A key feature of NFTs has completely broken / Web3 was supposed to make sure the original artist always got paid. Not so much anymore.
A key feature of NFTs has completely broken / Web3 was supposed to make sure the original artist always got paid. Not so much anymore.
Artists were supposed to keep getting paid. OpenSea is done with that.
![[VERGE] A key feature of NFTs has completely broken](https://radiation.party/pictrs/image/55b4758b-51ba-49c0-bdcb-21c660c4afd4.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
Are they trying to say that NFTs are some kind of bullshit scam that should have dissolved into the ether like the crypto bro's cocaine-fueled manic state that spawned them in the first place? How shocking and unpredictable.
What do you mean? You didnt go out and spend all your money on reproducable jpegs? Whats wrong with you?
reproducable jpegs? Excuse me?
I live walking distance from my local police department. If another person uses my NFT without my consent I will report them immediately. This is MY PROPERTY. The transaction has be verified scientifically on the block chain. Anyone who violates my NFT rights will pay the price.
Buddy, you have no idea who you are messing with. I have made a ridiculous amount of money in crypto/NFTs and I have the best lawyers. If you don’t delete those stolen jpegs, you’re going to regret it. When you steal someone’s property you get punished. Watch out.
I spent all my money on a chance to get a certain jpg.
So the guy on Reddit who told me I better get with the NFT game or be left behind in a year was full of shit?
The whole "web3" bs has always just been a shabby scam, and people fell for it
Did they though? It might be my filter bubble, but whenever I saw web3 being pushed I saw a small refraction of responses of people who also thought it was a great idea (typical salesbros - so a good idea for others to do, just not for themselves). But the vast majority of people reject it for being a scam.
So how many people fell for it, really?
Even the name “web3” is stupid. Isn’t it supposed to be the next step after “web 2.0?” Shouldn’t it then be “web 3.0?” They couldn’t even include a space between web and 3!
There actually is a Web 3.0, and it predates the cryptocurrency-oriented conceptualisation of "Web3" by quite some time.
Web 3.0 is otherwise known as the Semantic Web, a set of standards developed by the W3C for formally representing (meta)data and relationships between entities on the internet, and for facilitating the machine-reading and exchange thereof.
I thought the whole point of NFTs and the blockchain is that it's decentralized, and you can use "smart contracts" for things like this. How is one company able to decide to change it?
Apparently, smart contracts are not contracts at all... they are friendly suggestions. Unsurprisingly a contract needs a mechanism to enforce it, which makes decentralized contracts redundant at best (as you still need institutions outside of the blockchain to monitor and enforce the contracts), and or worse, completely useless if there is no legal way to enforce them.
The idea behind smart contracts is that they contain code to verify that the contract is fulfilled (that’s the “smart” part of the name).
This of course also means that you can only use it for stuff that happens on the same blockchain, because the contract can’t verify anything outside of that.
Which is why this isn’t relevant for the real world, it’s just eating its own tail.
They can only change it for their instance, but they can’t impact all NFT marketplaces. This is only significant because this company is the largest broker so it will impact more people.
Anyone can set up their own blockchain and build it however they want. Hell, they could make it centralized even.
Fortunately, nothing of actual value was lost. Just fools being parted from their money.
I am ok with this
It's broken now? I'd say that's a bold assumption that it ever worked in the first place.
Edit: to be clear, I mean that it is and always has been an impossible problem. The only reason it ever worked is because some broker company wanted it as a feature, not because anything compelled them to give original artists a cut. And that's before you consider the question, "but how do you know the NFT was made by the original artist?"
How is this Web3 scam still a thing? I thought I would finally stop hearing it after the crash but it just keeps coming back. The only people who will get rich from this are the scammers themselves.
It’s a mindset. Once you know that the solution is Blockchain, all you need to do is to find a question that fits this answer to get filthily rich.
Casinos are also a known scam, but that hasn’t stopped them.
Mastodon and fediverse is more web3 than web2 (lest I've misunderstood). The problem has been shitty implementation.
I.e In reality, nothing is more valuable than the ground work it stands on. So just because it's an NFT doesn't mean it should've been worth anything. It has to provide meaning and value to the consumer. Like if all of steam would put their marketplace on a blockchain, those items would still be just as valuable as before. The value comes from the item implementation, not the "storage" technology
"Web3" was supposed to enrich a bunch of assholes. It was never meant to do anything else.
