NFTs Are Legally Problematic ft. Steve Mould & Coffeezilla
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00:00 Intro
01:00 What are NFTS?
02:00 Steve Mould’s Technical Explanation of NFTs
05:54 NFTs as Digital Receipts
06:54 On Chain Problems: Contract Law
09:36 NBA Top Shots
11:20 Bored Ape
12:30 Click-Wrap Agreements
14:50 Smart Contracts
16:27 Copyrights
22:35 So Many Consumer Protection Issues!
26:53 But Wait….Are NFTs Actually Securities?
29:41 Coffeezilla Explains the Scammy Nature of NFTs
30:43 More on Market Manipulation
33:17 What About the Off-Chain Problems?
41:06 Innovations So Mundane, No One Should Care!
44:12 Learn More About the Dangers of NFTs on Nebula
🐒 Do you think NFTs are a scam? Learn more from Steve Mould: kzhead.info/sun/fL6ahMhon3aqnoE/bejne.html 🚀 Get an EXTRA VIDEO on CuriosityStream/Nebula for 26% OFF! legaleagle.link/curiositystream
They're ripe for scammers
Yes.
If you are willing to pay to say that you own digital art do I have a JPEG of the Brooklyn bridge to sell you
OBJECTION to your pitch for Nebula. It's conjecture, untrue and misleading that KZhead WILL GUARANTEE 100% demonetize said content and WILL GUARANTEE 100% not make it available to viewers. You can't know in advance whether videos will get demonetized. Even if it ends up being demonetized it doesn't amount to a strike so it's still available on your channel. You can use other tools e.g. community posts and shorts to lead people to the content. It's the BS misleading VPN pitches all over again. Just be honest and say outright that you chose to put said content behind a paywall.
@@FriscoFlame HA!
The more I listen to this, the more the whole NFT world seems like a MLM meant for slightly computer literate people who think they are too smart to fall for MLMs.
No, NFTs are a straight up ponzi scheme that build up their attractiveness by uselessly using cool technology. Crypto-hype and FOMO are the main driving factors. Anyone who actually understands the technology either doesn't buy into it or buys into it for the memes.
you did it you boiled nfts down to the bare essentials
Well said!
and you'd be right to think that
That's exactly what it is
Every time someone claims that NFTs benefit creators, I remember that one time someone minted NFTs using art by an illustrator who died of cancer just months prior, and people told her family that they should have just minted it themselves if they didn’t want this to happen :)
@@bigvidboi4909 And Bob Ross.
Quinni, right?
Man Quinni was so beloved the artist community and still is,It’s disgusting that someone would do this.sadly artists getting their art stolen and used for nft is pretty common
Hey what about Beeple?
people have been stealing artists work long before NFTs. it's only sad that the fraudster got paid, but it takes nothing away from the original artist. the fraudulently minted NFT is for all purposes a fake.
NFT felt like buying and selling stuffs on an MMO. The people that play the same MMO may able to value your purchase, but people outside the game would pull their hair of how you spend hundred to thousand dollars for a single digital sword. And when the developers decide to close the game, you cant demand anything about it.
Well yes but usually that sword actually has uses, even if it's just in that game
@@Knux5577 you are right, in games you buy things for +happiness, in nft you buy things for +bragging I guess? xD
@@RoseDragonesscan be used for combat and defense purposes bruh
Csgo skin money go brrr
gacha games in a nutshell. but in those cases, some do it for the thrill or to actually get something (more powerful characters for example) out of it. NFTs are just misleading from the onset, although you can still "pay for the thrill". At least the MMO/gacha stuff does give what's promised. NFTs is pretty much a gamble if you even get what you paid for, with little to no chance of winning if it's "legal ownership" of something.
"Programmers are really bad at understanding contract law" I wonder if that's the reason my uni has a mandatory 'Law and finance' module for enginnering students (including computer science students) and one of the topics is contract law.
my IT course also had a tiny bit of copyright law
Sometimes that's why only vaguely relevant modules exist in degree courses. Sometimes the uni is just filling the time because they don't have enough modules to fill a degree.
And of course the only people who know less about contract law are company executives, who are the ones that are writing what the programmers are doing detail for detail, and won't accept any deviation
It's usually added to degrees that have a high amount of exploitation at entry levels. I.E graphic design, software devs, 3D artists etc. At least that was the case in my country.
But computer science students aren't programmers nor does it have anything to do with programming.
“Programmers are really bad at contingencies.” Me a programmer: looks up what a contingency is.
Do programmer usually code some sort of failsafe or redundancy in case something go wrong?
@@dustinnabil798 no, since they're usually burnt out with coding the intended functionality they fail to even think about Joe Schmuckitelly, who will inevitably do something dumb with it.
@@dustinnabil798 Ideally yes. They are typically known as "exceptions" and most programming languages support implementing them. Whenever a part of the program gets an unexpected answer, like it was expecting a number but gets a word instead, it can trigger an exception. Theoretically the programmer should instruct it how to handle exceptions in advance. However people don't always have the time with deadlines etc. Also if the program pops up an error message the end user might ignore it or override it. It's hard sitting in front of a computer to anticipate every single thing that might happen and the best response to it.
@@michaelkenner3289 Ah exceptions/errors, I tend to either implement them or deliberately skip some depending on the job a script/program has to do. But importantly never essential ones to prevent bad data processing inside the process itself. I tend to get a fair amount of specific one off/temporary things that are manually started and logging verified type situations. In that scenario when it theoretically won't be used long and won't run fully automated it's often not worth implementing extensively. Especially since those things tend to fall more frequently in the "we need this instantly for a (soon to be) urgent thing". Sadly some of those in their entirety or partial have a bad habit of making it into production processes later, retrofitting proper logging and error handling for a job that runs long term and maybe even fully automatically later can be a nuisance. And sometimes hard to explain to certain types of people why more time needs to be spent on this "already working thing that they can click on". When it's known ahead of time it is intended for long term and/or automated use I put a bit more effort into it up front. And there's always a balance to figure out in how granular and extensive you want to make the exception handling. But trying to implement it at least for bad inputs by users and external systems it connects to that can go wrong is definitely worth it long term in my experience so far. Nothing beats the frustration of generic "it doesn't work when it runs and there's an error", much nicer to know what specific location in the code it fails and ideally with the reason too (invalid credentials, access denied, host not found, connection timed out, connection refused, etc).
@@dustinnabil798 Not really. Programmers are pretty bad at this kinda stuff. There are things like formal methods you can use, but they hurt development speed and "velocity" is a buzzword in most engineering organizations. They'll just throw an exception or something and go home. It's not a great system tbh.
Minting an NFT without permission of the artist led deviant art to create an entire program that scanned open seas which notified an artist when their art showed up as an NFT. Open seas mostly ignored all takedowns issued by the victims. NFTs are not for artists. Also it's hard to take legal action against those who are smart enough to remain truly anonymous for a pump and dump
Word. the most frustrating (and telling!!) thing about the NFT community is their blame-the-victim response: the artists are to blame, they should have all minted NFTs for every single image. (Which, as far as I can tell, still wouldn't stop somebody else from minting _another_ NFT and then selling that.)
@@Julia-lk8jn it wouldnt. also minting an nft is not free, it can actually be quite expensive and listing it somewhere to be sold/seen is also again expensive. so now you have to pay to make something you dont want because people are telling you that they will do it themselves if you dont to make money of it and they probably still will regardless.
Current DeviantArt member here. Yeah, I remember the site had issued us a notice about someone's art showing up as NFT by someone else. And like you said, the site created a program to do just that. I never had any notification of any of my art being posted as NFT but I hope that doesn't happen to me and anyone else.
Also, NFTs are only links. You can't copyright links.
Open seas are where pirates roam
I once believed that planking was the dumbest thing I'd ever see on the internet, but every year, the internet exceeds my expectations. NFTs are just... bafflingly absurd.
Planking at least requires a theoretical artistic merit. The juxtaposition of a picaresque landscape and the human laying facedown. NFTs are almost always computer-generated in the ugliest ways possible. No artistic merit whatsoever.
Nft are definitely a big old scam. Beeple sold 5000 of them for like $69m then goes on to do a normal art project of printing a book of the same things and still makes all the money. The owner of the NFT’s gets naff all unless they can find an even bigger idiot to sell them to.
I agree. They're tacky, naff, ugly, and kitch at best. Money can't buy taste but it can certainly make a scammer rich until they're caught.
wow, remember planking?
I try not to.
I have a coworker who sees me making animations during my breaks and constantly asks me about turning my stuff into NFTs even though I keep saying no. Not interested. They have a bad rep. He still brings it up. Might show him this video next time
boy do I have a god news bout this NFT for your coworker...
So it’s basically the same as “adopting” an animal at a zoo, right? You get a little certificate congratulating your donation but you don’t own the animal, just that certificate. But some reason someone made buying and selling these certificates an actual market.
