In what sense do the purchasers of your NFTs have "ownership" of your work - what could they do with it that I could not, and how is this legally enforced? If NFTv2 comes out in a year with 10x the financial rewards, will you commit to not offering the same pieces again?
Partially agree - but people have been excited about e.g. smart contracts for the last ~5 years, yet which consumer or B2B apps are using them now?
When Web2 came along, Gmail, Maps and Facebook were immediately exciting and obviously better than what came before. How much longer do we need to wait for those Web3 killer apps, that appeal to users who aren't purely in it for token price speculation?
When Gmail came along, like a decade after the web started getting popular, there were countless people, very much like you now, telling everybody how much better their desktop email app was.
Nfts may or may not be the blockchain's killer app (I think they are), but the average person's track record identifying a technology's killer app is a tad less than perfect
> Nfts may or may not be the blockchain's killer app (I think they are)
How is a bit of data on a blockchain pointing to a URI a breakthrough? It's utterly ineffective at proving ownership of anything, since the data at the uri can be changed, or more likely - the entire server will disappear at some point in time. And then what about uris on the blockchain pointing to illegal material (things that are actually copyrighted by someone through the legal system, CP, etc)?
Obviously storing actual data on-chain is too costly as well (both financially on the large chains, and practically/environmentally on any of them).
Everyone I know who's into NFTs and crypto was a con artist before blockchain and they'll be con artists after. Wait until I tell you about the drug addict scammers I know that started a crypto coin of their own and got a friend who knows literally nothing about crypto to write their whitepaper.
I'd argue the exponential growth curves for Gmail, Maps, and Facebook (with no financial reward for the user) suggests there was a good appreciation of the utility. When will get an equivalent Web3 app that isn't predominantly driven by price speculation? What will this look like?
But do digital goods in games really justify the Web2 -> Web3 iteration? Compared to Web2 bringing us Gmail, Maps, Facebook etc, feels a little anemic so far.
My hunch is that crypto is focusing on the wrong things. I suspect we’ll never have land registers in blockchain (dumb idea anyway).
In NFTs crypto kind of stumbled upon something important, because digital art didn’t have a way to be authenticated by artists themselves, they had to use galleries, it was a mess. Now a digital artist can just drop his stuff onto the world and authenticate it. This was a Real Problem, if you make physical art you can just go to the local arts and crafts or Etsy and charge money for it. But digital art was really hard to monetise. So crypto came in a bit sideways and solved a Real Problem People Had.
Curiously they seem to really focus on “real world” problems, like banks or land registry or whatever, when I’m starting to think this is the entirely wrong way to see crypto. I think it needs to focus on problems that exist in the digital arena Only IE data ownership, data portability.
But the obsessions of the original conceptions around crypto are hard to kill, and I feel like right now there’s a lot of resistance to leaving the Nick Szabo idea of “smart contracts will replace lawyers”, same as it was before with a lot of Nakamoto’s ideas. But I think the “crypto will replace lawyers” and “crypto will replace banks” folks will be sorely disappointed. I see a very low percent chance crypto will change that much about banking just due to the security issues.
Is it though? Honest question since I'm not an artist. But looking from the outside: For ongoing support, Patreon/Flattr/etc. are a common solution. For specific work, you can commission a piece and pay for it through whatever channel, even with cash.
It just didn’t work for individual digital art. Patreon doesn’t pay you for making art, that’s incidental. At least the way I’ve seen it used. It also creates no secondary market, there’s no resale, royalties. The possibility of making a single art piece worth 10,000$ That is impossible in patreon. Patreon was more of a decentralised art school at its best, where you could pay for individual tutors.
I also know the average income I saw being generated from Patreon was low. Not high enough to quit your day job, more of a second job type thing. NFT income is incomparable, I know of cases of people who are now millionaires.
NFTs are essentially just a way to sell digital art in a way that approximates physical art auctions, and in that regard they are an overwhelming sucess.
I want to be excited about Web3 and feel I'm missing something, given how many smart minds are. But every time someone talks about NFTs on a podcast I feel there are many questions not answered.
