[theshadowknows]

I used to come onto HN and see crypto-coin news and I'd jump into the comments and ask something along the lines of "But isn't bitcoin and all the other things like it just a giant scam?" and someone who believed in Bitcoin to be a transformative technology would jump in and explain the real potential. I personally still think it's sort of a scam, but I'm happy for all of the people who used it to get rich....so, along those lines...

How is "NFT" not a gigantic scam? I'm looking at this image right now: https://rarible.com/token/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118a18...

There is nothing at all to keep me from screenshotting or otherwise downloading that image. I won't have to pay the author $213 for it, I just take the image because I can. Now I won't necessarily "be the original owner" of it or whatever but....I mean....I have the same image as the owner and I have $213 where the new "owner" simply has the image.....

Can someone, if such a person exists, that believes in NFT's as having actual value please explain it? It just seems to me like a few thousand people have realized "Hey people will literally give me $200 just because I told them to" and are doing it at scale....

And according to that website, so far the author of those "NFT"s has made 13 million dollars......Is that true? If this person has made 13 million dollars because they drew a few monkeys....I'm pretty sure they will be President of the US one day.

[kashyapc]

I'll quote this response[1] from the other day's thread:

"Imagine a world where all or most of our interactions are in the digital realm. When you wake up in this place you are naked, cannot show anyone anything about yourself, but you are very rich. Now how do you show others that you are rich? Simple, you buy Gucci NFT clothes that other naked peasants can see. That's what's happening."

Someone in the thread elaborated:

"Nah... it's much worse: you're buying a banner that hangs over your head saying 'I own Gucci clothes', but you're still naked."

Elsewhere, a colleague of mine (also an artist) elaborated still further:

"Even worse: the person you bought the banner from can set fire to it at any time and you'll be left with nothing."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29160040 ("NFT's aren't the answer to the problems of digital art")

[Cthulhu_]

You get a certificate of ownership for your clothes - but you don't actually hold that certificate, it's a digital record in some database.

I mean, it's as valuable as what others believe it's worth, and like any common object with the word 'supreme' on it, there's people who consider these things valuable.

[nefitty]

The best analogy I've heard is, "Imagine you spent $1,000 for a painting. Now, instead, imagine you spent $1,000 to buy the receipt."

[ASalazarMX]

And any other person can have an identical painting, but without the receipt.

NFTs are a scam to introduce artificial scarcity and make someone else pay for it. The "art" (speaking of the picture in the root comment) hardly has any value itself.

[metters]

I agree, but also have to add: Does any (normal, non digital) art (say picture or sculpture) have any value itself? Besides the value of the material of course.

[nybble41]

That last point ("can set fire to it at any time") is wrong, at least for the many NFTs which use decentralized content-addressed hosting such as IPFS. Or even without the hosting, as long as the NFT identifies the content in sufficient detail—a hash is best but a plain-English description can also work. You just need to save the content yourself so it doesn't disappear if the original host shuts down. No matter what the seller does you'll still have your certificate.

I mostly agree regarding the limited practical value of most art NFTs, but then you could say the same about signed & numbered physical prints which are otherwise indistinguishable from their unsigned/unnumbered (but cheaper) equivalents—yet people pay a premium for those too.

NFTs are pretty general, so one could associate them with licensing or something like a VIP / backstage pass or rewards club membership. In the absence of these things, however, what you're mostly buying is the digital equivalent of the artist's autograph. Which isn't exactly nothing, but I still have a hard time justifying the prices many of these NFTs trade at.

[chrisco255]

Yes, you can screenshot the Mona Lisa or print out a signed Mickey Mantle rookie card, but it's not the same thing is it? The verifiable timestamp and record of account associated with a wallet address (public key) that is known to be associated with the artist that produced the work is the same as establishing physical provenance for a unique item.

And as for value goes, NFTs are far more liquid than physical art works because settlement is instant, provenance is simply a matter of inspecting transaction history (no need for counterparties such as Sotheby's), the market is worldwide, it's a composeable asset that can be used with other games, apps, etc., it can be used as an authentication token for exclusive access to software or physical events, etc. But never underestimate the value of liquidity.

[PragmaticPulp]

> The verifiable timestamp and record of account associated with a wallet address (public key) that is known to be associated with the artist that produced the work is the same as establishing physical provenance for a unique item.

Not really. In your Mona Lisa example, an NFT would be more like a blockchain based ticket to the Louvre that has a link to a Mona Lisa JPEG.

That’s the mismatch in NFT discussions: The believers have been convinced that the NFT is the artwork, but everyone else looks at the NFT and sees a link to a JPEG with no actual rights, possession, or ownership of the artwork.

NFTs aren’t the artwork. They’re a fancy crypto receipt that says “I paid X amount to someone and we agreed that transaction had a link to this specific JPEG”. You can technically go into the blockchain and confirm that your receipt was the first, but there’s nothing stopping anyone else from making another NFT of the Mona Lisa and selling it.

The blockchain itself can’t even verify that the Louvre sold you the original Mona Lisa NFT, you have to rely on 3rd-party news articles and such to confirm the address was truly associated with the Louvre. We’re already seeing scams where fraudulent NFTs are being produced that claim to be authorized by legal owners of the artwork but are actually just scammers selling NFTs of someone else’s artwork. But the funny part is that discovering these frauds has zero impact on the blockchain because the NFT was already minted and owned and you can’t undo that. We just have to look off-chain to websites to tell us what these tokens are supposed to be thought of, ignoring the actual blockchain NFT contents and trusting the non-blockchain NFT sources.

They might be valuable to other members of the NFT believers group in the same way that rare baseball cards are valuable to other baseball card collectors, but the rest of us just aren’t interested in trading digital baseball cards of JPEGs.

There’s also a huge problem with wash trading: Someone can make their NFT or NFT collection look arbitrarily valuable by trading it between multiple wallets they own. From the outside it looks like the NFT is “sold” for huge amounts of money, but really it’s just someone moving their own money and NFTs around on the blockchain. In the real art world this is much less practical because someone would be paying huge tax bills and auction fees on each sale. With blockchain, someone can simply wash trade with themselves across wallets and nobody would ever know. NFT values are definitely being pumped up by this scam because it’s too obvious and easy to ignore.

[andreilys]

They might be valuable to other members of the NFT believers group in the same way that rare baseball cards are valuable to other baseball card collectors, but the rest of us just aren’t interested in trading digital baseball cards of JPEGs.

Well that's the point isn't it?

It's valuable within the in-group that the person is part of. It increases their status within the crypto community and gives them access to exclusive networks/events.

Sure you can right-click save a crypto punk, but will that allow you into their community?

Much in the same way that I marvel at peoples ability to spend millions of dollars on Modern art (Basquiat's for example look like a 5 y/o drew them), NFT's to me serve a similar function.

Yet another way for humans to form tribes, create meaning and use conspicuous consumption to signal status.

[PragmaticPulp]

> It increases their status within the crypto community and gives them access to exclusive networks/events.

But we’re starting to see situations where people lose their NFTs or the NFTs are stolen through hacks or phishing.

And then the community goes out of their way to pretend it never happened, that the NFT doesn’t matter, and that the silly Cryptopunk or goofy lion JPEG still belongs to the person even though the NFT doesn’t.

At what point do we acknowledge that the NFT doesn’t actually matter in these communities and that it’s all about throwing money around?

