something that fixes it, proven to work for years, millions of tickets sold with no sign of a scalping market and the people who hate shitcoins throw their toys out of the pram and insist on maintaining Ticketmaster’s dominance.
Weird take, I have no problem with GUTS existing. If they’re helping break Ticketmaster’s monopoly more power to them. But their use of NTFs and blockchain is pointless.
Actually if I want to give them as much credit as I can here’s my take: They
wanted to build GUTS to fix scalping, but VCs aren’t interested in that. So
they had the fantastic idea of using the NFT craze to their advantage. They say
they’re using NFTs, get huge investment to build out infrastructure and get the
business running. Now they know that NFTs on a technical level don’t actually
help at all, so they build a traditional ticketing platform and then add the
GET protocol on top to keep investors happy.
If it was designed to be transferrable wherever to whomever without using the protocol the original negative point you had at first would now exist with people selling wallets and such.
All the negatives I listed were for actual NFT-based tickets, where ticket
buyers own the wallet and have to pay in crypto. Such a system would never get
any mass adoption, but it’s also the only actual way you use NFTs for tickets.
If a system doesn’t let you own the wallet and pay in crypto, then their
crypto-based systems are just for show.
Sorry for the essay. I wrote it mostly for myself, but if you made it all the way through thanks.
It’s fantastic for things like game characters and cosmetics - it would be awesome if, say, clearing or 100%-ing a game let you use assets from that game in compatible games… like an open protocol for gamertags.
Imagine how much more people would be into events if you got to use the unlocks in other games. It could provide a safe and easy copyright framework for developers using such assets in other games (since only the owner could issue an nft), and encourage compatibility which would drastically increase the ability to reuse character models
There would even be room for monetization later on - if this system grew to any size, artists could sell assets, and could even make money by charging in coin for transfers (like it happens now)
Instead, they over monetized it from the start. Integration never became popular for developers (because why would it? Without good libraries, free default assets, and a copyright framework, it’s just a niche feature that might make it in as an afterthought).
What they needed was basically anyone to champion this kind of system in exchange for a payoff down the line. Any publisher could have released some libraries and given away old assets, and they could have become an exchange for assets…a few groups independently did this, but they focused on making money immediately without offering anything for developer adoption
Instead, it started to be used for money laundering, artists and collectors saw dollar signs, and it exploded without anyone building the foundation
All the things you describe either do not need nfts or blockchsin, or are just speculator marketplaces and thus of no actual use to anyone but con artists.
I’ve never heard of a way that NFTs are actually useful, I’ve only heard of people saying things we can do today, but with blockchain (and much less efficiently), or as a way to form a speculators market (ie: a con)
I am a big proponet of blckchains, but speculative nfts have no purpose. Using a blockchain to establish who authored tome work, thats a an actual use.
we already have that feature in our society, without nfts or blockchain. it’s worked for hundreds of years
Blockchains are public ledgers of information. It’s neat. It can be a practical way to keep a ledger. Apparently some banks use a blockchain to validate transactions now.
It’s the whole hype about how it would change the world, and the incredible amounts of grifting that poison Blockchain for the public. For far too many people, it’s just another get-rich-quick scheme.
you can have a public ledger of information without blockchain, we’ve done that for thousands of years in far more efficient ways.
Sure we can do without. We have done without many things for “thousands of years”. I seriously doubt that it was more efficient in all circumstances.
The claim of public ledgers having been more efficient for that long is so absurd to me that I’m doubting whether you are serious.
deleted by creator
Block chains do not need to be, and most real applications are not, public. Signing signed work has existed for decades, and almost every single use of it is in a private application.
Copyright isn’t the same, but moreover, it’s not that it didn’t exist. It’s that blockchains remove a class of failures that exist in centralized beauracracy.
and replace those well-known, well-understood, workable failures accounted for by decades/centuries of law, with a brand new class of failures! and hurt the environment as a fun side effect
Yes, never change, never do new stuff. Also, human bureaucracy uses more energy than proof of stake systems.
An important part of changing and doing new stuff is recognizing how the change impacts the wider space. Just changing and disrupting things for the sake of change is likely ignoring all the details that went into the original system. Often, those details aren’t even understood or known at the time, but someone 70 years ago encountered a situation, put a system in place, and it worked ever since.
The past 15 years of big tech disruption of existing systems is a good example of this. We changed so much about so many institutions, and so so much of it turned out to be for the worse.
