So, NFTs?

[Ian Absentia]

2 hours ago, greger said:

And, they sound just more and more like a cult, when I hear them talk.
They are talking about people not understanding what NFTs is about, but  NOTHING of the common concerns that they bring up, are misunderstood to most people.
This is just terrible.

Honestly?  They sound like they're hyping a product to investors.  What they're saying isn't unlike 401K packages, insurance policies, time-share condominiums, spirituality/health lifestyle retreats, shareholder conferences, etc.  It's getting everyone in the room on the same page and excited, and discrediting everyone who's not in the room (skeptics, critics, your friends and family, your spouse, etc).

"Cult" seems a bit strong, but yeah, "business culture".

Chaosium publicly mincing at water's edge instead of taking the plunge is a PR crisis that they need to quash.

!i!

[Edit: Oh, God, listening further to the explanation of Immutable X, asset bundling, and the purchase of carbon offsets, and imagining all the hand-waving to make the details go away.]

Edited February 20, 2022 by Ian Absentia

[JonL]

Strong Amway/Scientology energy.

[Ian Absentia]

Carbon Offsets.

I want to punch you in the nose.  I know it's wrong, but I want to do it.  Maybe it's just business, whatever.  But I know that disorderly conduct and assault will make me look bad.  So I know this guy over here whom I can pay to find people who might be prone to assault to not punch someone in the nose.  Sure, the people he says he's enjoined won't take you to the doctor, or clean up the bloody mess, or even do my public service time for disorderly/assault, but they promise to not punch one person in the nose.

The net calculation?  I punch you in the nose, minus someone else not getting punched = no nose, no punch.  The world is a more peaceful place.

!i!

[MOB]

10 hours ago, greger said:

And he does say "They have suspended for now the planned drops they had for us in q2", so I am not thinking they will be back on in 2 months.

As we said in our announcement, we have halted our plans for any future NFT/digital collectable releases. Either in Q2 or any other time.

[KungFuFenris]

18 minutes ago, MOB said:

As we said in our announcement, we have halted our plans for any future NFT/digital collectable releases. Either in Q2 or any other time.

Alrighty. So, that's good.

But, honestly. Is that a *never/won't*? Because it's not all that clear whether or not y'all are still under a contract.  

Edited February 21, 2022 by KungFuFenris

[Rick Meints]

17 hours ago, KungFuFenris said:

Alrighty. So, that's good.

But, honestly. Is that a *never/won't*? Because it's not all that clear whether or not y'all are still under a contract.  

It's not uncommon at all for businesses to not share contract status or details. 

[KungFuFenris]

1 hour ago, Rick Meints said:

It's not uncommon at all for businesses to not share contract status or details. 

Well. I guess that's as close as I am going to get to a actual answer to that.

Alrighty. Biz as usual. Just needed to be a bit more inquisitive.

[Berwyn]

5 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

It's not uncommon at all for businesses to not share contract status or details. 

Fine forget the contract details. Tell us Chaosium is never going to do NFTs again.  

[Berwyn]

22 hours ago, MOB said:

As we said in our announcement, we have halted our plans for any future NFT/digital collectable releases. Either in Q2 or any other time.

That’s not what the announcement said. It said:

“While we address the concerns of the tabletop gaming community we have halted our plans for future NFT releases.”

While we X we have Y. So once you’re done addressing the concerns of the tabletop gaming community, then what? More NFTs? 

[g33k]

Chaosium *MAY* be contractually obligated to do another round (or more) of NFT's with VeVe... in which case I don't expect any absolute explicit unambiguous all-time "no we won't, evermore" (this is what I expect, as Chaosium language says "suspend" not "cancel").

Chaosium may *also* be contractually obligated to a certain degree of confidentiality... in which case I don't expect we will get ANYTHING "unambiguous," until the contract expires (and maybe not even then, as it may have terms that continue forward even if no other business is done together).

[Ian Absentia]

It is pointless, unwise, and frankly unfair, to speculate publicly on Chaosium's intent.

Fire at will on VeVe's seemingly contradictory statements, though.  And apply the hairy eyeball to any equivocal business-speak.

!i!

Edited February 22, 2022 by Ian Absentia
Clarification - do what you do in private.

[ThornPlutonius]

I think NFTs, like crypto currencies, are a passing fad that will soon fall apart.

[PhilHibbs]

Legal Eagle on NFTs:

 

[Ian Absentia]

21 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

Legal Eagle on NFTs:

Timestamp 15:36.  "So, for better or worse, lawyers exist for a reason.  And programmers are really, really bad at planning for contingencies.  And they're also really bad at understanding contract law in general."

Ha.

!i!

[PhilHibbs]

It seems to me that NFTs could have filled a useful niche. I was talking to a friend who works in the VFX industry - several people here will have met him at Bacharach - many years ago about digital art, and how a digital artist can make money other than in the movie industry. Physical artists can sell originals or limited edition prints, but digital artists could not at the time do that. He said that there were some interesting developments in that direction that could allow digital artists to sell limited digital copies. I thought it sounded like nonsense, literally impossible. How can you limit something in the digital space? It just didn't make sense.

Fast forward a couple of decades and here they are. NFTs. What seemed impossible to me became possible through the wizardry of blockchains.

But what it brought to the world wasn't some utopia of legitimate digital creativity being rewarded by limited edition sales of worthy artistry. Instead we have Angry Sloth Surf Club. Oh well, I guess the future has a habit of doing that sort of thing to good ideas!

