NFT projects are just MLMs for tech elites

NFT always felt ridiculous to me, but I though I understood the mechanism: &quot;it&#x27;s like baseball cards but in the blockchain&quot;.<p>This week I learned it&#x27;s not.<p>NFT are Non Fungible Tokens, which means tokens that can&#x27;t be divided, unlike crypto currencies like Bitcoin that can be divided in Satoshis. So you exchange the totality of it, or not. Basically it&#x27;s a unique number in the blockchain you change ownership by applying cryptographic signatures during a transaction. Most of the time it&#x27;s an ethereum smart contract address + a token id.<p>But wait, where are the pics ? The gifs ? The videos ?<p>I mean, opensea.io does allow you to mint (the term for magically turning a media into an official NFT backed by the blockchain) up to 100MB of content.<p>So where is it? Not in the blockchain, obviously, it&#x27;s already fat enough with tiny transaction data.<p>Well, it&#x27;s just stored in the centralized platforms like opensea, rarible, etc.<p>Basically, the NFT is not even that piece of art, baseball card or whatever, it&#x27;s just the number linked to the proprietary, centralized, privately own trading platform that hosts the content.<p>The platform disappears, or bans you, or changes policy, or is blocked, or whatever, and your NFT is back to being a bare-bone blockchain contract number and a token id.<p>It&#x27;s even more bullshit that I though! You don&#x27;t even have control on whatever you make believe to virtually own. It&#x27;s madness.<p>But you know what, the week I spent in this weird universe was also so much fun. There is an atmosphere of creative WTF, a mix of scams, community bonding, money laundering and genuine experimentation all bathed in some frenetic craziness that reminds me of the early days of the internet.<p>Despite all that crap, I kinda like it.

There’s a lot of confusion here about why NFTs are valuable if the buyer doesn’t get to own the image copyright. This should not feel mysterious - NFTs are just like baseball cards.<p>If you buy a Barry Bonds baseball card for $1,000, you don’t own the artistic rights to the image on the card. All you own is the card itself, which has negligible manufacturing cost. It would be trivial for any card company to produce a million functionally equivalent Barry Bonds cards.<p>When you buy a Barry Bonds baseball card, you hope that the card company won’t dump a million more on the market. You also hope that if another baseball card company springs up and prints their own Barry Bonds cards, people won’t be <i>as interested</i> in that brand of cards. Attention and scarcity drive value; the nuance is that other speculators must care about scarcity along the same dimension that you possess it (in this case: the brand of the baseball card company and the year the card was made). There are a hundred tokens functionally equivalent to Bitcoin, but none approach Bitcoin’s value - purely because Bitcoin sustains more consumer and media attention. This position is fairly stable because attention has strong positive feedback loops.<p>There has always been interest in speculative collectibles. A purely digital collectible solves a lot of practical problems related to exchange: you don’t have to wait a week to receive the item in the mail, you don’t have to worry about its condition because it does not degrade with time or use, there is minimal counterparty risk due to online escrow contracts, and counterfeits are harder to fake (along the relevant dimension of scarcity, which is the origin address).<p>People have been speculating on collectibles for thousands of years. Crypto just makes it easier to trade them back and forth.

Ok, let&#x27;s see if I&#x27;m following the discussion right. let&#x27;s say you buy an NFT for using a GIF of the Techno Viking, from the Viking himself, and Reddit verifies it. Now you are the only person on Reddit that can have a Techno Viking GIF signature, yippee! Except I can make a new NFT of the same GIF and nothing in the NFT itself betrays that it wasn&#x27;t issued by the real Techno Viking, so it&#x27;s up to him, Reddit and you to call me out and reach for old school copyright laws to stop me from using it. Which is no different than me uploading a Techno Viking video to YouTube and getting sued by him or flagged by YouTube, is it?

All of this gushing hype for the future of artistry is transparently performative. Nobody in this tech cares about art or artists, any of the useful functions of NFTs have long been possible and many orders of magnitude less expensive using public key cryptography or digital signatures.

