[niahmiah]

It's stupid at face value. No pyramid required. You cannot intrinsically link real world items to tokens. The source of truth is the real world, not the token.

Add an unlimited supply of unique things, and how could anyone expect to make money from this?

[Nextgrid]

> You cannot intrinsically link real world items to tokens. The source of truth is the real world, not the token.

This is also why every project do to X but with blockchain (like solving counterfeiting/authenticity, copyright, etc) is either stupid or a con using a buzzword to try and solicit investment or media attention.

The reason blockchains work for cryptocurrencies is because the source of truth is the blockchain itself. This breaks down in the real world where the state of the real world is the source of truth and you'd need a trusted, centralized entity to bridge the two worlds, but at this point why use a blockchain instead of a database if you're going to trust a single entity anyway?

[Alex3917]

Blockchain doesn’t need to make it impossible to counterfeit real-world items to be useful, it just needs to reduce counterfeiting levels by reducing the profitability. It’s more than capable of doing that. If you can only sell at most one counterfeit item per authentic item, that’s already a multi-trillion dollar innovation.

[Nextgrid]

I still can't see how a blockchain here would do something that a database wouldn't. A DB of authentic serial numbers with a way to mark them as claimed is all you need. If your new widget's serial is already marked as claimed on the manufacturer's website then you most likely have a counterfeit, no blockchain necessary.

[rdiddly]

Well, all you need is an immutable write-only (edit: append-only) database. Which is the one thing a blockchain actually is.

[TomSwirly]

But a very very very slow such database, one that uses insane quantities of memory and energy.

[delaaxe]

I think you mean append only. Blockchains are immutable thus not writeable

[rdiddly]

Whoops, yes

[ses1984]

What if you want to sell your thing?

Who is hosting this db?

[ojr]

Somebody always host the NFT image, it can be taken down from ipfs or from a cloud service like s3 at any moment. Also NFT are only worth something because someone provides a frontend to serve the "NFT metadata".

NFTs are essentially sleek frontend UIs mixed in with a speculative volatile currency less juridicial than dollars. It also helps that blockchain assets led by bitcoin are in a bull run.

The innovation is now a company like Dapper Labs can provide a marketplace like NBA Topshot providing a digital experience with licensed content. This digital experience can be traded using Paypal but using a traditional method comes with tradeoffs. Dapper Labs created an in-house blockchain called Flow. The benefits of a blockchain is it is harder for double spends to occur. Blockchain makes it hard for race conditions to occur when the source of truth is distributed among computers in a network.

It would be easier to make a database of hash values but traditional databases are less transparent than blockchains. Blockchains are too expensive. Some digital experiences are worth it, most probably aren't, enough people care about the frontend.

[SCHiM]

You are, as a saas I think.

I mean, this gives you all the control, you can charge for all sorts of services and "value adds". There's no reason you, as the maker of this software, would want this available as a block chain.

Unless you also create a token and start having people speculate on your anti-counterfeiting blockchain?

That's what it looks like to me anyway.

[ses1984]

I am not really following you. The appeal of an nft is that it doesn't rely on a saas, it doesn't rely on a trusted third party that needs up time that needs to be available in the future.

Jacob Collier tried to sell an nft that granted lifetime access to his concerts.

The appeal of such an nft is that it can be traded independently of any third party, on the open market.

Of course it depends on Jacob's promise to honor it.

He went back on it when people raised environmental issues.

[scotty79]

Databse dies with company that set it up. And companies die all the time.

[whateveracct]

NBA Topshot is already worthless without the express written consent of the NBA.

NBA Topshot would be better served by a DB. The NFT part is there for hype.

[fock]

opensource the database (just as dying companies should opensource repair manuals and signing keys - have fun with your blockchain-authenticated John Deere). and regularly archive the state hash in a public archive.

[scotty79]

I wonder why e-gold didn't just opensource their database.

[phroobster]

Sounds like a lot of work. Not sure why you think that is superior to simply using a blockchain.

[IgorPartola]

I have a bicycle. I sell you the NFT for that bicycle. I then sell the bicycle to my neighbor. How did that work out?

