Let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and pretend everything worked as they say, in what world is giving access to the book to the few people that pay for the nft, “democratising”?
The dude in the linked forum post goes on to say this:
> Here is where we make the dreams of the Harkonnen become true. [...]
I'm finding it really very difficult to imagine that someone's read/watched Dune and come away thinking the the Harkonnen are the good guys. So I can't imagine that intellectual honesty is one of their strong points.
> The little prince was still not satisfied. "If I own a scarf, I can tie it around my neck and take it away. If I own a flower, I can pick it and take it away. But you can't pick the stars!" "No, but I can put them in the bank." "What does that mean?" "That means that I write the number of my stars on a slip of paper. And then I lock that slip of paper in a drawer." "And that's all?" "That's enough!"
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry satirized NFTs 70 years before they were invented!
Forget the idea that owning the token represents something. Buying an NFT just means you bought the NFT itself; it does not mean you bought the image, have access to the image, bought any rights to the image. It just means you bought the NFT.
Kinda missing the point of NFTs there, it's a collector's item and I can't spend $2.6m to buy the actual physical book, but I could spend $2.6k to buy an NFT with 1000 editions which was minted by the owner of the physical book. I don't care about Jorodowsky's Dune, but if I was a fan I could then show off my NFT on twitter, or <<the metaverse>> or just print it out and frame it.
FAQS
- Can't someone else just download the image and pretend they own it? Yes, just as someone can buy a fake LV bag and show it off. Other collectors will still know, and don't care about the fakes. As the tech becomes more mainstream, sites like twitter will show whether you actually own the NFT you claim to.
- Can't someone else mint their own NFT? Yes, but like with real collectors items, provenance matters. Just like one can forge a perfect Picasso but without any plausible proof of origin it would not be worth much.
- Can't they decide to mint more "fragments" after the fact, therefore diluting the price of each of the 1000 editions. No, the smart contract that governs the NFT can't be changed.
- Won't the link inside my NFT die? No, the link is usually just a SHA256 hash of the content; with the content being hosted on IPFS. It's all p2p so as long as a host somewhere in the world has a copy, you can always find the content by hash, even if the underlying technology changes with time.
So NFT's are just a way to introduce artificial scarcity for what is otherwise a reproducible digital good? A way for people to flex money on things that don't exist? They're like DLC skins in a video game - worth nothing, other than showing off that you spent $x dollars?
Kinda? Most things are reproducible. Limited edition sneakers are reproducible, and yet scarcity makes them worth thousands of dollars.
Is it stupid to pay $10k for some hard to find sneakers? maybe, but people do it because they have the money and they're collectors, or they want to flex. Is it more real because there's a physical item which costs maybe $20 to manufacture?
It's not like your example with the DLC skins, DLC skins are not limited in any way, the game company can create more and more of them. An NFT collection is limited, there will never be more than the amount the contract specifies (unless the contract leaves that open-ended intentionally). The creator can't simply sell new ones, because using a new contract would make the new ones lose all inherent value.
It's exactly the same as how certain sneakers are worth $10k and others that are from the same brand, same designers, same materials are worth $100 – provenance matters, and knowing it was released in an extremely limited way makes something more valuable.
As far as I understand it, NFTs usually represent the title for the copyright, etc for the piece of art or whatever other non fungible item it is supposed to represent. Honestly NFTs should be pointing to a legal document showing that it's acting that way in addition to a copy of the image asset. 2 urls. Maybe NFTs do or should have an addendum part for transactions, so you can add URL or hash updates as hosting goes down.
When you transfer an NFT from one address to another, you have transferred title to whoever owns the private keys for it.
You’d need a separate legal contract that was valid in whatever jurisdiction saying the owner of an NFT owned the copyright. At which point the NFT is basically superfluous, because the contract is doing all the work and at that point you may as well just have the contract itself.
An NFT is more like an autographed photocopy of something. Except apparently a lot of NFTs on popular platforms are created from stolen digital art, so you get the fun of not even being completely sure if the autograph is actually by the creator of the art (but it’s verifiable that is is by the creator of the token).
Looks nice, I've been rolling my own simple version of something similar because none of the existing solutions supported my main use case, which is to convert format on the fly for the target device (a la Plex)
I'm curious how you achieve this? Is it similar to Calibre-web's Send to device? Or did you code the conversions yourself (or are you using an external service) and emailing the file?
Are you also providing the reading experience or sending the converted file raw to use in another program's reader?
You use the webapp from your target device, then when you select a book, it's converted on the server (I use mostly Kindle Comic Coverter and Calibre ebook-convert), then served as a regular html download and opened in a native reader.
This works particularly well from Kindle, so I never have to connect it to a computer, and I don't have any email size limit which is quite easy to go over with comics
Interesting, I'll have to look into that as well. I have a lot of platforms that I have to support, so utilizing tools can be problematic. I'm sure that's why send to email is so popular (and it's easy to implement).
I used to browse lowendbox which occasionally has good deals from smaller companies who've been around for at least a few years but there's always a risk one day they'll sell, shut down operations or worse just disappear. However, if budget is your number one priority, you can get a years VPS hosting for low double digit dollars a year.
Nowadays a host personal projects on scaleway and netcup (EU based). I've been with the first for a could of years and the second for 6 months now, good service from both.
If you're mainly hosting static* or cacheable content, you may even get by with a raspberry pi running behind cloudflare's free plan with cache enabled. If you don't mind all traffic to your site being served by such a third party of course.
* If you only have static content, GitHub pages can be considered too.
$5/mo - but there are plenty of decent VPS for $5/yr - the catch is they will be IPv6 only for port 80 so you chuck it behind Cloudflare (carrying static load as well).
The low end world will shock anyone who has only ever seen AWS pricing.
Quite, and the $40-60 a year bracket for a VPS is quite normal, but the original message was "decent VPS for $10/yr". Linode certainly doesn't go that low - at least last time I checked.
I saw an VPS from Italy I think for in the region of $20/year some time back, Sephiroth87 was after a $10/year VPS recommendation, not a $60/year one that hvgk suggested.
They do blame you though, most people won't be aware of the real issue, when cloudflare went down, the trending things on twitter were #spotifydown and #applemusic
I wouldn't put the focus on it being ONLY 850k, that seems a competent price, I would really like to know how in the world they spent 11M on the uk one...
I don’t know specifics about the UK version, but most of those costs likely weren’t on the app proper. They did run a field test, for example.
For comparison, the German version cost millions, too. That included multi-language support, setting up help lines, security evaluation, load testing millions of concurrent users and, IIRC, connecting to quite a few of different hospital computer systems.
Add in time pressure, and costs go up. Germany did get a quality system, judging by what the spokesman for the Chaos Computer Club said (paraphrasing: ‘we have the unfamiliar problem that there is so little to complain about’. They never endorse stuff, so that’s about as endorsing as their statements can get)
It also includes the DPIA, which in itself can be an expensive process. There was a lot of concern/press in Ireland pre-release about the privacy implications of the app. It's hot on the heels of a "mandatory but not compulsory" national ID card fiasco that was determined to be unlawful by the privacy regulator last year: https://www.thejournal.ie/psc-no-legal-basis-4766822-Aug2019...
We ran a field test too. But again; I probably can’t talk about that much. Sorry. If you have more in depth technical questions I might be able to answer them.
We had a team of great devs and designers who worked on this. What most would consider “par for the course” in relation to an MVP startup for instance.