During the pandemic I had a few friends that endured severe mental health problems due to the fact their GPU’s died in the middle of the height of bitcoin bullshit. One couldn’t do their job, and neither could socialize through the games we typically loved to play together. They became further isolated during a time of physical isolation.
Ever since then I’ve been completely against bitcoin. I understand they allegedly made the process less GPU heavy now, but I won’t forget that human suffering took place for literally no good reason other than a pyramid scheme preying upon ignorant and stupid people.
So yeah, fuck crypto. People need to find another way to do that shit.
I’m not a block chain defender in any sense, but you don’t have to do the idiotic proof of work crap to make block chains actually usable. You and I can sign something with a key, for instance. And the signing of signed data creates the “chain”. No worthless CPU usage, no idiotic “proof of…”. You know it’s my key, I know it’s your key, we know the order of signing. Done.
All the hype nonsense was just grifters trying to steal money. And crypto currency has absolutely no purpose whatsoever.
How does it establish who authored a work? The only thing the blockchain can be guaranteed to prove is who first registered it on said chain, which absolutely doesn’t necessarily mean the author. Immutability doesn’t do anything to solve the garbage in garbage out problem.
Digital timestamping existed before blockchains
It might be useful for artists to register all their work so grabby AI companies can’t just use it as training data because it has digital ownership.
I imagined it used for trading rare items. Imagine games like the classic Diablo2 where you can fight random characters and collect rare items. If each were an NFT, the ownership could be traded to other gamers for real money. In that aspect I see real value.
But that’s not how it’s been implemented.
Also for reference, Kodak actually patented a blockchain technology to provide IP rights to photographs taken on special cameras which actually could be extremely beneficial if properly implemented.
You can do that without nfts and blockchain. And have been able to do that in other games, and again it’s just about funding a speculators market which is of no use to anyone aside from people conning other people.
Gotcha, I stopped gaming a long time ago - life keeps me too busy. I swear I’ll start/finish Skyrim when I finally retire - maybe by then it’ll be ported to some holographic virtual reality game system lol.
It’ll probably be The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim Anniversary Super Special Deluxe Ultra Ultimate Edition 2
They’re pretty good for getting rid of ticket touts but the company doing that is based in the Netherlands and it’s slow to spread elsewhere. The protocol’s rules mean you can’t resell for more than face value and they’ve sold over 4m tickets that way.
NFTs have absolutely no effect on ticket reselling. Instead of selling the token you sell the wallet at whatever price you want. And to do that you’re giving up refunds & easy online purchases.
Looking at “your ticket provider” who I think you’re talking about they claim they’ve sold 4m tickets, but their NFT integration involves making copies of tickets sold traditionally. They haven’t sold 4m NFT tickets. Doesn’ t even look like they even mention NFTs on their site.
GUTS tickets?
They mention the protocol prominently but don’t make note of the token standard they use (ERC-721, maybe ERC-1155 these days - aka NFTs).
You can’t really sell your wallet as easily as you think, it’s tied to your GUTS account which you’ve verified on your phone along with all of your personal details so the new meta fantasy you’d have to imagine is somebody selling tickets with phone or selling a GUTS account with maybe a burner phone number but also your actual personal details attached (this hasn’t been happening…at all), it’s not like selling somebody a BTC private key. Different protocols can have different rules built in.
One of Netherlands largest comedians uses them and was delighted with the eradication of scalpers after they sold 50k tickets in a few hours for him. Ziggo Dome partnered with them (big 17k concert venue) and has also extolled the virtue of a scalperless ticket seller/reseller.
I get it, you hate shitcoins and anything related to shitcoins is immediately cancer - but this exists and it works and has worked millions of times.
So having read through how GUTS works:
So please explain to me how this system benefits from being based on NFTs. Looks to me like the only thing NTFs are doing here is adding overhead and a marketing gimmick.
The benefit is the protocol can be used by any other ticket resellers worldwide very easily without having to set up some kind of multinational co-op and that the protocol/smart contract enforces the rules.
Usually the argument I’d hear is “But couldn’t any company do this with a database?” and the answer is “Sure they could - now show me a company with shareholders who profit off of their consumers getting fucked over habitually that’s willing to do it.”
