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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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Dunno if this is Culture War or not, but I could really use some Instruction for the Bewildered on this.

So NFTs are a bubble that has finally burst, surprising nobody (or at least, nobody seems to be willing to admit publicly they believed the hype). They were the Tulip Mania of our day.

Or maybe they're not, at least if you have the right ones. Who knows, certainly not me, that's why I'm asking for explanations.

I couldn't understand just exactly what was meant to be so wonderful about them, and the common reason seemed to be "they're not fungible", which left me where it found me.

Was it just because of the magic worlds "crypto" and "blockchain"? What the hell was supposed to be going on here? You can buy a share of some (generally terrible) image, but you won't own it, the original creator will, and many others can also own a share of it, but because it's "blockchain" this somehow makes it vastly valuable?

At least Jack's magic beans really did grow into a giant vine where he eventually obtained treasure, but this sort of thing bewilders me as to what the hell is going on.

Was it just because of the magic worlds "crypto" and "blockchain"? What the hell was supposed to be going on here?

In theory, it was supposed to be an authentication schema that avoided a lot of present authentication issues.

In certain circles, there's a major problem with digital art, in that it's very hard to prove that a specific piece is 'yours' or was 'commissioned by' you, in the way that possessing a physical piece of traditional art does. Not just in the sense that someone else could take a picture or save-to-hardrive and repost, but they could readily do so and pretend you were faking. You could post it onto a website, but not only does that invite someone to right-click-save, it's only useful so long as the website is active with your media on it, and only to the extent the timestamps there are more authoritative than those from a random self-host who could fake them. Having process files like version'd photoshop files or sketch layers largely just cycles back a level.

This isn't a hugely valuable things in terms of productivity or world-changing ramifications, but for people who care a lot about digital art, it can be really annoying. Even at casual levels, there are Problems -- a lot of bigger-name furries find themselves impersonated on sites like F-list by people who are just trying to leverage their art, which doesn't sound that bad until you stumble on a profile claiming to be you and into some stuff. At more professional spheres, art impersonation is a big deal.

By having some strongly delineated identifier showing ownership, with a good way to transfer it, which is authoritative but separate from an authority, could be useful.

In practice, it got dominated by grifters early on, as with a good many other crypto crap did -- just like a lot of 'decentralized' crypto DNS ended up running through a couple oracle servers, a lot of NFT implementations did that and validated the url (why?) instead of some meaningful identifier for the image, and that's when they weren't just a glorified pump-and-dump. I think there are some technical issues for part of that, but there was also just some inexplicably high dollar values going around very early on in the tech's development. There's some charitable explanations possible, like zero-index-rate behaviors or tech-dumb investors huffing farts, but I expect a lot of people saw rumors of conventional modern art as money-laundering and thought this would be the next thing in that field.