Does Second Life plan to get into NFTs ?

[Coffee Pancake]

 

https://www.livemint.com/market/cryptocurrency/crypto-traders-have-short-window-to-avoid-house-tax-plan-11636244504852.html

 

[Rein Cloud]

it's painfully obvious that some people that posted in this thread have no idea what an NFT actually is or how the blockchain can be used. 🤣

imagine thinking that jpegs are the only use of NFTs. 

[Coffee Pancake]

17 minutes ago, Rein Cloud said:

it's painfully obvious that some people that posted in this thread have no idea what an NFT actually is or how the blockchain can be used. 🤣

imagine thinking that jpegs are the only use of NFTs. 

Imagine thinking owning a URL on the blockchain has any use it all.

You know the target of URL's aren't inscribed in stone, right? That someone else has complete control over what that link points to and can change it on a whim ..

Now tell me that would make sense when applied to a physical asset ... If only there was another system for such things that wasn't entirely superficial and a climate disaster dependent on massive amounts of energy usage.

[Alwin Alcott]

6 hours ago, Rein Cloud said:

it's painfully obvious that some people that posted in this thread have no idea what an NFT actually is

[Phunkstein]

The reason why people in SL hate on new technology is because they benefit from the old technology and the new technology threatens that. 

It's quite simple- NFT's in SL would be beneficial to creators as well as consumers because YOU would own your items instead of LL owning your items. This would allow a customer who has purchased an item to resell that item to someone else when they no longer want it. And because YOU own your items, you could take them with you wherever you go- whether that be a game or some other funky part of the metaverse. And vice-versa, NFT's from other parts of the metaverse could be recognized in SL.

And don't come at me with the "that can already be done" bull***** either, because it cannot be done in a trustless manner without smart contracts.

I wont even get into the benefits of DAO.

 

 

 

[animats]

4 hours ago, Phunkstein said:

The reason why people in SL hate on new technology is because they benefit from the old technology and the new technology threatens that. 

It's quite simple- NFT's in SL would be beneficial to creators as well as consumers because YOU would own your items instead of LL owning your items. This would allow a customer who has purchased an item to resell that item to someone else when they no longer want it. And because YOU own your items, you could take them with you wherever you go- whether that be a game or some other funky part of the metaverse. And vice-versa, NFT's from other parts of the metaverse could be recognized in SL.

And don't come at me with the "that can already be done" bull***** either, because it cannot be done in a trustless manner without smart contracts.

I wont even get into the benefits of DAO.

Currently, you can resell items within SL that have the "transfer" privilege. There's a market in that.

As I mentioned previously, it's technically possible to implement an NFT-type system that would prevent you from having the same object in SL and an Open Simulator grid at the same time, but would allow transferring them back and forth. But probably not worth the trouble.

The practical problems are:

• The cost and overhead of doing anything on the Ethereum blockchain is more than most SL items sell for.
• Most existing NFTs are of such low quality that they would be laughed off SL.

Really.

This is a typical piece of NFT artwork.

You can own Sheep #10687 for only US$14,904. Yes, most NFT art is that crappy. And yes, those are all machine-generated variations on the same design.

Place your bids now, suckers.

(1 Ethereum = 4,320.38 US Dollar, as of a few minutes ago.)

People buy these in hopes of finding a bigger sucker to buy from them. If you look at the listings closely, you find people asking high prices for "used" items, but those items are not getting bids. The actual prices at which sales take place are far lower. Many transactions are "wash sales"; the seller is selling to themself to pump up the listed price. The items shown above almost certainly have bids like that.

Beanie Babies on eBay work exactly like this. High asking prices, no bids, few resales, and those resales are at low prices. NFTs are the same concept.

[Lucia Nightfire]

7 hours ago, Phunkstein said:

The reason why people in SL hate on new technology is because they benefit from the old technology and the new technology threatens that. 

It's quite simple- NFT's in SL would be beneficial to creators as well as consumers because YOU would own your items instead of LL owning your items. This would allow a customer who has purchased an item to resell that item to someone else when they no longer want it. And because YOU own your items, you could take them with you wherever you go- whether that be a game or some other funky part of the metaverse. And vice-versa, NFT's from other parts of the metaverse could be recognized in SL.

