CGOL patterns as NFTs

[pcallahan]

If Bill Gosper wanted to sell an NFT of the one and only Gosper Glider Gun, I would definitely not buy it -- I'm just not interested. If he was doing the NFT-selling because he needed some money, I would hope that other people would be interested and that he'd make million$... and if that didn't work out, I'd try organizing something like a GoFundMe.

And to get back to my celebrity analogy, if it came to that I would pay more for Gosper's old running shoes with his autograph than an NFT. I also think that 50 years from now (when the contributions of CGoL to the development of self-replicating machines are fully appreciated ) that this artifact would be worth a lot more in the collectibles market than some NFT, AKA the digital equivalent of a beanie baby.

[mscibing]

Right now NFTs seem to be about speculation, gambling on the future value of tokens. Gambling is not something I want a part in encouraging, and so I will not be participating in NFTs.

[simsim314]

if it came to that I would pay more for Gosper's old running shoes with his autograph than an NFT.

Would you yourself prefer selling your old shoes with autograph, or NFT of your reflector?

For the commercial-license idea I can make a much stronger statement: I will retire permanently from the field of CGoL research before paying any money for one of these hypothetical Proprietarian patterns. I believe that doing that would be setting a terrible precedent, so as a matter of principle I won't do it.

So if for example I build universally directional spaceship of any valid speed - and sell it on Etsy per each download, you will retire from CGOL? It would be very sad I think, but I would claim that even this threat is not deterrent enough for me. But I would try to convince you not to retire, just because I want to sell my work. Your only chance is to win the race against me in any field I'm researching - constructed spaceships, stable reflectors and conduits, quadratic growth, and hopefully I'll also get one day into glider synth. Any new pattern will have Proprietary license if the NFTs will be treated the way the community is now treating the idea. Obviously we are talking from now on - old patterns, I think I released without any license, but I have no intention into closing them. I think publishing the pattern on this forum for free, is somehow already complying with the idea of free patterns, but I'm not entirely sure. Anyway my main intention is from now on.

Your previous contributions (many of them quite awesome!) are already in the public domain

I guess the previous contributions can gain value from NFTs, and if this will fail to monetize, I will not hesitate to publish my new discoveries with commercial license. I see no real reason not doing so. Hopefully more people will join this path - it's completely legitimate I think. Artists in many fields demand being payed, I'm sure you bought a book, a song or a movie in your life. I hope you will also start respecting yourself and your effort and sell your patterns too. But you are a free person as I am.

Your threats to disrupt this community can be easily countered by establishing a forum rule that states that all CA rules, CA Patterns and CA ideas posted to this forum shall be in the public domain.

Well then I will need simply to open my own forum - and the community will have to either completely ignore my research, hopefully I will be productive enough to at least convince some of the members to not ignore me completely. Hopefully many good people will join too. The advantage of this place and of LifeWiki is that everything done in the field is concentrated in one place. Now you want to enforce several places. I personally would prefer not to compete with the infrastructure. I also don't think it would be ethical to block members and their research just for demanding being payed for their effort.

Why is monetization all so suddenly necessary to help the community now?

There is no good time for this. I personally think it will help in the long run. You can ask this question at any post/offer/idea.

It's been operating perfectly fine for 50 years without issue.

I think there are plenty of issues you tend to ignore just because you are used to not being payed. The main issue is that people are putting a lot of effort without getting any payment and after a while they stop doing that. They would not stop if they would be payed and we would get a lot of great people working full time on their discoveries.

I don't get the mentality of associating every single thing you do with money.

I don't. I published many discoveries and patterns for free and done them purely for fun. But now I want to be payed for this effort. If you don't - this is completely legitimate. You can't tell me not to want to be payed for my artwork and my creations. This is preposterous. Even if you never payed a penny to any creator, never bought a book, never bought a movie or a song or a painting - I would judge you as negative person belonging to a minority of people who don't want to pay creators for their hard work. As I see it, my effort here is not different from people who are writing, drawing, playing chess or engaged in any creative activity and I see no reason to be expected doing this work for free. I can sell my patterns with commercial license, and you can't stop me from doing that - even if for some very perverted reason you think I should not be doing this.

I want to help out the progress of the community by putting work in, but I don't want, nor do expect compensation.