As for the exclusive communities: I’m still not convinced any of these are actually as interesting as the NFT sellers want you to believe. Maybe someone, somewhere has put together a banger Discord channel with some good conversations that requires the purchase of a $10,000 NFT to access, but it's still a Discord channel.

The "exclusive communities" thing is really just another abstract value proposition that the NFT sellers have come up with to try to inject some tangible value into an otherwise valueless token. It's also yet another example of NFT sellers taking something that costs $0 (or near $0) to create, applying some hype, adding the "NFT" buzzword, and then selling it to FOMO people who don't want to miss the next Bitcoin or TSLA wealth-generating meme asset.

[fragmede]

> It's also yet another example of NFT sellers taking something that costs $0 (or near $0) to create

Without commenting on the NFT aspect, a good community is worth its weight in gold, and so are community managers. Companies looking to open source pieces of code continually relearn that lession - open source communities don't "just happen", there's a ridiculous amount of work that goes into creating a viable one, even (or especially) if there's a closed source company backing it. That NFTs have chosen to have discussions in private is their prerogative (and I can't blame them either - NFTs still face questions of legitimacy like the above, and whether you believe in them or not, having to answer the same FUD again and again from users just trolling and calling you a scammer must be tiresome when trying to build things). What exclusive NFT communities are worth, I don't know, but charging a fee to join or a monthly fee for access to some group of people is worth it in many contexts. It's not remotely "near $0".

[royaltheartist]

Noticing a lot of takes on here that are side-stepping the "You don't actually own anything" part to suddenly focus on community buildings, as if a community has formed on the basis of receipt collection

[willcipriano]

> Much in the same way that I marvel at peoples ability to spend millions of dollars on Modern art (Basquiat's for example look like a 5 y/o drew them), NFT's to me serve a similar function.

Money laundering?

[jimmaswell]

> NFTs aren’t the artwork. They’re a fancy crypto receipt that says “I paid X amount to someone and we agreed that transaction had a link to this specific JPEG”. You can technically go into the blockchain and confirm that your receipt was the first, but there’s nothing stopping anyone else from making another NFT of the Mona Lisa and selling it.

A bill of sale to the rights to a musical recording is just a receipt and doesn't physically stop anyone from violating copyright, sure. This isn't new. People commission artwork and buy the rights to it all the time. What's new is simply the mechanism being put on a blockchain. I don't get what's so inherently crazy or a scam about that. Furry "adoptables" would map very easily onto NFTs.

NFTs for things you don't own are more silly novelties or scams, but we've always had bridge sellers.

[theshadowknows]

That makes a lot of sense, and thanks for the detailed answers. The age old "this isn't for you" is applicable here...I don't see the value personally, but I understand the motivation behind it..sort of like how I don't mind streaming music vs "owning" a digital copy of it as .mp3 or whatever.

[Uehreka]

> the age old “this isn’t for you” is applicable here

I disagree. When people are going around calling this a revolution that will change the fabric of society, they can’t just revert to “maybe it’s just not for you” when they have trouble explaining it or defending it. Either this is revolutionary or it’s a niche thing, but it can’t be both.

[SuoDuanDao]

But doesn't every revolution start out with a niche of early adopters that see the potential in something where everyone else just sees the clunky first prototype? Bitcoin in the early days may not have been for you, but if your retirement fund starts holding an amount of crypto it will become 'for you' then. The Tesla Model 3 is for a lot more people than the model S, and so on. Why would a revolution need to be 'for everyone' during the growth-hacking days?

[Uehreka]

I’m pretty sure almost everyone who buys a Model 3 thinks that a Model S is “for them”, they just can’t afford it. When the Model S came out, it was clear what it would be good for, and all that needed to change was to get the price down and the scale up.

And if someone was like “What’s the big deal with the Tesla Model S?” I could say things like “This car runs on electricity, so it will help reduce our carbon footprint. It’s also really fast, really quiet, has more storage space than other cars, has better software than other cars.” and the person asking the question would have an answer.

What I wouldn’t do is say “Whatever, when this is the only kind of car you can buy, you’ll understand.” Which is the answer I get a lot when I ask questions about crypto and NFTs.

[pketh]

> Either this is revolutionary or it’s a niche thing, but it can’t be both.

My reading of this is that it's describing something at a single point of time. So to use your example, the Tesla S was niche, _then_ the 3 evolved the idea to become revolutionary.

Some niches eventually become revolutionary, but they're not both niche and revolutionary at the same time.

[root_axis]

> doesn't every revolution start out with a niche of early adopters

So does every obvious scam.

[cr1895]

> Yes, you can screenshot the Mona Lisa or print out a signed Mickey Mantle rookie card, but it's not the same thing is it?

Obviously not, because those are tangible things. That’s not a valid comparison.

[dcolkitt]

But you're not paying for the tangibility. Digital image replication is near perfect. You could have a tangible copy of the Mona Lisa that is physically indistinguishable from the real one.

The reason people pay millions for artworks is because of the intangible provenance. If the value was the tangible, then tangible digital replications would sell for the same value as the original.

[mythz]

Which is running the same scam as buying a Star [1], except it's done on a blockchain selling to greater fools who are being promised of untold riches that will come their way from buying a row in a database containing a link to a CDN

[1] https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1445795674696597506

[dcolkitt]

No it’s a lot more like the market for luxury goods.

Why does a Chanel purse sell for substantially more than a similar quality leather bag from a generic manufacturer? Because of the intangible status market of the Chanel brand.

If the Chanel logo combined with artificial scarcity turns a $1000 bag into a $6000 purse, why would we not expect the Chanel logo with the same artificial scarcity to turn a $0 JPEG into a $1000 JPEG?

[mythz]

> No it’s a lot more like the market for luxury goods.

Yep exactly like that, except there's no luxury good, not even a receipt of a luxury good, just a ticket to the directions of an online store that's hosting the same bag of pixels that's given out to everyone who ever cared to come across the same public directions with their browser.

There's no respect to be earned from a public digital trail admitting you've traded real money for a link to a fake clout badge.

[chrisco255]

The problem with "buying a star" or selling a star is there really is no provenance for it.

Your bank account is simply a row in a Cobol database managed by some archaic institution. Your stocks in your Robinhood app are the same. You seem to be demeaning the value of database records when so much of the world economy is merely that.

[mythz]

> Your bank account is simply a row in a Cobol database managed by some archaic institution.

My bank is managing my real cash money account, which has real utility that can be used to purchase tangible assets like the property that houses my family.

Your NFT is a worthless forgotten entry buried in a DB of a URL pointing to a public image (everyone has access to, but no one else had to trade real money for) that will become a broken link when this pyramid scam collapses vaporizing every dollar that remained invested in it.

If I'm demeaning of anything, it's all the astroturfers, spam bots and scammers trying to hype up this fake FOMO market that is being marketed to greater fools (who aren't aware of what they're actually buying) as their next source of crypto wave riches they missed out by hearing about BTC too late.

[nybble41]

> Your bank account is simply a row in a Cobol database managed by some archaic institution.

Your bank account is a set of contracts between you and your bank which say that when you want to withdraw funds or instruct the bank to send some of your money to someone else they are obligated to comply. The database is merely a summary of your interactions with the bank via those contracts, and their current obligations toward you. Delete the database and those contracts still exist, though the content may need to be reconstructed from other sources.

A similar argument can be made for stocks.

NFTs are just the database entries without the contracts. They have their uses, but it's not really the same thing at all.

