[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

[chrisco255]

You can't steal a blockchain receipt. Here's a challenge for you: go right click a CryptoPunk and save it, or use this NFTBay to torrent the JPEG yourself. Then try and sell it.

[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.

[notkaiho]

I still don't see how a digital copy can have the same brush texture as those of Dutch masters