Ticketmaster thrives on being a law unto themselves, everybody complains about them, here’s something that fixes it, proven to work for years, millions of tickets sold with no sign of a scalping market and the people who hate shitcoins throw their toys out of the pram and insist on maintaining Ticketmaster’s dominance.
Congrats I guess, you get what you deserve.
Your conflating the idea of BTC or other currencies being decentralised with the needs of a specific protocol - not everything has to be shitcoin maximalism, it just has to be useful to the businesses and consumers using it. Purchases being made though normal money is a feature, not sure why you’d want it to be crypto since you hate it, you don’t want to force people to see the boring backend stuff that shouldn’t matter to them, that’s what smart contracts are essentially for. The protocol enforces a ruleset, that’s it. If it was designed to be transferrable wherever to whomever without using the protocol the original negative point you had at first (which you seemed to think is a bad thing, as do I) would now exist with people selling wallets and such.
I think there’s some confusion over how these systems work, so I’ll do my best to explain it and that should clear things up.
You might notice that absolutely none of that requires any interaction whatsoever with NFTs. That’s because they’re entirely redundant in this system. Here’s what GUTS also does on the backend in order to pretend their business is built on blockchain:
scannedTicketevent on the NFT. (This is redundant even in the GET protocol, I really don’t understand why this exists)(Note this is a simplification; there’s batching going on to reduce costs)
Here’s a couple important things to keep in mind:
The GET protocol is simply a smart contract(s). It can be minted, sold, resold, scanned, checked, invalidated and claimed. that’s it. There is no authentication, no money transfer, no identity checking, no refunds, no customer support system. None of the things that are hard about selling tickets is helped by the GET protocol.
The money a ticket reseller gets doesn’t go through the smart contract - it would only be able to do that if the money was first converted to crypto and then back. So when a ticket is resold that money goes straight to GUTS’s bank account and then to the resellers. As such the only thing enforcing that scalpers can’t sell at a higher price is GUTS’s servers. Not the smart contract.
The GET protocol in theory lets you be independent of the seller - you can sell tickets with a simple transaction on ethereum or polygon. Not so with GUTS, because they have full ownership of the wallets.
Now that we’re hopefully on the same page I’ll respond to some of your claims:
GUTS is a for-profit private company. I agree shareholders can often make things worse, but lets not pretend the same profit motive isn’t there.
Weird take, I have no problem with GUTS existing. If they’re helping break Ticketmaster’s monopoly more power to them. But their use of NTFs and blockchain is pointless.
Actually if I want to give them as much credit as I can here’s my take: They wanted to build GUTS to fix scalping, but VCs aren’t interested in that. So they had the fantastic idea of using the NFT craze to their advantage. They say they’re using NFTs, get huge investment to build out infrastructure and get the business running. Now they know that NFTs on a technical level don’t actually help at all, so they build a traditional ticketing platform and then add the GET protocol on top to keep investors happy.
All the negatives I listed were for actual NFT-based tickets, where ticket buyers own the wallet and have to pay in crypto. Such a system would never get any mass adoption, but it’s also the only actual way you use NFTs for tickets.
If a system doesn’t let you own the wallet and pay in crypto, then their crypto-based systems are just for show.
Sorry for the essay. I wrote it mostly for myself, but if you made it all the way through thanks.
It’s fantastic for things like game characters and cosmetics - it would be awesome if, say, clearing or 100%-ing a game let you use assets from that game in compatible games… like an open protocol for gamertags.
Imagine how much more people would be into events if you got to use the unlocks in other games. It could provide a safe and easy copyright framework for developers using such assets in other games (since only the owner could issue an nft), and encourage compatibility which would drastically increase the ability to reuse character models
There would even be room for monetization later on - if this system grew to any size, artists could sell assets, and could even make money by charging in coin for transfers (like it happens now)
Instead, they over monetized it from the start. Integration never became popular for developers (because why would it? Without good libraries, free default assets, and a copyright framework, it’s just a niche feature that might make it in as an afterthought).
What they needed was basically anyone to champion this kind of system in exchange for a payoff down the line. Any publisher could have released some libraries and given away old assets, and they could have become an exchange for assets…a few groups independently did this, but they focused on making money immediately without offering anything for developer adoption
Instead, it started to be used for money laundering, artists and collectors saw dollar signs, and it exploded without anyone building the foundation
All the things you describe either do not need nfts or blockchsin, or are just speculator marketplaces and thus of no actual use to anyone but con artists.