You are also not contributing to feeding any cute animals :(, so the zoo one is a better thing to put your money if you like certificates.
yeah but you cant right-click save an animal... like the comment above, zoo would be a much better place for money dumping in my eyes. At least you get seasonal passes.
It's even worse than that. You don't even get the certificate. You get a phone number you can call and someone will come round and show you your certificate. But you have no gurantee that they'll answer the phone.
@@cgi2002 Perfection... thank you for that
I think It's more accurate to compare NFT to star naming/buying a star
"Just look at this stuff. This is bad art. And if you're claiming that this art is inherently worth hundreds of thousands of dollars apart from any speculative value... (pause) uh... I don't think you're good at art." Literally shouted over here. That was glorious.
Do you have a rough timestamp so I can replay it? Edit: Nevermind, 22:20
@@erseshe Historical, personal and cultural value is part of the price for traditional art NFTs have none of those
@@brucewayne8550 "NFTs have none of those" They actually do. Some of the most expensive nfts have historical value for being the first of their kind.
It's also a mistake to evaluate an nft by solely looking at a jpg. It's the interplay of the underlying technology, use, contents, history that there can be a more accurate overview of it's value.
@@erseshe For something to be worth millions without the speculative value all it takes is for someone to not be willing to part with it for anything less than that amount. if no one will pay what they demand, they will not be willing to sell. With pure speculation, people will sell at a loss because their end goal is strictly the money, rather than the object they possess.
Given the recent influx of AI generated art lately, it's interestring to rewatch this and catch the bit about precident in US law regarding "Only a human can make a work that is copyrightable."
peta suing over a monkey selfie set a precedent that will likely have a huge impact on the future industrial applications of AI
hoo boy, i sure hope that remains true, there are many AI ""Art""" shills now
@@sweetblackblood1 But anything they use AI art for can then be used by other entities without getting into legal trouble, I would assume. Company A can take Company B's poster art, for example, and Company B can't do anything about it.
This is the very first time a KZheadr has talked me into buying their sponsor's product. And if course it's a lawyer
Damn it. They can't keep getting away with this T_T
@@raimarulightning if it wasn't for those meddling lawyers I would have ..
"programmers are really bad at planning for contingencies" As a programmer: Hey! How dare you attack us with the truth?
Even in something as simple as data dumping VBA Excel Macros.... "Nah. They'll never change the format of the original document"... Famous last words.
The real problem is that you can't program for a contingency when you don't know what will happen and what is needed. That's mostly because of the exacting nature of programming and the very imprecise nature of the rest of reality.
@@Razmoudah Yes, and while that is fundamental, there is also a secondary cultural factor. The short iteration cycles encourage design around faster turnaround and phasing out old work. Often environments are built around low-cost failures respectively. Resilient engineering built around contingencies is smaller subfields of programming which are often taken over by subfields related to the direct use case.
@@danielmorton9956 Not exactly. Even for factors that have a degree of prediction there is still a limit to the long-term viability of a set of programming due to the changing nature of the hardware that the code may be ran on. Yes, there are ways to limit the problem, but it can't be completely negated.
@@Razmoudah So code for resilient systems is not for changing hardware. When you design embedded code for interacting with PLC's, managing an industrial process, military operations, or a NASA probe, your life cycle expands to be similar to that of a subsystem. When your system requires years of testing for safety or reliability, there are no swaps. By assuming the program is run on changing hardware, you've ignored programming that doesn't fall under the stereotypical programming types because it's associated with its specific industry or subfield.
I can't recommend "Line Goes Up" enough for people who want to learn about the history of NFT's and how they're being used and abused. Thanks for covering the legal aspects in detail here!
Folding Ideas might just make the best videos on the platform
+
Funny enough, your comment was displayed right next to that very video in the suggestions tab.
Line Goes Up is an excellent breakdown of the NFT space.
+
The best description I recall regarding nft's in gaming... "They're a solution looking for a problem" Pretty much everything game companies are doing with them can be done with other existing methods.
Not to mention that it can already be done better.
And other methods can do it better. They just want to hamfist it in.
Good description of Blockchain in general an excel spoken of like it’s a relic
Exactly the argument I keep making. Every problem they solve is already solved better. Every "opportunity" they create is some anti-consumer crap you really don't want catching on.
What game companies do is craft addiction mechanics to milk money from players. One way to do it is with lootboxes which are essentially gambling. Another way is to use the NFT grift of promising big financial returns if someone buys or earns a token with no intrinsic value in hopes of selling it later to a bigger fool.
First time I heard about NFT's many moons ago, the first thought that came to my mind was "you could easily make a mint selling garbage to idiots with this". Nice to know I was on the right track :)
NFT's are a great modern example of the old adage: "A fool and their money are soon separated."
"a fool and his money are soon parted"... Is the way I've always heard it. But I agree. I don't think many people got wrapped into the whole monkey jpeg idiocy. Having said that I personally invested a lot of my savings in a company working on an NFT project and I was promptly parted with my money. This was with a friend who I've known for 15 years. Oh well... Everyday is a learning day...
I just can't wrap my head around buying into any of this garbage...how are people so stupid I really just can't imagine thinking this crap is worth any money at all
And "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is"
@@clickbait007 u a fool 💀
Unless you're Timothy Dexter. Luckiest fool ever. His story is hilarious TBH.
To me NFTs are about as "Legitimate" as "Naming a star" after someone. It is technically not a scam but also are not actually getting anything either.
I had a college boyfriend buy me a star - it was useless but so cute. And I'm pretty sure no money was laundered as a part of that transaction.
Yea That’s good. I like that. What about highways and schools for example named after a person. Surely they gain something…?
@@Acteaon A dead person got something out of it?
Haha buying a star is so stupid, I could print out my own phony certificate and it would be just as legitimate.
Do you mean that I don’t actually own a square yard of the moon?! 😢
One time I told a NFT shill "Well, if you believe NFTs to be any worth, then I have a bridge to sell to you..." Never thought it was that close to the truth.
Well now, Trump is selling his own NFT trading cards.
More than a few bridges have been sold as nfts. tulips too.
@@DarkZerol he's always late to the show.
@Ronney Rendon but always looking to scam people, and wouldn't you know, there are plenty of rubes ready to give him their actual money....SMH
I work for this startup and there was a serious push to bring NFTs into our app. Me and this other guy were going nuts trying to teach everyone what a scam they are and just a flash in the pan and nothing to pin the company to. Thank god we won
I co-founded a startup and I very much did not win that argument. VCs were crazy about NFTs then, and are crazy about AI now.
@@nicdegrave3313 for real!
Gotta love how the supposed "future" of the internet is overpriced receipts based on unenforceable contracts, and every tech company is diving headfirst into it for speculative purposes.
Not just tech companies, even sports teams
What I hate about NFTs is that they basically reinforce the overbearing and outrageous DRM ideas pushed on us by the film and video game industries. It was never okay to begin with, and yet people are now making a fad out of it and screwing themselves over.
Money makes stupid people, a tale as old as humanity itself.
The same reason you should question subscription platforms, they don't need to provide anything useful. They can take stuff away from you because you don't own anything and can't sell anything. That last part is the definition of online copyright. If I buy a song from the Internet am I allowed to sell it. With hard copies there is no question (almost)
digital tulips.
"For better or worse, lawyers exist for a reason" - LegalEagle
I trust a computer more than a human. Most plane accidents happen when taking off and landing, not on autopilot. We trust computers for good reason. I doubt people who don't. Our financial system will be handled through the internet, 1s and 0s. The internet is only 30 years old, commercially. Our old guard institution has yet to digitized, as the rest of the world has. The points raised in this video are already obsolete. And lawyers exist because we haven't been able to replace them yet. Believe that.
Nice I’m the 669th like
@@emtheslav2295 im 700th. Is it can be sale on nft?
Can't say the same about NFTs lol
The whole concept of defi is staying as far away as laws as possible not because Defi is criminal but because Defi is free
I'm an accountant. Our industry is hammered by tonnes of people claiming blockchain will solve all our issues and make things easier. But none of them have considered one of your last points - what if they've sold the car the blockchain says they own. How do we know the bank matches what the blockchain says etc. It doesn't really make it easier, it just moves what we're verifying from the centralised ledger, to the decentralised one. There's tonnes of other reasons not to bother too, so it just makes it pointless.
the block chain has to be updated to who has the new receipt (assuming the said chain is still alive and isnt compromized) IE it was legally sold and not stolen because hacking wallets is a thing
@@lesslighter This is if the blockchain is universal - I'm on about when the blockchain is just internal. When it's external it brings a whole other load of issues. And in either one... they could just use cash. Or swap something else off ledger. A group company could hand the asset to another and just not bother recording it. It doesn't solve any issues because the issues weren't with how we recorded transactions.