And don't come at me with the "that can already be done" bull***** either, because it cannot be done in a trustless manner without smart contracts.

I wont even get into the benefits of DAO.

 

 

 

Your first ever post on the forums (on that alt account at least) is dying on the NFT hype hill?

We don't need NFT get rich quick scams in SL. Gacha was bad enough.

[Theresa Tennyson]

12 hours ago, Phunkstein said:

And because YOU own your items, you could take them with you wherever you go- whether that be a game or some other funky part of the metaverse. And vice-versa, NFT's from other parts of the metaverse could be recognized in SL.

And unless the "other parts of the metaverse" use exactly the same asset classification system as Second Life they'll be useless as teats on a boar hog.

[Coffee Pancake]

16 hours ago, Phunkstein said:

It's quite simple- NFT's in SL would be beneficial to creators as well as consumers because YOU would own your items instead of LL owning your items.

This is a misconception.

An NFT does not imply or transfer ownership or anything.

NFT's are digital receipts published on a block chain. No more. No less.

The actual asset data is not stored on the blockchain in anyway what-so-ever. 

If anything NFT's have demonstrated less ownership. Anyone can access the asset the blockchain entry points to without restriction or license. 

As the owner of an NFT, you can't even use the legal system to enforce your claim of ownership as NFT's do not transfer copyright, that remains with the original creator. So at absolute best, all an NFT can do is verify the holder has paid to access the content.

You no more own the items an NFT point to than you own movies with a Netflix subscription.

16 hours ago, Phunkstein said:

This would allow a customer who has purchased an item to resell that item to someone else when they no longer want it.

You can already do that with transferable items.

No NFT required.

No Trust required.

No smurt contract required.

No DAO BS.

Just an object, you set for sale, someone else buys and then immediately takes ownership of.

 

Best of all, you don't have to pay a small fortune in fees incurred by the act of transferring the receipt.

16 hours ago, Phunkstein said:

And because YOU own your items, you could take them with you wherever you go- whether that be a game or some other funky part of the metaverse. And vice-versa, NFT's from other parts of the metaverse could be recognized in SL.

No you actually can't take them anywhere.

Digital assets can be anything. That anything can only operate in contexts where it has direct support.

Say you have an NFT of an SL asset, a 3D textured and scripted thing. That SL asset is useless to a 3D platform based on a different system. The format is wrong, the materials are incorrect, what the hell are "prims" and the script will not function.

The same way you can't open a photoshop file in notepad and expect it to make sense.

16 hours ago, Phunkstein said:

And don't come at me with the "that can already be done" bull***** either, because it cannot be done in a trustless manner without smart contracts.

ROFL

[Aishagain]

18 hours ago, Phunkstein said:

It's quite simple- NFT's in SL would be beneficial to creators as well as consumers because YOU would own your items instead of LL owning your items.

Not going to happen.  Ever.

[Petey Carver]

On 8/29/2021 at 4:41 PM, animats said:

SL already has something comparable to NFTs - no-copy objects. There's a market in unique objects and "rares".

If you really wanted to use a blockchain-based NFT system with Second Life, you could do it. A script in the object would make an HTTP call to a blockchain node to check if you owned the object and it was the only instance of that object. If the check fails for a few times in succession, the object deletes itself. Check on rez and once a day.

A nice feature is that a re-delivery terminal for no copy items is possible. You could request re-delivery and get a lost object back. If you managed to get two copies in-world, one would delete itself after a while.

This could be made to work cross-grid, so that you could delete an object on one grid (say SL) and get it re-delivered on some Open Simulator grid.Any grid with tamper-resistant LSL scripts could be allowed to participate.

This requires coding some LSL programs and some smart contracts, and some web servers. If done right, ownership validation should continue to work as long as the blockchain involved continues to run.

To the end user, it would look like an in-world vendor system. No Linden Lab cooperation is required.

This is do-able technically. Interesting project for someone into NFTs. Probably not a moneymaker, but worth doing for the PR value. Make YouTube videos of nice-looking NFTs rezzed in SL. They'd look better than 90% of the NFTs out there.

 

On 8/29/2021 at 4:41 PM, animats said:

SL already has something comparable to NFTs - no-copy objects. There's a market in unique objects and "rares".