Hard disagree, "web3" (defi) is meant to provide a decentralized alternative to our modern economic infrastructure, that doesn't have huge institutional points of failure like central banks or investment banks. The only reason people piled into these speculative projects, centralized exchanges etc. is because probably > 60% of the population is into the idea of getting-rich-quick while < 1% of the population is into trying to build a better future with tech, or even just getting their head around how the technology work in the first place & what kind of potential it actually has.
I've been watching blockchain since Bitcoin was under a dollar and it really blows my mind how much people love to spout off about it without understanding anything about the space. You've got teams of hundreds, thousands of people working for years to solve all the problems in the space like PoS or scalability or contract security, but the general public is all just talking trash about the entire space because of NFTs.
Even this article, "Web3 was supposed to make sure the original artist always got paid"? Who said that? "A key feature of NFTs has completely broken?" No one who knew anything about NFTs ever said there was some universal "guarantee an artist would get paid", particularly not if a contract to purchase an NFT didn't guarantee that directly. If a given contract guaranteed that (or at least, the party creating the NFT on-chain), then it still does. If it didn't, then it didn't. Anyone actually learned Solidity and read a smart contract for themselves? Cause I'll tell you, any smart contract where some institution has "god controls" over the state of the contract, that's against the entire point of "web3"/"defi".
I think the Trump NFTs were my first time hearing of perpetual trade royalties. Most of the NFTs I own are tied to games though... maybe it's more common in the art space and chains I don't frequent.
I was into BTC before anyone really had a good place even check the value and would waste them on side projects and also gamble them away randomly like they were Chuck E Cheese tickets. It does not keep me up at night, in fact everyone constantly checking the price of crypto is almost the antithesis to Crypto in my opinion. The investing mindset is kind of nauseating, you can't talk about any project without price being brought up.
Very well put. I'm so sick of people dog-piling on NFT/Blockchain because their only exposure to it is shitty Bored Ape images and manipulated crypto currencies. There's so much potential there but lazy media reporting and people's unwillingness to actually learn something about it has done some serious damage to web3 viability.
Yeah NFTs themselves don't guarantee royalties, but most publicly advertised NFTs are based on unique or limited run graphics that include such contract terms. When artists started getting sketched out by the idea, one of the biggest arguments in favor of them was that artists could receive royalties on every sale, something that became a major selling point for marketplaces aimed at laymen who didn't really know anything about crypto.
It's not surprising, then, that this feature being taken away seems to negate one of biggest supposed benefits that NFTs provided. This was supposed to be the thing that balanced concerns about art theft and the value of quantity over quality that haunt NFTs to this day.
The general opinion of crypto isn't going to improve until people feel it's stable and safe enough to actually trust their money with, and moves like this certainly aren't helping that image of volatility.
This is now a recurring feature of tech vaporware. Claiming something that is clearly shit is okay because it does some good, or something that is uselesslt frivolous and speculative will have and important function and use-case in the future.
My condolences to those that have been made fools by this - we all need to keep an eye out for these patterns going forward.
I wanna add: prosecute and sue these thieves. Sue the people who took money to promote these lies. They all deserve to have those ill-gotten funds ripped away.
To me that whole royalties spiel was always just marketing to bait non-technical people into adopting the NFT system.
I've never seen anyone build and use an enforcable mechanism for a multi transaction chain to pay out to one original address repeatedly. I think at the very least you would always have to hold the NFT in a multi sig wallet between the artist and the current owner, for the artist to have a mechanism to keep enforcing their royalty claims. That would also require involvement of the artist in every further transaction.
Maybe I'm missing something like a smart contract that can fabricate new multi sig transactions on demand with pre-approval of the artist somehow... If anyone knows of something like that I'd be interested in the technical details.
It could theoretically be done by implementing a covenant system in contracts, but it never got built despite all the talk about it (probably because of the extra complexity it requires in validating new transactions). Otherwise, like you said, multisig is needed so one side can simply demand the new transaction to be signed use the same contract before agreeing on transferring. Which requires this second signer to anyways be available online...
A. I don't actually feel bad for anyone because if you're involved in NFTs in any way, you're begging to be scammed. There is no legitimate use for NFTs.
B. This seems like blatant illegal fraud. You can't just advertise "get this cut of all transactions forever" to get people to join, then say "just kidding" once they include their "art" in your shitty scam. They're entitled to their shitty cut of your shitty transaction, and you can't hand wave it away by pointing to fine print when you sold the product very clearly making that claim.
