pouët.net

Will I be insta-ostracized and banned for thinking about this? Let's find out.

NFTs get a bad rep and in some cases rightfully so, but don't you think demos as NFTs might be a great match? I'm seeing people minting NFTs with generative art (and include the resulting video in the NFT), in some cases pushing it as far as deadbeef(google) with demo inputs on chain and providing C code separately to compile the demo.

But what if we built a dedicated NFT platform for demos? Featuring a platform to code for (webgl?), a web player, permanent storage solution for larger demos or direct on-chain solution for <1k ones. I think people would love collecting this unique form of art and it would make the demoscene a bit more known to the population. As for demo artists, they get access to bigger audiences, permanent storage/playability and a way to earn from their art.

What do you think?

personally i think you suck at searching the bbs for same threads

Oh, thanks. Pretty impressive amounts of hate in that thread. Guess I got my answer.

yep

IF YOU WANT A DEDICATED NFT PLATFORM FOR DEMOS JUST BUILD ONE, WHAT'S KEEPING YOU FROM MAKING ONE?

Yes I believe I wrote that I hate it with every fibre of my body somewhere but perhaps a more thought through statement would be that I strongly dislike NFTs. To briefly rehash my points of view; when you buy a NFT you only buy a string of numbers, they have weak or no legal protection, they are shit for the environment and they are only as permanent as your average blow-joe website (like <10-15 years).

But by all means, I won't stop you from creating such a site or flame you for it. I'm sure there are several active and inactive sceners that will take the chance to earn some cash on their past creations. Just think for a minute about the long standing problem of the commercialization of art and what it'll do to things we do for fun. Also, art collectors like Guggenheim are rotating in their graves with laughter every time you buy a NFT.

El Topo: I agree with you about the impermanence of certain kinds of NFTs (regrettably, most popular ones, where you buy a URL to a CDN), but this problem has solutions, for example using arweave or storing directly on-chain. The legal status and protections of digital property are a matter of time and will come with emergence of digital-native states or advancement of laws in existing ones. As for the environment argument, it has been debunked well in the previous thread, and there is progress happening with moving to proof-of-stake.

I'm no NFT fanboy or trader looking for a quick buck, I just understand that this is v0.1 technology and looking for applications which make sense and trying to see what it might become.

Commercialisation of art? Art has been paid for since time immemorial, most of the renaissance art was paid for by the church or nobility. Seems like Guggenheim had no problem with that.

psenough: I just wanna talk to interested parties first before investing my time in it

Aha?

evindor: Yes art has been paid for for long but it hasn't been an industry (creation of desire by others than the artist) for more than perhaps 100+ years. I will not go in to that debate further because there is probably some scholar among us that knows this stuff better.



No.

Moerder: Are we talking about Bitcoin or Ethereum?

If you attack the environmental aspect of Bitcoin, you should compare its energy consumption to that of the money printing industry - central banks, most part of regular banks and large chunks of the government and the financial industry. Add to that the dirty gold mining industry. And the product of the printed money world - perpetual wars. In that comparison Bitcoin offers a 100x improvement.

As for Ethereum, on which most NFTs run nowadays, their team is working on transitioning to proof of stake. Bashing the state of this technology as it is today without offering alternatives or improvements is akin to bashing the internet in early 90s for all the things it couldn't do.

I already own or co-own the demos I've made by virtue of social convention in the demoscene, and I believe also by virtue of copyright. I already could rightfully put my demos on sale. I would not make any money though, because demos are generally given out for free so their market value is basically nothing. You're saying NFTs would create a supposed new market for the exact same demos, which is special and separate from the real market. That sounds like a scam.

Look, I hate to break it down for you. but this may not be the community to evangelize this to.

Gargaj: yep, I've figured as much. No evangelisation just some discussion/exploration. I respect your opinions and came here to learn them.

The difference is that one of them runs the daily lives of 7 billion people, and the other is a plaything for a few thousand Silicon Valley financebros. In that context, it's pretty shocking that the environmental impact is only 100 times smaller. It's like saying "this can of energy drink only contains 1% of the cyanide compared to the entire world's annual harvest of apples".

Saying "what X is doing may be bad, but Y is doing much worse things, so it's fine" is not exactly debunking.

Uhhuh, so you don't think any of those systems and stability perpetuated by the "money printing industry" (i.e. the global economic system) benefits Bitcoin at all? I've seen this observation that the hidden environmental costs of existing currency are already worse than Bitcoin offered countless times, but it's a highly naive point to make since Bitcoin is also part of and dependent on the very same systems. You can't just remove the "petrodollar" from the global equation and expect cryptocurrencies to smoothly overtake its place without also assuming the same responsibilities that you argue are a hindrance and an environmental burden (which they still are) of the current system. Bitcoin is only made possible by the relative stability (ymmv) that the current conditions have created and wouldn't survive without them; the rest of the environmental costs of cryptocurrency are just stacked on top of what we already have no matter what.

It'll never happen. Even their own team knows that they're risking tanking the price because there is an understanding in the stakeholders that the energy waste itself is the investment.

I'm with El Topo here: NFTs are imo the epitome of virtual bullshit. Some guy now owns the first tweet. WTF, srsly?! What is the effing value in that? It is the same as owning a part of Lorem Ipsum for all I care, let alone that the principle of owning something digitally copyable is ridiculous...

NFTs, from what I can tell, are a great example of how something (crypto) that is created with this libertarian Stick It To The Man mindset is immediately judo-thrown into a vulture capitalist tool the moment there's a large enough sum of money involved.

Wanna REALLY stick it to the man? Make art for free, like the scene has for decades.

Can an nft be something different from a link? Can a small prod fit within the nft?

loaderror: considering an NFT i just a hash value of whatever you want it to be, yes.

rloaderro: yes, you can put any data inside. It gets more expensive as you increase the size, but it's not too crazy for demo size limits. I found the most legit attempt at a more permanent nft by deadbeef(dot)com (see his about page for details) - he put the C source code on chain, which generates a unique generative art piece provided a hash value. The nft contains that hash value + the link to the code stored on chain, so as long as you have access to a C compiler and the chain is alive you will be able to reconstruct the nft.

Also if you design the piece such that it produces sufficiently different results given different hashes, you are able to put the source code on chain once and make several nfts referring to this one source.

I have no relation to deadbeef btw, just found his stuff pretty cool.

Gargaj: I have no desire to stick it to anyone. What I'm trying to do is to see if there's more to this technology than hype and if something cool can be created with it. I don't deny that by far and large, the current nft wave is ridiculous, mostly based on impermanent centralized services like opensea and mostly driven by people's greed. But that doesn't mean there is no interesting seed in the idea of digital property, that only means the world is searching.

Everything that can be done in terms of digital property was already long done by TF2 hats and WoW mounts, and they did it more efficiently, with more accountability / traceability, and with less class divide.

Like a painting obviously.