@@timmystwin honestly chain things is just a solution looking for more problems than its solving, but it is what people call a security dystopia and a libeterian's wet dream as some people call it. I'm not even sure how you can make an internal chain at least its only "within company" since that pretty much defeats the purpose of its public ledgery-ness, monero chain aside... which for people saying it will solve real estate... well to begin with Titles are a Public paper therefore its already "on-chain" without calling it a block chain
That's really easy, that's specifically what smart contracts are for. The money and private key of the car go into an escrow until the deal is done.
@@lesslighter Cryptocurrencies are already used all the time. They are popular, because there is demand. There is simply nothing else that can take the place of Monero for example.
OMG - if there was ever a video that aged like the most wonderful fine wine - here it is. I was looking for information on NFT's after the Trump release, and this is just what I needed.
So Trump "trading cards" are just receipts for the $100 he conned someone for
Trump NFTs are legitimate. You give money to Trump. Trump is able to buy food and other necessary items for him to survive another day. Very simple proposition and reason for buying the Trump NFT
@@Kevin-bl6lgi’m sure trump doesn’t need people buying his NFTs. he’s plenty rich without selling silly internet pictures
@@Kevin-bl6lgand the best reason not to
@@quikq_8499update! A bit less rich now.
I think this is my first "NFT explains" video I watched that actually showed me the url link and how that url link works/breakdown of the actual code..... Finally got to see and actually learnt how the url works.
Ayy funny I found you here
It doesn’t always work like this, the original Bitcoin (BSV) stores the image on the blockchain itself. It meets the legal requirements where every other chain does not.
@@SparkytheBlade then you know why NFT not using it ? Because slow, inefficient and high gas fee
@@SparkytheBlade classic cryptobros: solving a problem they created with an even shittier one.
Dan Olsen's video goes into it.
NFTs, to me, always seem like the old "bill of goods" scam. You're buying a receipt, not the thing on the receipt.
nice pfp
Its not "seem" ... they are just that. The fact that people selling NFTs are not routinely pursued for wire fraud is just another sign of the law being slow to catch up.
It's that PLUS a bunch of separate pyramid schemes - the scammers have weaponized the sunk-cost fallacy to build themselves an army of people to defend their "investments" so they can try to pass that hot-potato down the line
@@RobABankWithABagel - that sounds a lot like the stock market. Or selling expensive Nike shoes.
It is a bill of goods scam, with a whole bunch of techno pollution associated with it.
it's quite fun to make NFT-bros instantly irate by going "oh it's like beanie babies!" after they explain the blockchain contract.
This is like buying a tattoo on someone else's arm.
Brilliant! 👏🏻
Bro you just gave me a great idea for funding my infinite wish list of tattoos.
exactly 😂
Except in that case, the tattoo actually exists.
Actually, a star in a faraway galaxy is an interesting comparison, because that's really very similar to nfts. Plenty of places claim that they can sell you stars, but no one official actually recognizes those as authorities. All you've bought is a line in one company's star catalog. Another company could easily sell someone else the same star, because no one actually owns it. (Edit: clarity)
That is exactly the business plan I thought of immediately after hearing him mention that. Why aren't I making heaps of money off idiots? Oh. It's morals again isn't it? Shit gets expensive.
Seems like this should also be grounds for fraud legislation
@@LabGecko unregulated. Present circumstance creates the need for regulation, yet it's a long road.
This is exactly what an NFT is. Its like buying an art piece that's being displayed in a museum, you don't own the art, you just get a plaque with your name on it on the art piece in the museum, or like putting your name on a park bench. I don't see how NFT's could have legal repercussions other than for the people stealing others art and making NFT's out of them. I only watched 10 mins of the vid and already heard some ill interpreted information about what an NFT actually is
I was just thinking this. Glad I'm not the only one
"Humor is subjective. However it is _objectively_ funny to copy other people's NFTs." - Hannah Reloaded (quoted from vague memory)
Yay Hannah! LegalEagle has made a number of videos explaining peculiar legal issues in an enjoyable way. This NFT-nonsense, however, is too stupid for me to endure more than a couple of minutes at a time before I have to bang my head against the desk. Your quote saved me from that this time.
@@KitagumaIgen :D
i think its funny that i can sell mine for money and... your copy is useless. this meme is like a marker that people repeat that silently screams "i have no idea what an NFT actually is but I act like I do!"
@@BigHotSauceBoss69 Which describes the vast majority of NFT buyers. And no, it is not useless when there are plenty of people who freak out when someone copies a worthless little picture.
@@BigHotSauceBoss69 did you know you also have to buy it for money as well? It’s not a free money game you’re playing. Unfortunately most people playing the game are either already rich and screwing people over, or are the people who are getting screwed over. I’m not paying my life savings for an ugly monkey, I’ll just gamble in the Pokémon casino instead
One time a fellow student at my university hired me to be a discord mod for an nft project. They never put in any actual work to make the project realize, even the artist quit out. My 'workload' was pretty much just looking at an empty server (the marketing guy also didn't do anything) and verifying that no one was misbehaving. That and getting proper documentation of our agreement and such. Seeing as how he was a student in the business law class i was also in, it really shouldn't have surprised him when I sued him for wage theft. Eventually his father found out a month or so later and settled on his behalf for a couple k.
That's called good work if you can get it
I sleep so well at night as a digital artist who did not make nfts in 2022 despite everyone saying I was "missing out" or "going to regret it" lol
Ironically selling art normally is actually more secure for the buyer and seller since you sell a file that they can then host on an account or store privately but NFTs are all on the block chain which renders them open to everyone and not hiddable
@@PodreyJenkin138 That's two different kinds of security. If the art is secret, ie no one knows it, then you can't prove that it's yours. To prove that it's yours, people have to know what it is.
Saying NFTs irl equivalent is receipts is going to ruffle every cryptobro’s feathers and I totally love it. Perfect analysis legal eagle
Receipts that just keep getting longer and longer, much like CVS receipts.
@@KoopaKontroller at least I can get a refund with CVS receipts.
It's what myself and many other folks in the technology community who understand what NFTs actually are have been saying for a long time.
Most crypto people who have been there a while understand that an NFT is a spot on the blockchain you own. That's it.
@@yikesforever6006 And at least they usually have coupons on the back.
Additionally with Consumer Protection, NFTs are sold globally which means they run foul of consumer protection laws of other countries which are far stricter on terms, conditions and liabilities than the US market. (For example in Australia, even as a US company, since the consumer is Australian, your bound by Australia law to deliver a working product). That failure to deliver on all promises and features of your "NFT" can still be considered fraud.
Only if you, as the company that made them, sell them directly. If it is legal and only sold directly to people in the country you are inhabiting, then you cannot be liable for someone selling it on, unless you were aware that was their direct intent. See guns for example. Selling a gun in the US to a US citizen is not illegal. But if that person sells that gun to Denmark, you are not legally liable for that if you had no hand in that. So it depends on HOW it is sold on.
Did someone not deliver their terrible ape picture?
Wait... in america yoo don't legally have to deliver a working product? That explains a lot....
@@tyrongkojy In the US the concept of "buyer beware"... which is the buyer should assure that the product is good and that the seller had the right to sell it. In most other countries, the seller must assure the product is good and that the customer has every right under the law if the product is faulty.
@@SioxerNikita In most countries, even if the sale is indirect... the seller and all those on the supply chain, must guarantee the product is good and has no undue liability as its delivered to the consumer. Regardless of country of origin. (ie Apple is still liable for a faulty iPhone regardless of its sold by an electronic store in Denmark due to their being a 2 year consumer protection guarantee under the Danish Sale of Goods Act)
After familiarizing myself with the basic details of NFTs (Adult Butters in the South Park special got me curious as I couldn't make heads or tails of them from what the show said about them) I am simply dumbfounded by the amount of NFT owners-- often these ppl paid large sums of money for these things, too -- who simply don't know what an NFT is, even though many arrogantly and condescendingly dismiss anyone who tries to correct them. I mean, I have seen NFT owners in videos, and I've even encountered a few in comments threads, who assert with the self-assured confidence of a walking case study of the _Dunning Kruger Effect, _ that they own the NFT's _image_ rather than sort of leasing the bit of code that links to the artwork... I've seen owners ranting about how so-called"right-clickers" -- who are ppl who copy various NFT jpegs and then use them as thumbnails and profile pics and such -- are "stealing their" --the NFT owner's -- property, and bemoaning how they should all be arrested for theft! Then when someone helpfully explains to the NFT bro how they are misunderstanding what NFTs are and how they work, the bro will often be flippant and rude while derisively, and ironically, "roasting" the helpful explainer for being just "ignorant", and smugly explaining to the channel viewers how hilariously "ignorant" Mr. Helpful was about NFTs/Crypto in general.
clearly some nasty youtuber cut you deep _pets_
Not that it contradicts what you're saying, but to correct a bit about Dunning and Kruger's conclusion... it wasn't that people who think they know don't. It's that the people with average performance had the highest discrepancy between their performance and their confidence in that performance. People who did extremely well and people who did extremely poorly were generally correct in how much confidence they had in their performance. Average performers overestimated themselves. It's a nitpick, but one that I think is important to point out, given how popular the misconception of their study is. It's not about the people at the low end of the curve, or the high end. It's the people in the middle.