Great. I neither until now - but now I am. You can't tell others to be like you.

it seems like this is more of a personal desire for payment than a lofty goal of aiding all of us in some mysterious way.

Those claims were also heard when music, writing, philosophy, chess was making a path from hobby to a profession. I don't think any of those fields lost their prestige because of monetization. I don't want to aid all of you - I want to change the rules, this change will aid the research field itself not any specific individual. Today no one complains that they have to buy a book in order to know philosophy. I think in the future no one will complain they have to buy patterns in order to learn CA. At least starting from some more advanced level.

But it's just really unlikely in my view that there is money from outside the community.

Two answers here:

1. Money creates wider community. Money allows promoting the field - creating commercials, adds in google etc. etc thus creating a wider community. So the first answer is money creates more money. People that know that they can make this hobby into a profession will be more motivated into the hobby. This is true for all hobbies: music, football, chess, ballet whatever, you name it.

2. Trading NFTs for example is also creating this vibe. If we would buy NFTs from each other, wider NFT community will notice and join. Trying to understand how we work, why we sell this or that NFT by this or that price. Thus directly pouring money which can start from very few bucks invested by the community into trading NFTs, to the millions we hear about NFTs. So very few bucks and engaged community can create a lot of value from outside of the field.

I'm in the unusual position of actually having been paid to work on Life when Nick Gotts invited me to Aberystwyth over 20 years ago. This is was not a sustainable model, but he had the grant money to support my stay for a few months.

Interesting.

It might be science if it has a cool animation.

CGOL/CA has cool animations.

[simsim314]

Exactly! I respect my own work by letting other people use it. If I make people pay for it, then it gets used (and seen) less, and does not earn the proper respect it deserves.

As a creator you have the full right to treat your creations and the respect for you and the creations as you see fit. I think as you as well - but I disagree that any form of monetization should be discouraged, and when I get ignored for completely valid, open source friendly monetization strategy - as being a scam, grift or gambling or whatever, while people are totally fine with paying any other creators in other communities for their proprietary license and not for CGOL creations, I would say the problem is way deeper.

People expect not to pay anything for CGOL patterns - as Dave said that he would quit CGOL before paying any buck for NFT nor for downloading a proprietary pattern. I guess Dave would pay for a movie or for a music or a book, or even for a 3d model and not for CGOL pattern because of his view on the field and his values. And I totally respect them - but I completely disagree. Contrary to Dave I would gladly buy NFTs of other creators and pay them a good buck for downloads in proprietary license, as I do in any other creative field, and don't expect people to do work for free.

I would agree that it's great until some point in the research everything basic is for free, to get people encouraged and started. But I wouldn't agree that people and creators would not getting payed in the long run for anything they do. Dave included in the list of great creators that should get payed for their effort, as far as I'm concerned.

[wwei47]

I'd rather use YouTube and libraries for music and books. I haven't used 3D models a lot, so I can't say for that.

[simsim314]

I'd rather use YouTube and libraries for music and books. I haven't used 3D models a lot, so I can't say for that.

I pay for YouTube too, as this is my main virtual consumption. But I do pay to creators on patreon and if I would be listening to music I would pay for spotify as many of my friends. And I'm also paying for downloading books and 3d models although not a lot. I don't see those very different from creative work in CGOL I'm doing, or more valuable in some inherent sense. As far as I can tell I would get 1-2 downloads a month for proprietary pattern for the rest of my life, as people come and go in this field, and every time there would be someone new who wants to see/use my pattern, and because the results are "real" i.e. have intrinsic value. Maybe each pattern will not bring lots of money immediately, but several discoveries will bring a good buck over the years. This is my guess - I would definitely try it if NFTs will not get the proper attention.

EDIT As to the claim this is slowing down the research I will strongly disagree. Anyone can buy the results they want to use, and because they will need to sell their results too - this will create a situation where people actually get payed for their research, and this will accelerate the field much more, maybe even more than NFTs. As I see it - people will use old CGOL technology for development of their free patterns, and then buy/sell with proprietary license the more improved and more efficient patterns.

And regarding the open-source close-source wars, as far as I can tell - people would come to agreements and find better way to interact instead of licensing and courts. I just want to force people to think about this issue more seriously, and not just assume someone has to make work for free. I'm guessing the agreements will include some sort of NFT monetization agreements while opening the proprietary patterns.