For example - Kevin Rose has minted 1000 NFT's for "membership" of his podcast VIP group. Users had to pay ~3 ETH (~$12k) for each one - but he hasn't yet told them what the benefits of holding will be, when they'll come, and how long they'll be offered for.
As a user, I might be prepared to pay a membership for these benefits (being able to cancel any time) - but why would I risk $12k up front, having no idea what I'm getting? What incentive does he have to offer beyond the bare minimum to sustain his reputation?
The only way it makes sense is if it's about pure price speculation. Can anyone enlighten me on how this is progress?
In what sense would I "own" the art? Do I have more rights over it than anyone else - and if so, how are these legally enforced? What prevents the artist from minting a different type of NFT (or whatever comes next) on that same artwork?
When people say own, they are referring to current possession. This a colloquialism that does not distinguish the legal rights, surprising that this has to even be said but it keeps coming up exclusively in the NFT topic. Try not to overthink it?
An artist can attempt to additionally bundle explicit rights into an NFT transaction. Just like they can attempt to bundle a physically copyright assignment with a sale of physical art. But they don't, in either case, thats not how the market has formed. Its a very uncommon thing that also has nothing to do with the technology, but the technology can help it, its still not what people are doing.
"But I like physical things because theyre valuable to me because I can touch them and look at them without a computer", okay, there are multiple generations of people that don't care by now. Compare it to the digital things then.
These populations do care that their earned digital goods are arbitrary modifiable and revokable entries in a company database, and have different limits about how much money they put towards something like that, versus this format of possession.
Limiting ourselves to the digital world - does ownership of an NFT give me any more rights to experience or enjoy a piece of work than a non-owner? If someone else wanted to use my Bored Ape as their Twitter photo, could I stop them?
Yes, it does. Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), for example, has physical clubs and events that require users to prove provenance for access. This means signing an address that is a current owner, and applies to both physical and digital access of tertiary goods and services. Signing an address proves access to that address and means they have the private key to move everything.
The "right click and save as" "screenshot" and "twitter photo" people would not have access. Even the replicants discussed in the OP here would not have access.
Additionally, many popular NFTs, like BAYC, get airdropped many things for attention, some of which have varying degrees of value, or BAYC may be the only ones available to mint another new NFT being dropped. This would be enforced at the code or smart contract level. It is common for many less valuable or otherwise uninteresting NFTs to partner up and collaborate with other NFTs to make this chain of communities. Sometimes that results in some level of value. By common, I mean over the last 5 months in the NFT space. This concept has pre-dated NFT related things, and some of my best trades have been from either receiving airdrops or claiming things that went on to have a lot of value. But I really like some of the worthless things I've claimed too.
> "physical clubs and events that require users to prove provenance for access"
Feels like the "access to physical events" problem was solved before NFTs.
> The "right click and save as" "screenshot" and "twitter photo" people would not have access.
But per original question - if I wanted to use any Bored Ape as my Twitter photo, is there anything stopping me?
Take your point re: additional digital goods being delivered on chain, just feels a little anemic vs the richness of everything else available for free (or behind a membership) online. If users didn't care primarily about price appreciation, not sure whether that part would be exciting.
Maybe it requires the collector gene to be enthused? If so, can these kinds of Web3 applications ever go mainstream as Web2 apps?
> Feels like the "access to physical events" problem was solved before NFTs.
I don't really consider it solved, has Ticketmaster solved festival passes in a way everyone likes? When organizers aren't using ticketmaster, is transferring the ticket solved or is it rife with scams and abuse and arbitrary restrictions and guesswork. The tertiary benefit is also not something NFT's are aiming to solve. You asked and got an answer about what people are doing. Not what it was created to do.
There is nothing stopping you from using a Twitter photo. Also not something an NFT was claiming to solve. This is just a viral strawman where other people created a use case that wasn't presented and then criticized that use case to discredit the other thing. If you want to pretend to own something valuable or be part of a community you can still do that. I don't really understand what that means to you. I guess that's a good follow up question, what does that mean to you?
There is nothing wrong with speculation. This is not exclusive to the NFT space either when it comes to art or any collectible. I'm really having trouble with all the higher standards you are procedurally generating for this one space.