[cr1895]

>You could have a tangible copy of the Mona Lisa that is physically indistinguishable from the real one.

It certainly would not be. It might look very very similar, but in no way indistinguishable to the degree that one digital file is literally the same as a copy of itself.

[SuoDuanDao]

>one digital file is literally the same as a copy of itself.

That's the problem NFT's seek to solve ;). You may not think it's a problem, but a lot of people on the production side of digital artwork do.

[dcolkitt]

Top forgeries are so similar that it often takes a team of experts independently examining a piece until the fake is detected.

Are you seriously trying to claim that the reason the original Mona Lisa has value (vis-a-vis a high quality forgery) is because of the minute tangible composition of the paint?

I’m sorry, but no. It’s clearly the intangible provenance. Otherwise forgeries wouldn’t fall in value when detected, because after all nothing has changed about their tangible composition.

[cr1895]

>Top forgeries are so similar that it often takes a team of experts independently examining a piece until the fake is detected.

And even if it might be difficult to tell apart, it isn't literally the same thing.

>Are you seriously trying to claim that the reason the original Mona Lisa has value (vis-a-vis a high quality forgery) is because of the minute tangible composition of the paint?

I'm not sure how you concluded that is what I said. I never made any statement as to why it is valued the way that it is.

[notkaiho]

but a digital image is not tangible, i.e. something you can have displayed, in a physical frame, in meatspace.

[dcolkitt]

Half of my Twitter feed is profile pics of NFTs being displayed prominently.

In a pre-digital pre-social media world you’re right. But in the modern world where people spend more time socializing online than in meatspace, digital goods become easier to display than physical ones.

I think a lot of HN doesn’t get this because they don’t spend much time on social media. But for someone like Steph Curry, putting an ape in his profile pic gets a lot more exposure than a Van Gogh on his living room wall.

[BEEdwards]

>Half of my Twitter feed is profile pics of NFTs being displayed prominently.

And I could in 30 seconds, find the most expensive nft, copy the image and use that as my profile picture...

[baseballMan]

I'm not an NFT fan by any stretch of the imagination but you can buy a reproduction of the Mona Lisa or a fake Mickey Mantle card.

https://www.amazon.com/DECORARTS-Leonardo-Davinci-Classic-Re...

Obviously, the real mona lisa or the mickey mantle card has value because they were painted by famous artists, or signed by a famous baseball player... But at the end of the day they only have value because someone says they have value.

[Uehreka]

But the thing is, I get the historical significance of the Mona Lisa and Mickey Mantle. I don’t need an appraiser or something to know why they have value. The value proposition of these Bored Apes is a lot less clear, and acting like “we all just play the game in our everyday lives already” is kind of hiding the ball.

[chrisco255]

I have thousands of baseball cards stored away from when I was a kid. I remember pouring over the monthly appraisals published in Beckett magazine. I haven't checked in years. The cards could be worth thousands for all I know.

It actually doesn't make any logical sense that baseball cards have value. They are stock photos printed on card stock. They sold for pennies. I don't own the rights to the image. I can't even play any sort of interesting game with them in the same way I could with Magic the Gathering cards or Pokemon cards. I simply own the card and can resell it to other people and try to assemble interesting collections and discuss with other collectors. There really is no other utility other than that.

Bored Ape Yacht Club has memed itself into relevance, as indicated by your casual mention of their brand. They are digital collectibles but they also have become a true club in the sense that there are exclusive events both in real life and in the metaverse that BAYC holders get access to.

They also have gaming franchises in the works. And I imagine if U.S. securities laws weren't so draconian, they would probably arrange profit sharing among holders for proceeds from merchandising the franchise.

But for now, ownership of a BAYC grants you ownership of a meme. That's not an insult, by the way, quite the contrary. Human culture is memes all the way down.

[The-Bus]

There's also only one Mona Lisa. Copies and images of it are just that.

[ASalazarMX]

The NFT is detached from the actual object it represents, it has perceived value only with the people that accept that it represents some kind of ownership. An NFT of the Mona Lisa would be worthless if anyone could get their own original Mona Lisa, sans NFT, just by asking.

Any object that is post-scarcity (like digital images) is incompatible with the business model of NFTs... except in its circle of believers.

[notkaiho]

People continue to misunderstand even the above, and think that it's somehow actually conferring them the rights to all the bytes, and the results are hilarious: https://twitter.com/JackShawhan/status/1457951413368016899

[carnitine]

That’s obviously not someone being serious.

[IntelMiner]

How can you definitively prove that?

[Winsaucerer]

Screenshotting the Mona Lisa or printing out a signed Mickey Mantle card is not a good analogy to copying an NFT. In the case of the NFT, the exact same bytes can be on my system as the 'owner' has.

How can I get a Mona Lisa copy that has the exact same physical makeup? Or a duplicate signed Mickey Mantle with the same ink strokes?

Digital assets can be easily duplicated identically. The only thing you're missing is some stamp on a chain that says you're the owner.

[koonsolo]

You can see it as the "signature" of the creator. Everybody owns the photograph, but only 1 person owns the signed photograph.

[Winsaucerer]

It seems to me more analogous to a certificate, since there's nothing like a signature embedded in the image itself that only one person has. Anyone can have the thing itself (an identical digital copy), but only one person has the certificate provided by the original creator.

[goodoldneon]

The painting example isn't valid. There's 1 original painting that only 1 person (or group) can own. Anyone who buys a print has something fundamentally different than I do; I have the painting hanging in my house. With a digital image, there isn't an original: all copies are equivalent (save for compression)

[e_proxus]

Actually, that would almost approach some "real" value for NFTs...

Let's say you have digital artwork in a lossless format. You then take the world by storm with the compressed version. Everyone loves it. You sell an NFT with a hash/URI/encoding of the original uncompressed version encrypted so only the owner on the blockchain can decrypt it.

Needlessly to say, this would only work for digital art that is compressible. The owner could perhaps prove that they really own the original by showing a differently compressed version of it.

[cr1895]

The creator of the lossless one can also just decide to distribute that lossless version after selling an NFT of it.

Doesn't that defeat the point of only the NFT owner having control of it?

[goodoldneon]

Yep. DRM can only go so far. Physical goods inherently have scarcity but digital goods don't

[NicoJuicy]

Comparing a digital cartoon of a monkey ( as usual) with a painted and original Mona Lisa is just wrong.

NFT's are mostly here to sell you avatar's of tech-minded people who create ( and even generate) as much as possible avatars.

[BTCOG]

Chrisco255 - This is precisely the rub of the scam. You bought it, hook, line, and sinker. But this is 100% incorrect. An NFT owner does not own the artwork. You are just scammed into thinking you bought a free and downloadable to all JPEG image.

[barnabee]

This statement doesn’t really make any sense. It’s like saying a car doesn’t have 4 doors because some cars don’t have four doors.

An NFT is a basic, fundamental piece of technology that represents unique digital tokens (token A is distinct from and not exchangeable with token B, unlike money and stocks and most tokens before them that are interchangeable with others of the same kind), usually on a public blockchain (though that’s not technically required).

If the artist signs a contract assigning all rights to the artwork to whoever holds the NFT they minted (and some do), sure they own the artwork!

If a domain name system is programmed to let whoever owns an NFT device where it points to, then the NFT holder owns that domain as much as you own any domain you purchase in the traditional way (especially if that system itself is verifiably immutable).