[dvgrn]

For the commercial-license idea I can make a much stronger statement: I will retire permanently from the field of CGoL research before paying any money for one of these hypothetical Proprietarian patterns. I believe that doing that would be setting a terrible precedent, so as a matter of principle I won't do it.

So if for example I build universally directional spaceship of any valid speed - and sell it on Etsy per each download, you will retire from CGOL?

What I wrote was written very carefully, and you have not summarized it correctly. You are free to try to sell an omnidirectional spaceship pattern on Etsy if you want. I would strongly advise you not to attempt this, since it seems nearly certain that you won't see any kind of positive outcome -- but I'm not demanding anything. I wouldn't necessarily quit the CGoL field because of that.

However, I would give up on CGoL before I would consider "buying the rights" to any such pattern myself. Not being able to tinker and improve on a pattern would be annoying, but buying the rights and then being unable to share anything (improvements, observations, generator scripts, etc.) with my fellow Enthusians would be much, much worse.

My statement was in response to a "guess" of yours that I might actually, if it came down to it, buy some NFTs or otherwise participate in one of your hypothetical patterns-for-cash systems. Once again, I'm not speaking for anyone else, and I'm not telling anyone else what to do, but I personally will not be participating.

CA patterns are mathematical entities, not property. "Buying the rights" to CA patterns would mean pretending that there are property rights attached to them. This would set a very dangerous precedent, and would be a serious violation one of the key points of trust that helps to hold the current CA community together: "don't make something fun into something horribly painfully complicated by getting the lawyers involved". In the history of CA research, to my knowledge, only Stephen Wolfram has ever been silly enough to violate that rule.

The addition of property-rights negotiations to CGoL research would be extraordinarily irritating and depressing to me personally, so I would avoid it like the plague. If I had to worry about it very much -- "let's see, can I safely build a different, simpler design of omnidirectional spaceship than simsim314's, or will he think that I've copied some part of the mechanism that I've actually re-invented, that he thinks is his intellectual property, so he'll sue me and lose all of his money paying lawyers while wasting a year of my life?" -- I would very likely become too depressed and distracted to get anything useful done in the CGoL field... and that is why I would retire. Life is hard enough as it is.

Dave included in the list of great creators that should get payed for their effort, as far as I'm concerned.

I've requested this before, but I'll ask again in a different way: please, please do not include me in your mental list of people who might eventually be benefited by your plan in the long run. For the reasons I've described above, the odds are very heavily against my seeing any benefit from Proprietarianism, whether it succeeds or fails.

Everyone who has responded to your comments seems to believe that an eventual failure of Proprietarianism is much more likely, if not a virtual certainty. Without more participants, can your funding model possibly have a shadow of a hope of working? Please consider, where exactly are you going to get the additional recruits you've postulated, who will join you in this quixotic Proprietarian venture and produce irresistibly amazing patterns that they will then sell downloads of, while guarding them forever against copyright infringement by suing everyone who doesn't pay for them? Please ask those specific people that you're thinking of if they will, in fact, consider becoming CGoL-pattern Proprietarians under any circumstances -- and please listen to what they have to say.

[calcyman]

Your only chance is to win the race against me in any field I'm researching - constructed spaceships, stable reflectors and conduits, quadratic growth, and hopefully I'll also get one day into glider synth.

I'd encourage everyone here to read this article by Eric S. Raymond: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

Any new pattern will have Proprietary license if the NFTs will be treated the way the community is now treating the idea. Obviously we are talking from now on - old patterns, I think I released without any license, but I have no intention into closing them. I think publishing the pattern on this forum for free, is somehow already complying with the idea of free patterns, but I'm not entirely sure. Anyway my main intention is from now on.

Your previous contributions (many of them quite awesome!) are already in the public domain

I guess the previous contributions can gain value from NFTs, and if this will fail to monetize, I will not hesitate to publish my new discoveries with commercial license. I see no real reason not doing so. Hopefully more people will join this path - it's completely legitimate I think. Artists in many fields demand being payed, I'm sure you bought a book, a song or a movie in your life. I hope you will also start respecting yourself and your effort and sell your patterns too. But you are a free person as I am.