If you really wanted to use a blockchain-based NFT system with Second Life, you could do it. A script in the object would make an HTTP call to a blockchain node to check if you owned the object and it was the only instance of that object. If the check fails for a few times in succession, the object deletes itself. Check on rez and once a day.

A nice feature is that a re-delivery terminal for no copy items is possible. You could request re-delivery and get a lost object back. If you managed to get two copies in-world, one would delete itself after a while.

This could be made to work cross-grid, so that you could delete an object on one grid (say SL) and get it re-delivered on some Open Simulator grid.Any grid with tamper-resistant LSL scripts could be allowed to participate.

This requires coding some LSL programs and some smart contracts, and some web servers. If done right, ownership validation should continue to work as long as the blockchain involved continues to run.

To the end user, it would look like an in-world vendor system. No Linden Lab cooperation is required.

This is do-able technically. Interesting project for someone into NFTs. Probably not a moneymaker, but worth doing for the PR value. Make YouTube videos of nice-looking NFTs rezzed in SL. They'd look better than 90% of the NFTs out there.

the VKC pets work that way

[Petey Carver]

On 8/29/2021 at 7:37 PM, Coffee Pancake said:

Yes. I would like you to tell me how and why such a thing could be applied to SL content.

• What would you wants as an NFT.
• How would that work (vs content we have now).
• What would you do with it.
• How much would you pay for it.

Otherwise its just "SL needs this BUZZWORD for .. um .. reasons .. "

any ideas if the regions and parcels can be related to NFT

[animats]

19 minutes ago, Petey Carver said:

any ideas if the regions and parcels can be related to NFT

If you really wanted to, you could set up a virtual real estate investment trust to own land in SL. I wonder if one of the big SL landlords which buys up SL land, keeps it vacant, and prices it too high to rent or sell is some kind of REIT with corporate funding.

But SL land is not scarce. Pay US$349.00 once and $229 a month and Linden Lab will start up a new region for you.

[Coffee Pancake]

45 minutes ago, Petey Carver said:

any ideas if the regions and parcels can be related to NFT

For mainland :

There is a monthly fee payable to LL for hosting the land, normally if you stop paying this fee, the land will revert to Linden ownership (after a grace period) and any items on that land are retuned. The land will then go to auction to be resold.

How would a parcel being an NFT affect how land & hosting fees work, what would happen if you stopping paying those hosting fees? what happens to the land the NFT points to? what would happen to the NFT? what happens if the NFT owner goes absent ? etc etc ...

For normal land sales between two parties, the land is set for sale, someone pays the ticket price and land ownership transfers immediately. There are no fees external fees aside from usual L$ purchasing.

For NFT land, the ownership would be tied to the holder of the NFT, which itself would be subject to GAS fees if based on ETH (other blockchains & brokers also have fees), this could be anything from $10 to $500 in total depending on where it was going. So the cost of buying the land is the land price + the associated transfer fees.

Are you willing to pay the land price and the transfer fees (which may easily be dwarf  the land value) ?

 

Private Islands :

Private islands are essentially virtual machines rented from LL. There is a monthly fee and failure or withdrawal of payment causes the land to be removed.

How are LL to handle land "owned" via an NFT should payment cease? Again, what happens to the Land, NFT, objects on the NFT land, etc etc ...

Private islands are typically subdivided and then sold for a token amount to transfer ownership capabilities, a rental fee is then paid to the island owner which in turns goes to LL to pay the monthly hosting costs. An island owner may at any time (and for any reason) evict a renter and reclaim ownership of the land so it can be let to another user.

How would subdivided parcels as NFT's function under these circumstances? What happens if the island owner defaults? What happens if the parcel "owner" does? If the lsland owner has a dead parcel with a dead renter, can they reclaim and rent the parcel out again? How does this function with a system based on NFTs?

Are you more or less likely to rent land under these conditions factoring the GAS fees in addition to the monthly fees?

 

Practical implications :

If the land ownership is authenticated against an NFT, how does that translate to parcel permissions? Who gets to place objects on the land, how is that authenticated, do the objects have to be NFTs on the same blockchain with the same owner ID too?

When you buy a thing in SL to place on your land, how will GAS fees impact your shopping habits? What happens if the land an NFT is placed on changes ownership? if the object is returned, where does it go (or does it just get deleted) ? When you sell the NFT referencing an object, what happens? How does the object rezzed in SL or the land it's placed on know the NFT has changed hands?

