This is the best summary I could come up with:
One of the big promises of NFTs was that the artist who originally made them could get a cut every time their piece was resold.
Starting March 2024, those fees will essentially be tips — an optional percentage of a sale price that sellers can choose to give the original artist.
The marketplace will continue enforcing the fees on certain existing collections until March 2024, at which point they’ll become optional on all sales.
Critics say it will hurt small artists and undermines creators’ ability to control their relationship with the people who buy their work.
OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer criticized the fees’ “ineffective, unilateral enforcement” and said that creators will find other ways to monetize their work.
“Our role in this ecosystem is to empower innovation beyond a single use case or business model,” he writes in the blog post announcing that OpenSea will no longer support the ecosystem’s primary business model.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Are they trying to say that NFTs are some kind of bullshit scam that should have dissolved into the ether like the crypto bro’s cocaine-fueled manic state that spawned them in the first place? How shocking and unpredictable.
What do you mean? You didnt go out and spend all your money on reproducable jpegs? Whats wrong with you?
I mortgaged my house for a computer-generated ape that my son’s cousin’s uncle’s neighbor’s mailman said would one day finance my retirement.
reproducable jpegs? Excuse me?
I live walking distance from my local police department. If another person uses my NFT without my consent I will report them immediately. This is MY PROPERTY. The transaction has be verified scientifically on the block chain. Anyone who violates my NFT rights will pay the price.
Buddy, you have no idea who you are messing with. I have made a ridiculous amount of money in crypto/NFTs and I have the best lawyers. If you don’t delete those stolen jpegs, you’re going to regret it. When you steal someone’s property you get punished. Watch out.
Sorry to disappoint ya, but the thing that gets stored on the blockchain isn’t the image itself but usually just a link to the image, sometimes with a hash of the image.
You’re not storing the image itself on the blockchain, meaning if the link goes down your NFT is useless.
Additionally, you cannot report someone for using your NFT unless you get a registered copyright for it, and the use of your NFT must not fall under fair use. Considering that there’s so many different variants of the same NFT in most cases, it’d be barely possible to register a copyright as you’d immediately strike all the other variants AND there is a chance the distributor already has copyright on the work.
(ofc, I’m not a lawyer, check local legislation.)
OpenSea is bad on purpose. Who remembers their insider trading scandal(s)?
I thought the royalty payments were enforced by the contract?
Turns out that the smart contract is a post-it note stapled to the NFT and the marketplace can just ignore what the post-it note says because it’s not legally binding.
What they can’t do is trade with marketplaces that do enforce the contract. Originally it was enforced because if one marketplace stopped enforcing it the marketplace would be cut off from the Echo system but turns out that the 5 big marketplaces just need to agree to drop it and everything is fine.
There is no good design for this. The only design that works is external regulation and laws wich is why we use that for real things that aren’t scams.
No see it’s a lot more sophisticated than that. The post-it note is immutable because of maths or something, so what that means is that it’s capital-P Property. And because Property is a magic spell that binds even the old ones, and this spell is unbreakable, I own all these apes.
You have to see it in context and only makes sense for people who don’t wholly trust companies and governments to do the right thing either.
The post-it note is immutable because of maths or something
This is vs. “immutable because it’s in X company’s database”. Neither a database nor a blockchain can themselves enforce contracts.
Basically the transfer function on an erc721 interface (nft) cannot have enforced royalty payment otherwise it wouldn’t support people transferring the token outside of a sale. Theoretically you could use some kind of interface standard or write up a different contract where users are forced to pay a royalty on any kind of transfer but then there wouldn’t be a way to transfer it without paying the royalty and basically no nft trading platforms would support it because under the hood you have to transfer them the token so they can sell it on your behalf once a buyer is found.
FYI not trying to shill funny pictures but I do know a bit of solidity so maybe someone here is actually curious about the limitation.
At this point I hope no one’s surprised about this.
In hindsight, that’s about the least surprising thing for me. The smart contract system (like everything around cryptocurrency) was not designed and implemented by legal or financial experts. It was designed by tech bros who think they’re smarter than everyone else because they’re competent at programming and/or math.
That’s the generous interpretation, anyway. The less generous interpretation is that the people who designed the system knew it was all bullshit and just wanted to scam people to make a quick buck.