Just as a word of warning: Simon Ekstrom's single-channel recipes are GPLv3:

https://github.com/simeksgol/GoL_single ... er/LICENSE

...so even though slmake (the algorithm and source code and most of the /data directory) is MIT-licenced, you'd need to tread very carefully if you want to use the single-channel recipes in some proprietarily licenced work. I believe that your Remini avoids those (since you created your own p30 single-channel library) and only uses the MIT-licenced parts of the repository, so should be free of restrictions, but you'll probably need to talk to a lawyer to find out exactly what restrictions would be imposed on works derived from the p1 single-channel library.

[simsim314]

CA patterns are mathematical entities, not property.

They are somewhere between artistic creation and software. Math is not simulation you run, math is something static. Code is something you execute - and code has standard copyrights laws. Generally speaking code is also mathematical entity - but if it comes to this, I will let the court to decide this topic. As I said before - I'm certain copyrights are completely valid for any CGOL creation which is complex enough, just like any artistic/software creations, and laws of regular creative licenses are applied to CGOL patterns. This is called intellectual property - and it seems no one in this community never heard of it.

I would very likely become too depressed and distracted to get anything useful done in the CGoL field... and that is why I would retire. Life is hard enough as it is.

All my claim is that you and anyone else in this community should respect the effort you all put into this, expressed in economical format. I can't force you to - I can't force you to buy NFTs too, but they are the most viable option that allows an open source community to remain open source while motivating artists and contributors in the community economically. Your refusal to understand this, proves you don't understand what problem NFTs solve, and this proves that you don't recognize intellectual property at all, and have complete disregard to time and effort put into it. And this is already unacceptable by me, at least regarding my effort.

Everyone who has responded to your comments seems to believe that an eventual failure of Proprietarianism is much more likely.

Proprietarianism doesn't require anyone's cooperation as it's enforced by law of most civilized countries. NFTs on the other hand are not - they express the values of a community and respect of effort put into it. But it seems like this community has no value to its hard work.

Without more participants, can your funding model possibly have a shadow of a hope of working?

Yes some of my patterns were downloaded tens of thousands times - I guess out of those downloads some of the people who downloaded the pattern for free would pay some buck for the work put into them. And if I'm wrong - oh well it's a shame, maybe I shouldn't invest my time into it, if no one is willing to pay anything for the effort. I would rather validate this claim before coming to any conclusions.

Please consider, where exactly are you going to get the additional recruits you've postulated, who will join you in this quixotic Proprietarian venture and produce irresistibly amazing patterns that they will then sell downloads of, while guarding them forever against copyright infringement by suing everyone who doesn't pay for them?

I hope once it comes to this - people will value the NFT solution much more than they now, and I'll negotiate an agreement with people who are willing to both pay for the work, understanding that work should not be done for free and also keep it open to everyone. And if no such people exist - well then it's a shame. I'll wait until they will arrive.

[simsim314]

Simon Ekstrom's single-channel recipes are GPLv3...so even though slmake (the algorithm and source code and most of the /data directory) is MIT-licenced...

slmake is a software - so I can see why it's license as any other piece of software. But I couldn't find any code in Ekstrom's single-channel recipes repository, thus Simon has already created a precedent of attaching license to pure CGOL patterns. I will not be the first in this regard, only the first to use a Commercial license. As I hope it will not actually need to come to this, and NFTs would be a viable alternative to monetizing CGOL work, they will actually benefit more from GPL or MIT licensing. As I said I have no reason to commercialize CGOL patterns, only monetizing them. But yes I would publish my results with very strict commercial license if people don't get the point why hard work should be monetized, just to make a point. I don't think commercial licensing is good monetization strategy for the community - but a community should mature before using NFTs as monetization, first people usually think it's kind of a joke, and demand to use creators work for free - before realizing they can't the hard way. In Russia for example people got used to download books for free, and several sites needed to get down and people sued until the culture changed, and people started to buy books. This is very common phenomenon that people disrespect intellectual property when they got used to it. To be clear once again - I'm totally in support of free distribution and open source, this is why I started my discussion from NFTs, but then I realized people here are just assuming they deserve to get everything for free - they expect everyone here to work for free and publish everything with open-source license. And although I'm in support of open source, I think that expecting artists and creators do everything for free is rude and unacceptable culture, and should be changed the hard way sometimes.

And thanks for pointing this out.