[WJW]

That seems like a suboptimal fraud. Why not sell a thousand different NFTs on the same bike?

[dragontamer]

For even better efficiency, sell the NFTs to yourself to pump the last sold price to $10,000+, with cryptocoin proof that the "last buyer" thought the price was worth $10,000.

[Pyrodogg]

Is it even a fraud? What rights does holding the NFT give to the source object?

[Y_Y]

The NFT itself is the fraud.

[Alex3917]

10x better than you selling 10 bicycles. Your example actually demonstrates why blockchain is hugely valuable.

[IgorPartola]

Want to buy an NFT to my bicycle? $100 will do it. Comes with no rights and I may sell a similar NFT to others.

[bsenftner]

And you fundamentally do not understand NFTs. It is perfectly fine and acceptable and within the contract of the NTF for the owner of the physical item to sell said physical item separate from that item's NFT. They are separate assets. An NTF was never said to represent the physical object, the NTF represents itself as the unique only NFT representing the physical object, but the two are wholly separate independent things. The owner and/or transfer of ownership of the physical object has no relation to the NFT beyond the claim of it being the one and only NFT of that physical object. The entire concept is a grifter's game for fools.

[kerng]

It's not linking to real world items, but to digital assets.

But it doesn't really.

I learned the other day that NFT standards don't even store a hash of the digital asset.

So, ransomware will wipe out a lot of NFTs one day, because the blockchain smart contracts dont know (have any cryptographic proof) what digital asset they hold.

Herr an article that was posted the other day: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2021/broken-nft-standar...

[mc32]

Pyramid scheme or Money Laundering instrument?

In any event I can’t see authorities keeping a blind eye on this.

[mysterydip]

That was my thought on it. What easier way to launder money than with virtual items of arbitrary value? "Man pays thousands for bicycle tire" would raise many eyebrows. "Man pays thousands for NFT picture of bicycle tire" just makes people laugh and shake their heads.

[hprotagonist]

https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/7y3cdi/cmv_mo...

why bother with involving a computer and a hard to modify paper trail?

[orwin]

Its easier, and you can lauder the money across millions of NFTs.

[bradleyjg]

It takes authorities a long time to catch up. We still have ransomware attacks despite authorities having all the tools necessary to shut off the payment channels.

[curation]

They keep a blind eye on superyachts.

[Havoc]

>You cannot intrinsically link real world items to tokens.

Patents & trademarks?

[gus_massa]

There is only one patent office per country and one trademark office per country. (It may be more complicated.) And if you ignore the patent/trademark office in your country, they can call some people with tanks to go to your home and ask nicely to follow the patent/trademark rules. (It may be more complicated.)

And there are rules about how the trademarks/patents from one country applies in other countries. (IIRC you must fill some paperwork in every country, but copyright is similar and easier to extend globally.)

Anyway, everyone can create a new chain of NFT, so the same object can be NFTed in many blockchains. Specially because some NFT implementations don't even ask if you are the creator of the digital object.

[maxerickson]

Not blockchain tokens.

The interesting facets all come from the legal consequences of ignoring them, not the serial number or whatever.

[arcturus17]

Those are (a) very heavily regulated by definition and (b) means to an end, which is to create societal good, ie, foster innovation (I don’t want to argue whether that’s actually the case - I’m just taking the statu quo position)

Could one say the same about tokens?

[adnzzzzZ]

Yes. a) is very heavily regulated by the chain/protocol used to make the tokens work and b) would be to introduce scarcity to digital items, which possibly creates good and fosters innovation (I similarly don't want to argue whether that will actually be the case) in fields which benefit from scarcity.

[TomSwirly]

> is very heavily regulated by the chain/protocol

That's not what "regulated" means. There is no enforcement, so you can simply copy the work and the "chain/protocol" does nothing.

[ben_w]

b isn’t the case, because a is entirely self-referential. Anyone can any any time create a new private key, so you can only trust things signed with private keys you already trust. That trust can be another private key signing it, but ultimately the foundation of the trust is in the physical world where someone can lock you up for breaking rules.

I’m equivocating if this is the is/ought problem or the Münchhausen trilemma, kinda feels like both.