This would have been more interesting if the author had traced <i>where</i> all the money being plowed into NFTs is coming from.<p>I suspect that most of it does <i>not</i> come from outside of the current ETH (or whatever) ecosystem. I&#x27;d bet that most of the volume comes from people who are either treating it as play money, or trying to pump the NFT scam for their own benefit (real or imagined).

sorry to be pedantic, but it&#x27;s literally not multi-level-marketing? Specifically, it&#x27;s missing the multi-level part. Your upline isn&#x27;t getting $$$ when you sell a NFT. I suppose you can make the argument that if you then take the money and buy more stuff, then your upline gets paid, but that describes most distributor arrangements. Come to think of it, there isn&#x27;t really even an upline. It&#x27;s just a network of artists and traders with no set hierarchy.

I summed up all my complaints about NFT&#x27;s in this (short) article:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fortressofdoors.com&#x2F;the-degraded-blockchain-problem&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fortressofdoors.com&#x2F;the-degraded-blockchain-prob...</a><p>&gt; In short, the minute you connect your blockchain to an app frontend you now have a degraded blockchain, one that cannot even in principle guarantee immutability, trustlessness, and decentralization – at least not for assets that the app&#x27;s customers actually care about.<p>Scratch the surface on almost any NFT ecosystem or blockchain application and I find I&#x27;m still relying on trust, or a centralized service, or a service that&#x27;s more mutable than it advertises. So if I don&#x27;t get the purported benefits of blockchain anyways, what was the point of getting a blockchain involved?<p>EDIT: Getting a lot of responses that I don’t have time to reply to. My more involved thoughts on the entire space are here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=fZBIYjsXT_s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=fZBIYjsXT_s</a>

Car&#x2F;bag&#x2F;cloth&#x2F;jewelry&#x2F;art - these type of things are sometime considered status symbol. It help people convey certain “message” to other. NFT might could be the same in the ever more virtual world. I might not be be the target audience; but it does not meant that it hold no value to other.<p>People spent lots of money on game skins, rare weapon. So there is a market.<p>When one goes to a physical conference: flair&#x2F;badges serves similar purpose. NFT could be that in zoom&#x2F;team&#x2F;slack.<p>My naive way of looking at NFT: Maybe it can be used to help fund open source free software. Instead piece of art; a flair&#x2F;pin&#x2F;badge for showing your support for your favor projects.<p>do not underestimate people&#x27;s vanity.

NFTs as they&#x27;re being used is silly, but to me the fact the article makes a brief mention about &quot;digital ownership&quot; makes me realize why I agree with Proudhon on the absurdity of property rights. Basically, everyone needs some kind of means of subsistence. In Proudhon&#x27;s day most people lived by subsistence farming, so land was an essential element to that. And thus, the contention was what happens when all the land is owned? Do those born afterward become diminished by the need to purchase or rent land? Or is ownership contingent on the possession of it as in its direct use. Meaning that someone who inherits some title to land has no valid claim if they can only use&#x2F;consume it? Today, people still need land to subsist but not in the same way that people did in the 19th century. As such, the whole idea of title ownership whether it&#x27;s an Ethereum smart contract or an old fashioned title from the government it needs state enforcement as without this element it&#x27;s worthless. Thus, the real problem with NFTs and just title&#x2F;absentee ownership is the fact that it attempts to deprive people of subsistence rights whether in the physical world with using state violence to prevent people from finding shelter, food, medical care, and so forth. Or whether it&#x27;s non-physical such as trying to make it illegal to distribute content ranging from images of art to information regarding circuit designs and chemical formulas for essential medicines. So to me, NFTs as certificates of &quot;authentic ownership&quot; seem like another example of the absurdity of title ownership. Your piece of paper or JSON file does not entitle you or others to absentee ownership. Use and possession are the only true means of ownership and absent that you must lean on the state to enforce it and the only means to enforce is through violence of various means (physical, structural, financial, etc).

Here’s an amazing email from Hal Finney on proto-NFTs 1993-<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;UJpFjzx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;UJpFjzx</a><p>I think people who have been in bitcoin for 10 years are more skeptical of NFTs because suddenly they’re framed as the ultimate crypto use case. And Eth is ultra sound money. And while there’s some interesting generative art (eg deafbeef) most of the industry is hyping NFTs for videogames.<p>There are better and more transformative use cases than just the “metaverse”.