On the other hand if all the NFT signals is that you bought a limited edition token linked to a piece of art from its creator and that you donated a lot of money to a certain charity, some people want to be known for that kind of thing and see value there too, that’s ok!

And yes, if you buy something with no rights, perhaps not even from the creator of the art because you didn’t check, because you think it might go up in value… maybe you got scammed.

Technology helps people do more, and that includes scammers. The presence of scammers is irrelevant and unrelated to the presence and possibility of interesting, useful, or fun use cases. The fact you don’t find them interesting, useful, or fun doesn’t make the technology itself a scam or everyone involved a scammer, it just means your preferences lie elsewhere.

[amcoastal]

You wouldn't steal a car would you?

[rudilee]

Remind me of this skit https://youtu.be/Fb7N-JtQWGI

[jankins]

What you’re describing is the scam, and that’s become the definition, but “NFTs” in general do have more potential than that, even if it’s crowded out by bullshit. NFTs make more sense where a token’s utility is implemented in the same system as its ownership. For example, a domain name is an NFT, and there’s an ethereum name service: https://docs.ens.domains/ - ownership of a domain allows you to configure the domain.

I’d wager most people purchasing art NFTs don’t really have a good understanding of what they’re buying. Some think the art lives on-chain, or that if the art lives on IPFS it is a blockchain-based permanent thing (it’s not, data only exists in IPFS as long as >0 people “pin” it, and artists engage in pin rings to pin each other’s art).

So I see potential value of NFTs in general, though I don’t think the value is necessarily good. You could make the argument that art NFTs are like a MVP to see how ownership of different kinds of things in a distributed system works. I’m very skeptical because it’s attempting to create artificial scarcity of digital media, and if they figure it out for real, I can see that going wrong in more ways than I can see it going right.

[conception]

NFTs are a great idea but what people are doing with them now is a scam.

I’m not sure if it will ever come to pass but imagine what the rumors for GameStop’s nft could be - a decentralized steam.

People can build whatever client they want and it uses the blockchain to determine if you own a particular digital game. Then when you want to see it you can just sell the nft. Obviously there are a lot of considerations to that but having a decentralized ownership of digital goods isn’t a terrible idea as compared to “renting” we do now for everything.

That said paying 30k for a jpeg seems also a scam but Twitter is going to use them for avatars or something so now, potentially, we’re talking about buy unique digital “gear” for your online persona. Sounds less dumb and more like unique skins in a game or something.

So yes most of it is a scam and tulip fever today but I could see the tech being used for interesting things.

Probably won’t be but it could be.

[Macha]

> I’m not sure if it will ever come to pass but imagine what the rumors for GameStop’s nft could be - a decentralized steam.

Let's look at the issues of this one. Let's imagine you wanted to buy FIFA 2025 on this NFT steam.

As a game purchaser, you want to play the game. It'd also be nice if you can resell it when you're done, but this is a secondary use case.

As a game publisher, EA want only people who own the game to play it. They'd also rather they get that money directly, they've previously fought against resale and ownership rights, but let's assume they've given in on that in this example.

So they can't put FIFA 2025 on the blockchain, because it's huge, and then anyone could read/play it. So they put a record that u/conception owns FIFA 2025.

So then you need to use that token to sign something to prove to someone that you own the game such that they can provide you the binaries. What happens if this provider goes out of business? What even is their business model of this binary redemption provider, since there's no guarantee they recieved your money in this decentralised example. So they're hosting data and traffic for potentially zero income.

These providers do allow developers to sell keys on their own website, but they enforce requirements on the developers if they're using Steam/Epic whatever to sell keys not to undercut the store that the keys are for. They do this because there's an interest in still obtaining these devs that won't go for steam exclusivity and yet getting their users into Steam for future sales. The decentralised blockchain means they can go somewhere else very easily next time too, and again, they're not being paid for their services in this example - charging a fee for downloads would be worse for the user and noncompetitive versus centralised services.

Then you get the game. Is the game going to verify with some sort of blockchain transaction at launch? Online only DRM is quite unpopular for games with single player modes. Plus blockchain transactions are slow.

Ok, let's assume it does like many games did in the SecuROM era and only checks periodically.

What happens when someone comes along and cracks that DRM? Does it solve that problem for publishers? No.

I just fail to see how this solves the problems that exist with game distribution, and there's clear areas where it's worse for every party involved.

[conception]

There are a number of digital issues to handle and for large companies the classic “how is blockchain better than a central database” doesn’t pass.

For a smaller dev, does saving some percentages of profits to distribution make sense?

As for DRM, I don’t think an nft solves that or piracy in general but neither does the current system.

I guess the question of nfts is “Is it possible for ownership of unique digital goods to exist without a central authority controlling it?”

Doesn’t seem like a bad question to ask, and I don’t think the tech is there, but the idea of an nft could answer it.

[Macha]

> For a smaller dev, does saving some percentages of profits to distribution make sense?

No, because NFTs don't cover distribution because even a 2d indie game can be multiple gb so won't be on the blockchain.

It also ignores that a big feature these distribution platforms offer to developers is discovery too, whether by recommendations, charts, or just seeing what your friends are playing

[ahelwer]

I think I can explain. I understand why others value them, although I don't agree with the valuation (as a litmus test, I also think shelling out $30k for a genuine Rolex is very stupid). My lack of agreement also does not prevent me from participating and profiting off the people who think they do have value, although I have not done so.

There are basically two theories of their value: the collectible theory and the ownership theory. These overlap but are best explained separately.

In the collectible theory, NFTs are like an autograph you get on merch from a famous person. Think an autographed photo of Will Shatner you might get at a con. Usually the (cryptographic) autographer is the original artist of the work being autographed. Of course the autographer can release multiple autographed versions of the same work, but this decreases their value (and the value of any further work they might autograph).

Collectibles have long had value to humans, but they also suffer from three annoying problems: storage, fakes, and transaction costs. NFTs solve all three - they never degrade on the blockchain, their authenticity is cryptographically verifiable (assuming one can associate the signing address with the famous person, which is comparatively simple), and they are easily transferred online.

The second theory is the ownership theory. Here NFTs are used to track ownership of the underlying digital asset. In our current internet this is absurd, as the torrent is designed to demonstrate - everything is a copy, and even the NFT holder can never get access to the "original" bits. The ownership theory requires adoption of NFTs as an ownership mechanism in the metaverse, along with associated digital rights management technology. It's an early land-grab for the VR overworld.

Now, personally I don't find either of these theories very compelling. But I also didn't find cryptocurrencies generally very compelling, so I don't have a great track record. Cryptocurrency really tends to turn us all into Frank Grimes -like characters who miss out. I believe the more widely-used term is "midwit".

[jensensbutton]

> storage, fakes, and transaction costs. NFTs solve all three

NFTs solve none of these problems. The underlying asset is not stored on the blockchain and can be deleted at any time. Fakes are unaddressed since you can only validate you are the owner of a specific url and there's no guarantee that what you own is the original version (bytes are easy to copy). Any validation of authenticity must happen OFF of the blockchain in which case why are we doing this again? Transaction costs are a function of the market (even on the blockchain) and are not at all connected to NFTs.

[barnabee]

> The underlying asset is not stored on the blockchain and can be deleted at any time.

If the asset is stored on IPFS, as many are, this is simply not true. Even if the asset falls off the network (which the creator, owner, NFT holder, and anyone else can prevent by pinning it themselves) then as long as you have the file(a) and the IPFS software you can put it back at any time, and it’ll have the same URL thanks to content addressability.

