Where are all the NFT permies? I need your help.

We're trying to convince Paul to mint a collection of Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for for any $100-and-up backer that want one.  

But we're evidently really bad at explaining it.  

Are there people in the permieverse that can help us explain to Paul why it's a good idea?

Here's my lame, starting list of reasons:
- block-chain and NFTs open up the economic, tech, and art worlds to better applications of permaculture principles
- people are so into NFTs right now - it would be a great opportunity to tell more people about permaculture

More questions I need to have better answers for:
How many folks that are already on Permies are even interested in NFTs?
If we were to mint some Permies NFTs, where and to whom could we promote, outside of permies itself?
Would you want a Permies NFT?  Why?  
Do you already do crypto stuff?  If so, do you already have NFTs?  
Are there people outside of Permies that you would like to tell about Permies and how cool it is that we're minting NFTs?

Things that can make an NFT useful:

Use it like an ownership certificate or title. It proves that you ethically purchased a thing and if you sell said thing, you transfer the token as well.

Use it to prove that you have the right to a thing. As long as you hold this token, you can purchase a reprint of this t-shirt anytime from this print shop. No one else has access.

The more deeply that any person or organization is tied to crypto-currency, the less I want to do with them. That's about ten times as true for NFTs. I have no idea if I'm some safely-ignored crazy neo-luddite whacking away at this keyboard in my lonely corner of the world or if most people share my feelings. But I'd at least be cautious about embracing it too hard for all the scammy connotations that would rub off on you.

Also, I'm not in a position to really judge the truth of the matter but one of the largest indictments against NFTs is their carbon footprint. It seems like a weird marriage to suggest they're permaculture-friendly.

As a software engineer and 3D artist who has created a 3D animated NFT collection before.

All I can say is NFTs are a joke, they really don't provide any utility other than parting less tech-savvy people from their money. Even then the only people that make the big bucks from them are people that dump hundreds of thousands of dollars on influencer marketing or are part of online criminal syndicates that manipulate the market.

Not to mention that crypto and NFTs in general are crashing pretty hard right now.

I guess if the point is to just create them for Kickstarter backers then it isn't much effort to do. But you could also just sign some postcards then at least backers get something they really control.  Paul would have to decide if he has enough sway with enough tech-savvy folks that would appreciate an NFT for it to be worth it.

Keep in mind NFTs are just a hyperlink to an image on a server somewhere. You own that link, not the image and there isn't anything preventing the destination the NFT links to from changing or failing. They also are not valuable unless actively traded so if folks just hold on to them then the price will stagnate.


Almost unanimously all experienced engineers and artists I know think NFTs are the dumbest thing (maybe in ten years it will be better). The only people I see that promote them in my industry are new, crooks or working on "the next big thing the replace it all".

Autumn Dawn Sutton wrote:Things that can make an NFT useful:

Use it like an ownership certificate or title. It proves that you ethically purchased a thing and if you sell said thing, you transfer the token as well.

Use it to prove that you have the right to a thing. As long as you hold this token, you can purchase a reprint of this t-shirt anytime from this print shop. No one else has access.

You can also do those things without jumping through all the NFT hoops. Even then NFTs rarely actually are structured as legal grounds for "rights to a thing". Especially when wallet addresses can be anonymous, how is that more transparent? You have to prove the wallet is yours and then prove the NFT is giving you rights.

Say you purchase an NFT that is "a deed to land" and you get a link to an image of the deed. What you actually purchased was the link to the image, not the deed itself. The author (or server owner) can also change or void the image of the deed. There are some NFT projects better suited toward paperwork like that but it is still more hoops to jump through than if you just did it the traditional way which works well enough as it is.

I'll state up front that I am a big supporter of ADA. The idea behind crypto is a sound one, especially with companies like ADA who are focusing on building smart contracts and cutting out banking systems.

As for NFTs--I dont see much of a purpose really other than digital collector items. We all have things that we collect--I have several decks of permaculture playing cards that  have not been opened.

Look at NFT's for what they are--they are a gimmicky perk that would help raise money for other ventures.

And basically anyone has used their apples to make discounted purchases through vendors listed on permies already has a basic understanding of crypto. You "paid" permies.com with knowledge instead of cash, and earned an alternative to money.

I personally have no interest in this, or in fact any of the NFT-hype. I just don't see any point to it. I get a piece of digital code that I can prove I am the sole owner of. How is this adding value in any meaningful way to anything, let alone to anything permaculture related?

What is the value proposition here?
Why would anyone want to buy this NFT?
What status/value etc does this ownership confer?

