“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”.
Bunch of words about people working hard on a ponzi scheme doesn’t make it not functionally a ponzi scheme.
Fundamental difference between a currency accruing value due to superior characteristics over its competitors, and a Ponzi scheme where a truly worthless good that only has transitory value because it’s “the next big thing” is passed along from original entrants to new entrants. USD has no “inherent” value (not even the “full faith and credit of the government”) either, and critical issues where the broader institution responsible for its issuance is a corrupt war-mongering police state. If we’re being honest here.
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.
I don’t know much about NFTs, but can’t the “give original artist a cut of royalties” clause be coded into the smart contracts? Why does it depend on a particular platform?