In any case, membership is actually a good example. If NYTimes stopped making infinite memberships, paid monthly, and instead limited it to, say, 100,000 memberships and some of their operation was funded by a portion of royalties when one of the membership was traded, what would the memberships cost? What would people be willing to pay? What would NYTimes have to do to make people willing to pay for access to their investigative journalism? All that's happening is that you are seeing price discovery in a place where there was none. Replace NYTimes with one of the finance ones like WSJ, if that's easier. or with Soho House memberships.
> I don't really consider it solved, has Ticketmaster solved festival passes in a way everyone likes?
I hate Ticketmaster as much as the next guy, but had a fine experience with the resellers (e.g. StubHub) which offer many things NFTs do not - like customer service (with an actual phone number), a centralized record if I lose my ticket, refunds if the seller mis-represents, no requirement to buy an asset that will likely fluctuate wildly in price, and transaction fees likely lower than gas fees. Not sold on giving up those benefits.
> If you want to pretend to own something valuable or be part of a community you can still do that. I don't really understand what that means to you. I guess that's a good follow up question, what does that mean to you?
I haven't been part of one of these communities, so hard to comment on the value of being a true member or just appearing to be one. If Bored Apes lost 99% of their value, would the community remain equally rich and engaged? What do they truly have in common?
> If NYTimes stopped making infinite memberships, paid monthly, and instead limited it to, say, 100,000 memberships and some of their operation was funded by a portion of royalties when one of the membership was traded, what would the memberships cost?
I'm skeptical limiting access to quality journalism and inflating the price can really be counted as a good use case. For a Soho House membership, I'd much prefer to pay a monthly rate based on what I'm receiving - rather than speculate that (a) they'll continue improving the offer, such that the value of my token will increase; (b) the broader NFT market won't crash.
Soho House's financial team would also likely want to project their earnings next year without making assumptions around sustained interest in NFTs.
Perfect, now we've moved to pragmatic criticism of the current state of NFTs that have nothing to do with the concept of NFTs.
(Non NFT tickets fluctuate wildly in price. Transaction fees on almost all chains are extremely low as gas is negligible in cost, with Ethereum mainnet being an exception.)
So we have less revocable or irrevocable digital goods that are tradable, scarce per collection that provably predates any subsequent issuance, tertiary benefits to physical and digital access, and membership. Even if this technology only was considered to do any of each of those things moderately well, instead of replacing any incumbent implementation, you still have trouble with .... what exactly? We've now agreed that each one is a single asset that does many things at least decently well without any custom implementation needed to be built even if the existing ONE thing in each category has an okay incumbent, and you get a fun picture to go with it. Yes, to some people that has aggregate value.
What are you still having trouble with at this point:
-Whether you should ever own/possess one?
-Whether you should ever use money to own/possess one?
-Something about speculation being bad?
-Something about not knowing if the market will still be there for resell and wondering if that would make everyone else leave the NFT space?
It seems like cognitive dissonance to me, since some of these ideas compete with each other.
> pragmatic criticism of the current state of NFTs that have nothing to do with the concept of NFTs.
Which NFTs include a central authority able to re-issue my ticket if I lose it, address mis-representation by sellers, give refunds if the performance doesn't happen, etc? Isn't that lack of a central authority - and its attendant downsides - core to the medium?
> Non NFT tickets fluctuate wildly in price.
Which non NFT tickets have fluctuated like Bored Ape NFTs this year, and which are highly susceptible to market sentiment for the entire ticketing medium?
> What are you still having trouble with at this point:
Trying to understand how many people I respect have such enthusiasm for a medium which appears to have many downsides vs the status quo - and not yet a killer app like e.g. Gmail, Maps, Facebook to justify the Web2->Web3 transition. No doubt I'm missing something, just trying to understand what.
There's been enthusiasm for smart contracts for 5+ years, but which mainstream consumer or B2B apps have yet implemented them for non-speculation use cases?
How would it be progress for the New York Times to restrict access to quality journalism - or for Soho House to expose its future cash flows to extreme market volatility?
Plenty of NFT projects have issued refunds directly to current holders. It's just a management decision and wouldn't really make the news.