[calcyman]

If you read the ESR article, you'll see the following parenthetical comment:

You don't have to believe that you're obligated to give all your creative product away, though the hackers that do are the ones that get most respect from other hackers. It's consistent with hacker values to sell enough of it to keep you in food and rent and computers. It's fine to use your hacking skills to support a family or even get rich, as long as you don't forget your loyalty to your art and your fellow hackers while doing it.

I agree with the whole of that statement, including that it's absolutely fine to get rich (which is why I'm supportive of the Cryptopia proposal, for example). The final clause, though -- 'as long as you don't forget your loyalty to your art and your fellow hackers while doing it' -- is worth keeping firmly in the back of your mind.

[simsim314]

I agree with the whole of that statement, including that it's absolutely fine to get rich (which is why I'm supportive of the Cryptopia proposal, for example).

1. I was always talking about Cryptopia from the start. I had just a bit more complex design of the NFTs rather than simple "mint an image" approach you get in opensea. Socially speaking it's the same as long as you know to what it's attributed, I thought it will be more fun. But nevermind, for now I'm totally fine with minting images and gifs.

2. Everyone said they will not participate, while mniemic also said he would pay for 3d model of a pattern and it's fine that creators demand payment. This was somehow reasonable to him that you will demand payment with commercial license but not NFTs. If commercial licenses make more sense to members of this community - I have no conceptual problem to use them instead of open source monetization, until the community will realize that NFTs is way better and more civil, and understand how they function.

3.

as long as you don't forget your loyalty to your art and your fellow hackers while doing it'

As long the fellow hackers don't disrespect their own art.

4. Regarding Cryptopia - I was thinking to create a "minting party" - window of time (a week for example) when CA/CGOL creators would mint their NFTs. And repeat this minting week several times a year. Thus we would be able to attribute the specific mint to a minting cycle. Each cycle will have a beginning and an end, and all mints would be validated and published in the forum and some immutable place for tracking - github/ArDrive. This is needed for old patterns that were never minted to have some meaningful minting time, to focus attention on those patterns. Unlike patterns that are being discovered now - they can have minting time correlated with their discovery time. What do you think?

[andrewph33]

I am definitely not participating in exchanging money or ownership of CGOL (or any CA for that matter) patterns. Nobody was in this sphere for the money for its first 50 years; even if it does turn out to be a good motivator for joiners in the future, I doubt they'll stick.

[simsim314]

Nobody was in this sphere for the money for its first 50 years; even if it does turn out to be a good motivator for joiners in the future, I doubt they'll stick.

Would you buy a book? Or pay for a music?

[dvgrn]

I can't force you to buy NFTs too, but they are the most viable option that allows an open source community to remain open source while motivating artists and contributors in the community economically.

Unfortunately I do not agree that they are the "most viable option", because I don't agree that they are a viable option at all. As a way of motivating artists and contributors in the community, I believe they simply will not work, and in fact, they are most likely to have zero positive consequences and serious negative consequences.

By analogy, I'm watching you standing at the edge of a dangerous canyon here, saying that you're planning to flap your hands really really hard so that you can fly safely across to the other side. You are saying that this is the "most viable" way that you can reach the other side, but I very strongly disagree with your whole premise, and I'm seriously advising you not to embark on this particular adventure -- for your own good and everyone else's, since you may possibly drag some other people or community resources off the cliff with you.

Your refusal to understand this, proves you don't understand what problem NFTs solve, and this proves that you don't recognize intellectual property at all, and have complete disregard to time and effort put into it.

This is hyperbole, not any kind of "proof". I don't believe that any of what you say here is true.

Specifically, I understand very well the problem that you believe that NFTs might solve. Like Paul Callahan, I have been paid in the past for CA-related work, briefly -- up to $60 per hour, I think it was in my case, believe it or not -- but it definitely wasn't for very many hours, and more of that same kind of work is just not reliably available. I recognize and respect intellectual property rights. The CA community has always been very, very respectful of intellectual property rights, in the sense that many people have put an absolutely huge amount of work over the years into maintaining attribution and credit for the discoverers of patterns. We do everything we can to acknowledge the time and effort involved.

However, I strongly believe that CGoL patterns are best treated as if they have high "curiosity value", but exactly zero monetary value. The project of finding significant monetary value in something that has always been an unmonetized mathematical recreation, honestly seems like a wildly improbably effort, like tilting at windmills or flapping your arms to fly. You have the right to make the effort anyway. It's just that it seems completely and clearly doomed to failure, so my advice would be for you to spend your time in other ways.