There are uses for NFT, but it is clearly not what they are famous for.
NFT aren't pictures of monke, they are a way to authenticate something in a decentralised way, so no trust in another entity needed. The picture isn't the NFT, and that is why you can just right click-copy it.
You can't however just copy the NFT, the actual token. Having a token that's verifiably owned by someone is useful for certain things. It's like a certificate of authenticity, but digital.
I reckon the meeting about the tokens went something like "okay, how can we monetise this?", "Okay hear me out here... monkeys!... digital monkeys!"
Who could have seen this coming? Who could have foreseen that all of Web3 was a ponzi scheme that would say anything to get people to pretend hashes on a blockchain is worth 100s of 1000s of dollars. Who? WHO?
It sure sounds like that wasn't a feature of NFTs, but a feature of OpenSea
This is the best summary I could come up with:
One of the big promises of NFTs was that the artist who originally made them could get a cut every time their piece was resold.
Starting March 2024, those fees will essentially be tips — an optional percentage of a sale price that sellers can choose to give the original artist.
The marketplace will continue enforcing the fees on certain existing collections until March 2024, at which point they’ll become optional on all sales.
Critics say it will hurt small artists and undermines creators’ ability to control their relationship with the people who buy their work.
OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer criticized the fees’ “ineffective, unilateral enforcement” and said that creators will find other ways to monetize their work.
“Our role in this ecosystem is to empower innovation beyond a single use case or business model,” he writes in the blog post announcing that OpenSea will no longer support the ecosystem’s primary business model.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
pfffffffffffffffff
I want to be sympathetic, but honestly, I'm just not.
Web3 was a mistake from the beginning.
Because web2 centralization worked out fine. Meta owns half the web and everything feels dead
Except people has been stealing art to do NFTs without paying the artists from day 1?
Yeah, I don't know why people think this is somehow a new problem.
Yeah, wtf do they mean "anymore"? Did they not see a single artist having their stuff copied and put into some blockchain by grifters?
Right click. Save as.
Also note that the ERC721 standard says nothing about royalties. Royaltiew weren't designed as a "key feature"
It's not the art that you buy, it's the "original URL" that belongs to you. You buy a treasure map leading to a princess. It's your princess, that's what is says on the napkin, but everyone can fuck her.
Ik the technology is useful, but selling shit I can screen shot is fucking pointless. If you want to buy shit from the artist, just buy their shit.
What you’re buying when you purchase an NFT is a link to a website. That link shows the image. If the link ever breaks because the website goes down or out of business, it’s pretty worthless. I would have thought the implementation would be based on something more enduring like the actual content and not a link.
I thought the royalty payments were enforced by the contract?
Turns out that the smart contract is a post-it note stapled to the NFT and the marketplace can just ignore what the post-it note says because it's not legally binding.
What they can't do is trade with marketplaces that do enforce the contract. Originally it was enforced because if one marketplace stopped enforcing it the marketplace would be cut off from the Echo system but turns out that the 5 big marketplaces just need to agree to drop it and everything is fine.
You’re thinking too rationally now. The thing with NFTs is that it’s not rational at all. Try again.
Basically the transfer function on an erc721 interface (nft) cannot have enforced royalty payment otherwise it wouldn't support people transferring the token outside of a sale. Theoretically you could use some kind of interface standard or write up a different contract where users are forced to pay a royalty on any kind of transfer but then there wouldn't be a way to transfer it without paying the royalty and basically no nft trading platforms would support it because under the hood you have to transfer them the token so they can sell it on your behalf once a buyer is found.
FYI not trying to shill funny pictures but I do know a bit of solidity so maybe someone here is actually curious about the limitation.
Thank you. This is what I wanted to know!