I&#x27;d argue that startups are also MLMs for tech elites.<p>EDIT: Good video that summarizes it well that I just found: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zU5JsP6pUpc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zU5JsP6pUpc</a>

<i>eyeroll</i> I won’t deny that there are tons of NFT projects that are nothing more than modern day tulip mania. On the other hand there is an entirely new world of opportunity that has never existed before for both common people, artists and corporations in the form of DeFi projects. Basically any distributed form of ownership you can imagine is now possible through NFT and DAOs. There has never been a better time to learn about it either.

&gt; The venn diagram of NFT haters are almost exact matches of Crypto haters<p>Nonsense. I&#x27;m pro-crypto but think NFTs are absolutely idiotic.<p>Scarcity is fundamental to any store of value. There are an infinite number of potential NFTs.

The way I see NFTs is this:<p>It is an open API to deal with ownership rights. Every behavior that you can program into ownership, is now available. The profile pictures are stupid, yes, but the idea that property is moved to an open database which anyone can program a behavior is exciting.<p>Aston martin can now have a lounge in France where only Aston Martin owners can join, even if your car is in New York. Even if they can do that now, they haven&#x27;t, and would not do it in an open api that anyone can build any application they want for owners.<p>We are learning what is possible at this very moment, a lot of the experiments are memes, and there are twice as many scams. Open and permissionless means that scammers as well as innovators are invited. However, there&#x27;s excitement there which is very palpable and I would encourage you not to dismiss it.

This whole rant assumes that people just buy NFTs to sell them to the next guy, but that&#x27;s not the case. Some people buy NFTs to support artists (like Patreon) - others are gamified to represent something in a dapp, for example metaverse parcels are like domain names. And of course some just collect them for the flex. It&#x27;s not really an MLM anyway you slice it.

If you buy an NFT for a piece of art, you can&#x27;t even sell prints of the piece of art. You can&#x27;t take a pic of it and sell a t-shirt of the art. You own nothing associated with that piece of art, except for the NFT itself.<p>It&#x27;s such a strange, strange concept to want to invest in.<p>What if they create a new NFT blockchain standard. Does the previous NFT become invalid? Is there anything contractual saying you can&#x27;t have multiple types of NFTs on a single piece of art? I kind of doubt it.

Why do people want Picassos? Show them off, appear sophisticated, an investment, etc. Crypto Punks are something a wealthy segment of society likes and because they are graphical and fit neatly into an avatar, they become like an expensive watch except for the digital set. This phenomenon is not hard to understand.

For me nfts provide an easier way for me to support digital artists I love that I&#x27;ve been following for a while.<p>I don&#x27;t really like the collectable scarcity kind of thing, but I like building a collection and having an easy way to explore and find art and artists. Also a lot of these websites are providing this art at higher resolutions and quality than social media would allow for (IPFS) and without direct hosting.<p>I think it&#x27;s here to stay in some form but it&#x27;ll definitely undergo some change.<p>Not everything exists for function, let&#x27;s enjoy our time.

I&#x27;ve read a lot of very well meaning, starry-eyed opinions of NFTs and to be honest, most of what is claimed is true. But it belies the pragmatic reason that NFTs are popular: mass speculation.<p>People have been collecting things for years, often at prices that make outsiders scratch their heads. The difference is that the current mainstream hype around NFTs has nothing to do with the true fandom of collectibles of yesteryear, where speculation is a side-effect of scarcity. Current NFT hype is rooted solely in the fact that some people are (seemingly) making money flipping NFTs.<p>If there was a huge market for buying digital collectibles from artists, athletes, etc pre-NFT then we would see large markets for that. It&#x27;s not as if there was anything stopping A-list celebs from dropping limited availability collectibles...there just must not have been much demand for it. Gaming has seen healthy digital asset economies because there is utility to use these items in-game. But prices have remained moderated because there is (usually) no secondary market, so people are paying roughly whatever utility they gain from using the items in-game.<p>So whilst NFTs have potential, and I&#x27;m sure we will see some successes, the current popularity is simply down to speculation, as with pretty much everything else crypto.