If the purpose is purely to improve donations to Permies/Paul/The Lab etc... then it feels like NFT just adds an extra layer of obfuscation and confusion. I'm buying something digital, to support them, rather than making a donation? But the thing I "own" at the end is a "token" that itself has no purpose or value?

Hello!

I realize we've far exceeded expectations on this Kickstarter and may be having trouble coming up with stretch goals, especially this close to the deadline.  That being said, for me personally, NFTs hold no value.  I'd much rather have some piece of content (even something small) that will help me along my permaculture journey.

Blessings and take care,
Alan

I generally stay away from everything crypto at least for the reasons stated below.

From 2018 to 2022, annualized electricity usage from global crypto-assets grew rapidly, with estimates of electricity usage doubling to quadrupling. As of August 2022, published estimates of the total global electricity usage for crypto-assets are between 120 and 240 billion kilowatt-hours per year, a range that exceeds the total annual electricity usage of many individual countries, such as Argentina or Australia. This is equivalent to 0.4% to 0.9% of annual global electricity usage, and is comparable to the annual electricity usage of all conventional data centers in the world.

                                 ***

Global electricity generation for the crypto-assets with the largest market capitalizations resulted in a combined 140 ± 30 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year (Mt CO2/y), or about 0.3% of global annual greenhouse gas emissions. Crypto-asset activity in the United States is estimated to result in approximately 25 to 50 Mt CO2/y, which is 0.4% to 0.8% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. This range of emissions is similar to emissions from diesel fuel used in railroads in the United States.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/09/08/fact-sheet-climate-and-energy-implications-of-crypto-assets-in-the-united-states/

I had a coworker who bought an NFT which was a usable digital character in a game, and as he played a game and earned experience/currency that could be used to upgrade the character and make it more powerful/valuable. Assuming someone else wants to buy it to play later.

The #1 function of NFTs that I've read is as a tool for money laundering. I pay you $50M in illegal funds (typically using a crypto wallet) for a worthless digital widgit, and then you pay me $50M back for a different worthless doodad, and now the paper trail to a legit financial asset has begun. But who knows, maybe NFTs will evolve to become something useful down the road.

NFTs could still be made as a fun piece of art with no real intended value, the same way some backers are getting their images added to the video.

Beau Davidson wrote:
We're trying to convince Paul to mint a collection of Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for for any $100-and-up backer that want one.  

But we're evidently really bad at explaining it.  

Are there people in the permieverse that can help us explain to Paul why it's a good idea?

Here's my lame, starting list of reasons:
- block-chain and NFTs open up the economic, tech, and art worlds to better applications of permaculture principles
- people are so into NFTs right now - it would be a great opportunity to tell more people about permaculture

More questions I need to have better answers for:
How many folks that are already on Permies are even interested in NFTs?
If we were to mint some Permies NFTs, where and to whom could we promote, outside of permies itself?
Would you want a Permies NFT?  Why?  
Do you already do crypto stuff?  If so, do you already have NFTs?  
Are there people outside of Permies that you would like to tell about Permies and how cool it is that we're minting NFTs?

Umm, yeah.
I don't get it either.
A paragraph each on these "worlds" being "opened" by NFTs to permaculture, and another on WTF NFTs have to do with permaculture principles, might be a place to start.
What would Paul's NFT be? What does it do for me?

Someone sent me this, depicting their response to this thread.   I'll leave it at that.

John Wolfram wrote:I generally stay away from everything crypto at least for the reasons stated below.

...
Global electricity generation for the crypto-assets ...

On a nice plus-side, Ethereum recently changed the way miners process these, and shifted away from a very energy-intensive method that relied on powerful video cards. As a result the video card market has started dropping from insanely high prices and ever-greater energy consumption. I had read about a coal powered power plant that was put online in another country just to provide power for miners in that region, so fingers crossed that trend has peaked and will come back down now.

I apologize if anything in my previous post made anyone uncomfortable.

I'd like to revisit this thread since I was the first one posting with an unsupportive stance. The very best conversations in the world are the ones where I'm shown to be wrong and I get to change my mind. I like being right. That doesn't mean that I cling to the illusion of being right in the face of evidence contrary to what I thought, that means that when I'm given sufficient contrary evidence, I change my mind. Way up top when I posted, I expected this thread to be full of gushing crypto fans, and I wanted to get out ahead of that with my own squeamishness. But I certainly didn't want to create a chilling effect on the conversation. If someone can explain the value of an NFT in this context, I'm all ears. (ETA: And also, it could just fun for some people and not for me, we don't all have the same hobbies -- I won't get anything direct out of Spanish subtitles either, but that doesn't mean I don't think they're great.)