Obligatory rather funny If NFTs Were Honest | Honest Ads https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG_v4bb2e4k which sets this out, a year ago
I can’t believe I’ve never seen this, it’s incredible. When NFTs were first hyped I spent far too much time explaining to techbros how they were just buying an entry in a decentralized ledger that pointed to some url on a centralized server someone owned and could take down or change on a whim. Nobody cared, because as this video demonstrates it was never about art or anything but about grifting. Thanks for sharing
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=sG
https://piped.video/watch?v=sG_v4bb2e4k
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I know i'm really late to the party, but this video gave me an idea how blockchains could actually be useful for art. Not to sign a digital image to your name, that's bullshit. But to link an actual piece of art to you as a certificate of ownership. So in case it gets stolen, you can prove you're the real owner. This requires first time entries to be verified by certified experts, but after that you're good to go. You would need to solve a bunch of problems, like what happens when someone dies and the objects are inherited, or what if you buy it, but the owner doesn't update the chain or makes a mistake, etc. You would probably need a group of mods/experts who can amend the entries. But then you could more easily contact the owner, manage reproduction rights and in general make art theft less attractive, because all art dealers can easily check the current state.
This was actually the original idea of non-fungible tokens, but because you need special legislation to tie an object to this digital receipt (there is nothing legally tying one thing to the other), they just skipped over it completely and said the NFT itself was the commodity, which is why they could only do it for digital art with the a web link. (we could, for example, see this more useful for a title to a car or house)
In fact, many NFTs don't even contain any language about copyright or licensing, they don't even attempt to pretend that the NFT holder owns the copyright. The owner of the NFT in these cases only owns the NFT, and not the copyright. Of course, you have to transfer the copyright separately from transferring the NFT, which makes this whole thing redundant for buying/selling on secondary markets, but they could have at least tried to pretend they could.
That was just many parts of the grift. Also when that feature was very rarely used, it was ironically a regular web 2.0 feature that was pushed between participating centralized MFT marketplaces. You know, because it was never actually decentralized.
As long as I can take a screenshot of any random NFT and integrate a picture into my website, there's no fucking way those things are worth anything.
They're worth a lot if you're laundering money
You think it's funny to take screenshots of people's NFTS, huh? Property theft is a joke to you? l'll have you know that the blockchain doesn't lie. I own it. Even if you save it, it's my property. You are mad that you don't own the art that I own. Delete that screenshot.
A problem with a blockchain-related grift? I’m utterly shocked!!!
thank fuck nobody bought the nft of my dingus
NFTs have a place but it isn't central to the Internet. That was hype to separate idiots who didn't know better from their money, aka grifting, and that kind of grifting has used literally everything to do that same thing in the past so NFTs are not a unique tool to that end.
NFTs have no place at all. There has yet to be any good suggestion on what they should be used for that isn't served by something else just fine. Or if not "fine", then at least solves no problem that would make it better. Not in-game items, not ticket sales, not silly ape pictures.
This is the funniest use of NFTs I've ever read about:
As a self-described “fartpreneur,” however, Matto may have girlbossed a little too close to the sun. On Christmas, she says, she went to the ER with what she describes as heart attack-esque symptoms, which doctors promptly diagnosed as severe gas pain as a result of her diet. Matto’s visit to the ER, which she recounted to a journalist from the U.K. outlet Jam Press, was aggregated across news outlets across the globe, prompting fervent social media debate as to whether Matto’s fart-selling enterprise was a savvy business move or a cultural death rattle resounding from the bowels of late-stage capitalism (pun very much intended). Yet Matto is unruffled by such critiques, and has harnessed her newfound virality into promoting her newest venture: selling fart jar NFTs for 0.05 ETH (a little less than $200) each, though she has significantly reduced sales of her physical fart jars following her ER visit.
OpenSea is bad on purpose. Who remembers their insider trading scandal(s)?
“To be clear, creator fees aren’t going away—simply the ineffective, unilateral enforcement of them,” OpenSea co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer
So no, a key feature isn't broken, they've just decided to allow people to not include residual fees of they choose.
The verge either don't know what they're talking about or they're maliciously promoting a false story.
Maybe both.
At this point I hope no one’s surprised about this.
I'm surprised with the amateurish design of the smart contracts.
In hindsight, that’s about the least surprising thing for me. The smart contract system (like everything around cryptocurrency) was not designed and implemented by legal or financial experts. It was designed by tech bros who think they’re smarter than everyone else because they’re competent at programming and/or math.
That’s the generous interpretation, anyway. The less generous interpretation is that the people who designed the system knew it was all bullshit and just wanted to scam people to make a quick buck.
The confidence of people commenting here that have little idea what an NFT even is kinda funny if not sad. You're on the anti-NFT bandwagon just as much as tech bros are on the pro-NFT bandwagon.
The fact is blockchain is a technology that can hold value, why would people think it's somehow immune to being used by bad actors? Does the blockchain enable more fraud than the dollar?