[Judgmentality]

> And just as there's only one original Mona Lisa, there's only one original NFT of the Mona Lisa

I apologize if I'm misunderstanding, but can't you create as many NFTs of the Mona Lisa as you want? What's to stop someone from just creating a second one, even the original owner of the Mona Lisa? You can't copy the Mona Lisa (at least not in such a way as to call it the original), but you can make another NFT of the real Mona Lisa and...as far as I can tell it's just as good.

I realize you can't copy the chain that's already descended from the first NFT, but why does that matter? You can still say this is a genuine NFT for the real Mona Lisa, and the problem is you can make as many of those as you want. Or at least that's how I understand it.

Copying something digital is very different from copying something molecular. A digital copy is as good as the original. A molecular copy is almost certainly possible to distinguish, and if you can't you may as well not have an original.

[nostrademons]

My understanding is that the NFT also contains a hash of the work that it represents, so there really is only one of a given digital work. You can create another NFT of a different digitization, but there's still distinguishing factors between them that would make one "better" than the other (higher resolution, maybe, or more ubiquitous file format). Also over time a particular digitizations' status of being the first gives it its own legitimacy, unless the environment changes in a way that makes competing ones significantly more convenient.

It's sort of like the forking problem for cryptocurrencies in general. Anyone can fork the Bitcoin code and say they made a new cryptocurrency, and many people have done exactly that (Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, Bitcoin ABC). In practice, the fork tends to die out, because much of a cryptocurrency's value is in who agrees that it's valuable, and there's a big first-mover advantage there.

[lordnacho]

An NFT is basically a number in a smart contract. Through the ERC721 (there are others) interface, you can ask the smart contract which address owns that particular number. So, "contract 0xdeadbeef... , who owns 123456 ? It's owned by 0xabcdef..."

This is totally fine, but keep in mind someone could deploy an identical contract to a different address, which also has a 123456 in it, which is also owned by 0xabcdef. You'd have to be careful when you're checking the ownership that you're checking everything. I could imagine an unscrupulous person saying "Look, I sent you 123456, it's in your address, see?" and then absconding.

[bko]

> My understanding is that the NFT also contains a hash of the work that it represents, so there really is only one of a given digital work

I've never heard that before. Can someone confirm this is true? Is it solving for a hash of the original digitization of the work or something?

[clpm4j]

My understanding is that John can take a picture/jpg of the Mona Lisa, mint an ERC-20 token and sell his picture/jpg on a NFT marketplace. Jane can also take a picture/jpg of the Mona Lisa, mint an ERC-20 token and sell her picture/jpg on a NFT marketplace. I think the difference shows up when Jack Dorsey mints a screenshot of his first tweet and sells it, it's worth $2m because it's sold by Jack. Whereas I could screenshot Jack's first tweet, mint it and sell it for $0.01 because it's sold by me.

Very happy to be corrected if this is incorrect.

[Judgmentality]

This is also my understanding, and my point was (in this example) Jack Dorsey can just do it a second time, and a third time, and so on.

And it's not like Monet making more paintings, because each painting is unique. This is an identical digital copy from the same person, with no guarantee of its longevity.

[aboodman]

Both of these statements are true:

- An NFT can (should) include a hash of the work

- Multiple NFTs can exist pointing to the same hash.

However:

> And it's not like Monet making more paintings, because each painting is unique.

Each NFT is also unique in the sense that each NFT itself has an address and its own history. They are distinguishable. They are orderable.

> This is an identical digital copy from the same person, with no guarantee of its longevity.

The record has a guaranteed longevity - the longevity of the underlying blockchain. The object it points to obviously does not.

However that's not really important. Building records in the city clerk office have a guaranteed longevity that is far greater than the buildings themselves.

So for example, if Jack minted multiple NFTs for the same tweet it would be clear to everyone which one was first. Only the first one would presumably be considered valuable.

If Jack attached IP rights to those NFTs, courts would presumably only consider the first valid.

I personally find NFTs that lack actual legal property rights to be silly and valueless, but I wanted to address confusion about how they actually work.

[Judgmentality]

> So for example, if Jack minted multiple NFTs for the same tweet it would be clear to everyone which one was first. Only the first one would presumably be considered valuable.

That's not how I see it at all. Once Jack has been shown to be willing to oversell himself just to make a quick buck, it will immediately devalue everything associated with him, including the original NFT. You're buying into the quality/credibility/longevity of the creator here, and once it's shown he's a shill there's not much reason to value any of his original "work" highly.

I am open to being wrong, but it still boggles my mind anybody could think NFTs are anything other than a scam. At least bitcoin had lots of legitimate theory to be used as an alternative to currency, even if it only ended up being an investment alternative for gold. An NFT is like trying to sell art without actually having to create art.

[rideontime]

It's not.