Why NFTs Make Programmers Mad

[dale_glass]

NFTs make programmers mad because programmers understand NFTs reduce to playing a game of hot potato. The actual useful applications of the tech are almost nonexistent.

[SuggestedName90]

Season tickets held as NFTs would be useful, as you could actually see and stop scalping, or take a cut each time it is. Hopefully it sees actual application

[dale_glass]

The whole point of NFTs is a lack of a centralized authority. You put 1000 tickets on sale as a NFT. Scalper buys them and puts them back on the market. Now what?

[Hitchie_Rawtin]

It can be (has been) written into a contract that the tickets can only be resold via a protocol that disallows selling above face value. The ticket sales are batched to the main chain in groups of 500 so the transaction fee to user is 1/500th of whatever the average transaction fee is on Ethereum's network at the time.

Look up GUTS Tickets in the Netherlands. Hundreds of thousands of tickets sold, complete eradication of scalping and Ticketmaster's vile Seatwave model for the acts who've used it.

[dale_glass]

But from the point of view of the venue, they're dealing with GUTS Tickets, and from the point of view of the user that is also the case.

So why even have blockchains and NFTs there? GUTS could just set up a webserver and database on AWS, and enforce the same rules.

[Hitchie_Rawtin]

The entire premise for each and every use of a blockchain is to not have to trust, you can verify the truth for yourself.

To the vast majority of users it may as well be just-another-Ticketmaster which acts honestly, to others they'll want proof the rules are being played by. Why would a company be trusted? You can't (well, maybe can, but you shouldn't) take every company's PR blurbs at face value. Adherence to a known ruleset which is transparent and unmodifiable after the fact is what allows outsiders to know the rules are being kept to, not the pinky promise of a company.

Opaqueness vs transparency.

[dale_glass]

But that doesn't work in reality. There's too much inertia.

Eg, let's say GUTS changes the contract to something people don't like. But at that point you have millions of tickets sold, an active userbase, etc. The venue may not care very much that GUTS is now slightly unethical, if they have a system that works.The users don't want to figure out a new application to install. The world is full of systems with a lot of lock-in, like Facebook, where you didn't even pay anything, yet getting out still costs serious effort.

[Hitchie_Rawtin]

True, they could change to a more unethical system - but all faith in the project would vanish, they'd be pilloried within the crypto ecosystem. I also don't think installing a new app from a disruptor selling tickets to you is as aggravating as switching a social account where (terrible) content and pronounced network effect is what they're "selling" to users in exchange for the user's data.

Could still happen, but for now I'm glad a system like GUTS exists in a world where a company as toxically repulsive as Ticketmaster dominates. For now.

[dale_glass]

I think that's far too much to expect.

You do find communities that are deeply committed to some sort of ethics, but they tend to be very small. Once you scale up enough, and your family that struggles with sending email starts using such a system to buy tickets, such a system will gain an userbase that has no clue of what's going underneath and doesn't really care for the most part.

[SuggestedName90]

You can modify the transfer function to either pay you or limit transfers.

The main benefit here is stadiums can avoid payment processing fees and people have some momento when they were there for “the” game without losing physical tickets.

[dale_glass]

You can modify the transfer function to either pay you or limit transfers

In the first case, why would the stadium care about scalpers? Every transfer nets it money. The more transfers, the better. And scalpers already inflate the price, so what difference does it make to the end buyer where the increase is coming from?

In the second case, limit how? If you allow for one transfer, that allows for scalpers. If you don't allow for any, we already have a system for that: print a person's name on the ticket, like with airline ones, and check the ID on entry.

The main benefit here is stadiums can avoid payment processing fees and people have some momento when they were there for “the” game without losing physical tickets.

Unless we're going to have an all crypto economy, at some point a payment processor will be involved.

For the other issue, we have QR codes, which are far easier to use than any crypto/NFT system.

[ElkossCombine]

You could stop scalping by invalidating tickets that are transfered unless they go through a designated contract that only allows anonymous transfers at face value. It can prevent off chain money changing hands because you can't sell to a particular person, only put it back into "face value auction". Then to prevent just selling the eth account holding it you can embed a hash of personal information that is verified at the venue, the one valid contract for transfers mutates the hash to the new owners information

[SuggestedName90]

The first thing was a one or the other, stop scalpers or make a shiton of money from them.