@@dontmisunderstand6041 Sounds like the people talking about the study don’t know what they’re doing either.
I love you man, you're justifying the gut feeling I had all along about these things being stupid
Way more than just stupid. They're downright dangerous. Something massive and negative will come as a consequence of this if it hasn't already.
"As soon as an NFT crashes . . ." The guy who bought the first Tweet NFT for 2.5 million tried to sell it and his first offer was less than $1000. I think it went up to 10K after several months but has remained unsold because the guy wants 10 million or so for it and nobody wants to spend that much on it. Yeah, when these things crash, they crash hard and I am just waiting for the fireworks to begin when people start filling lawsuits on the price manipulation. It will be glorious. Edit: Ah, I see you mention that later in the video.
Exactly, NFT's are just a bigger fools scam. People who were fooled into buying NFT's always expected there'd be a bigger fool out there to buy their reciept so they can make a profit. but what can they do when the world runs out of fools?
Didn't I recently hear about a gaming company who was recently pushing very hard on these nfts, essentially sell their company for $3 million, and then they turned around and invested $2 million dollars worth of their nft stuff, and they eventually came out with nothing because nfts are worthless? And they only have $1 million dollars now.
@@user-tp5yb4hr4w I don't know what you're referring to, but it sounds like something that probably happened.
@@user-tp5yb4hr4w square Enix sold most of their IPs to work on nfts, but the losses you mention might be exaggerated since I didn't hear about those, then again I haven't followed it super precisely.
@@user-tp5yb4hr4w I think you're referring to Square Enix, who sold many of their successful IPs (including the Tomb Raider franchise) in order to focus on applying NFTs and other blockchain technologies to gaming. I don't think it's as simple as "they lost $X million" because it's R&D spending, but a lot of people in the gaming press have pointed out that NFTs are broadly unpopular among gamers (e.g. Ubisoft tried introducing them and reportedly sold only 100 of the 10 000 NFTs they minted)
The more I learn about NFTs, the more I'm confused and convinced it's all a scam. EDIT: Didn't expect this to blow up. Wow. Let me clarify: NFT art is 100% scam. You can't convince me otherwise. NFTs as a concept is still confusing to me but at its core, it's fine. Does it have a practical use? I'm sure it can be used as such.
I mean, the moment I heard somebody bought "the 1st tweet", it was already raising blood-red flags in my head. The fact that this same tweet got the highest bid for around 1000x less than original price pretty much cemented the point (and no, the guy didn't finally resell it using some bogus reason that he wants to sell to somebody who will truly appreciate it, ie. somebody who will pay him more than what he paid)
That's because it's all a scam that runs on confusing the marks (among other things).
It's yet another attempt by multi-billion dollar companies to convince the general population that they too can live in the lap of luxury...they just have to buy the new cure-all to poverty... incidentally *created* by said multi-billion dollar corporations. If you ever question whether or not something is a scam, look at who is promoting it.
If you see NFTs as a scam then you are *not* confused.
It pretty much has the main hallmarks of a scam: - evangelists will happily go on what a big thing it's going to be and how everybody "in" on it will be rich, annnnnnny day now - even if you are responsible and try to look things up, it makes less sense, not more - if you ask an evangelist questions like "how does it work?" , "how is it enforced?", "but what if ...?" they'll either get hostile or "well you have to do your homework" patronizing.
“Programmers are really really bad at planning for contingencies”. Like lawyers, planning for contingencies is a quintessential aspect of programming and those programmers that can best imagine and prioritize them are the most effective.
Please do an episode on the legal issues with AI generated art. Everyone who are talking about these issues seem to have no idea what they're talking about. I'd love to hear a lawyer's take on this.
I'm an art historian. I would just tell you that AI has yet to generate anything resembling an even remotely interesting artwork. Don't waste your time - and certainly not any money. Yeah, the technology is interesting ... slightly ... But that's about as far as I would go at this point. As for the legal issues, I am guessing your question comes down to one of authorship. Perhaps you are wondering if the programmers of the AI have any ability to claim copyright? Definitely a question for a lawyer. Maybe he'll reply. But I can tell you that copyright law varies a lot between countries, medium (image vs film vs. text) and how the work might be republished or used by others. I would guess that the AI would qualify as intellectual property, but the human creator of individual images would still hold the copyright. After all, Kodak doesn't get the copyright for photographs taken with their film and Adobe doesn't get the copyright for images edited with Photoshop, right? Unless AI becomes sentient, I see no reason why anything would be any different.
@@ems4884 for someone who claims to be an art historian you sure are painfully out of the loop. I'm guessing you haven't actually spent a lot of time researching AI art. I get it, not everybody lives on the internet.
What part did they get wrong/miss? Genuinely curious, since I'm also out of the loop @Zarkyun
@@zuniamosone of the biggest problems is that ai can’t just generate art out of nothing, it needs to collect pre-existing art which is stolen from the original artists who are not given credit. i don’t think anyone truly believes that ai art can fully pass as man-made, the problem is the parts that DO look man-made… are man-made. aka, stolen
@@l4cunazbut if this was true we wouldn't see AI constantly getting things wrong. Why do hands always have too many fingers, when artists are either drawing all five or less in a simpler style? Image AI is trained on hundreds of thousands of images, it then tries to guess based on that how something should look. If it were true that it was just copy pasting from other artists, we'd easily be able to see irrefutable examples of it, and there would be many lawsuits about stolen IP, yet we don't see this regularly despite the vast amount of ai generated images
I'd also like to remind everyone that you don't need an NFT in order to acquire a copyright or otherwise form a contract. That's how ownership, including digital ownership, has worked forever and adding an NFT to the mix does not in any way facilitate this (if anything, it needlessly complicates things by making people with more money than sense believe that they own things that they don't).
Reminds me of that group Spice DAO that bought a screenplay for a Dune adaptation that was never realized. This was in January of this year. Christie’s expected 30-40k and this group bought it for 3 million. They thought they bought the rights to Dune. They publicly tweeted a three point plan and of course were immediately mocked. If I recall they planned to burn it as well to retain sole rights. What they got was a unrealized screenplay that is available online. It’s truly mind boggling how dumb some people are.
I understand where the NFT people are coming from, because they live in a post-copyright world. Though NFTs are a pretty stupid alternative.
@@ChrisJones-rd4wb how do they live in a post copyright world? They live in the same world we do, and copyright is still definitely viable
@@NakedGrizzly Legally speaking, yes. Practically speaking, copyright is a leacherous tool of the rich and companies. Ever since the dawn of the internet, copyright has been extremely hard to enforce, even for big companies. For small creators that don't have a lawyer, it is effetively impossible to enforce copyright. Thus the market has adapted. Artists have switched modles. Patrion, commisions, art has switched to more ethical payment models, reconizing art is a scarce service, not an scarce object. The only ones behind the times are big companies and old people. Companies use copyright as more of a spiteful baseball bat to crush people they don't like. While not really affecting overall piracy. And Old people still think it's a fair and functioning system, even as record labels take millions from artists, and patent trolls just sit on ideas, not innovating, and just making passive income off people that actually want to make a product.
@@ChrisJones-rd4wb Cheers bro I'll slap to that give me five 👋
"Programmers are bad at contract law" Yeah I am with you there legaleagle, I was accused of stealing when I made changes to a minecraft mod and released my version. I had proper credits and proper licesnsing, but turns out that these people did not read their own license and just slapped LGPL on it lol.
Hahahaha. Viral license win right there.
Choosing a licence without knowing what it says is a classy move
Classic 😁 I think it was Steve Ballmer who said open source is like cancer, which is kinda true in ShareAlike licenses. Once the work is open source, you can't get rid of that license. It stays with the work and it's derivatives.
@ Not all open source lics do that. There are a good number that let you close source new versions of the software
Unfortunately, a lot of programmers--well, a lot of people really--who are proficient at what they do often assume that proficiency extends to things beyond their field.
As an artist who strongly believes in "No such thing as bad art" in.. most cases, I want to expand on a comment you made "And as a non-legal aside, I know art is inherently subjective and there's no objectivity in art and claiming that something is good art or bad art is inherently inchoate, but I mean, just look at this stuff, this is bad art." I agree. I think some people do have the wrong idea when it comes to judging good vs. bad art, such as thinking the quality of art is dependent on how good an artist is at anatomy or detailed shading or whatever. The thing that makes good art is intention and expression. I can think of phenomenal artists whose technical skill may fall below a lot of these NFTs like bored apes and whatever, but their art is phenomenal because it has heart to it. It's telling a compelling story and expressing something meaningful and unique. And that isn't to say every art piece needs to have this deep meaning, you can also just make art because it looks pretty, but the main point is that there was any degree of passion or heart or emotion put into it. You can just physically feel how devoid of emotion and passion these NFTs are, that is why it's bad art.