I'm also not completely crypto-naive. I jumped on BTC early enough to have mined a thousand of my own (on just regular PCs in our house not optimized mining rigs) and then sold a bunch for, by today's standards, ridiculously little money, and then lost a bunch more in the theft/collapse of mtgox (and am pursuing their bankruptcy remediation). But like, my problem with fiat currency is that it's fake and the solution I'm looking for is not an even more fake currency. I'm more likely to buy into helium or precious metals or ammunition (depending on the goals).

Anyway, from my perspective, even while very skeptical, I am 100% open-armed welcoming to pro-NFT discussion. And I'm sorry if I contributed to a hostile environment.

Christopher Weeks wrote:my problem with fiat currency is that it's fake and the solution I'm looking for is not an even more fake currency

Thanks for jumping back in, Christopher.  Your statement is akin to what I've been thinking of lately, in terms of economics.  We should probably start a new thread for this conversation, but the over-simplified progression of my thought is this:

- Marx advocated the gold standard
- Hildegard von Bingen, long before, advocated for what she described as the Body Standard - meaning a human body should be the standard unit of value, and all actions and commerce should be weighed against their affect on bodies.  That, I find interesting.
- I wonder about taking it further, and consider a currency based on biosphere diversity as a unit of measure, maybe "organisms per square foot, adjusted for temperature" or something.  
- But that would be very convoluted, so . . .
- Perhaps a soil-based economy.  Reference the Carbon Coin concept, flawed but has potential.
- It seems simpler to me to consider "energy expenditure" the base unit of currency.
- In this regard, it is my understanding that many consider crypto to be more of a materials-based currency than physical fiat currencies, and I see their argument.  It is, if I understand correctly, largely dependent on energy consumption in mining and maintaining the ledger.  The way this is changing with proof-of-stake replacing proof-of-work is interesting, potentially positive (ecologically speaking), and uncertain, but it is still an energy-based currency.
- I also see the danger it poses in the vast bubble produced by cheap fossil fuel.  It is problematic to say the least, but energy as a currency foundation could grow with energy sources, to include contemporary sunlight (either direct, photosynthesized, digested for animal traction).  These are all energy expenditures.

I suppose I am inventing nothing new here, but would welcome thoughts and resources speaking to these concepts.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you mean by NFTs in this context? You seem in part to be talking about digital currency, but at the same time talking about NFTs of things like digital art?

The value in a "currency" - of what ever form - is in it being widely accepted, so that transactions are easily facilitated with it. This depends on confidence that the system is stable, that my currency will hold its value long enough for me to trade it etc... In the context of traditional currencies they were historically backed by huge reserves of gold. More recently they are backed by what is essentially the value of the economic productivity of a nation.  If you are proposing a "Permies currency" then you need to think carefully about how you will satisfy these needs - backing with value, fluidity in exchange etc... These can't be just based on hype, or your currency will sooner or later crash. The fundamentals matter. If people start trading in your notional currency (say I do a day of labour in exchange for PieBucks), how do I use it to pay a local mechanic to fix my car, or to buy school uniform for my kids?

But elsewhere in the same thread are discussions of NFT of eg digital art. The "NFT" bit is essentially a certificate of ownership in that case. "Joe Bloggs is the legal owner of this self portrait of Paul Wheaton surrounded by Pies". So we are left with "Why is this a useful thing to do?" Where does this add value to what is already being done?

Just out of curiosity, as a coding exercise I created a couple smart contracts (what people are really taking about when they talk about NFTs) on the ethereum testnet, part of which involved minting NFTs to be exchanged as per the contract. While I do see value in the technology of smart contracts, the NFT is basically just the receipt, which to me is only useful to prove that you were a party to the contract. If the smart contract stipulated that me as the holder of the NFT gets 0.1% of profits of the permies empire per year, then yes perhaps I would be interested in plunking down some real $ for that. However it seems that what you are suggesting is to create a smart contract where the buyer gets a receipt showing that they paid to buy a receipt, useless and redundant when compared to the really existing goodies that the kickstarter backers already receive.

This thread was interesting to read from top to bottom and it was neat to see people clarify their positions peacefully.  As someone living mostly under a rock, I've missed a lot of the last 5 years of development of spoken/unspoken social codes online.  Last I knew, trolls were everywhere!  Now I see people on Youtube gloating about how a totally pointless, cheesy video that isn't what it said it was, "changed my life..." I guess that must the new kind of trolling: saccharine exaggerations.

So on the theme of currency theories, social media (I'm most conscious of Youtube) highlights the currency of "time" -- how long someone can keep a viewer watching their monetized video.