I can think of one genuinely useful application of NFTs for collectibles: fractal art, and (guaranteed reproducible) procedural art in general. In that case, the artwork itself can be fully on-chain, since it&#x27;s defined entirely by its input parameters, which are rarely large - the real value comes from finding those parameters! And yet the visuals, once computed, can be stunning:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8cgp2WNNKmQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8cgp2WNNKmQ</a><p>For something like this, I can actually see the value of owning a token that represents &quot;the original&quot;. And when the artwork is on-chain, this claim can be easily verified so long as the author immediately puts its on the chain: the one and only &quot;true&quot; NFT for it is the one that is the oldest in blockchain history.

Most of the comments assume that with NFTs you are buying just a piece of digital image with no utility whatsoever. And yes, it is the case with most of the things we see on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensea.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensea.io&#x2F;</a>.<p>But on the other hand, there are a bunch of interesting projects out there where you can do some cool things with your NFTs, like the &quot;card game&quot; Axie Infinity and other ripoff projects - with a very few original ones - inspired by it.<p>NFTs for collectible card games is promising and maybe this can lead to some other interesting use cases in the future.<p>Anyway, I recommend searching for &quot;utility nft projects&quot;. Most of them seem just like something to steal money from other people, but again... there are some interesting things coming out from it.

&gt; This Ape sold for $2.3M (769 ETH) last night.<p>NFTs make me think our society has gone completely insane. People sometimes ask me to explain them because I, like, &quot;understand technology&quot;, and I have no explanation for what they want explained.

Thank fuck someone said it.<p>Similar angle:<p><i>”Are NFTs DRM by Another Name?<p>[...] What do NFTs do that DRM doesn’t do? Not much. To me, the only interesting thing is that NFT schemes make public the identities of people who paid money for the NFTs that point to digital objects, so that those people have help from the NFT platform in exercising bragging rights. DRM technologies generally don’t do this, though they certainly could.”</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;copyrightandtechnology.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;15&#x2F;are-nfts-drm-by-another-name&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;copyrightandtechnology.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;15&#x2F;are-nfts-drm-b...</a>

I watched the link below to try to understand what is going on with NFTs. This helped a bit but I don&#x27;t quite understand how to apply the token to a physical or digital thing. Does it make sense that for a digital item (like a jpg) it would be a hash of the file, the entire file or something else? Also, how would one use an NFT with a physical item (if that is in fact possible)?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=i86Nh-Srfsk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=i86Nh-Srfsk</a>

What many people seem to do is associate NFTs with art. Art is a subset of what NFTs are used for. We&#x27;re in that phase where the first apps on the iPhone were the beer pouring ones, as that was the only way they could figure out how to use the gyroscopes. More use-cases will come, as the tech matures, the tulip manias fade.<p>I&#x27;m incredibly bearish about art via NFTs, but I see potential in non fungible tokens &#x2F; smart contracts more broadly. Look at how successful NBA top shot has been...collecting digital moments that can be seamlessly traded on a market place. That&#x27;s like baseball cards, but more convenient. In a future that will increasingly be more digital and VR is slowly gaining stronger foothold, it will be easier to show your friends your digital collectibles collection than it will be to show your baseball card collection. You can also guarantee its authenticity instead of hoping the shady seller on ebay is honest.

This is NFTs 1.0. The current issue is that there&#x27;s a gap between your NFT and a suitable metaverse.<p>People love to customize their avatars, it&#x27;s just what we like to do. NFTs 2.0 will be able to take your purchases and add them into whatever metaverse dominates at that current time.<p>As much as people like to say why buy things digital I remember reading a HN thread where many, many, many people preferred to live in a digital world VERSUS the real world. Therefore if you live in a metaverse you probably will want to customize and make yourself digital twin unique to your likes, desires etc.<p>What we are seeing right now is a standard progressive of a new digital product that some take advantage of, others don&#x27;t see it and some will see the potential.<p>QR Codes have been around for years, dropped off the map and then came storming back even though they are unsecure, some people hate them, others love them and so on.

I wish that HN would implement an automatic acronym and abbreviation expander!<p>What is an MLM?<p>Ah, multi-level marketing. A euphemism for a pyramid scheme.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Multi-level_marketing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Multi-level_marketing</a>.

