Quote from: gmaxwell on Today at 05:50:30 PM

Aww yiss, motherfucking free markets!!!

A big part of why NFT's exist is specifically to enable stuff like this-- money pass transactions, illiquid trades booked at arbitrary values, etc. This crap about art is really 90% cover for money laundering, graft, and pump and dumps.

Sure, it might be fun to spend a couple bucks on a digital title to some art, but the millions (even hundreds of millions)-- being directed at NFTs is driven by motivations far less simple and clean.

Do you suppose that this doesn’t occur with physical artworks? I reasonably suspect that it is the primary purpose of “modern art”, which requires zero talent to create:

Have a brooding bipolar “artist” smear some random blobs of paint on a canvas—or throw some junk in a bin—or take a photograph of a urinal, or whatever.
Pronouce it “modern art”.
“Sell” it for $10 million between parties who want to transfer $10 million for other reasons.

If anybody ever questions this: “You are unsophisticated. You do not understand art.”

I point this out, because I disagree with the FUD with NFTs. It is similar to the FUD with Bitcoin and so-called “money laundering”. See also my prior post about this, which nutildah ripped off.

Yes, I have no doubt that Bitcoin is sometimes used for “money laundering”. Far more “money laundering” is done with bags of cash, shell corporations, layering with front businesses, and most of all, insider connections at big banks (HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, ...). Are you an old-school organized crime boss with a hundred million dollars to clean in a hurry? You don’t use Bitcoin for that! Instead, you call your banker.

Yes, artwork NFTs will probably be used for some “money laundering”. But it will be a drop in the bucket compared to the monkey-business that already must exist in the art world.

Please, let us not ruin a good thing with Four Horsemen of the Cryptocalypse type of fearmongering. Bitcoiners should know better than that!

NFTs have great potential as a technology. They may sometimes be used for stupidity, just as Bitcoin has oft been used for stupendously idiotic “investments” (especially in the early days). NFTs may sometimes be used for criminal activity, just as Bitcoin is sometimes used for criminal activity. But ultimately, the good will outweigh the bad by orders of magnitude.

We will see that develop, if developers have the freedom to innovate without all the scare stories. A generalized means of conveying non-fungible value could and should do for numerous use cases what Bitcoin has done for fungible value, i.e., money.

* nullius is now an avant-garde Neo-Dadaist offering a compact disc audiorecording of John Cage’s 4′33″ of silence which has been run through a Panasonic® microwave oven. It is an artistic statement on the technological hermeneutics of the social-historical nexus between transgressive musical innovation, crass commercialism, and the never-ending existential quest for food by oppressed classes struggling under neoliberal-technocratic global capitalism. It will be bought from the artist for $10,000 by a snobbish billionaire, who will “sell” it to another snobbish billionaire for $10,000,000. If you do not appreciate this art, then you are an unsophisticated rube: You do not understand art. Art is best understood by snobbish billionaires who want to send each other money for undisclosed reasons.

Quote from: nullius on March 21, 2020, 07:16:30 PM

Everyone in “crypto” should also be familiar with the Four Horsemen of the Cryptocalypse. AFAIK/IIRC (?), the identification originated with The Cyphernomicon by Timothy C. May.

https://web.archive.org/web/20020727001417/http://www.cypherpunks.to/faq/cyphernomicron/chapter8.html#3

Quote from: The Cyphernomicon, v0.666, by Timothy C. May (1994-09-10)

8.3.4. "How will privacy and anonymity be attacked?"

the downsides just listed are often cited as a reason we can't have "anonymity"
like so many other "computer hacker" items, as a tool for the "Four Horsemen": drug-dealers, money-launderers, terrorists, and pedophiles.

See also: 12. Digital Cash and Net Commerce.

R.I.P., T. C. May (1951–2018). If he had lived just a bit longer—perhaps he got lucky.

nutildah ripped off my writings without credit:

Nullian Original (archive.is) (archive.org)

Subject: [WO] NFTs are good!

Quote from: nullius on March 17, 2021, 09:49:50 PM

Proof that NFT technology will succeed: I see WOers slinging the exact same FUD against NFTs as has always been used against Bitcoin. Let’s see just how much this technology will totally take over the world:

“It’s a Ponzi.” ✔
“The scarcity is artificial. Anyone can make perfect copies of it.” ✔
“Drug dealers will use it to launder money.” ✔
“Those fools will be burned when it is shut down by regulators (SEC, et al.).”² ✔

I anticipate that as I keep reading WO posts about NFTs, I will be adding to this list...

Paraphrased plagiarism—replete with Unicode checkmarks paraphrased as different Unicode checkmarks (archive.is) (archive.org)

Quote from: nutildah on Today at 09:38:21 PM

What's struck me as a touch ironic is that bitcoiners are criticizing NFTs for the exact same reasons nocoiners criticize bitcoin:

"Anybody can make one." ✓
"It's a bubble and a fad that will never catch on." ✓
"It's a highly illiquid market, or else it's all wash trading." ✓
"Its only used by money launderers and criminals." ✓

What am I forgetting?

That would get you expelled from any academic environment.

To me as an original thinker, it is discouraging: Why should I contribute my original thoughts to this forum, so that nutildah can rip me off without even the slightest acknowledgment? There is only one nullius. nutildah’s unattributed paraphrase of my ideas is conceptually a half-step away from Faketoshi’s claim that he wrote the Bitcoin whitepaper.

(nutildah does get extra chutzpah points insofar as he pretends to have me ignore-listed. Cue the plagiarism bingo card: “We had similar thoughts, including even the placement of Unicode checkmarks!”)

I will report it on the plagiarism thread.