A cup with a ladybug in it sold for nearly 1MM a few decades ago. That's not art.
i do believe in such a thing as "bad art". Pretty much every form of art is a skill that takes years to develop and perfect, anyone can have an amazing, creative idea but if you can't bring it to life in a way that accurately represents your vision, its useless and will end up getting lost under bad technique. If there were no hierarchy in art, what would be the point in honing your craft?
@@transient442 I think there’s skill level in certain specific aspects, like anatomical accuracy and use of color etc etc. However I think that if art is to any degree a sincere expression of ones emotions, passions, etc. then it’s not bad art. Not every artist is focused on ‘honing their skills’ and improving in that way, it may just be an effective outlet for them. It’s all art. The NFTs are something else though
@@PossumsDont69 I mean the price someone pays for art shouldn’t be the determining factor in whether that thing is art/is bad art. Again it comes down to the intent when making it, was there an expression of passion or emotion or personality, or was it bullshitted to make money.
@@user-xd7dt6gr8l right, everything is technically "art" i get that, but that doesn't necessarily mean its "good" art. Expressing yourself is great, but if you don't have the skills to articulate your expression, it generally doesn't come across in your work. As much as art can be subjective it's also not. When you look at the bigger picture, people tend to agree on what's "good" more than they don't.
This reminds me of the artist who taped a banana to the wall and sold a document giving ownership rights to the highest bidder. I forget how much it sold for but it did sell and well, there you have it. The "banana art" was created by Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan, and the piece quickly went viral at Art Basel Miami Beach. Several versions of the piece eventually sold for over $100,000.
I got a feeling that Art enthusiast are just idiot with too much money every time i see what kind of art actually being bid
Money laundry scam. No way people with that much money are that stupid
fools parting with their money
It's all just Duchamp's urinal in a hall of funhouse mirrors
My favorite part of that story was that a prominent performance artist later went to the wall, took the banana and ate it. He was charged with vandalism, but successfully defended the act as derivative performance art.
I used to think there were a large amount of naïve people buying NFT's and getting scammed, but now I realize the overwhelming majority are: 1. The scammers themselves who make the NFT projects. 2. The people complicit with the scam, hoping to mint & sell at a profit so they aren't the one left holding the bag. So basically scammers scamming scammers hoping to not be the scammed. They all understand the risks, and still participate knowing its likely a rug pull, hoping to beat the odds, as if they are some exception. They are gambling addicts in their purest form.
Nft are hot potatoes. It goes up and up and then it falls
This might be weird analogy but it reminds me a bit about the Pick Up Artistry scene and all the money people make from that. It sounds like an industry designed to exploit women when it's actually an industry designed to exploit the men who want to be exploiting women!
As the saying goes, sir this is a casino
It's a greater fool scam, the naive people ARE the scammers
@@theomegajuice8660 Second degree exploiters.
"Programmers are really bad at understanding contract law, in general." As a programmer... This is entirely true. Give me a piece of code and chances are I can decipher what it does even if I don't use that programming language. Give me a legal contract to review, though, and I'm going to refer you to a lawyer. If someone were to rely on my legal expertise then they'd definitely be seeing the other person in court.
Also, a big difference between code and contracts: contracts are necessarily executed by entities capable of introspection. No computer will ever be able to look at its own code and decide whether what it has been asked to do is enforceable or consider the intent behind a stipulation in order to apply additional rules, at least without being programmed to do so when interpreting.
to be fair, lawyers have developed a unique no fully logical language. even for a normal person, trying to understand what it does can easily lead to jail time.
@@NXTangl To be a smartass compilers do the same thing all the time but well, Halting Problem.
"Give me a legal contract to review, though, and I'm going to refer you to a lawyer." But before that, my eyes will glaze over and I'll stare off into the distance for about 30 minutes, instead of actually reviewing the legal document.
Legal terminology is what you get after a thousand years of people hunting for holes and exploits and the legal profession adding more and more special case handling to fix it until they produce spaghetti code. With code as contract, there's nothing to stop a lot of perfectly legal but underhanded tricks. Eg, you could take out a loan, use the money to buy a 51% stake in a DAO, use your majority vote to introduce and pass a 'give all of the company assets to me!' proposal, and make off with all the company crypto-currency. Do it right and you'll finish up with enough to pay off the loan and have some left over.
One time a man sold me the concept of happiness but I'm having trouble collecting on it and it's made me really sad
Aw
Kim Kardashian might have known she was violating the law if she’d passed the bar exam. Just sayin’.
A lot of artists hate them because it's just another way for someone to steal your work and make money off of it. Practically made for people to be able to make more of a profit from being art thieves. I think this is also important for anyone getting into NFTs to view.
Also even if an artist minted their own NFT, no one is buying an NFT to support the artist. It's a strictly money thing, not an artistic thing No one gives a shit about the look of the randomly generated apes, it's all to be a part of some club, and to (hopefully) make bank off it
@@royalblanket Good old money laundring..
Stealing someone's intellectual property is iligal. So if someone decides to turn Monalisa or other work into NFT and profit from it, expect legal consequences.
@@AK-og6hn the Mona Lisa wouldn’t count here, because it’s in the public domain, but yes using other people’s art for NFTs is literally just copyright infringement
@@zacyquack holy shit i forgot all the works that enter public domain also include paintings lmfao.
What made the "buy-a-star" companies so nasty was they sued or threatened to sue astronomical organizations that stated the new names were not valid, so those organizations just gave up telling the truth. Eventually the public figured out the scam, for the most part.
I look forward to cryptodingbats trying to sue regulatory bodies when those bodies say that NFTs are drenched in scam and aren't ownership of anything
I've never heard of anyone mention those as anything other than a goofy thing to put on your wall. Surely nobody was speculating on the future value of stars? Oh God, there were, weren't there.
what about owning land in Ireland thing so you call your self Lord or Lady? seems like another scam
I was under the impression that it was just meant to be cute fake presents like Hogwarts acceptance letter. Of course nutters will take it seriously.
@@Flowmaster925 It's Scotland, but yeah, pretty much. Although the idea is more so that much of the funds are supposed to be used for wildlife preservation, so it may be more noble... assuming they actually do it. But yeah, you don't own that land, you're not recognized as a Lord or Lady in Britain, and the unique plots probably have multiple owners. Anyway, if you want to call yourself a Lord, just do it. I've been selecting "Doctor" on forms all my life and I dropped out of high school, and nobody's stopped me... yet.
0:02 liking the very quick erasing of scam so that you know the answer from the start.
This is a very good companion piece to the Folding Ideas one. I love how that video probably made an appreciable contribution to the death of NFTs. This one probably didn't hurt, either.
When NFTs were first introduced to me, I thought that it was simply the original copyright people were buying. Later, I realized that it was just money laundering/scamming.
Yep I thought the same. I thought that the owner would have that specific art copyrighted. When I found out that they DIDN'T actually have the copyright and I could just download their jpeg NFT and use it however I wanted (without owning it), I realized they might as well be buying air.
"Would you like to buy a bridge?" Yes, I would "Here's a picture of the bridge. Cool isn't it?" Indeed! "Pay me 2 million dollars and it's yours" Amazing! Take my money! "Thanks. Here's the picture!" Wait, what? You're buying directions to the bridge. Or the picture of it. But nothing more.
@@StCreed almost right, but with NFTs they don't even give you the picture, they keep the picture with them in their catalogue and can change it to another picture if they desire.
The biggest problem is that NFTs are usually presented in a way that makes people believe they're buying something more substantial. NFTs in and of themselves aren't really that complicated in terms of what they can do. But the way they're presented and the way they are used makes them incredibly confusing if you don't understand what they are, because it becomes pretty difficult for people to wrap their head around the fact they are not buying a picture, or that they aren't really accounted for in current laws.
I now understand NFT’s: they’re exactly like the square foot of Moon real estate someone bought me as a novelty gift: they promise only to write down somewhere that I ‘own’ that square foot of the moon, and they confer no legal rights whatsoever.
Or the "Name A Star" program in the 70's and 80's, where for $20, someone could say that you named a star something, and then when that file system goes down (and it has) nobody had a record of a damn thing.
You've only partly understood. If you do it wrong, then yes, that's effectively what you end up with, and most are doing it wrong. If you do it right, then the NFT is actually tied to something of real value, and acts as a fully transparent proof of ownership that's impossible to forge. That has lots of uses.
@@leerobbo92 Not really because the only "things" it can be tied to are digital entities which are infinitely reproducible. Ownership isn't what matters in this case, copyright is!
@@leerobbo92 Except nobody uses it that way, making your argument pointless. A deed / actual posession do the same thing, except for the fact that a deed can be enforced whereas a NFT can only be laughed out of court.
