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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29725 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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There's NFTs as in "monkey pictures" and NFTs as the technologies. NFTs enable digital property that escapes the issue of control over the database. Right now, digital ownership is based on a) the database admins will not tamper with "your property" and b) if they did, courts will adjudicate the issue and force the database owners to restore your property. In that context, it being your actual property is debatable, it's more of a contract you entered with the company to get certain services that is kept by that same company. The contract's original, binding version is not yours, the original is in the company's control and possession. NFTs means that this contract, for instance, digital show tickets, is inscribed onto a public ledger that is hardened against tampering, not just an entry in Ticketmaster's database. A house is actually a great example of what an NFT could represent; owning a house is not having the house in your pocket, it's having the deed in your name. An NFT could be the deed to a house; it would be unique, impossible to (practically) forge, kept on a public, safe ledger (again, not just an entry in someone's database), and there's all sort of neat stuff you could do with it; keys and locks that unlock with proof of ownership (or a revokable proof of access from the owner). Legal and financial transactions (like mortgages) that are adjudicated automatically by code, etc... Whether we'll get there anytime soon is questionable, but that's what the technology enables. Anything unique could be represented as an NFT.

The monkey picture kind of NFT is mostly just playing around with the economic effect of introducing exclusivity to a market, untethered from any other inherent usage value. The image is typically not even part of the NFT (as in, it's not written into the blockchain, as that is expensive, at least if you want to keep it on the base chain; it's kept externally), so what you're paying for is more like certificate. Often the image is created by an algorithm, so if you have the code and your token's properties you can recreate the image. You could recreate any of the other images too, but you wouldn't have the certificate to them. You can then use proof of ownership of that certificate programatically, for instance your ownership of a monkey could be verified by anyone and used as a ticket to access a party where you get your retinas burned.

Okay, your first example makes better sense, tethering it to something that is a physical store of value and then all the fancy tech comes in with ledgers and so forth.

The monkey pictures stuff never made sense to me.

And I see that FTX sank money into the monkey pictures, then unsuccessfully sued were named as colluding to artificially inflate the price in a lawsuit when the value went down after the hype faded:

“FTX has several deep ties to Yuga such that it would be mutually beneficial for both Yuga and FTX (as well as Sotheby’s) if the BAYC NFT collection were to rise in price and trading volume activity. Upon information and belief, given the extensive financial interests shared by Yuga, Sotheby’s and FTX, each knew that FTX was the real buyer of the lot of BAYC NFTs at the Sotheby’s auction at the time that Sotheby’s representatives were publicly representing that a ‘traditional’ buyer had made the purchase,” the lawsuit said. FTX is not named as a defendant.

I have to ask once again, how the fudge did this guy fool all the smart EAs and Bay Area rationalists into being his cheerleaders? I think this is one of those cases where a dumb idiot like me would have said "this is too good to be true, also buying monkey pictures is stupid" but the smart people got fooled with "shh, it's all Bayesian calculation and the blockchain and crypto! Crypto is the future!" besides him throwing money at liberal causes (the Carrick Flynn election attempt will live in my heart for aye).

The Sequoia Capital interview will never fail to be a thing of beauty and a joy forever:

The FTX competitive advantage? Ethical behavior.

An NFT ticket gives an unforgeable token, but this token only means anything as long as venues accept it, which they'll contract out to ticketmaster anyway, and they can revoke any access rights from a token as easily as if it was in their database.

NFT house ownership is a great example of something only useful for weird speculation. Otherwise, property rights only mean anything at all if enforced by violence, generally a state monopoly. But if you trust the state to respect that right, the state can just as well maintain the database. If you don't, the token being secure doesn't make the house any more secure.

Not that an NFT house deed is very secure, since by their nature they're bearer deeds. Which might be a useful concept to have for various legal purposes, but I don't think most people would be very comfortable with their house ownership being susceptible to burglary or 5$ wrench password cracking, since to the extent that they function as NFTs, transactions made under duress should be irreversible by courts.

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