 

tl;dr :  .. No.

There is no way in hell SL land or object infrastructure can be translated to an NFT "ownership" model. The requirement to pay hosting fees to LL makes it deeply impractical for LL and private land operators. Notions of "NFT ownership" count for nothing when then asset that is "owned" is hosted on and serviced by a 3rd party (this applied to all NFT assets). NFT's are far from free to  transfer & this alone breaks the entire SL economy.

NFT land or objects would impose huge transfer fees and massive inconvenience to users of SL. Notions of ownership are deeply flawed as there are many cases that by necessity would result in the destruction of the asset by a 3rd party.

Even if LL roll there own blurkchain and eat all the associated transfer fees, the blurkchain is not free to run and could easily be computationally larger than the infrastructure used to host the actual regions. Someone will have to pay for this "service" somehow, guess who that would be ....

There are no benefits to the consumer in SL over systems already in place.

This would likely empty out the social side of SL overnight, actual chicken little territory, what value does a virtual world devoid of users have?

Edited November 25, 2021 by Coffee Pancake

[Coffee Pancake]

22 minutes ago, animats said:

If you really wanted to, you could set up a virtual real estate investment trust to own land in SL. I wonder if one of the big SL landlords which buys up SL land, keeps it vacant, and prices it too high to rent or sell is some kind of REIT with corporate funding.

This will fall foul of LL's banking rules.

LL do not respect the titled owner of anything, they only respect the person paying the fees to keep that thing alive in SL, if that goes away ... all bets are off.

[Coffee Pancake]

I will add ..

The value of anything isn't related in anyway to the cost or investment used procuring the thing.

The value of a thing is the price someone else is actually prepared exchange for it.

If you paid 1 ETH for a thing, and ETH doubles in value, is your thing now worth 2 ETH to someone else? No.

[Petey Carver]

2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

For mainland :

There is a monthly fee payable to LL for hosting the land, normally if you stop paying this fee, the land will revert to Linden ownership (after a grace period) and any items on that land are retuned. The land will then go to auction to be resold.

How would a parcel being an NFT affect how land & hosting fees work, what would happen if you stopping paying those hosting fees? what happens to the land the NFT points to? what would happen to the NFT? what happens if the NFT owner goes absent ? etc etc ...

For normal land sales between two parties, the land is set for sale, someone pays the ticket price and land ownership transfers immediately. There are no fees external fees aside from usual L$ purchasing.

For NFT land, the ownership would be tied to the holder of the NFT, which itself would be subject to GAS fees if based on ETH (other blockchains & brokers also have fees), this could be anything from $10 to $500 in total depending on where it was going. So the cost of buying the land is the land price + the associated transfer fees.

Are you willing to pay the land price and the transfer fees (which may easily be dwarf  the land value) ?

 

Private Islands :

Private islands are essentially virtual machines rented from LL. There is a monthly fee and failure or withdrawal of payment causes the land to be removed.

How are LL to handle land "owned" via an NFT should payment cease? Again, what happens to the Land, NFT, objects on the NFT land, etc etc ...

Private islands are typically subdivided and then sold for a token amount to transfer ownership capabilities, a rental fee is then paid to the island owner which in turns goes to LL to pay the monthly hosting costs. An island owner may at any time (and for any reason) evict a renter and reclaim ownership of the land so it can be let to another user.

How would subdivided parcels as NFT's function under these circumstances? What happens if the island owner defaults? What happens if the parcel "owner" does? If the lsland owner has a dead parcel with a dead renter, can they reclaim and rent the parcel out again? How does this function with a system based on NFTs?

Are you more or less likely to rent land under these conditions factoring the GAS fees in addition to the monthly fees?

 

Practical implications :

If the land ownership is authenticated against an NFT, how does that translate to parcel permissions? Who gets to place objects on the land, how is that authenticated, do the objects have to be NFTs on the same blockchain with the same owner ID too?

When you buy a thing in SL to place on your land, how will GAS fees impact your shopping habits? What happens if the land an NFT is placed on changes ownership? if the object is returned, where does it go (or does it just get deleted) ? When you sell the NFT referencing an object, what happens? How does the object rezzed in SL or the land it's placed on know the NFT has changed hands?