@@leerobbo92 Tying it to something of real value is just bringing this back to traditional ownership rights in the real world. You're emphasizing the value of the Blockchain, not NFTs. This is just Tech bro talk for a virtual deed instead of one at City Hall. That's fine, that's reasonable but NFT are just re-inventing the wheel in a much dumber way. If the digital space centralized home ownership and only one person could own said house at 123 Main on the Blockchain without any possibility of someone else faking that deed, I'd be all for it but the product being sold here is a JPEG, not something tangible that's even worth challenging. Attaching technology to justify something worthless is literally just the Dotcom bust all over again.
A note on ipfs files changing: they can't. But they _can_ disappear. How can't they change? The url itself is a checksum of the image. It's impossible to change the content of the url without also changing the url on ipfs. The url isn't representing a location, it's representing a summarization of the data requested. (More accurately it's a digital fingerprint). It's like going to the library and asking for that one book with a lion on the cover where British siblings defeat an ice queen. A standard url might be more like "could I get a copy of _The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe_ by C.S. Lewis?" That doesn't make IPFS links inside of NFTs any less problematic, however. A file only remains present on the ipfs network so long as someone chooses to keep it "pinned" or so long as it stays within a cache - which eventually will be emptied. Files disappear off of IPFS all of the time. (said as a regular IPFS user)summarizationsummarization
There is just a problem with your claim: A checksum is a hash and by definition a hash function is not necessarily unique (an injective mapping). True it's hard to falsify checksums, but there are ways to do it and some of them had dire consequences for security already.
The url IS a location, it just HAPPENS to be a summary too
I can't recommend the Folding Ideas 'Line Goes Up' video highly enough, it's long af but absolutely fascinating.
"But I mean... just look at this stuff. This is BAD art. And if you're claiming that this art is inherently worth hundreds of thousands of dollars apart from any speculative value, I don't think you're good at art." Thank you, LegalEagle. That was a good laugh :D
It's like those post-modern paintings that are sold for millions of dollars and are totally not a tool for money laundering. 🤣
Good thing he isn't deciding what they're worth then.
On that note, even tho most of these kinds of NFT's are repugnat to look at, people shoudnt claim they are not art, as i've seen some do. Art has no parameters so all you'd do with that argument is give ammo to the indoctrinated defenders of NFT's. The fine art market is already a complete money laundering scam anyways with made up prices anyways so NFT's are not breaking new grounds or anything
See I agree with the video, and the flippant nature of the claim also made me laugh but: 1. This art was made by someone, who most likely actually put an effort and considers it is a nice piece of art 2. Art is not only about superficial aesthetic appeal, oftentimes, it is about the reaction it creates in the audience because of solidified codes which interact in interesting and challenging ways 3. Aesthetic value is subjective. And tastes change over time. While some may prefer renaissance art, others may be so bathed in it, it doesn't register as beautiful so much as normal. Same goes for the other way around where indigenous art for a long time only registered as craftsmanship, rather than art because it didn't please western tastes. It just seemed an odd kindof claim from this channel, with usually much more nuanced and insightful claims.
@@CloudCarry Okay monkeybro advocate
The way I tend to describe NFTs is that they are a unique sign that you own that points to some non unique thing that you don't own. You can stand in the museum next to the art with your sign that points to it, but you can't stop anyone else from browsing the museum. They just dont have your sign.
🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯
That's only when they are used incorrectly Some artist use NFTs properly. Exclusive clubs, access to perks and merchandise, meet n greets, access to discord channels with the artist, etc. In reality, NFTs are basically Costco memberships. (except one time fee and transferable) Only buy an NFT if you support the artist and what they offer. If you abuse NFTs and sell them for Mark ups, it's no different than the PS5 scalpers NFTs are designed to connect artists with their audiences. And remove the middle man. Imagine bands selling tickets as NFTs. No more ticket master! And all funds go directly to the band! Not to all the added expenses.
@@coreyfrank506 you can do literally all of that much easier and much less terrible for the environment without crypto.
@@coreyfrank506 you don't need NFTs for any of that.
@@coreyfrank506 I can still do the same thing without that for free
The visual components of this explanation during Mould's section was AMAZING and really helpful in understanding all this.
Holy Sh*t, am I glad to be old! While all this stuff is fascinating to learn about and understand a bit more, I am infinitely grateful that I grew up before the internet and its effect on young people's financial responsibility and spending/saving habits. They say, "a fool and his money are easily parted" , but this stuff seems complex enough that you need to be far smarter than a step above the average fool, to keep from being taken. With the last couple generations of people who grew up with and are comfortable (but not experts) on electronic transactions, and you've got a huge portion of the population that is susceptible to this form of risky purchasing.
That's a good point, the technological angle adds a lot of razzmatazz to what would otherwise be a more easily spotted scam.
For me, the bottom line for any investment is: Does it have inherent value? Property, for example has inherent value (everyone needs a place to live, and we need space to grow food, and this doesn't change much), whereas NFT's don't really have any inherent value. If the value of something relies on a 'greater fool', and not its inherent value, I don't think it's a good investment. But I'm no investor.
… especially when it is pushed by some ridiculous ‘influencer’ whose main aim seems to be to get money out of gullible followers…
in reality all you have to ask is "what does it do for me" and if they stutter or start doubling down on how much it can save me, dont believe it
Let's be real before this it was Enron or any other number of companies where claims were made about its inherent value that were simply untrue. Lots of older people fell for bad investments based on lies before the most recent young generation came around.
NFTs are the first thing in my life where I’ve actually thought “satire is dead”. If it was a Black Mirror episode I’d think it was farfetched. It’s the massive wave of embarrassed disgust they give me. They’re just so obviously crap and worthless. It’s like a selling a parcel of land on a planet in No Man’s Sky or something.
Like buying the receipt of someone else's meal at a fancy restaurant and claiming you've eaten in it.
You and me both. First time I read up on cryptocurrencies was way back in 2010, thought it was stupid as all hell and you can imagine how I feel 12 years later seeing that idiocy keep chugging along with offshoots like NFTs. My only regret is that I didn't buy those bitcoins for less than $200 each like I thought I'd do back in 2012 when the first mining boom blew, but I was a broke university student at the time.
I have bad news for you... Go look into Earth 2 (KiraTV and JoshStrifeHayes have some particularly good videos on it)
Bro, anime waifus have more use than NFTs because at least the art is good and they can be used for entertainment purposes.
@@BlastedCharacterLimi Yeah, their example LITERALLY exists. Which just makes their comment bring even more sadness.
It came up in Dan Olson's video, and it bears repeating: a hell of a lot of the darlings of these unregulated markets are people who are straight up banned from working within regulated ones. So it'd be shocking if they weren't using it to do much the same things that they did to get banned before.
Preach
Even the legendary Wolf of Wall Street wants a piece of the action now…
As a retired programmer I agree with LegalEagle. I have seen so much bad programming and so little rem or // or /* */, that is remarks to other programmers that have to go over your code, and that is inevitable. I have to agree: Programmers don't think of contingencies - or even know what is it. What I usually saw was: "Daaa, me programmer. I smart."
Program safety in theory and practice is a huge, prolific field of research, every programming language has a zoo of errors, there's a myriad of testing techniques and software packages for them, software engineering courses and universities put great emphasis on testing and edge cases. Automatically generated tests, fuzzing, invariants... Programmers know infinitely more about contingencies than lawyers.
You're buying a hash code. Its kinda like the whole "illegal numbers" thing that crops up now and then when people share a certificate key that is "owned by" some company.
The best analogy to NFTs are "Star Registries." Those companies who advertise "name a star after a loved one" when all they actually sell you is a promise to write your star name in their records and not accept another name for the same star from anyone else. They have no official recognition in the scientific community and you have no actually rights or power to control the name of the star.
Although most of those do actually make it clear (assuming you read the paperwork) that it is a novelty thing and no rights or privileges are actually granted by the transaction. So at least they are avoiding the NFT problem of false promises that so often goes along with the NFT sales.
I bought one of those… knowing it was just a cutesy fun gift. Do I regret it? Not at all. I married the lady i got it for. The difference in NFTs is that I was clearly informed as to my product I was purchasing. NFTs very rarely have any info on what you’re actually getting.
I was thinking this too. I've framed certificates of these star registries from poor folks who bought them after deceased family members or as something for their grandchildren. On one hand, if it helps you with coping with the loss of a loved one, that's fine. If it inspires a child to look up at the stars and think of the mystery of space, that's also fine. But it's a bit deceptive in the certificate and the premise. A much better, and thankfully more popular, trend is getting the "night sky" mockup based on the latitude and longitude of a particular date, so people are doing that for birthdays, spousal meet and marrying dates. Those are lovely and they don't carry some false connotation that you own something you most definitely do not.
