[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.