This post might as well have just been titled &quot;Launch House is really out of touch&quot;

As financial holdings or blockchain assets they also seem speculative at best to me. I participate, however, because some digital artists are truly truly good; and they are finally seeing success&#x2F;sales.<p>Without getting too far into it, the Mona Lisa is of undeniably high quality. But its (is saying “her” gauche?) value is certainly not just a function of quality. Cultural relevance, scarcity, etc. I like that digital artists found a way to participate in the culture and make money. This is why I buy NFTs.<p>It’s also the most transparent “shill” pump and dump scheme ever. :) The article is not wrong, but there ARE other motivations. Especially on PoS low-electricity blockchain technologies.

There is another great post about nft availability.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blockrotate.medium.com&#x2F;nft-availability-is-a-problem-2794f1d1e95e" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blockrotate.medium.com&#x2F;nft-availability-is-a-problem...</a>

Strange that no one mentions Algorand in this context. There are several NFT marketplaces on Algorand and the fees for transactions are less than a penny. It costs around 20-40 cents (depending on ALGO price) to fund the escrow for a sale or auction on our site. Transactions complete within about 5 seconds, with confirmation within around 15-20 seconds. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gifeconomy.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gifeconomy.com</a> if you are interested. You can also exchange ALGO easily on places like Coinbase. And if you search you will find multiple other NFT sites using ALGOs.

Never before have I found the technically competent so divided. I sit in both HN and crypto camps I find this article catches all of the negative and none of the positive. I think everyone needs to zoom out.

I think of NFT as scrip; substitutes for money like gift cards, Disney Dollars, or Itchy &amp; Scratchy Money.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Disney_Dollars" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Disney_Dollars</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dErRj6V8_xQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dErRj6V8_xQ</a><p>You can buy them with money and maybe redeem for goods&#x2F;service where accepted. Or convert back to money by selling to some other sucker, probably at a loss.

NFTs are a scam as old as markets themselves. Buy your own supply at any price, then sell to a sucker at a &quot;discount&quot;.<p>Sprinkle around marketing bullshit about how all real world things will be NFTs one day, be really good at capturing imaginations and creating fantasy. More suckers get in.<p>They&#x27;ll end the same way as similar scams too - founding teams had no skin in the game since they just paid themselves, pros will ride the wave and cash out in time, and suckers will be left without bids.

There&#x27;s a missing perspective in a lot of these comments: some people like to support artists and aren&#x27;t that naive when it comes to &quot;buying NFTs&quot;. They see stuff they like and want to support the creator. That&#x27;s also an aspect of this. Some fraction of the art NFT space is people literally investing directly in artists with the possibility of getting a return on investment, but not necessarily an expectation of that.

NFTs are just another attack on the concept of ownership and wealth and a step in making a class of people who own tangible things and then everyone else who either just rents them or scrambles to hold ephemeral things like this that grant no true value. True ownership, of a physical good or legal asset is what you actually want to shoot for. Going back to the PG essay talking about wealth. NFTs are strictly not in that class.

Can&#x27;t we just be honest about it and say that NFTs are highly priced for exactly the same reason &quot;tokens&quot; were a few years ago? Or indeed dot com before that.<p>Mundane things become valuable when you link them to something new and hyped like crypto or the internet. It&#x27;s as simple as that.<p>Hopefully there will emerge some meaningful use cases on the other side, in the meantime a lot of people will end up holding the bag.

imagine there was no dollar, no central bank. all we have is this public ledger with lots of tokens. some are stable and some are variable, some have cool art, some are ugly. That&#x27;s what crypto is. The deeper you dig, the more you will understand. You can start with questioning yourself, what&#x27;s money? how much is a gucci bag worth?

it&#x27;s easy to get blinded by the scams and abuses enabled by new technology, but what matters in the long term are the new benefits and use cases.<p>will NFTs last? unclear.<p>however, one benefit is clear and compelling: decentralized royalty capture and IP management.<p>the NBA and other large enterprises could build and manage IP APIs that mimic NFT functionality.<p>but what if you&#x27;re an individual artist? or what if you&#x27;re taylor swift? today these creators resort to record labels or the equivalent to manage royalties.<p>NFTs empower individuals to capture royalties and manage IP without a middleman and without needing to build custom APIs; think of them as outsourced APIs.<p>royalty capture and IP management are the last functions to get disrupted in record label stack. now musicians can choose different &quot;vendors&quot; for the major activities in the value chain, from marketing to funding to creation to distribution -- and now IP&#x2F;royalty management.<p>is this enough to sustain NFTs? unclear.