Wait, are you telling me that I wasted my money? There will never be space explorers who have to report that they are approaching Alpha DeezNutz?? Talk about a let down.
@@TravlingNow damn, now I want the ability to name systems I discover in Elite Dangerous just to make this happen.
“Maybe we never needed to answer the digital scarcity question at all because it was already solved by regular copyright law.” That is a GLORIOUS killing blow to the NFT evangelists, and I love it so much. I would love to see the CryptoCreeps and NFTubers react to this video and splutter all over themselves trying to refute it.
Tbh copyright is shitty too ngl
@@joachimtheboss5326 true, it can be abused and should get renovated, but NFTs ain’t a better deal.
An NFT is simply an immutable digital certificate-of-ownership which can be used to enhance traditional copyright law. In other words, neither you or the creator of this video fully understand the scope of it.
@@johnjohnson2542 yeah dude your hour long video does a great job explaining the full scope of things
@@johnjohnson2542 Uh Huh, I totally don’t get it for not jumping on the next big snake oil fad. It’s receipts bro, you are paying millions of dollars for receipts. It’s not that I don’t get it, it’s that there is nothing to get.
These collabs are legendary! I love how many creators you work with!! Keep it up, Mr. Eagle ^.^
Ive never been able to understand what exactly NFT was - this has definately helped. Also, was Bored Ape not a stolen artwork from an actor from Seth Green originally?
More like Seth Green bought a bored ape NFT until someone found a way to steal it and asked for a ransom so Seth can get it back.
...why? Bored Apes were the collection, Seth Green had one of his hacked and stolen.
Literally two weeks ago I was telling my 72 year old dad: an NFT is buying a receipt. I wasn't sure if that analogy would hold but I'm glad the Eagle confirmed it.
Even my dad got curious about it, good thing I had known it wasn't anything good before he invested anything. We could have been bankrupt with only a jpeg left to our name.
@@Martin-yh7vi Hell, it's not even clear if you would have had THAT in the end.
It’s worse than that. It’s a non-official unenforceable receipt
But that's exactly like buying other art, you are buying proof that it wasn't stolen by Nazis.
@@erikc.2462 True, probably wouldn't have anything at all lmao.
"programmers are bad at contract law." Am programmer can confirm. The most miserable project I had was taking a CBA and having to program the (often contradictory!) requirements laid out in that document.
They're not necessarily contradictory; you're just bad at contract law.
@@John-tr5hn Lol. Not in this case. Literally had to call the lawyers who then had to add an appendix to explain the contradictions. That was fun for all parties.
@@malachiReformed I've been there - non-technical managers meet with clients and thrash out requirements, and you only see it when signed and they want you the build this travesty of an idea.
Also worth saying that contract lawyers are bad at programming. I literally came across a situation where lawyers promised a software feature that was NP-Hard. No, I'm not making that up. They were pretty confused when they were told that it might take several thousand years to fulfill the terms of the contract.
That indicates how ambiguous contract law is. Programming is about absoluteness - law is the opposite ie loopholes
PETA WENT TO COURT TO DEFEND A MONKEYS PICTURE COPYRIGHT... LITERALLY. Wtf why did I just learn about that, this is amazing Also, I'm so sad the monkey didn't get the chance to testify
I know right. I have been seeing that picture floating around for awhile now. I never knew it actually had a story behind it.
Amd was the chimpanzee recognized as a natural person under law? Becazse that opens a lot of cans of worms.
PETAs mission is to eradicate human rights because humans aren't animals and we did not evolve here we are aliens sent by god.
@egoalter1276 It was not. It was declared that animals cannot hold copyright, only humans can
To be fair, the case in itself shows the glaring flaw with the notion of copyright. Notably, the notion of ownership of an abstract concept based on the act of creativity falls apart under rather lax scrutiny. They escaped having to reckon with those flaws in that case with an off-handed dismissal of non-humans having rights at all, but imagine for a second that the situation is slightly different. Imagine you ask someone to take a photo of you. Who owns the copyright of that photo? Any collaborative effort with no pre-set hierarchy or agreement, who owns that?
Outstanding production that very clearly explains the details behind NFTs, copyright law, and the creative arts. I have sold many works during my career and made very clear to my patrons, in contract, that they own the painting, but copyright/reproduction rights remained with me. This was included to prevent them from making reproductions for sale/profit. Digital art/AI is a rather new phenomenon onset with this unique digital age and protecting the originators of digital works will continue to be tricky and convoluted. Thanks again for clearing much of this up!!
An art group I follow, and used to participate in, got tons of their art stolen and were being sold as NFTs. Thankfully everyone reported it and they were taken down. Can't support something that basically makes art theft thrive!
The fact that the NFTs can be "taken down" at all also puts the lie to the idea that this stuff is anywhere near as decentralized as claimed
@@chemicalfrankie1030 ?
@@chemicalfrankie1030 how does the video relate to this person sharing their own experiences with nfts? Unless you're implying that the art wasn't stolen because "yadda yadda Blockchain or whatever" and in that case I'd feel really bad for anyone who's affected by your financial decisions
@@chemicalfrankie1030 it was stolen because they were essentially selling the art which even if it was a NFT, it is still stealing
@@jmiller6066 NFTs cannot be taken down (unless you take down every copy of the ledger). The NFT most probably still exists, only the link to the copy of the art is now broken.
As someone who has a reasonable grasp of the technology, but isn't a lawyer, I appreciated you taking a detour into the fundamentals of contract law for those us who never went to law school.
i also appreciate him having the humility to get someone with more of a tech background to give an explanation of that side of things, instead of grasping at abstract analogies like too many of these nft "explanation" videos tend to do (looking at you, folding ideas). that simple, concrete, example of how an NFT is typically implemented was one of the strongest parts of the video.
In the case that an NFT contains a link to an ipfs URI like in the example, the off-chain content cannot change like with a hyperlink - this is because ipfs URIs are content-addressable. The random-looking text after the "ipfs://" scheme is something called a hash of the file contents - basically a number derived from the binary information contained in the file. If the file's contents changed, the address would no longer point to it, and since IPFS is distributed, once a file is published to IPFS, the uploader of the file is powerless to change or remove it, because it is distributed between many people who maintain the IPFS network.
NFTs are what happen when a society has far too much money and time on its hands
I feel the same way. But I think it goes much deeper. Too much for one reply. And it may vary as much as people do.
nfts are what happen when everyone is desperate for get rich quick schemes and fear of missing out of something that could skyrocket in speculative value.
Couldn't agree more. NFTs about bored monkeys!? Come on...
NFTs are what happens when everyone, everywhere, is squeezed for all they are worth, for their entire lives, leading to an entire culture of people who yearn for freedom from the squeeze but have no context on what freedom can be other than becoming the one doing the squeezing. Between the man being lashed and the man holding the lash, who is truly free? Neither. They are both serving interests not their own.
When certain people in society do.
“You can’t own a moment” - sounds like an idea for a Doctor Who villain; some super advanced alien going around and using his advanced technology to abduct slices of time from the timeline and collecting them in a vault somewhere so that he can actually own a moment. 😜
How else do you think quantum time started?😜
That's actually a really cool concept for a villain in a time-space adventure, holy guacamole
@@baronvonslambert I read that as Tarzan the Infinite...😅
thats just rassilon. thats the time lords' whole deal.
Bro, you gotta pitch this to the network. They'd hire you on the spot.
35:12 Yep, there’s a huge problem with artists having their work stolen, minted as NFTs, and sold on shady websites. What does the buyer end up with? A link to art they have no rights to, not even the limited ownership they would have if they bought a non-exclusive copy from the artist. NFTs are of less than zero value to society as long as they can be made without verifying ownership of copyright to ALL NFTs ever produced. That must be the standard NFTs are upheld to-that’s the only way they have a point
If I doodle a copy of the Mona Lisa and sell it to some idiot telling them it's the original, isn't it their fault for not doing the due diligence? You wouldn't blame the paint, you'd blame the fraudster Artists need to protect their work and one way of doing so is by making an NFT with it before uploading it anywhere else. Then it's provable that you are the original creator
@@KaitouKaiju There's nothing stopping anyone from making NFTs with stolen art regardless if the artist has done so already.
@@KaitouKaiju the fraudster making an NFT without the artist's consent should already be held accountable. Just because it's new and there aren't laws against it yet doesn't mean you should bully artists into buying NFT insurance.
@@KaitouKaiju It's not a doodle, however. It's a perfect copy. With the NFT slapped on top, which helps, since most people don't understand copyright law, much less NFT law Creative works are inherently protected by copyright law. You can also register your copyright, but you don't need to--if someone steals it before you even publish it, you're still protected. You can use things like previous sketches and drafts, a body of work in the same style, to prove authenticity if you need to force a legal issue. Granted, most artists can't afford taking legal action, just legal threats. Same issue remains with NFTs if they don't already verify the copyright that they rely on. If they're not additional security on top of a copyright, they're another point of failure, security-wise. That seems to defeat the purpose, to me
@@KaitouKaiju they may be an idiot, but that doesn't justify you committing fraud. You decided to do that on your own. This idea that the only way artists can protect themselves from the grift is by participating in it is basically extortion to try to forcibly manufacture legitimacy for NFTs, and by extension, cryptocurrency. Pretty telling about just how much people in this space actually value art.