 

tl;dr :  .. No.

There is no way in hell SL land or object infrastructure can be translated to an NFT "ownership" model. The requirement to pay hosting fees to LL makes it deeply impractical for LL and private land operators. Notions of "NFT ownership" count for nothing when then asset that is "owned" is hosted on and serviced by a 3rd party (this applied to all NFT assets). NFT's are far from free to  transfer & this alone breaks the entire SL economy.

NFT land or objects would impose huge transfer fees and massive inconvenience to users of SL. Notions of ownership are deeply flawed as there are many cases that by necessity would result in the destruction of the asset by a 3rd party.

Even if LL roll there own blurkchain and eat all the associated transfer fees, the blurkchain is not free to run and could easily be computationally larger than the infrastructure used to host the actual regions. Someone will have to pay for this "service" somehow, guess who that would be ....

There are no benefits to the consumer in SL over systems already in place.

This would likely empty out the social side of SL overnight, actual chicken little territory, what value does a virtual world devoid of users have?

Wow, thanks for posting that. Do you know how that compares to NFT land like Decentraland MANA. These crypto currencies like meme stocks seem to have a value based on whether or not Elon Musk is endorsing them. Once the value for crypto games is established. SL may look like it would be a good buy for gazillionaires . It already has  a dedicated resident base.

[animats]

2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

This will fall foul of LL's banking rules.

You'd have to go through all the legal procedures to set up a real-world entity to be a REIT, I expect.

SL has corporate landowners. Some are non-profits, some are for profit. There are universities and medical centers with land in SL. CasperTech is a UK company. At one time, IBM had whole islands. So this isn't new. Some of the bigger landlords are probably incorporated already.

I'd prefer not to see the financialization of SL land. In some "metaverses", the action involves flipping land, not using it for anything. Decentraland is like that, and Upland is that in pure form - Upland is buying and selling plots on a map. SL land is more useful. Land is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

So, while it's technically and probably legally possible to go there, let's not.

[Coffee Pancake]

3 hours ago, Petey Carver said:

Wow, thanks for posting that. Do you know how that compares to NFT land like Decentraland MANA. These crypto currencies like meme stocks seem to have a value based on whether or not Elon Musk is endorsing them. Once the value for crypto games is established. SL may look like it would be a good buy for gazillionaires . It already has  a dedicated resident base.

Decentraland's business model is entirely based on the union of a hype bubble and a bad case of fomo.

It has almost no active population and is entirely speculation based .. the speculation being, if this works out, you can get mega rich over night. This is highly unlikely to pan out, but that doesn't stop techbros and crypto nuts getting all excited about it .. maybe they just want you to buy into the hype, because their own "investment" depends on others getting sucked into the ponzi fomo.

 

Crypto games is a nonsense. No game lasts forever, and once past its commercial lifespan, the publisher backing it will kill the severs, poof! all your in game crypto cash just became about as useful as french francs. Doesn't matter how they did the blurkchain part, worthless internet points are worthless.

NFTs in games is even worse. 

 

Say you have an NFT game, and you buy an NFT thing .. so far so good and the sales pitch claims you can then take your NFT thing to other games because you "own" the thing.

In practice this is gibberish. You don't "own" anything, you have a receipt for payment stored on a blurkchain that in turns links to a 3rd party hosting the things file(s).

What even is the thing, can it universally be dropped into other games with NFTs? No. 

Say your thing is in a special or propriety format, like Adobe PSD. That's only going to open in software that explicitly support the PSD file format. So if your NFT game doesn't, it's will have no idea what to do with that data.

This gets more complicated once you get into 3D models or game assets, suddenly everything is a different propriety format designed explicitly for the game it's tied to. Say you buy a NFT car in a driving game, and say SL supported NFTs, could that car be dropped into SL without modification .. no. The extra modification required to format the car and create control systems would be additional data and therefore not stored as part of your NFT (if it could be done at all !!). The same goes for putting this NFT car into any other game.

In short, NFT game stuff is a pure fiction with no connection to how such digital assets actually work. The creators of the NFT stoof know this. But because of the hype cash grab aspect they are all quietly ignoring this rather fundamental point.

It's no different from buying hearthstone cards .. are they useful anywhere else? Are they worth anything if Blizzard close the game or switch off the servers .. nope! Think this wont happen .. remember remember the Diablo 3 real money auction house.