For example, you could see what response you get from a Kickstarter project set up to fund your CGoL research. That's a model where everyone's participation is strictly voluntary, and no one is doing anything that implicitly threatens anyone else with highly unpleasant court cases, as you have been doing in previous posts. I don't expect that a Kickstarter campaign will be particularly successful either, but my opinion is that it's significantly more viable than the suggestions you've made so far for monetization.

Once again, this is all just my own opinion, and I'm not demanding or expecting any work from you on any particular terms. I'd really appreciate it if you would stop accusing the community in general of being rude, for believing things that they may not in fact believe, or expecting and demanding things that they are not in fact expecting or demanding.

[andrewph33]

Nobody was in this sphere for the money for its first 50 years; even if it does turn out to be a good motivator for joiners in the future, I doubt they'll stick.

Would you buy a book? Or pay for a music?

Physical books, I have bought before, but only because of the paper that needs to be chopped for the pages. As for music, I look around on YouTube if they're a big artist.

I'm totally fine with physical memorabilia of CA like a grid of lights whose flickering corresponds to your very own glider gun shooting, I just don't think that a restrictive license of that glider gun itself would be ethical.

[simsim314]

For example, you could see what response you get from a Kickstarter project set up to fund your CGoL research.

The problem with such approach is that Kickstarter is made to sponsor future effort for money. It's harder to commit to something rather than release an existing work with license. I might try it out in any case, just saying that for me is less viable option. I might try it just to see what happens.

high "curiosity value", but exactly zero monetary value.

I don't believe such case is logically consistent.

The CA community has always been very, very respectful of intellectual property rights, in the sense that many people have put an absolutely huge amount of work over the years into maintaining attribution and credit for the discoverers of patterns.

Attribution is different from intellectual property.

and no one is doing anything that implicitly threatens anyone else with highly unpleasant court cases, as you have been doing in previous posts.

To be clear I was doing it in previous posts because mniemic was totally fine with this monetization model, stating that creators have a full right to demand a payment for their work. I was trying to show it's not a good model and it's not a pleasant reality to live in.

I don't expect that a Kickstarter campaign will be particularly successful either, but my opinion is that it's significantly more viable than the suggestions you've made so far for monetization.

There is no conceptual difference between kickstarting a project before is finished, and selling NFTs after it's done. If anything buying a kickstarter project you don't know if you support anything at all, while buying NFTs you support the final product and effort made by the artist, without restricting anyone to enjoy the result, yet still allowing the artist to get rewarded. This is basic recognition of effort put into the work - that's all. The fact that you and the rest of the community don't get this - forces me to act in less pleasant manners to explain my point. It actually makes 0 sense NFT would be less viable option for a finished product than getting just a promise from a Kickstarter. Not to mention that from a Kickstarter the best case scenario you will get the project done, and NFT is not only that you know the project is done, but you can gain some additional benefits from it. Logically speaking this is simply strictly better deal in any sense. But I know people are irrational creatures. Not sure I want to commit to a Kickstarter though.

[simsim314]

I just don't think that a restrictive license of that glider gun itself would be ethical.

Would it be ethical to download a pdf of copyrighted book?

[pcallahan]

CA patterns are mathematical entities, not property.

They are somewhere between artistic creation and software.

I made a similar comment already, but it depends on the pattern. Every digital object is a "mathematical entity" taken to extremes since it can be represented easily as a natural number and follows some rules in a mathematical system (e.g. an mp3 file simply encodes waveforms). I don't think that's a meaningful objection in itself.

Though I don't see how to answer this question in borderline cases, I would distinguish between whether a CGoL pattern is a consequence of Life rules (e.g. a queen bee shuttle) that has a reasonable chance of being discovered repeatedly, or a sufficiently complex assembly of such components (a p30-based computational unit) with a provenance that makes it clear it is the work of an inventor and unlikely to be duplicated without reference to the original. In the real world we also have very complex products of nature, such as human DNA sequences, which were eventually declared unpatentable. So far there is no Life ecology of sufficient scale to produce these.