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The same people most excited about NFTs due to their belief in “ownership” seem to be the same ones who think that paying for music or software means you “own” it, as opposed to the reality of the limited license to use it.
Except in those cases you *have* the software, or at least a license and an available copy. Here it's not clear there's any license (except maybe for the basketball example and even then it's so limited you can't even download it for offline access).
which is why you don't pay for any of it if the source is someone you don't want to support.
i would argue that the ppl _most_ excited abt the NFTs are the ones purposefully intending to rug pull. oh it’s disgusting for sure but hey, in their mind, it’s not their fault. it’s the stupid fan base who thought buying nfts from their favorite youtuber. and so since they’re so much smarter than you, they actually _deserve_ to get paid. ugh. the mental gymnastics is so gross.
NFTs work by finding someone dumber than you to give you money for nothing.
Classic greater fool scam
Helluva grift. I'm not doing it, though.
Nah, they work by getting people to buy crypto coins, letting rich people get out.
And there are a LOT of rich dummies out there, so bully.
Considering that the customer base is the US, that's a stupidly low bar.
Thank you for sharing this! It was really well put together and gave me a lot of great value❤
I was half asleep listening to this. Thank you for letting me remember law. My great grandfather was a probate lawyer. Some people find it boring. I don’t. It’s like the Paper Chase. There’s just too much fun. Who does not love John Houseman
I'm surprised you didn't talk about how easy it is to launder money through NFTs. IRS: "how did you receive $200,000 in one transaction?" Drug dealer: "I sold an NFT that I created and valued it at $200,000. And someone bought it." IRS: "Huh.... okie doke then."
not much differnt than the traditional art market lol...
@@God0fTime it really is the new age art market
They can ask you to point to the NFT to check that you're not just making stuff up. Of course, you can create an NFT for the transaction even though it's not *really* what you're receiving the money for.
@@seneca983 yeah, thats what im talking about. They can just spend a little money on a good machine that'll be great for making nfts and then make an nft whenever they're doing an illegal transaction, and boom. Immediately laundered money.
This is exactly what the physical fine art market is :) also i was in washington d.c., where it is illegal to sell weed but not to own it, and there you can go into nifty NFT shops and buy NFT art, and you will get the strain of your choice for free! Isnt that a nice loophole. So you’re right on the money with that one 🤣🤣
As a software engineer, it makes me smile to see stock footage of a fellow "developer" at 14:51 typing "adoijdiwqjdoij" into a terminal command line, hitting enter 3 times, then repeating the process. lolz
you're right! I didn't notice it at first, but once you know it's painfully obvious. Adorable. Reminds me of the good old times when you could tell movie extras "just shout something in Finnish, it just has to sound foreign", without suspecting that one day there'll be an internet, as well as people who will joyfully inform anybody online that the cute alien fleeing from the Big Bad just shouted "run for your lives, our boss came to work naked _again_!"
lol u made my day
And on the right screen the classic "color 2" hacker move.
Must be long into the session. stock-fottage-coder is so done with the code that that is all they bring together.
43:53 That one looks solid though not even looking at the screen.
I did watch the entire video even though my anxiety was already high before your voice became even more animated and rushed. It breaks my heart seeing how many people are so eager to rip off their fellow humans. Thank you for presenting all of those angles. I wasn't buying an honest content creator eagerness to adopt NFTs (they weren't selling or promoting NFTs). It just was not computing. Love Coffeezilla's persistence shining the spotlight on scammers and sellers of this generation's snake oil. (Has his hair grown back yet or did he lose another prediction?)
I love to see you talk about the series Jojo's bizarre adventure and their use of copyright when it comes to using the names of artists and songs within the work. I always wondered how much it violates to have a character named after a song if that character does not have anything in common with the song besides the name that they share.
When I was a kid, I convinced my brother that I can sell him the White House for $5, which I proceeded to do. Did I NFT?
Was that after selling him the Brooklyn Bridge?
You must be the one who sold the Sun to that crazy lady
No, but just because of not having the "on the Blockchain" part...
Only if you scribbled him a picture of it
did you wrote him a deed saying that he owns the White House but cannot enter, use, or live in it?
I did a research project our initial goal was to predict how much an NFT will make and Mitch they will make based on the transaction data. However, when we did some in depth analyst we found a bunch of weird transactions. We ended up figuring out that it was a bunch of wash trading. We found that our dataset that contained 4.5 million transfers from between April and September of 2021 31% of the transfers were wash trading. So it’s kinda no wonder people are so skeptical.
Have you seen how the bored apes and mutant apes basically follow the same pattern with floor price too (at least in big lines)? Very suspicious
Painting the tape is also very common. Weird how this stuff is illegal for real art auctions, but enforced on NFTs.
share the data or gtfo
I mean this is definitely a reason to be skeptical of specific assests and is definitely a problem, however, I admit that personally i find many are more skeptical out of a mksunderstanding of the fact that there isnt any distinct underlying technology itself and associations with particular assets.
Did your paper get published? I'd like to add it to my "proof NFTs are terrible" folder.
Really enjoyed this video. I watched Line Goes Up a few weeks ago and was still left confused about what exactly someone was purchasing when they bought an NFT. Your description of it as a receipt for a transaction or a transaction history makes a lot of sense. I was also wondering how an NFT owner could go about "taking back" their property from someone who copied and pasted the image. Line Goes Up made me think there wasn't much that could be done and this video confirmed it.
20:44 Talks about novels. Stock footage: Volumes of German Federal Court decisions
From my perspective as a computer/embedded engineer, I have yet to see a single NFT-based solution to a problem that can't be better solved using a traditional SQL database.
curious about this actually. I had a thought of using a blockchain for say certain food items to provide data and info on properties of the prepertation and source. I had thought blockchain's decentralized nature could be useful as well as the append only nature. May I ask for some elaboration on why blockchain based solutions aren't needed
Fraud is easier using nfts
what if your problem is having too many graphics cards and not enough warehouse fires?
@@Izanagi009 it’s way too expensive, takes too long, and is weirdly public.
@@Izanagi009 People have tried this, but it usually ends up going nowhere, as usually the problems are people feeding bad data into the system, *not* the good data being attacked and altered into bad data. An Append only system doesn't solve "Garbage in, Garbage out," which is the real issues companies have to deal with.
'Innovations so mundane, no one should care.' THANK YOU! Glad someone brought it up. I've seen a buncha NFT bros hype up features that just kinda suck, or have already been done better by other techs, smh.
That's literally how all innovations come about. You're fortunate enough to be watching it in real time.
@@3sgtecelica Did you just blank out the latter half of my complaint? I would agree if the 'innovations' you say I'm watching in real time WERE actual innovations. What's next, you gonna imply that I think Edison was a Warlock???
@@MintyCoolness my point was that actual innovations come off as mundane in comparison to hype trains.
@@MintyCoolness Edison as a Warlock is now canon lol. He's got the hair for it.
Right, like DAOs. Those are Co-Ops. My local WinCo or REI does the same innovations that a DAO does, but without any technical mumbo jumbo and can actually sell me a gallon of milk or shoe without needing to invest in fartcoin or some such ironic nonsense.
Excellent overview and series of explanations. Thank you. I work in the Anti Financial Crime arena on the technical and business advisory side and this has helped me so much. Much appreciated. 👍
Your comment on whether NFT art is good or bad art - and ultimate decision that it’s bad art - is not grounded in a measurable reality yet is equally absolutely true and it’s painful to say how tangible that reality is, my brain just imploded
The way I see it NFT's are the epitome for the golden rule of marketing: "Always be selling the concept of selling to other salespeople" Or, in the case, "Sell the idea of selling something to an idiot with money to an idiot with money"
So they're basically MLMs. No wonder I hated the concept the second I heard about it🤦♂
...or a pyramid scheme?
Iirc Folding Ideas explained it's basically a Bigger Fool scam. What you're selling is essentially worthless, and its real value won't increase, but since every subsequent buyer needs to make a profit, they all need a "bigger fool" who will buy it for more money. Eventually that fool can't be found, and the last buyer will have lost a fortune. All to a worthless jpeg.
So just like real art then. Except real art also has the side effect of being able to put on a wall.
A fool and their money are soon parted.
This video proves why I'm glad my programming degree at college required me to take a Contract Sales/law class; everyone needs to know the basics of how these contracts/law work in society.
5:49 Tamper-resistant. Nothing is tamper -proof.
Thank you for a very good legal explanation of a very esoteric subject!