I’d certainly agree that any NFT that links to a digital asset in a mutable / non-content addressable way is worthless.

[ahelwer]

You can argue against this all you want but these arguments sound eerily similar to the "it's just a slow database" type arguments of yesteryear.

Bubbles can eventually have value, weirdly - their irrational nature can sort of act as a forcing function taking us out of a local maxima, facilitating the creation of entirely new unforeseeable and previously-impossible things that actually have value of some sort. With cryptocurrencies you could argue they facilitated (through smart contracts and then distributed exchanges) the creation of massively-multiplayer online gambling games with no barriers to entry for publication & interface with the financial system where people win through patience and steely nerve. You may think more-advanced open-source casinos are not good for society, but they certainly hold economic value.

If I wanted I could write a smart contract for a MMO gambling game like POWH3D and publish it tomorrow. That isn't a capability I used to have - quite a few hoops to jump through to get a game onto a casino floor, or start up an online gambling website.

[ARandumGuy]

> If I wanted I could write a smart contract for a MMO gambling game like POWH3D and publish it tomorrow. That isn't a capability I used to have - quite a few hoops to jump through to get a game onto a casino floor, or start up an online gambling website.

The previous restrictions on starting your own online casino have never been technological. It's really not that hard to set up your own online casino using non-blockchain technology. The main hurdles are entirely legal. Gambling has a ton of regulations and restrictions in virtually every jurisdiction, and many governments are more then happy to aggressively punish those who break the rules. Regulators aren't going to look kindly on your MMO gambling game just because "it uses the blockchain."

And sure, maybe you can more easily evade regulators by making a blockchain casino, over a traditional online casino. But to me, "creating illegal casinos more easily then before" isn't a particularly compelling use case.

[jensensbutton]

Not sure what you _thought_ I was saying, but I was only saying parent's statement about NFTs is wrong. This was not a statement about the impact of cryptocurrencies on society.

You seem defensive. Find a comment that requires the above defense.

[ohgodplsno]

>they never degrade on the blockchain

That's entirely wrong. None of the NFTs are stored on the blockchain, merely a bit of JSON that contains a link to your image. If you're lucky, it's hosted on IPFS (and it'll disappear whenever everyone stops seeding it). Otherwise, it's just a link to your image host of choice, and the author is free to replace it with the image of a dick in three months, deleting all your resale value.

>their authenticity is cryptographically verifiable

No, it authenticates the seller. I can sell you an NFT of a Botticelli, that doesn't make me Botticelli or a member of his estate. Since every one on the market doesn't care for copyright, it doesn't matter.

>they are easily transferred online

So is the JPEG that I just right clicked

The collectible theory is a load of crap. NFTs are for laundering money and finding suckers.

[ahelwer]

> No, it authenticates the seller

Reminds me of that tweet about how programmers are like compilers that read things until they find the first concept they disagree with, then post it like an error message. Read the directly-following parenthetical.

[ohgodplsno]

Now now, I'm a smart compiler: I read an entire paragraph of bullshit before calling it out, with detailed error messages.

[NoGravitas]

I mean, the collectible theory can be right, and NFTs can still be for laundering money and finding suckers. I can see how they could function as the equivalent of the signature on a signed and numbered print. But no one is paying thousands of dollars for ugly monke or lion picrew pfps based on the art.

[djyaz1200]

This is a good explanation of why some people perceive NFT's to have value, setting aside if they do or not. The people who believe they have value I think expect at some point a business model will emerge to provide them with income for access to the "art" they "own".

The way to make a business model is to associate copyright ownership with the NFT ownership and then assert those rights by filing DMCA takedowns (and/or lawsuits) everyday to anyone who displays the "art" without paying for the privilege and using the NFT owners original work as the source file.

This would create digital scarcity because copies couldn't be used without legal exposure, so any real business or serious person who wanted to use it would pay for the rights to. It's like the Getty Images business model scaled way way up. I don't necessarily think this business model is good for society or will actually happen but it's the way to monetize NFTs.

[Macha]

> The way to make a business model is to associate copyright ownership with the NFT ownership and then assert those rights by filing DMCA takedowns (and/or lawsuits) everyday to anyone who displays the "art" without paying for the privilege and using the NFT owners original work as the source file.

The issue is you need the legal process to tie ownership of the NFT to ownership/transferrable license/whatever of the work. And once you're setting up that legal process, what then do you need the NFT for?

[djyaz1200]

I presume those who support NFT's (I'm not among them) would suggest that owners would use the legal process in some cases to set a precedent for enforcing rights so that people end up respecting those rights. Like parking tickets for private parking lots, the incentive would be just pay to avoid the hassle if you want to use the asset legitimately. I think the odds of this "pay to display" business model coming together are low but if they did it could be a big financial opportunity for those who hold the rights to valuable content.

[barnabee]

Contracts are a PITA! If you can write one, once, probably based on a completely standard template and then never talk to a lawyer, sign a transfer of ownership, worry about where that ownership info is stored and updating the information when it changes, etc. because the initial contract deferred all that to the owner of the NFT which can be bought and sold with a couple of clicks, I’d call that a massive improvement! Even if a contract is still needed somewhere, the friction is gone.

[Macha]

You can't escape the contracts though.

What happens in that initial sale? The owner declares that whoever possesses the NFT owns the good? Under laws like the first sale doctrine, they can't prevent the subsequent owner passing the legal ownership seperate to the NFT so ownership of the NFT still means nothing legally.

Well how about they take a leaf out of the software industry book, and instead of selling you ownership of the thing the NFT represents, they sell you a transferrable non-revocable exclusive license that requires in its terms that transfers of the license and transfers of the NFT happen in tandem. Well now the future buyers _are_ dealing with contracts.

[djyaz1200]

I agree you can't escape having some contracts but I think the NFT supporters would say that the NFT functions like the deed to a property.

A problem NFT appears to be an attempt to solve is all the parasitic people, organizations and rules that govern the transfer of assets. These lawyers, title clerks, law firms, title companies, auction houses and governments extract significant rent from asset transfer marketplaces. This rent is a cost to market participants but the larger cost is limiting the liquidity and size of the overall market.

Like imagine if the title to a car was an NFT instead of a piece of paper. I think NFT might just be a complete scam but it might have utility in disintermediating markets.

[jsmith45]

Right. If the issue is that you don't trust a government enough to allow them to track ownership via updating the copyright registration, then relying on them to help enforce your digital scarcity.

In reality the only digital scarcity that NFTs directly create is the scaricty of the token itself. Which is fine, and could potentially be used for interesting purposes. One problem is that they pretty much always require off-blockchain knowledge of which contract is the correct one for the purpose.

The other problem is that most plausible useful purposes I've seen discussed (like tracking "ownership" of digital items in a video game) could work just fine as a centralized database.

I've yet to see a proposed practical use (not "art") of NFTs where all participants are sufficently mutually distrustful that a central database cannot be used. There may well exist such uses, and those might be worth getting excited about.

As for the "art", well digital money laundering schemes just don't cut it for me. Like literally: selling some shitty tokens and buying it using other accounts you own, is a great way to provide an explanation for crypto you acquired from some illegal trade or whatever. If anybody asks where you got the crypto from, you can point to your NFTs, and explain that you are just as shocked as everybody else at how much people are willing to buy this stuff for.

[ahelwer]

Ease of entry, transferability, etc.