 

But it gets worse (because of course it does) .. 

Your NFT is still just a receipt with a URL that points to a 3rd party. The actual data that makes up the thing is never stored with the NFT as that would be stupidly expensive and impractical.

The 3rd party could, for any reason, and without recourse, change or remove the contents of the URL (as we have seen with NFT art made from copyrighted work that has been taken down with DMCA claims).

The 3rd party could just go away .. and you have zero recourse legally, you lost the online asset and while you still own an NFT receipt/link, it's now and forever, just a 404 .. 

Sucks to be you!

 

BUTT PIRACY (sorry, I mean ; but, piracy) .. 

The NFT on the blurk chain can be read out by literally anyone, it's public data, in a public distributed database .. that's literally the point. This means that EVERYONE can look at the blurkchain, read the URLS, visit them and download the asset you think you own.

The asset itself is a fixed entity, it has no concept or connection to the NFT part of the equation. So the thing contains no ownership information - that's what the NFT is for.

Since the NFT only demonstrates you have paid for the thing, copies pulled from the 3rd party hosting are identical to your "legit" copy.

The copyright owner (copyright stays with the creator of the thing) is the ONLY person/entity who can challenge anyone using the downloaded thing and then use copyright law to have it taken down (DMCA etc). So if they challenge you, you can prove your license with the NFT, but for everyone else using it without buying an NFT, all that can be done is report it to the creator and hope they have the time and money to take it up on a case by case basis.

Policing IP theft is expensive, which is why the DMCA is used exclusively against distributors rather than individual pirates. In practical terms, you paid for a thing everyone else just stole and got away with it faster than you can say mp3.

The only individual who loses out is the chump who paid for the NFT. The copyright holder got your cash, and everyone got the thing without paying for it and got to keep it.

There is no incentive for the copyright holder to bother going after pirates, they already got your money, and any action they take reduces that profit. Oops.

 

But it gets EVEN SUPER worse (because what really has value) .. 

An NFT itself is just a receipt, no different from that 9ft roll of paper you get from CVS.

The thing the NFT points to only has value if someone else is prepared to take ownership of your receipt in exchange for cash.

It's trivial for people to scam up the value of an NFT thing and make it look like it has value.

Here's how that works.

Oh .. all this talk of NFTs being like cash .. that's going to be a problem, because the IRS are very happy to see them as cash, which means you now owe tax on them.

[animats]

1 hour ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Decentraland's business model is entirely based on the union of a hype bubble and a bad case of fomo.

It has almost no active population and is entirely speculation based .. the speculation being, if this works out, you can get mega rich over night. This is highly unlikely to pan out, but that doesn't stop techbros and crypto nuts getting all excited about it .. maybe they just want you to buy into the hype, because their own "investment" depends on others getting sucked into the ponzi fomo.

Reuters article: Virtual real estate plot sells for record $2.4 million

"In June, a plot of virtual land in Decentraland sold for 1,295,000 MANA, worth $913,228 at the time. The buyers built a virtual shopping centre to sell digital clothing, but Reuters has visited this site multiple times since and not seen any shoppers."

[Ardy Lay]

Used theater tickets

[Coffee Pancake]

 

Edited November 27, 2021 by Coffee Pancake

[Crim Mip]

NFT's are a scam and more or less a way for shady people to move money around undetected and tax free....well they were. The US has closed that little loophole. If you want to do that now, you'll have to use investment grade art just like before. Also, if you think they are anon, you are nuts. Blockchain has been traceable for years. Why do you think there has been no move to shut down the tech. it's too valuable to the FBI and NSA for intel.

[animats]

As I pointed out, it's quite possible for a SL user to add NFTs to Second Life. Well, Someone did. Not LL, a third party. They're "robots". Two of them are on display in region "Universe v2", as bot avatars.

It's just a static display. Nothing going on there yet.

 

[Lucia Nightfire]

2 hours ago, animats said:

As I pointed out, it's quite possible for a SL user to add NFTs to Second Life. Well, Someone did. Not LL, a third party. They're "robots". Two of them are on display in region "Universe v2", as bot avatars.

It's just a static display. Nothing going on there yet.

 

Great, more LL aligning themself with NFTs...