[adnzzzzZ]

In the case of artists the foundation of the trust relies on the fact that the token is only valuable if it comes from the artist. This doesn't involve locking anyone up, as tokens created by people who aren't the artists are simply ignored since they inherently have no value.

There's no reason to assume that in other domains what you said should be the case more often than what I said if we both don't know the details of said domains.

[lokedhs]

But how do you prove that the artist was the one who issued the NFT?

[piva00]

What kinds of innovation are we talking about?

[_huayra_]

With NFTs it's just like getting rid of the "shackles" of a government-controlled fiat currency: you no longer can rely on the guns and legal system of that country to enforce any sort of exclusivity.

[ben_w]

The extent that you can or cannot trust the guns and legal system of your country is utterly unchanged. They, for any value of “they”, can still roll up to your door, point a gun at you, and order you to do stuff with your tokens. If “they” have legal powers, sucks to be you; if “they” are criminals, you have the same opportunities as before to use the law to recover your assets.

[manojlds]

But NFTs can also be for digital items, which is where I was first introduced to them - like cryptokitties and other games.

[setpatchaddress]

In games, you have the thing of value itself. It’s not an NFT just because it’s digital.

[manojlds]

But how do you sell it to someone else?

[delaaxe]

NFTs are not meant for physical items, they’re digital certificates.

People literally burnt a Banksy painting before auctioning its NFT.

[PragmaticPulp]

So now we have no Banksy painting but someone has a crypto token that says “This represents a Banksy painting” in the code?

Since there’s nothing to own or even point to, what’s stopping a second party from claiming they actually have the original Banksy NFT and selling their own? Just the time stamps on the blockchain?

What a miserable destruction of real art to profit on a trading frenzy.

[phailhaus]

Yup. You understand NFTs. You are not paying for the product, because once it's minted into an NFT, it's right there in public for anyone to copy; so it can't be used to do things like protect digital art. What you're actually paying for is the ability to say "this person _definitely_ gave me this item". That's still potentially useful in some use cases, like proof-of-ownership of software or tickets, but the way it's being branded as "wow you can own a banksy on the blockchain" is absolute garbage. Somebody actually paid millions of dollars just to be able to say "the artists that burned a banksy gave me this scanned jpeg."

[skyzadev]

Private keys are what's stopping other people from selling unauthentic NFTs for the same thing.

[PragmaticPulp]

Private keys don't verify that an NFT was authorized by the owners of the painting. You're still relying on real-world trust and claims that the NFT you're buying was the "real" NFT.

If the owners of the Banksy came out a few days later and claimed that someone else sold a fake Banksy NFT, but they're now going to sell the real NFT, the private keys won't help.

[skyzadev]

I am not sure why I got down votes here. If you are buying a NFT for an artwork that is not confirmed to have been created by the author of that artwork then surely you are just stupid?

Only Banksy can mint an NFT for his artwork for it to be of ANY value. The same way that only Banksy can create Banksy art.

Public-private key encryption is how you verify that something was signed by the original author.

[Bootvis]

How does that work, what links a private key to an object in such a way another private key can't be linked as well?

[_huayra_]

It's the same problem that always comes into play for crypto: either people have to accept the crypto as currency (which almost no institution that must buy things and pay taxes can do; the IRS doesn't accept bitcoin...) or there have to be gatekeepers to interact with the blockchain.

This can either be a crypto exchange (regulated on conversion to fiat, lest they get shut down by some SEC thing) or on those "vote on the blockchain" or "verified supply chain on the blockchain" things: eventually some non-blockchain entity has to be trusted enough to set state on the blockchain (e.g. "party A did indeed fulfill the contract to party B. please fulfill this smart contract", or "your food ingredient was prepared in accordance to your green/bio label's requirements").

[mortehu]

Excuse my ignorance, because I haven't looked into NFTs too carefully, but how do you decide which blockchain (or even block) is authoritative for a given item? Seems like something like a painting could be sold on an unlimited number of chains? If it's time priority (oldest wins), what's preventing miners from copying artwork from slower chains before they're included in a block?