As of now ... cryptocurrencies and the blockchain are just solutions searching for problems.

The same could be said for cryptocurrency as a whole. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Pinboard&#x2F;status&#x2F;1399058952336277505" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Pinboard&#x2F;status&#x2F;1399058952336277505</a>

The best comparison for NFTs I heard was the comparison with buying a star or a piece of land on the moon.<p>There are multiple providers that sell you various areas of space. But in the end it’s just a piece of paper that grants you nothing. Yes you can brag to your friends that you own a giant piece of land on the moon with earth view but not only is that pretty useless it also doesn’t matter ever. Because if the moon is ever colonized you won’t be able to claim the said land just because some private company said you own it.<p>When talking about NFTs I often hear that somehow ownership rights are attached to it. Which is only true if the rightful owner of the art explicitly states that ownership is defined by “whoever has access to the private key”.

Maybe someone should release a smart context which is a literal MLM&#x2F;pyramid NFT where everybody in the upline gets a portion of the sale (rather than just the seller and the creator)

This is a great time to checkout Air of Time: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;airoftime.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;airoftime.com</a><p>It will hopefully make NFTs feel a little sensible :)

Not really MLM per se, more like a greater fool scheme.

And again, like the recent misunderstanding of Macbook and iPad, it&#x27;s not for techbros, it&#x27;s for creatorbros.

This whole discussion here shows that NFT are really confusing. And this is the point. NFT is art - it makes you think.

NFTs are not baseball cards, they&#x27;re not JPEGs, they&#x27;re none of this.<p>They are emblems of buy-in to a community or idea. Think of it like the next generation of crowdfunding.<p>Most of what people are saying here is really ignorant of the reality on the ground to be honest, so it&#x27;s hard to say anything other than-- ya&#x27;ll really don&#x27;t see it, because you haven&#x27;t bothered to look.

I think NFT&#x27;s are wonderful for reducing inflation.<p>I just don&#x27;t like hearing about them so much.

Anything crypto related being discussed in HN is worthless. Nothing to see here people.

Do nft actually resell? Did anybody (not a celebrity) resell a nft?

Not all MLMs are just bubbles or Ponzi schemes like this. Some MLMs actually sell useful products and distribute actual revenue. E.g. I buy some Amway products from time to time and the quality seems fantastic. But NFTs seem selling pure bullshit.

Oh so NFTs are MLMs but real estate speculation is just fine?

Isn&#x27;t this just a new way to legally launder money?

so are SSL certs

there are so many applications of NFT. it starts with art and ends with something you never thought of.

All of crypto is just MLM for techies.

It&#x27;s not about ownership, it is about <i>bragging</i>. What is so hard to get, have you never been to a high school?

NFT is like the pet rock idea.

It&#x27;s even simpler than that. Art has always just been a way to avoid taxes for the wealthy.

basically all of crypto is

I mean much of the economy is an MLM for elites.<p>The elites of Claire’s Boutique aren’t letting employees design novel items.<p>Adam Smith wrote hundreds of years ago that division of labor, taken to extremes, would lead to dumber humans than the dumbest animal.<p>Here we have people standing around retail shops, not working on their ideas, but minding a “booth” for a distant “owner” who does little real work to sustain themselves. We believe in them therefor they get to be rich and not work. It’s simple manipulation of brain chemistry built into years of forced belief.<p>It’s exactly the math of an MLM; keep selling others selling my value for me.

Yeah well so is the economy.

#wut MLM

NFTs are money laundering.

As someone who was early in both crypto and NFTs, I really don&#x27;t get the hate from the crypto community especially. They are a powerful tool for artists and creators to manage their works, especially digital artists who could never control their art before. They can and do manage commercial and IP rights, artist royalties, help self-organize DAOs and other efforts, and assure the authenticity and provenance with a categorical shift in confidence which could never be done before. They will and are changing and improving our digital world such that it will never be the same, just as crypto has.