[FlamingCatOfDeath]

There are infinitely less stupid/energy intensive ways of making digital collectibles but there is no market for them because they don’t support the crypto Ponzi scheme. To call Cryptocurrency a dumpster would be slanderous to dumpster fires.

[Ian Absentia]

21 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

Oh well, I guess the future has a habit of doing that sort of thing to good ideas!

Edward R. Murrow had a similar lament about television.  It seems that every development in technology is co-opted as a delivery system for spam advertising and porn.

!i!

[FlamingCatOfDeath]

14 hours ago, Ian Absentia said:

It seems that every development in technology is co-opted as a delivery system for spam advertising and porn.

!i!

Scams that contribute significantly to destroying the planet cause enough destruction that they can be compellingly called evil. I have seen little compelling evidence that porn is even categorically destructive (within which I include art depending certain feature such as L'Origine du monde and other more explicit pieces). If you have references to compelling evidence on that topic I would be interested.

Edited July 5, 2022 by FlamingCatOfDeath
Clarification

[JanPospisil]

Blockchain is not magic, it's really really stupid tech with no practical use.  

Again, as a primarily digital artist - NFTs ain't "it".

[g33k]

On 7/9/2022 at 5:56 AM, JanPospisil said:

Blockchain is not magic, it's really really stupid tech with no practical use.  

Again, as a primarily digital artist - NFTs ain't "it".

I mean, props where props are due:  it's really really  clever  tech ... with no practical use.

(hypothetically, it seems likely that "crypto" (currencies, collectibles, etc) could/should be used for... oh, something like cryptography.  I imagine it could be a great secure validator for more-conventional transactions, for example)

[PhilHibbs]

On 7/10/2022 at 7:38 PM, g33k said:

(hypothetically, it seems likely that "crypto" (currencies, collectibles, etc) could/should be used for... oh, something like cryptography.  I imagine it could be a great secure validator for more-conventional transactions, for example)

You mean like a currency?

[g33k]

4 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

You mean like a currency?

No,  I mean a *validator,* an online representation of an actual, non-crypto transaction.

That could be a currency transaction, or a goods-for-currency, or a barter-exchange.

Take a GoPro vid of the packing & shipping-label attaching to a high-value product, and NFT that vid; etc. 

[FlamingCatOfDeath]

13 hours ago, g33k said:

No,  I mean a *validator,* an online representation of an actual, non-crypto transaction.

That could be a currency transaction, or a goods-for-currency, or a barter-exchange.

Take a GoPro vid of the packing & shipping-label attaching to a high-value product, and NFT that vid; etc. 

but that requires significantly more work than a normal form of cryptographic validation for no additional benefit. It definitionally requires more work because it requires keeping track of all previous validations. Crypto refers to cryptographic ledgers. It’s not that cryptography is stupid, it’s really useful, it’s not that ledgers don’t have their uses, they do, it’s that combining them creates something with no use case.

[JanPospisil]

On 7/13/2022 at 8:02 PM, g33k said:

No,  I mean a *validator,* an online representation of an actual, non-crypto transaction.

That could be a currency transaction, or a goods-for-currency, or a barter-exchange.

Take a GoPro vid of the packing & shipping-label attaching to a high-value product, and NFT that vid; etc. 

 Nobody's putting actual media on the blockchain, all NFTs just LINK to media somewhere online. It's absolutely useless for what you propose. 

And if you did want to put actual media on the blockchain, just the cost of doing that would make the use you're suggesting incredibly not worth doing.

The blockchain is slow, inflexible tech that doesn't have a practical use, despite cultists trying to find any for years.

[simonh]

There seems to be a lot of misconception of what NFTs are here and what they can or can't do.

A blockchain records the ownership of a token on the chain. In the case of an NFT the token contains data, typically a URL link. That link could be to a monkey picture stored on a server somewhere for example. So that data stored in the NFT might be something like a text field containing the string "http://www.pixhostingcompany.com/monkey233.jpg".

It doesn't contain a copy of the monkey picture (or whatever), it doesn't grant you any rights or ownership over the server the URL links to, it also doesn't guarantee that when you go there you will see a monkey and not a tree, or Rick Astley, or a 404 Not Found error. It doesn't guarantee someone, maybe the same person, won't sell another NFT containing the same URL link. In a few months or years you may well own a record containing a URL link that used to point to a monkey and now and forever more points to nothing at all.

Frequently NFT URLs link to files hosted on generic hosting services like Flicker, or Akamai so not even the person selling the original NFT has any control or ownership over the resource or service the link points to, which could disappear at any moment. So what you "own" is a ledger entry that says a particular blockchain ID sold you this URL text. It's as though I gave you a signed piece of paper with "http://www.pixhostingcompany.com/monkey233.jpg" printed on it.

Some NFTs refer to assets in a computer game, but again they are only references to the asset. They don't in any way guarantee that the asset will stay the same, will still be there tomorrow, will look or function the same in future, etc. It's just a link.

The only value they have that I can see is that they prove that a particular blockchain ID sold you the NFT. If that blockchain ID belongs to the artist, or leads through a chain of transactions back to the artist, it basically just proves you or someone back in the transaction chain were given the NFT by the owner of the original blockchain ID, which might be the artist. That could mean whoever they originally transferred the NFT to paid them some money.

Edited July 21, 2022 by simonh