I suppose I come across as hostile toward NFTs. I think that some of the underlying technology will eventually find use in other applications but 99% of the time NFTs (or crypto even) just don't provide a function that can't already be done better by traditional centralized means.

NFTs would be super cool as a way to track digital items in a video game, however, when there are 1000 different NFT projects doing that and not all of them can seamlessly move items between systems then a traditional centralized system starts to look a lot better. Even then massive companies like Valve have banned NFT games from their platform.

How NFTs could work on permies:

- You collect them all then you get X.

That could potentially encourage short-term trading of the NFTs, any image attached to them would be just for fun. Maybe make the NFTs look like the playing cards and if you collect a certain hand then you get X digital goodie on permies.

The system could be abused, however. Someone could collect them all, then send them all to another person, then to another, etc. so everyone gets the prize.

Then it becomes a game of "do the transaction fees cost less than the digital goodies I'd get". Maybe there's an NFT platform that has contracts to invalidate or destroy the NFTs after two trades.

Then again might as well implement something similar directly on the forums in a controllable way, it would probably be cheaper for everyone involved.

NFT: No Freaking Thanks

A concern of mine is that you can identify which wallets are controlled by permies by tracking these NFT's

This has turned into a valuable discussion, which can continue.  But I think we can put the idea of an NFT stretch goal to rest, at this point at least.  Just a few hours left in the Kickstarter so we're calling it.  Paul remains unconvinced; there will be no non-fungible stretchies at this time.

I use HEX crypto. I stake the HEX tokens. I am able to Tokenize (via NFT) a stake, to pass it to another wallet.

It's interesting to see this thread, thanks.

Where in the Empire of Permies do I see "tokenize" possibilities:
1) PDFs from the permies digital market
2) AntVillage deep roots lease
3) ...

permies already has nfts on the dogeparty blockchain, minted in 2015 they are non fungible now because everyone forgot their passwords when the hype ran out.    
https://permies.com/t/38737/created-PERMIES-Coin

Autumn Dawn Sutton wrote:Things that can make an NFT useful:

Use it like an ownership certificate or title. It proves that you ethically purchased a thing and if you sell said thing, you transfer the token as well.

Use it to prove that you have the right to a thing. As long as you hold this token, you can purchase a reprint of this t-shirt anytime from this print shop. No one else has access.

Valid points. The most useful/practical use I see at the moment is that the NFT and blockchain verify your identity. With the nft in your wallet, then you can access the video files or special forum. Otherwise the gamification and art transactions are a bit forced and not so practical, as the actual art work is still stored on someone else’s servers.

Beau Davidson wrote:
We're trying to convince Paul to mint a collection of Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for for any $100-and-up backer that want one.  

But we're evidently really bad at explaining it.  

Are there people in the permieverse that can help us explain to Paul why it's a good idea?

Here's my lame, starting list of reasons:
- block-chain and NFTs open up the economic, tech, and art worlds to better applications of permaculture principles
- people are so into NFTs right now - it would be a great opportunity to tell more people about permaculture

More questions I need to have better answers for:
How many folks that are already on Permies are even interested in NFTs?
If we were to mint some Permies NFTs, where and to whom could we promote, outside of permies itself?
Would you want a Permies NFT?  Why?  
Do you already do crypto stuff?  If so, do you already have NFTs?  
Are there people outside of Permies that you would like to tell about Permies and how cool it is that we're minting NFTs?

Hi guys, this is probably something I can help to talk around. I've got posted the separate thread, but probably this one is more relevant. We do have a platform that exactly matches with this  matter, and have quite few successful cases, when farmers created their NFT's and sold them through their community & clients and some even saved their business at that way. We mostly operating in Estonia, but now plan to extend to UK firstly  and other direction as a secondary goal

I’d be very glad to get the feedback and open for any discussion with you guys.  

Illia Ivanin wrote:Hi guys, this is probably something I can help to talk around. I've got posted the separate thread, but probably this one is more relevant. We do have a platform that exactly matches with this  matter, and have quite few successful cases, when farmers created their NFT's and sold them through their community & clients and some even saved their business at that way. We mostly operating in Estonia, but now plan to extend to UK firstly  and other direction as a secondary goal

I’d be very glad to get the feedback and open for any discussion with you guys.  

How does this work?  What kind of NFTs were farmers creating, and what was the incentive for the community to buy?

Beau Davidson wrote:

How does this work?  What kind of NFTs were farmers creating, and what was the incentive for the community to buy?

Crypto has a lot of scammers.

Some possible fails in the world of decentralized finance:
1) not well structured
2) speculation based on trend
3) third party promises
4) private group pump and dump