[jcranmer]

> The way to make a business model is to associate copyright ownership with the NFT ownership

Except I believe most NFT contracts don't actually grant copyright ownership, only the kind of standard copyright license-to-use grant you see in most terms of service.

[rory]

> they never degrade on the blockchain

I don't think this part is generally true, since the image itself isn't hosted on the blockchain.

...which brings me to: as someone who knows very little about this technology, why aren't the images themselves stored on the blockchain? Are they simply too big for that to be feasible?

[ohgodplsno]

Yep. Hosting any reasonably sized image will absolutely ruin you in gas costs.

[serverholic]

They are put on IPFS which can exist forever.

[npteljes]

URLs can also exist forever. The real point is that they are digital assets that don't exist on the blockchain itself.

[barnabee]

The content at a URL can be changed at any time, NFTs that don’t prove that the content that serve hasn’t changed make for worthless NFTs.

IPFS is ideal for this use case because the URL contains a hash of the content meaning that either the original asset is served or nothing (which you can fix if you have the asset).

[neilalexander]

"can" being the operative word but is very very far from guaranteed. If you wake up one day to find that no IPFS nodes are pinning the content anymore, it is as good as gone.

[barnabee]

Unless you or anyone else has a copy of the file, then they can put it back and the URL will be the same. If you own an NFT that points to something on IPFS you probably want to keep a copy of the file lying around to do this if necessary.

There are projects trying to create permanent decentralised, content addressable storage (in some case as layers on top of IPFS), so maybe even that problem will go away.

[serverholic]

Filecoin attempts to solve that by adding an incentive layer on top of ipfs.

[intothev01d]

It's not about images. This is about digital authenticity and historical record that is easily verifiable in an open, global system. This is instantaneous transfer of those rights or assets to anyone else in the world. In-game purchases of items, tickets to an event, transfer any digital item and the verifiable rights/ownership of it. Mark Cuban has been a big proponent and has been implementing use cases and I think it's more eye opening once you begin to see more advanced usages. https://twitter.com/JrWhipstock/status/1460311826026147840

[superbaconman]

Bingo. Just because you download an nft doesn't mean you own it. Proof of ownership is achieved by signing a challenge with the wallet linked with the nft (as encoded on the Blockchain).

[etothepii]

The tried and tested answer is to think about "buying" the Mona Lisa. If the Louvre offered the opportunity for someone to be called the owner of the Mona Lisa but they could never take it out of the Louvre or any way control it what would that sell for? I suspect many, many millions of dollars.

[gitfan86]

Similarly, you can give millions of dollars to a college and get a building or park named after you. You don't "own" it, you get social status out of it.

NFTs are no different than having a email from the Beanie Baby store saying that you bought the first beanie baby. If someone wants to buy that e-mail from you, then great, you made a profit.

[gaganyaan]

Yes, but you could then have a legitimate court case over the ownership, and might even win the right to control it anyways. NFTs are a scam because they offer no legal rights whatsoever.

[cr1895]

>If the Louvre offered the opportunity for someone to be called the owner of the Mona Lisa but they could never take it out of the Louvre or any way control it what would that sell for? I suspect many, many millions of dollars.

I thought that was a fairly normal thing? That is, someone buys or owns a work of art but it's left in a museum in perpetuity.

[ttyprintk]

Brought to you by Hardee’s

[smt88]

NFTs don't confer ownership of anything except a string of letters. Unless there's a legal system backing them, they're just trading cars.

Owning an NFT of a digital image doesn't mean you own it anymore than owning a LeBron James card means you own LeBron James.

[jallen_dot_dev]

> There is nothing at all to keep me from screenshotting or otherwise downloading that image. I won't have to pay the author $213 for it, I just take the image because I can.

This is like saying: There's nothing stopping me from downloading the Bitcoin source and running my own network. Now I have bitcoins and I didn't have to pay someone $60k for each one.

Yes, you have bitcoins but they're not the bitcoins anyone cares about. Likewise, you have a copy of the image of this NFT but you don't have the actual NFT that members of that community care about. NFTs are a club and if you want to join you have to buy one.

Now, you can argue whether anyone should want to join such a club but that's a totally different issue from the right-click-save criticism.

[fooyc]

NFTs are a scam, but saying that it's because you can download them without paying is missing the point. You could say the same thing about movies, music, games, art.

People in the cryptocurrency community believe that NFTs are used for money laundering. It's also believed that prices are inflated artificially to trick gullible or greedy people into buying them. But the download thing ? It's missing the point.

[serverholic]

A scam implies someone is getting hurt. Yet I haven't seen anyone getting hurt. You might say that people will get hurt when the bubble pops but people have been saying the same thing about crypto for awhile.

[Grustaf]

No, that's not it. A scam implies that it's deliberate deception. People being hurt is neither here nor there.

And obviously people ARE getting hurt, but that doesn't mean it's a scam. It's just a crazy bubble.

[serverholic]

I would say being deceived is also getting hurt…

[Grustaf]

Yes, a scam hurts people, but not everything that hurts people is a scam!

[serverholic]

This is true. People gamble on the stock market all the time, yet nobody would call it a scam.

[Quarrelsome]

I don't believe in NFTs but I can imagine that they represent a generational wealth in the same way that Elvis memorabilia has probably somewhat peaked in value as it closes its generational capture.

My argument would be that when Pokemon cards came out I'd imagine most adults at the time would think them worthless, its just a card with a picture of a dinosaur on it. It was the children and young adults that attributed the value upon them and thus as those people are now 30/40/50 with large amounts of disposable income they can be worth a lot.

The same could happen with NFTs. People buying into their value today might come good on their value in later decades. Maybe it doesn't have to make sense if enough people believe it.

[sharperguy]

It's like the difference between a genuine pokemon card and a print-off. The print-off looks just like the original, except for a missing security hologram.

In theory, you could use the print-off in games of pokemon at home with friends with no problem.

So why is the genuine one worth more? Because its the genuine card printed by The Pokemon Company, and you can prove it.

So in a sense, NFTs distill the "genuine" part and separate it from the need for a physical token or card.

That said, I am highly skeptical that any NFT will be worth the many thousands people are paying from them now in a few years time. Especially as the platforms they are based on fail to scale and transaction fees become ever more problematic.

[clippablematt]

People focus on the money, so walk away thinking “scam”.

Legitimacy, reputation, community. These things are scarce and important.

People like nfts. It’s pretty fun minting an nft on my own contract, then going to opensea and connecting my wallet and there it is. Then I go to Zora and connect, and there’s my files again. Then to showtime, still there. Open rainbow on my phone, everything goes with me.

Add on top of that resales, a royalty system, access keys to discord channels and tv shows, programmability so I can plug together my files however I like. Maybe I add a rule that you have to share the file with other people or it self destructs. Or you have to pet it like a tamagotchi.

All of the content is still freely accessible. NFT != DRM. So I can listen to all the music and see all the art. And I can have ownership of the things that are special to me. I spend 12hours a day on computers, why would we think digital artefact shouldn’t be valuable. Why would we think people wouldn’t want to belong to clubs and have a way of showing ownership of items relating to them. With a consistent way of referencing the data and signatures. All on the same api.

Yeah you could use pgp and share torrents and pay artists over Patreon.

But this is easier, faster, and more fun.

[whywhywhywhy]

Think you need to look into how the art market actually functions. The reality of preserving these artifacts goes way beyond just owning the painting, I mean even over time the paintings have to be re-painted over to restore them as they age anyway. Then you have things like videoart, digital art or just conceptual art.