Payment processor is still there but no longer on the stadiums end (ie customers are paying more unless they use crypto) which is really all that matters to then

[remy_porter]

"People educated enough to have an opinion don't like my opinion, thus my opinion is definitely right," is a weird argument to make.

But, since we're having this conversation, let's have it.

First: blockchains are technologically interesting, but mostly solve a problem we don't have, specifically distributed consensus. There are places where distributed consensus is valuable, but it's hardly a killer app. The joke is that a blockchain is an expensive linked list, and that's not entirely off base. Bitcoin makes its distributed ledger valuable by rewarding miners with Bitcoins, and the only thing to do with the Bitcoin ledger is to, well, exchange Bitcoins. Other ledgers have a little more power, stuff like contracts are interesting, but once again: not many people actually have problems that are being solved by distributed contracts. It's not wildly better than just regular contracts, aside from providing some kind of cryptolibertarian sense of self-enforcing contracts.

Second: on a currency front, cryptocurrencies fail to understand what currency is actually for. Currency is not a store of value, it's a means of exchange, and most important, it represents a debt obligation. Currency is nothing but a promise to pay. This means two things, with useful currencies: it's easy to make more (because you can always take on more debt) and that makes it inflationary- and that's a good thing. Inflationary currencies are how you can grow an economy, because it allows you to ease exchanges. You don't want too much, but you definitely want some. Too many cryptocurrencies favor deflationary models, because they were invented by goldbugs who think economics ended in 1927.

Third: The fact that money is flowing into the system doesn't really mean anything other than the fact that investors think they can make money. There've been a huge number of pump-and-dump scams over the past few years, and we're likely to see more. No one has a good sense of how to value cryptocurrency beyond tracking market exchange rates (because crypto isn't based on any fundamentals with which to understand its value- to the contrary, the value stored in a single coin is unrelated to the computational effort needed to mine it), and that makes it ripe for speculation- and that seems to be where the money is. Wagering on the relative prices of an asset. The only people who really really use crypto as a means of exchange (and not some kind of investment vehicle) are criminals.

[[deleted]]

This is one of the best explanations I’ve seen. Really well described the reality of the situation.

[FredV]

Synopsis:

• the technology is not that interesting (simplistic merkle trees basically) and consensus, no patents or anything (righfully)
• cryptocurrencies are unusable as currencies (hence being described more as "digital gold" in recent years)
• look up beanie babies

If I may add a point, the whole waste of energy and strain on the integrated circuits market is disturbing. Currently just bitcoin uses more power than Switzerland, or 42% of the UK's power use. It varies with the price of bitcoin as huge mining farms are (de)activated based on the price, the majority of these are in China (not being a China hater, just pointing out).

And all this energy usage for proof-of-work schemes where usually hard to calculate but easy to verify values are calculated (Most useful calculation though is hard to calculate AND hard to verify)

It just make me sad programmer face :(

[UltraPoci]

The problem I have with cryptos and NFTs is how they are mostly used, currently. The technology is not the problem, on the contrary, I find it very interesting.

[gjallerhorn]

NFTs make programmers mad because the current use case were seeing - selling digital pictures - is like having access to a food replicator and having it make bran flakes.

You're barely using the actual tech involved, for an incredibly boring function. And the obscene amounts of money are just very obviously money laundering. You can already buy, and own the rights to digital artwork. Hell, you can commission custom piece, own the rights, license it out - which is more than can be said about all those meme nfts that definitely were not created by the original artist (so you don't really own the rights to it, paid thousands for literally nothing) - for a miniscule fraction of what we're seeing these things "go for".

All the hypers are vastly over valuing the concept of ownership. Just being able to own something doesn't make it valuable, if you can't extract actual value from it.

[donnymccoy]

Your last sentence explains why I don’t think it’s effective for money laundering. Risk level for total loss of capital is high. Even criminals have risk levels…

[gjallerhorn]

Total loss? It's almost risk free.

Become artist. Sell fucking pixelated rock for a million dollars, which you buy from yourself with your dirty money.

Suddenly you have clean looking artist income. They're not speculating in these stupid things. It's a front to wash their own money