[delaaxe]

The buying decision originates from the content creator, who will tell you which ones are from him.

NFTs sold on other chains are akin to copies of the Mona Lisa: worthless

[EMM_386]

Good question.

There seem to be ... quite a lot of them.

https://coinmarketcap.com/nfts/

[maxerickson]

Certificate is a pretty fancy word for a blob of json with an ephemeral url.

[mrleinad]

So they not only destroyed art, but also wasted energy on creating the NFT, adding to global warming.

If there's anything that's not absolute evil in all that, I fail to see it.

[IAmGraydon]

Evil? No I don’t think so. I believe the correct word is idiotic.

[delaaxe]

This is not the first time art is destroyed upon purchase. Long before NFTs, a painting (banksy?) was shredded right after auction.

Not sure if anyone called that evil or idiotic

[zepto]

It was only partially shredded.

Nothing was actually destroyed, and the partially shredded artwork was a new artwork in its own right.

[bsenftner]

I'm sorry, but respectfully, you don't understand the modern art world: the destruction of the physical object and the creation of the NFT was, in this specific instance, the work of art itself. The art world has taken "meta" to extreme dimensions Internet Culture will not realize, perhaps ever.

[dmingod666]

True - if banana with tape is art. You are already deep into lala land. NFT is atleast sane and consistent on some level.

I mean aren't works of art exactly NFT in real life. Sometimes they also happen to look pretty to look at seems to be a archiach byproduct.

Look, if it's okay to buy limited edition numbered tins with the feces of an artist for 300k then it means anything goes. I don't understand where all these "Destroyed with Facts and Logic" people are coming from.

Its clown world out there already. Maybe, you're just too old to like the new clowns. Nothing wrong about that.

[zepto]

Ok - but that piece of art is done now.

NFTs are no longer original and so are not art.

[CryptoPunk]

Please, stop calling any non-essential use of energy that you're looking to smear, "evil". Are movies, which consume energy in their production and consumption, also evil? Video games? No, because you personally see the entertainment they provide as redeeming?

If people want to expend their own resources on NFTs, that's entirely their right to do so, and calling it evil because the process consumed energy is absurd.

If you have a problem with CO2 emission, by all means advocate for laws requiring energy production to not emit CO2 as a by-product. But to single out some non-essential activity that you personally don't like because of the imagined motives of those behind it, while ignoring every other non-essential activity that uses energy, is disingenuous and irresponsible.

[JPKab]

I really resent the community of grifters like yourself constantly pushing the stuff and defending its excesses.

I recently saw Twitter thread where a big pusher of NFTs was moaning on about how the real issue is we didn't create enough nuclear power plants and now we're blaming NFTs for this.

It's blatantly obvious that this is all a pyramid scheme capitalizing on people's complete ignorance and optimism with crypto. Enjoy your pyramid scheme and I hope you make out like a bandit and eventually develop a conscience for the people you're grifting.

[StevePerkins]

I don't think parent is promoting NFT's.

I think he or she is saying that "climate change" is a ridiculously hyperbolic attack vector. And they're right. Of all the idiotic aspects there are to NFT's, Ethereum energy consumption may not crack the Top 100.

[CryptoPunk]

That has nothing to do with my point, which is that by no reasonable standard, can the people producing/buying/selling NFTs be singled out as "evil" for contributing to global warming.

You're obviously getting overly emotional, and throwing whatever you can at the people involved in cryptocurrency ("they're evil for using energy") to see what sticks.

I reiterate, it's a reckless and disingenuous way to conduct oneself, regardless of whether the underlying grievances motivating the hostility have merit.

[rdiddly]

This is basically a "what about" argument but in this case it does illustrate something valid. There are lots of things that benefit a segment of people and harm everyone. One I happen to notice regularly because I don't have one, is cars. They not only contribute massively to climate change; they also directly kill ~35,000 people annually in the US. Yet cars are beloved, sacred, unassailable to a majority of Americans. Are those people evil? No one alive can throw the word evil around without implicating oneself. The whole concept is just a religious overlay designed to try and mitigate a bunch of much older and ubiquitous human behaviors that suddenly became disruptive after we took up agriculture and settled in villages. (Which by the way, was itself "evil" in that it enabled a few to feed themselves, by taking land from "everyone" or at least all hunter-gatherers, and destroying the natural habitat that the land contained.)