Maurizio Cattelan's "Comedian" piece, if you own it you don't just own the banana till it rots but the concept and the instructions on how to reproduce it for exhibition, it's not the same banana what you "own" isn't very tangible beyond the instructions on how to reproduce the work.

The fact you can save an image of the Mona Lisa doesn't mean you own it, sure you probably agree because its a physical object but what about say video art like Bill Viola's works. They're digital but you copying the digital file doesn't mean you own it.

Sure you can copy the ugly ape drawing, you could even try to resell it but buyers can tell it's not the real original ugly ape because of the blockchain.

Not defending it either way, just spelling out the mindset that causes it to have value.

[jagger27]

If in X years the domain in the link to the NFT stored in the blockchain expired and ends up pointing to a new image was it ever an ugly ape?

Is there at least a hash of the image stored with the metadata and link?

[moolcool]

The craziest thing about it to me is just how _absolutely hideous_ most of the profitable NFT art is. The BAYC apes are just some of the ugliest designs I've ever seen. Remarkably ugly stuff.

[lvass]

>Can someone, if such a person exists, that believes in NFT's as having actual value please explain it?

The market for paintings and other artwork has existed for centuries or millennia. I've never obtained value from it but many people did. To me it sounds stupid to pay much more than you would for something practically identical, unless you're betting on selling it for more later. I can't see how NFTs are different at all.

NFTs do have one considerable "advantage". It's trivial to have your money semi-anonymized in a blockchain, so it's even easier to launder money. It's also much easier to buy your own artwork for ludicrous amounts, so you can make money selling it after some newspapers pick up the story, and no one will suspect that you did it.

[pavlov]

An NFT is a bit like going to a book signing. The author sits there, but instead of signing your book, he just hands you a piece of paper with a number printed on it and says "next". You also need to give him a pile of casino tokens in exchange.

With luck, somebody else will appreciate your story of how the famous author touched this uniquely numbered piece of paper while thinking about his book, and will give you a larger pile of casino tokens for it.

Whether anyone ever has a copy of the book doesn't really come into it.

[clippablematt]

Youre almost there. But its more like tens of thousands of people putting hundreds of billions of dollars on the line to say that they witnessed the author sign your book, verifying your claims to whoever challenges them.

Which turns out to be pretty useful and maybe have value.

[pavlov]

Well, they didn’t actually witness the author signing anything. They witnessed the numbered piece of paper on a table in a bookstore, and the author may or may not have been present.

To know if this piece of paper was actually touched by the author, we still need verification outside of the blockchain.

It’s not obvious to me that all this has any value. “The author probably blessed a number” certainly doesn’t have the emotional connection of an actual physical signature, for example.

In a way NFTs seem to resemble the medieval church practice of selling indulgences. If you believe in the authority of those mass-produced blessed pieces of paper, they have value.

[nyhc99]

Anyone at any time can see the wallet address that created the NFT. It's trivial for any author or creator to publish their wallet address; it's simply a short hash value. That's the "verification outside of the blockchain" that you seem to think is such a stumbling point. I would suggest thinking more on the subject if it isn't obvious to you that this has value.

[Jensson]

> It's trivial for any author or creator to publish their wallet address; it's simply a short hash value.

It's also trivial for any author to change that message to a new hash so they can sell their NFT's again. Or the service where that message was posted might disappear, so you can no longer view the message and therefore nobody knows that the NFT is "authentic". So you basically get the same problem as any central authority of trust. In this case you trust the message board the author posts on, and you trust the author, and you have to also trust the service hosting whatever art the NFT points to. If you trust those then why not just trust a regular exchange instead?

[rvz]

> How is "NFT" not a gigantic scam?

Some types of NFTs are not scams, but the NFTs that are images, videos, audio are complete and utter scams.

Simply slapping blockchain on them creates the false illusion that you somehow 'own' it when given that are not even stored on the blockchain in the first place, it tells you that you actually own an expensive certificate that could point to anything since they are really living on centralised servers.

If that is not a scam, I don't know what is.

[laughingbovine]

It's like a certificate of authenticity. If you buy a nice watch which comes with a piece of paper saying that Rolex made it, what's actually worth money here? The watch is worth the money, provided you can prove that it was made by Rolex and not a knockoff. Is the certificate of authenticity itself worth money? Ehh... sort of... but only if you have the watch its authenticating. Who would buy the piece of paper alone?

What about if i can make infinite identical copies of the watch? Things stop making sense once there is no scarcity.

[Tenoke]

Can you explain to me why people buy movies or software they can get identical versions of on the other bay? Or why they go to a live concert with the band playing instead of a venue with an identical recording of it? Or why they buy a baseball card instead of printing it?

The reasons aren't singular nor quite the same but if you can answer those it might be easier to figure out why simplifications like 'i can have the same image' don't cover the whole value people derive from it.

[mam4]

> people here buy movies

Where on netflix ? People pay for easy access to a wide range of stuff which are in HD (personally i use primewire but eh... not HD).

> Or software they can get identical versions of on the other bay.

Maybe because they are in a compagny which doesn't wanna be liable for lawsuit. Once again personally as a individual i don't pay for software.

> why they go to a live concert with the band playing instead of a venue with an identical recording of it

Precisely because the energy of a real concert is better. Actually there's a bunch of bands which are supper popular not because they have better songs but because they give better show.

None of these reasons are applicable to NFT.

[Tenoke]

Everything that's on Netflix is on torrents and even pirate streaming sites since it's the easiest content to pirate.

Bands might have a different set live than studio versions but you can play that, and this counts 5 times more for DJs who also attract huge crowds. The extra energy and hype are more akin to the extra energy and hype and bragging rights you get from the NFT community when you have an actual NFT compared to lack of it when you just download the image.

[bitxbitxbitcoin]

If digital art is as valuable and worthy of recognition as physical art, then look at it through lens of the difference in price between the original Mona Lisa and replicas of it.

[theshadowknows]

I absolutely think that digital art is as valuable and worthy of recognition as physical art. My wife is an artist (oils and water colors, not digital) and we've discussed it at length that the skill and talent required to create digital art imparts equal value. I'm not arguing against that (I'm not saying that's what you're saying either, but just to be clear for folks who read the comments).

But...I do not see the value in being able to "prove" that you own said artwork...because you can't do it...Globally, the number of people who know what Ethereum or any other block-chain technology means is probably what..many thousands? Maybe..maybe a few hundred thousand? And of those the subset of people who actually care...I'm sure is far fewer. So you can only verify yourself as the "owner" of said art to a very small subset of people...

I guess it's like a collector community? People are willing to spend literally millions of dollars to prove to other collectors that they are the owners of these digital assets?

[clippablematt]

Yes. People will spend millions of dollars on this because belonging to a community is about the most meaningful experience we can have. People will dedicate themselves to that sense of being. See football clubs, churches, political parties, chess clubs… We spend our lives on computers, digital artefacts and communities will come to be the most expensive items ever.

This has been coming a long time. I have about 3000 hours in guild wars 2, when I log in I’m always so happy I have my legendary longbow. If they’d have been nfts that would be amazing. I’d love for that metadata to travel with me across other digital worlds.

[sgent]

Digital art is and should be valuable, but how is owning an NFT proof of ownership if no one recognizes it as such? If I own a NFT I get no real world ownership benefits (like displaying it on my website, or in my metaverse). The NFT can be deleted by the host and I have no recourse.