Borderline cases could include search results that are unlikely to be duplicated without knowing the initial input (there might be glider syntheses in this category). We attribute these to the discoverer, but they're not an inventor (and "firsts" of even simple things can be attributed). I wouldn't call these inventions. I can understand someone attempting to claim proprietary rights in this case, though I would discourage it.

If someone wants to "sell" a more complex invention, there are a lot of ways to reverse engineer it. That can also be fought in court, but I doubt the stakes would ever be high enough to do so in this community.

[pcallahan]

On the subject of what kind of derived art I'd consider buying (hint: it doesn't include NFTs) I remember when lucite laser sculptures first appeared (or "bubblegrams" according to Wikipedia).

I don't even know if people still buy them or if it was a fad, but it seemed like an interesting way to capture a 3D series of Life generations. I never had the budget or time to look into what it takes to make a custom product like this. I generated some rough visualizations that I've since lost. I still think it would have appeal to enthusiasts with disposable income who may not work on CGoL but would find such an object attractive enough to display. (Is this wishful thinking?)

More generally, I don't have a problem creating marketable "art" from Life patterns. In fact, I think it would be a positive trend. But you need to add some kind of aesthetic or at least entertainment value. My problem with NFTs is not that they're commercial but that they're of no intrinsic value or lasting interest. It's a one joke thing like a pet rock. The joke is on the buyer. Even a glider made out of wood blocks is better.

NFTs remind me a lot of scam certificates to name a star after yourself. I mean, it would be hard to understate how much I hate the NFT idea in particular, and I do not come at it as a purist who refuses to make money from CGoL.

[simsim314]

As far as I can tell NFT - is just a code, an id engraved permanently in the blockchain that can be traded.

What you do with it, how you trade it - and what meaning it has to you, it's up to you to interpret.

Just like more traditional money in the bank are also just numbers that can be transferred from account to account. What is the meaning of the number transfers is up to the higher context to decide. The number transfer is just a technology.

The fact that in some communities the NFTs became something like a scam, a speculation, or a gambling - should not stop any other community to attribute the NFT to a value of a discovery, or to an effort of an artist. Actually it's very common interpretation of NFTs in many communities that support work of different artists. They are sometimes overhyped that's true, but I would guess most of the times - the NFTs do represent the value people hold of a work being done, and those anomalies of millions from NFTs get into headlines are pretty rare, but the basic concept remains the same, NFT is just a technology.

Dave brought up Kickstarter - would you rather pay for a Kickstarter before the project is finished than buy an NFT after it's done to support the artist?

[dvgrn]

Dave brought up Kickstarter - would you rather pay for a Kickstarter before the project is finished than buy an NFT after it's done to support the artist?

Just as a side note: you mentioned that Kickstarter is maybe a bit problematic because the model involves sponsoring future effort.

I thought that that might be a really good model for the kind of effort you're describing: at least you'd know in advance whether it was worth putting in the work, as opposed to putting in all the work in advance and then hoping for someone to pay you to license it, and/or doing a lot of extra work to market it well enough that a large receptive audience knows that you have the work to sell.

However, it should be possible to do the work in advance, and then run a campaign to hit some dollar target before making it available to everyone. Kickstarter, GoFundMe, whatever -- I think there are quite a few options available, but I'm not an expert. Making the work available to only your campaign sponsors seems like much less of a good idea, because it would again bring up the spectacularly nauseating idea of "ownership" of CA patterns, and the implied threat of court proceedings. It just seems to me that it's really really worth avoiding all appearance of making threats against the very same people that you're trying to convince to be customers, or contributors.

Maybe a Patreon model would be more appropriate -- I currently support a few creative artists on Patreon. Writers, mostly, but I could cheerfully add a small monthly donation for CGoL research, especially if lots of other people were on board with doing the same thing. I don't have anywhere near enough spare capital to make any difference by myself.

[simsim314]

Maybe a Patreon model would be more appropriate

Just like Kickstarter, patreon requires some commitment. I don't mind to use this model - for the community as a whole. i.e. using the money to reward the artists or getting patreons to vote on what pattern to work next.

The problem with all those models in general is that people used to work on the patterns when they are in the mood and at the time of their choice without any commitment, and when it's done - then it's done. Commitment will ruin the usual mode in which most people operate on these projects. It will definitely ruin mine. On the other hand some proper amount of monetary investment will allow hiring someone to do the more laborious work. Yet again pateron is not the best model for this - as this model is made to support continues work over time by growing community of supporters, not sponsoring singular discoveries or larger project spread over several years with breaks.