[WJW]

Still a waste though, you could easily have auctioned the NFT without burning the original.

[koonsolo]

Real world item (person): Honus Wagner

Link item: 1909 T206 baseball card

Value: $2 million

Why don't you start printing these baseball cards and sell them?

Ha, but you say the baseball card is a real physical item, and a NFT is not. Well, an NFT is as real as the movie I watch on YouTube, the song I listen to on Spotify, and the numbers my bank shows.

But now you say the baseball card was part of a game, and so it's value is not from the person but from the collection game itself. Well, a lot of NFT's are also part of a collectible game.

Would love to hear the difference between a "physical" item and a "digital" item, or a "physical link to a physical item" or a "digital link to a physical (or digital) item".

[bradleyjg]

> Ha, but you say the baseball card is a real physical item, and a NFT is not. Well, an NFT is as real as the movie I watch on YouTube, the song I listen to on Spotify, and the numbers my bank shows.

It’s not an issue of realness. Of course an NFT is real, it’s a long number and is just as real as 3 or PI or any other number.[1] The issue is instead ownership. When I own a baseball card I have a physical card no one can take from my house/vault/whatever without the police getting involved. When I own the copyright to a movie I can choose to let other people watch it or not.

When I own an NFT it means there’s a blockchain somewhere that says I own a particular number. As long as the blockchain is still in existence I can prove that the blockchain says I own the number and I can transfer that number to you.

That’s not exactly nothing but it’s pretty darn close. It smells like a scam. You do raise a good point that it smells like a scam in the same way that a lot of consciously created collectibles do. Once comic books, baseball cards, or stamp producing nations started pushing their products as something people should buy because they’d appreciate in value they started to feel a lot scummier (and not conincidently the items in question rarely increased in value the way organic collectibles had.)

So, sure if you can get someone to pay you a lot of money for the “ownership” of some 256 digit number in some blockchain somewhere by claiming it represents the star Vega, as long as you don’t lie I suppose it shouldn’t be a crime. But you can’t expect the rest of us to respect the way you’ve chosen to make a living. You are going to get downvotes because you are promoting a disreputable activity.

[1] Hope you appreciate the effort it took not to make a math joke here.

[koonsolo]

Downvotes without any discussion.

Unfortunately getting used to that for crypto topics on HN.

[EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK]

Millennials just don't understand ... world is becoming digital very fast.

[rdiddly]

I will happily ignore NFTs, but look at money itself - it's a token too. It was supposed to represent and be coupled to real-world productive activity, but clearly there are many cases where the two have become decoupled. A price can be below the intrinsic worth of the item, and can be almost arbitrarily high. The source of truth is supposedly the item, the productive work that went into it, but in a heavily financialized economy, a lot of people make more money from mere price fluctuations than from productive activity.

[rory]

It does seem really stupid, but I don't see how it's substantively different than (also stupid-seeming) physical collectibles like baseball cards or Bearbricks. The supply of the "special" versions of those two collectibles is also constrained in a totally artificial manner.

[stephen_g]

At least you actually own a real object in that case. Not a token with a link to a JPEG that may disappear from wherever it’s hosted eventually...

[danaris]

At least if you have a really rare baseball card,

a) You have the physical card. It is in your possession, and the only way for you to lose it is for something physical to happen to it.

b) You can look at and enjoy the card in its physicality. You can show it to others, and the only reason that is the case is that it is physically in your possession.

Contrast that with NFTs, where all you "own" is the idea of owning a thing. If the thing your particular NFT says you own is a digital image, anyone can still see that image, and it can be deleted from the internet without your permission or any warning. You lose the exclusivity that's the main draw of owning something rare and special, and you don't have any practical control over the thing either.

[rory]

I guess, but if the point is interacting with the physical card, why are "counterfeit" cards worthless? Can't you interact with them in the exact same way as the "real" baseball card the counterfeit is copying? It seems like the value is all in the idea of owning one instance of a limited run.