[mattdesl]

If you are actually curious, see here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29265373

[nscalf]

There are some really cool things that can be done with NFTs (concert tickets, in game items that can be cross-game, etc). The most popular use right now is art. The really interesting thing is that NFT art is really close to real world art: both are ridiculously overpriced for something not very unique that is heavily driven by rich characters trying to hide their money. All art is dumb, not just NFTs. NFTs are just more liquid.

[nathias]

So in this case a scam would be when you pay the price the author wants and not a scam is when you just take it?

I get that the pirates would be against NTFs that are the tech of future DRM systems, but they could at least be honest about it. They aren't a scam, or killing the planet etc. they are bad because they are useful for copyright.

I found this intro useful: https://nftschool.dev

[jeabays]

You're right, it's just nonsense based around artificial scarcity and commodification of something, in a way that is not grounded in material reality, it is the logical conclusion of financialization, the trading of assets on increasing levels of abstraction to the point where they quite literally have no material value.

[sebirocs]

NFT is just a token that represents the artwork. You can screenshot, delete the original file or whatever but the token still exists. Now the value of NFTs can be questioned, and the people who promotes them as well. We know for sure that some people will end up losing money when this fad ends so yeah giant scam indeed, but NFT as a thing still have use case, and you can say kinda the same about bitcoin.

[delaaxe]

The NFT is not the picture, the NFT is the proof of ownership.

That ownership is only as valuable as the NFT's creator makes them.

Example: when Dolce Gabanna issues NFTs (they did), your wife and daughter immediately understand the value of having those displayed on a public social network profile, regardless of if tech engineers are still stuck over-intellectualizing them

Of course this only works on digital goods. NFTs on physical objects are scams.

[johnchristopher]

> I have the same image as the owner and I have $213 where the new "owner" simply has the image.....

AFAIU the owner also has a sort of unique and unfalsifiable certificate that let him cash in on the picture later on if its price ever raise ?

Like a certificate of authenticity for the Mona Lisa. You may have a very good copy (or even the original) but without the certificate your version sells for less ?

Did I get that right ?

[jcpham2]

I try to conceptualize an NFT inside of a realm that validates it. If you do not operate in a realm that validates something about in the NFT, implying ownership. Then the NFT concept doesn't make sense. If we're operating in some type of meta-realm that can also perform validation of some sort, then the NFT concept at least begins to make sense.

[snarf21]

They are just the new ponzi scheme, the new penny stocks, the new internet scam. I dare anyone who claims to believe in NFTs to put their entire net worth in NFTs and put that into escrow for 10 years. The crypto eco-system is mostly about scams. It was interesting tech but it should just be outlawed at this point.

[tata71]

So....you don't want an NFT for the deed to your house, instead of having to pay gobs of money to do a "search" for other people that might hold a copy of the same paper and be making claims with it?

Or an NFT of your shares of stock, so they can't be tampered with, or sold twice in short-sales, etc?

Do you really think cryptocurrency/cryptography nerds are into this technology for the jpegs?!

It's the underlying tech that's valuable — the jpeg art is just noise.

[chinathrow]

> ... this image ...

https://img.rarible.com/prod/image/upload/t_big/prod-itemIma...

Saved you a cookie banner dismissal.

[cslarson]

FYI, $200 is the current bid on that nft and isn't accepted by the seller for obvious reasons. BoredApeYachtClub nfts have a floor price of 52.42 ETH on opensea so the 66 ETH price tag the seller has on it is likely more in ballpark. 52 ETH is about $217k.

[Zababa]

The real scam is people wasting disk space to screenshot or download those horrors.

[ofou]

I think about NFTs as digital vinyls. The cool thing about them is that you can own it, even though you can stream it or download it via torrent.

[cinntaile]

Anyone buying an NFT is getting an NFT. Nobody is getting tricked, a necessary condition for a scam. Therefore there is no scam.

[ttyprintk]

When they discover that what they bought is an NFT, some people are so mad that they blame everyone else for right-clicking.

[Steve0]

Isn't this comparable to the guy in the Ferrari being mad at other drivers because he's in the same traffic jam as the rest or us?

I get where he's coming from, but that doesn't make it reasonable. And certainly not a scam by Ferrari.

[ttyprintk]

I struggle with that comparison, but it sounds like the sports car guy feels that his conspicuous wealth should elevate him above the rules meant for everyone else. To the extent that he shouldn’t even have to ask for it out loud, because his car is art and yours is a commodity that makes no statement on the scarcity of beauty.

If NFTs exist to make an artistic statement, then it’s not the same as a one-off art car. It’s a statement on conspicuously raising the ecological and conceptual cost for the same vulgar image that any scrolling rube can enjoy.

An NFT really could represent season tickets for some assigned seats in a sports arena, or (unfortunately) the order on a list of organ transplant recipients. But instead of problems of scarcity, NFT represents FOMO. And the most-confident adherents are definitely speculating on riding the wave.

[sparkling]

The way NFTs are being traded currently is a global game of musical chairs. You are basically paying for your name to be attached to a specific asset address on a distributed ledger.

However, i do see some use cases. Imagine a decentralized NFT ledger where e.g one can buy the copyrights (and rights to royalties) for digital assets like music that would then be integrated into services like Apple Music or Spotify. That would create a neat marketplace for intellectual property.

[BTCOG]

Bitcoin is a real, hard money that you will clearly see take over as a reserve over the next decade, and it's secure. It solved problems. Everything else, especially including Ethereum are nothing more than psuedo-intellectual scams. Ethereum has already changed their monetary consensus six times within five years. Play fiat games, and win fiat prizes.

You know you're only commenting this to get a rise, though.

[freddref]

I just printed out that image and stuck it on my wall.. nice.

[TekMol]

Are you married?

Say a new technology comes up that lets me clone your wife. Perfectly. Down to the last atom.

Would you then be ok with your wife being destroyed and replaced by the copy?

If you are not ok with that - aren't you just as irrational as the people who buy NFTs?

[npteljes]

I don't see how this particular irrationality is comparable to the irrationality surrounding NFTs.

To tweak the analogy to NFTs a bit better. Let's say that the fact of the marriage is recorded in a registry, and that the registry is trusted as canonical by the larger entity which people trust, like, the government. Now let's say that the registry is copied word to word, certified to be legal, and then the original destroyed. Surely that doesn't affect the marriage itself, the deep personal bond between the two people?

[cr1895]

That's an absurd hypothetical. A human being isn't an object...do you also mirror their consciousness?

[TekMol]

An NFT is also not an object.

Regarding consciousness - do you think consciousness is not made of atoms? What is it made of?

[cuzBchain]

It’s akin to them holding www.google.com, which is a memory block in a distributed database in a machine network to other machines.

I don’t need to use DNS to transmit/receive bits but only Google can transmit and receive from google.com using the DNS network

There’s nothing stopping people from setting up their own tribal network now that high speed reliable physical networks exist and cloud is push button deploy for an expert.

Like video subscriptions everyone is selling a platform to own memory addresses abstracted into a domain, and NFT.

Our internet is a multiverse of the same old electron states printing differently depending on preferences

I think humanity is starting to realize again the mainstream ephemeral value store (dollars) is not the only one. The network that generates these experiences is.

Who cares how much we spend (money is just an emotional abstract) so long as the network lives?

Long live the network