Thread by @AlexandraErin

So that "own a color on the blockchain" thing is less of a pipe dream and more of a pipe nightmare. It's a system you have to opt in to. This dude has created a pseudo-financial ecosystem where joining it means you have to agree you'll pay money every time you create art.

https://twitter.com/curator1of1/status/1487553250824015878

The thing is, there isn't a "smart contract" that's smart enough to know every single time you use a color. Even if you've opted in, you could use whatever colors you want and mint them through an unconnected protocol. It requires voluntary cooperation every step of the way.

Which, I mean, it's good. It's good that this joker can't actually use arbitrary code to lock you out of using a digital color combination freely whenever you want.

But it demonstrates how every promise made by NFTs and crypto is a lie. "Smart contracts" require participation.

It's possible to trick people into participating, as the "smart contract" wallet hacks on OpenSea have shown. But that demonstrates the other way in which smart contracts are lies: they *do* require participation, but they *don't* require informed consent by all parties.

For the promise that they'll get paid every time somebody uses *their* colors.

Meanwhile, the only people getting paid steadily for use of the scheme are the people running it. It's a decent scam as things go.

https://twitter.com/bex_machina/status/1487853328205639686

Just RGB hex colors. And the thing is, I think the psychology of their userbase is such that rather than changing the hex value by 1 to avoid fees, they'd deliberately use the "owned" shades in order to buy a sense of participation.

https://twitter.com/PossibleCabbage/status/1487854315276546049

Like, as somebody who's really into tabletop roleplaying games, I see the vibe here and on a primal level I understand it: it's a group game of make-believe. I mean, crypto in general is that, but this is kind of like the most ludically pure expression I've seen.

Ah, the plot sickens: to judge from the screenshotted sub-thread here, the "color NFT royalty thing" is basically a scheme to get people to buy into an OpenSea alternative.

https://twitter.com/legobutts/status/1487922144872968195

OpenSea is the centralized marketplace that essentially runs the NFT world. Because crypto is theoretically decentralized but there's no reason not to go where everybody else already is going, and several downsides to doing anything else.

So if you want to compete with the first platform to achieve any kind of real market saturation, you have to have *some* kind of incentive, and this color-owning gimmickry is an attempt to do create that kind of incentive.

Because once you have paid money to "own" a color in this particular marketplace, you have a powerful incentive to make that marketplace popular. You're going to want to give them your business and get your friends to do the same.

And as I said upthread, I think their target audience gets a kick out of participating in something like this. It's a fun game of make believe they can play with real money, with a dangled hope of making more money back.

Like scratch-off tickets.