Many festivals have direct sales for a few hundred dollars, resold for a few thousand before the festival occurs and the ticket is redeemed. Similar price moves are much more common in the NFT space than a move to a Bored Ape amount ($200,000 at time of writing). If several hundred percent isn't considered volatile enough for comparison, that really discredits the good faith efforts of this conversation.
> but which mainstream consumer or B2B apps have yet implemented them for non-speculation use cases?
Its crypto and everything else. At this point you can stop looking. If you are doing a crypto app and trying to make a sales process and funnel for people not in the crypto space, then you're wasting your time. There are already 2-3 trillion dollars of value in the space and high volume onchain and offchain. Many people are providing financial services to speculators, just like people that provide ... financial services to speculators in the rest of the economy. People extract value by making some other aspect of the ecosystem easier for other people.
> How would it be progress for the New York Times to restrict access to quality journalism - or for Soho House to expose its future cash flows to extreme market volatility?
The question is how much would the owners pay for that access. Not whether it is a viable business model the issuer gambled on. There are plenty of NFT projects that didn't get enough resales for that half-year-old model to be seen as viable for royalties or the community. Some are actively traded enough that it doesn't turn out to be a rip off. Guess who still earned all the money from the original sale but only talked about what they might do with royalties from after market sales, so the question is always "whose problem is it".
People are enthused because they get to experiment. Just move a function around, alter one variable in a class and viola' the hit of the week and $24,000,000[1] that people are very appreciative of. Maybe they've done something sustainable maybe not. People want to participate for whats possible. The prices from the original issuer are moderate/predictable or even free, the stuff that makes the headlines is just all enthused people that need to make their own objective decisions.
[1] https://www.adidas.com/into_the_metaverse/mint here Adidas is embracing that people like to buy and resell their merchandise, frequently at massive premiums, so they are only letting NFT holders authenticate to purchase for a specific future drop instead. They were about $800 each and they sold 30,000 of them. A merch flipper can price their own potential future revenues accordingly, or just be an actual collector first in line to collect the merchandise. Each experiment is different, available to be debated in isolation, it is impossible to use a broad brush because the word NFT is involved. Obviously someone is free to put one of these on their twitter avatar, it should be obvious that this won't help them with access to the Adidas drops. "Oh my god speculation I knewwww it, bot infested free for alls were so adequate", just a strawman for some fun (or is it), we can laugh
No, you don't have more rights than anyone else, and nothing prevents the artist from minting more NFTs of the same artwork. But this is no different than buying say a print of a fine art photograph (that print would be physical, yet only artificially limited and easily mass-produced; you may or may not care about this quality).
Feels a little different, in that I'd then have a fine art print to put on my wall and enjoy. In this case I have a string of characters on a hard drive. If I didn't care only about price appreciation, why would I pick the latter?
Digital things will never be able to reproduce the physical qualities of objects. Yet digital art exists and can be appreciated. And if you appreciate it enough, buy the NFT the artist has for sale.
As someone who works in tech and enjoys the outdoors (mainly hiking and biking, meaning I'm looking for sunny/temperate weather year round) I haven't found many better options than the Bay Area. Visited Miami and Austin in the last year, but the Summer temperatures are stifling and there's not the same wealth of natural beauty on their doorstep - Portland is great, but the grey skies would eventually wear me down.
I'd love to find somewhere more affordable but San Francisco still checks a lot of boxes. Where else to consider?
Zumper | San Francisco, CA + Providence, RI | Engineering, Product, Design, Sales
Zumper is building the future of apartment rentals, making renting an apartment as easy as booking a hotel. We've just raised a $60M series D, and are now the largest privately held rental marketplace in the US (one in three Americans will use us this year). We're proud to be one of Inc Magazine's "Best Places to Work" and have a solid technology stack + lots of interesting problems to work on at scale.
Thanks for putting this together! I've wondered before if Kittyhawk and other flying car companies count as climate-saving organizations. Flying small personal aircraft will always use vastly more energy per mile than vehicles that can roll along the ground - and even if there are no emissions in flight, the energy cost and likely emissions of making the batteries and equipment will be non-negligible.
My personal opinion is that we're not going to convince people to stop flying, so we should decarbonize air travel regardless of its relative efficiency.