[Hamuko]

>why are "counterfeit" cards worthless?

They're not worthless, they're worth less. I could easily hang up a counterfeit Mona Lisa on my wall and get a kick out of it. And if I stop getting a kick out of it, I can put it on Craigslist for $100 afterwards.

Of course, there's absolutely no history behind the painting as it wasn't painted by the renaissance man. No one would pay to see it because it would be about as significant as a JPEG of the Mona Lisa. However, that doesn't mean that it's worthless. Even that JPEG can make for a good phone wallpaper.

[rory]

Right, but in the case we're talking about (baseball cards), the counterfeit is worth WAY less. I'd guess it's worth about as much as a JPEG of it sized to be a phone wallpaper. Maybe a dollar.

[koffiezet]

One of the problems is that by definition, digital assets can be replicated at a virtual zero-cost. There is no "original" copy to be owned, since a digital asset that is uploaded is already a copy of a copy of a copy of some bits. If it happens to be an image or movie, and you open it in your browser, you're already looking at a copy. A baseball card that was produced in the 60's cannot be reproduced atom-for-atom. And there is an original mona lisa. Sure you can have a copy or picture of the mona lisa on your wall, but that will remain just that: a copy. But in the digital world, EVERYTHING is a copy. So what exactly is it that you own with an NFT?

Ownership is based on the ability to have something tangible of a limited supply, but as I established before, digital assets can be freely copied. What are you trying to do? Artificially limiting this? Trying to push through a completely new idea of 'ownership'?

The only thing owning an NFT gives you is bragging rights of a perceived ownership. But if I say "I don't recognize this NFT proving anything", copy your asset, reproduce it and sell it somehow, you can't stop me. You claim to own some bits and claim to be able to prove that, but I can just ignore that completely, since there is zero legal grounds for this.

This is why it is absolutely moronic in my mind to have an 'ownership' idea on digital assets. It's already bad enough in online games to have in-game assets, which is in a walled-garden, under control of the company making the game, so yeah, there they can do this, it adds some perceived value. But to actively introduce this concept in an open digital world sounds absolutely crazy, counter-productive and conceptually against everything my ideal version of the internet would be: open and free as in beer.

[flycaliguy]

What if in the future we have virtual reality merging more into our lives. In that world it would be different, having the real deal asset would be valuable.

[koffiezet]

Only of someone artificially limits the "supply" and the use.

[NohatCoder]

The climate impact of baseball cards is significantly lower.

It turns out that when you take stupid and scale it up massively, it becomes even more stupid.

[lottin]

The difference is that when you buy a collectible you get a collectible. When you buy an NFT you get a meaningless number.

[arebop]

You can teleport it around the world and you can prove its authenticity mathematically. But it lacks the romance of tangible artifacts.

[dmingod666]

Do you notice how many of your real world identities are linked to an entry in a database? How much of your assets are entries in a database.

What is missing is centralization and consensus of validity, db entries linking to the real world is done everyday.

[cosmodisk]

I'm sure all the new marketplaces facilitating it are making tons of it right now.

[cifu69]

the source of true is always concensous. the best example i can give you es bitcoin. nevertheless seeing NFTs as non-physical is also not true, every thing that operates in the blockchain is sustend onto de nodes thoso nodes are sustend by computers, and those computers are physical. it doesnt matter wheather fot the computers are 1s and 0s and the end of the day they are link to the reality

[Paradigma11]

Why would you not be able to attach certain rights to tokens that you mint and sell?

[arbitrage]

This felt really scammy to me. Like straight out of the grifters' handbook.

[spacemanmatt]

Beeple did pretty well

[graeme]

Beeple’s business partner bought the NFT. We have no idea how much went to Beeple. All we know if Christie’s got $9 million.

[CryptoPunk]

Source on Beeple's business partner buying it?

[y-satellite]

https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beepl...

Particularly the "Number Go Up" section, which shows that the buyer also runs (and owns a majority of) a crypto token called "B20", which curiously enough, Beeple also has a 2% stake in.

[CryptoPunk]

That's not proof of them being business partners.

[markkat]

A house is linked to a title. The title is a paper token.

