[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.

[SuoDuanDao]

Well sure... but plenty of people did criticise the model S as being out of the price range of so many people that it wouldn't have an appreciable effect on carbon footprint. To which the response 'it's targeting a small number of people that are willing to pay high prices for something that still has technical glitches, which will subsidise a more widely appealing product later' seems pretty valid. What's the alternative, tell people at that stage about the Model 3, which even Elon thought had low odds of being built by Tesla Motors? There are too many lessons learned between the Model S days and the Model 3 days to offer a realistic vision of those days, the proof was more in who was excited by the S than a carefully laid out roadmap between exciting the early adopters and appealing to a mass market.

[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.

[dcolkitt]

> 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.

Except there clearly is. At the point where many of the world's most famous athletes, musicians and actors have prominently displayed NFTs that they purchased, then there clearly is real social status associated with them.

You can debate about whether that's unfair, or stupid, or just a fad. But it's pretty clearly undeniable that NFTs today are an indisputable social status market to a not insignificant fraction of the population. The fact that you find that you think it shouldn't be that way doesn't change the way things are.

[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.

[c22]

The only difference is the pyramid scheme your bank account is embedded into has been going on a lot longer.

I own my house because I have a piece of paper that says I own it, but really it's because my neighbors choose to acknowledge the "legitimacy" of that paper. If someone else moves into my house while I'm on vacation I can oust them (probably) simply because I have more people "on my side". If enough people choose to acknowledge the legitimacy of NFTs then the scheme will not collapse. You are just making a prediction that people wont choose this, but I think you might be surprised. People attribute value to all sorts of nonsense, especially once they've invested in it themselves.

One day all this will be dust, but today, for a brief moment, some guy can trade his collection of digital monkey pictures for a real life piece of paper saying he owns a house, or a whole bunch of database entries at a crusty old bank. Or, I guess, even "cold hard cash" if he prefers.

[chrisco255]

> 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.

Nope, my NFT is a permanent record of account utilizing the ERC721 open standard for non-fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. The record of my purchase of the NFT will exist long after you or I are no longer around.

It is a transferrable asset tradeable 24/7 on the Ethereum blockchain, accessible as an open data standard on numerous marketplaces and applications. It is far more liquid and exchangeable than any physical asset I own.

Some of the NFTs I own exist as SVGs stored on Ethereum mainnet. Some exist on Filecoin or Arweave blockchains and have 200 years of prepaid storage to back them up. Some are backed by centralized photo servers and only merely exist as temporary novelties (which is totally ok, by the way).

It's not a pyramid scheme. It's deeper than you know and will evolve further than your bias will let you see. You don't have to like sports to understand why an athlete is paid $50 million a year to play with a ball. You would do well to understand it better before you demean it, even if you don't personally want to participate in it.

[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...

[IntelMiner]

The part that still baffles me is that if you did that, the NFT community would just say "oh well that's not the REAL owner!" and pretend you don't exist

Similarly if you "stole" the blockchain receipt of an actual NFT, therefore gaining "ownership" of it, the NFT community would simply pretend the person you stole it from was still the "real" owner, despite having zero "verifiable" status to it, beyond having possibly tweeted it before you did

I have to use a lot of quotes because even in a hypothetical there's so many variables that applying real world properties to just make my head hurt

[dcolkitt]

And in a day or two, you could find the most expensive old Dutch master sold at Sotheby's and have a perfect digital replication.

Nobody would stop you from hanging it out up in your living room, or even announcing to everyone on social media that it's the original and you're the owner. Nobody would need to, because everyone in the art collecting community would recognize this as super cringe.

People purchase art for social status. What you're describing is the opposite of social status.

[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