But my understanding is that Kittyhawk etc are (at least in part) creating a new market of single-person "quick hops" within cities or metropolitan areas, displacing ground transport. Not only would this increase energy use per mile for existing trips, it could lead to a lot of new ones (e.g. making it viable to commute from far flung locations). This ramp in energy use for personal convenience seems problematic.
We don't have to convice everyone to stop flying. We can start with to convincing everyone to fly less. Decarbonise in the meantime, if you can, of course.
The cheapest way to do it is buying a secondhand XBox/PS4/Switch + games for very little on Craigslist, and putting it back on there when you get bored (if that's within 6 months, I'd be surprised if you lost much). Or just keeping it and enjoying no input lag, no requirement for a subscription, no chance of the manufacturer bricking the device in future, and a huge secondhand market for games. Unless I really want to play games on something other than my TV or a handheld device (Switch), can't see why I'd take the more expensive and laggy Stadia option.
Our Google Maps bill went from ~$100k per year to $380k per year as a result of these changes. Needless to say, we're moving over to Mapbox.
What Google seems to miss is how this will affect customers' receptiveness to other Google products in the long-term. Having pulled the rug from under us once, there's no way we could consider e.g. a migration to Cloud in case the same happened again (where moving to a different provider would be far more painful).
I agree. I get that when you build your business around someone else's API that you are responsible for any changes and you should be prepared when business models change, but this would be analogous to milk prices going from $1/pint to $3.80/pint.
A 280% increase in pricing after you've gained dominance in market share is a tough pill to swallow and left a really bad taste in developer's mouths.
I too have moved on to Mapbox, and I suspect the OSM group was thrilled at the changes since now their mapping efforts probably increased tremendously. We're probably going to roll our own map tile servers based on OSM since Mapbox as well is pricey, but not Google Maps pricey.
Mapbox actually fired the majority of the people they were paying to work on OSM a few months ago [1]. I don't really know why, and it seems like a really odd decision (unless maybe they're developing their own non OSM-based map), but if anyone knows why I'd love to find out.
Google seems to launch a product, see if it dominates and then monitorises it or drop it like a stone. But offering a free product, advert free, building up customer base for years and then flipping the switch - has become the norm. What they seem to be gearing towards more and more, is offering customers subscription deals to opt out of adverts etc.
Pretty genius really from a company/marketing perspective and equally an approach that only a company the scale of Google with the pockets, could pull off. They effectively rope in lots of developers, then flip the switch on them, knowing some will jump, but equally most will hang in there for various reasons. They are now looking at tapping into the other end of the pie with customer subscriptions.
The upshot and what you end up paying for is the ability to get real support - least that is the vertues many a Google 1, user are trumpeting.
But the real upshot is moves like this will only fuel development of alternative offerings and more so, boost existing alternative offerings.
As with most things beyond death and taxes, there is some sort of choice. It is surprising how many companies in various forms count on consumers not exercising those choices.
lots of wild assumptions there, and slightly offtopic to the thread you replied to, which was about cloud offerings specifically , where they are already on the traditional google product path, not in this assumed path they might or not use for maps.
I see this as their biggest hurdle when trying to sell GCP.
When Amazon and MSFT have decent products and massive reliability, why even try switching to unreliable Google, irrespective of their technical superiority.
I'm using their search with autocomplete as a convenience feature in our app. My bill will go from $0 to $3,000 per month.
I'd be happy to pay them a reasonable price, but this costs more than our whole infrastructure, so we are moving to a vendor who offers a more realistic pricing for us.
Same thing here - have been using Google's autocomplete for 5 years and now it has become our biggest monthly expense for a niche consumer app. It cut our net profits in half.
Trouble is that there is no other service available with as comprehensive of coverage across the globe and so many languages as Google's, so we're just dealing with the hit.
Why do we need this though? I'm perfectly capable of typing my address, have been doing it for years. Every time I start typing where I live and some box pops up with a Google logo in it, I feel kind of violated.
Meanwhile in Google HQ, someone wins a bet over in which house this cookie deleting nerd using Linux on turns out to live in.
If we can please stop it, or at least opt out ("click here not to share your address details with Google") and turn the input box into a dumb textarea, that'd be great. Should save you money, too.