[bradleyjg]

That proves too much. There’s nothing inherent in the paper that grants any rights and privileges. It’s the legal system that does that. A digital token is either meaningless (if the legal system doesn’t recognize it) or massive overkill (if the legal system treats it the same as a wet signature).

[_huayra_]

It's not only the legal system, but the military / police components of a country that enforce private property too.

[markkat]

The legal system will recognize it, and attribution protocols are being built. Removing middlemen like title companies is an efficiency, not overkill.

[bradleyjg]

Title companies are fading away with the advent of digital land registries (using plain old boring databases).

As usual for “like X but with a blockchain” this is a solution in search of a problem. Because despite all the protestations to the contrary the real motivation for crypto is not providing useful goods or services in exchange for reasonable compensation, it is getting rich by being an early adopter.

[ceejayoz]

I can take the title to a court and say “this proves that house is mine, give it back”.

[smitty1e]

Mostly agree, but 'value' is a social construct, and as long as there is a subsequent rube, then NFTs will be NiFTy.

[ddeyar]

So you say that ownership should be kept in physical contracts? There are usecases when you are the owner of something which is not in your physical possession. I don't care about that NFT stuff, collectible can make sense or not. What bothers me is to do it with so much energy consumption. When you are attracted to lose money, then just do it environment friendly. https://medium.com/tqtezos/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake-t... Tezos has what it needs for that. NFTs on Tezos: https://kalamint.io/ https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/ Minting a NFT costs about 1 cent

[PragmaticPulp]

NFTs don’t sell ownership. They sell NFTs.

It’s like creating a contract that sells the contract itself. Then maybe you stamp a photo of Michael Jordan on the cover and call it a Michael Jordan contract, even though the contract doesn’t give the buyer any rights to anything Michael Jordan related, except the contract itself.

Then you can go out and make more Michael Jordan contracts, because there’s nothing in the first contract stopping you from making more.

So yes, actual ownership must be done with real physical contracts still if you want to enforce things in the real world. NFTs can only enforce things within the NFT itself, which is useless for real-world ownership.

[ddeyar]

The contract would give the buyer rights to use the content. When I'm the owner of a physical Picasso then I have the right to sell t-shirts with the motive on it. If someone else would do that, I could sue him. The same idea is behind this NFT hype, you buy the right to use the content. As far as I understand it.

[Pyrodogg]

It's theoretically possible that the contract could be structured in such a way that "The bearer of this token has rights X, Y, Z over this real or intellectual property", but that's definitely not what is being hyped right now.

More commonly, people are just buying an authenticated digital asset which confers no rights over the source material.

For example, An artist could sell unsigned instances of their digital art as .JPG files, and they could sell authenticated copies as NFT.

In both cases, you get a copy of the art. In neither case are you getting an implicit copyright to the work that would allow you to redistribute the work.

[PragmaticPulp]

NFTs don't transfer real-world rights. They only transfer the NFT itself.

You could potentially create a real-world contract that ties ownership of the real-world asset to whoever holds the NFT, but that would introduce real-world legal issues like voiding the NFT in the event that it was transferred fraudulently and so on.

It seems a lot of people have been misled into believing that NFTs are something they're not. NFTs are like a special URL that points to some other content. You can trade that URL, but the content being pointed to still exists separately.

[ddeyar]

Thanks for this conversation. It is truly very misleading. There is no implicit copyright. There are mentions about ownership and also contradictions. This generalization I made, was wrong.

[TomSwirly]

I want to comment you on your very good attitude here.

(And yes, it's just baffling that people pay for these NFTs when they really get nothing out of them.)

[Bjartr]

I think the picasso analogy is flawed. Works by picasso prior to about 1926 are in the public domain, works afterwards are still under copyright. There's nothing about the sale of an original piece that inherently transfers copyright, it depends on the terms of the transfer.

You can buy original animation cells from Disney movies, but try to resell that image commercially and you're probably gonna have a bad time.

AFAICT, NFTs are orthagonal to copyright. But it gets confusing because at least some sellers of NFTs are purposely trying to mislead, by omission if nothing else.