I see no conceptual reason why NFTs should not be the model - except some prejudice against them. To the contrary to your suggestions NFTs might also bring money from outside of narrow interest of CGOL/CA people. This is just a better model in all aspects, and more fitting the nature of projects and way of work that is being done here. Another advantage of NFTs is that they require very small initial investment, in the sense that if we would like to start monetizing the patterns it can be laughable low amount of money to start from. I mean 10-20 bucks could support all the NFTs minted by everyone and traded several times between the members. This would barely suffice for half hour of work of any developer.

So you basically suggesting trying sponsoring findings inside a small community, with narrow interest, and minimal viable product of several hundreds bucks at least which is way higher than sharing existing patterns in a trading community while several bucks would suffice to start rolling. Why? Cause you read in some news NFTs are a fraud or something. If you are willing to pay an artist for his art without any return at all - why are you rejecting the idea to do the same for NFT? This completely doesn't make sense to me. It's like you prefer to get nothing over getting NFT.

[dvgrn]

It's like you prefer to get nothing over getting NFT.

I do very strongly prefer getting nothing over getting the NFT proposal that you outlined above. I've written a lot of paragraphs about exactly why that is my preference. No point in repeating myself, I think.

I've spent two decades now working to help build the CA community, in various forms. To me your NFT proposal looks like a pointless distraction from the purpose of the community, and your commercial-license alternative looks like an absolute disaster. You haven't made the case successfully to me that either proposal would have any net benefit to the CA community, or even to yourself or any other individual. I tend to be much more worried that the opposite will be true, for both options. You don't have to convince me, of course, I'm not some Big Important CA Head Honcho or anything, but hopefully you can see that my concern is based on a perceived danger to something that I've personally invested a lot of time in.

You've repeated several times your very strong belief that NFTs in particular would be beneficial, and would not have any bad side effects, but you haven't given any particular evidence to back up that belief. How can you know for sure that NFTs would not be a distraction that will ultimately slow down the rate of discovery instead of increasing it? Honestly I don't see why either of our opinions should count for much -- neither of us has any particularly good credentials in the prophecy business.

Still, I think the whole subject is very much riskier than you have described it as being. You've outlined fairly clearly the obvious downsides of commercial licensing of CA patterns, apparently in an attempt to convince people to accept NFTs as a less-bad alternative. But I haven't seen anywhere where you've acknowledged the large burden of (unpaid, and much more importantly unwanted!) work that a shift toward NFTs would be likely to place on conwaylife.com maintainers and the community at large. Why should I choose a less-bad alternative that I don't actually believe will produce any reliable monetization anyway -- when I can instead vote for the system we have right now, which not surprisingly I really like, to the point where I've been actively encouraging it to continue for the last twenty years?

"Community Approval and Engagement"
A quick look back at, and quote from, your suggestion that started this whole discussion:

I came up with a design that have much of the NFT mechanics but can work to encourage CGOL pattern discovery.
...
3. The next step is to upload composed patterns (minting a new component) made from either a. components mined by you b. components bought from someone c. other composed components you own. Obviously with detailed "proof of source" and "proof of ownership" - i.e. providing the exact source of each component and validating you're the current rightful owner of all the used component, in the minted pattern.
...
6. Obviously this can't work without community approval and engagement.

Speaking for myself again, none of this would actually encourage me to do any "CGOL pattern discovery" -- exactly the opposite. It looks to me like a lot of very painful bureaucratic blockchain shuffling, which would take up a nonzero amount of my time and would very likely give me absolutely nothing that I value in return. I could be wrong, but that's my best guess at how it would turn out.

You mentioned needing "community approval and engagement" for NFTs. This is a very expensive thing to ask for -- not in terms of money, but in terms of the scarcity of the "engagement" resource. It's not an infinite, freely available resource, any more than your CGoL research time is. More engagement in NFTs is likely to mean less engagement in the community's current projects -- unless NFTs make the community grow substantially. However, every comment I've read so far suggests that if NFTs became a primary focus, the community would be much more likely to shrink substantially -- which of course is something I would much rather avoid.

[Book]

Agree (with dvgrn). This idea is an enormous can of ugly worms.