[lettergram]

I have to be honest. I view NFTs as one of the dumbest things to come out of the crypto space. I see the use cases, but frankly I don’t think it’s innovative nor does it solve something in a really unique way.

Part of the point of digital assets are that they can be copied. If you don’t want to copy them, you can validate with the issuing authority (which is virtually all NFTs as it is).

[slg]

>I have to be honest. I view NFTs as one of the dumbest things to come out of the crypto space.

This is so obvious to me that it is tough to stop myself from believing that everyone knows this and is just ignoring it in an attempt to make a quick buck. There are much better arguments for cryptocurrency. I happen to think they are generally overvalued and overhyped, but there is also real utility at the heart of it that people can believe in and project forward. NFTs seem to be stupid all the way down.

[pkdpic]

> Part of the point of digital assets are that they can be copied

As someone still fairly new to this industry still enamored with all the naïve big-picture stuff I was under the impression that the ease and immediacy of copying digital information was nearly the ENTIRE point. Or at least the biggest characteristic that distinguishes digital information technology from other human innovations historically. That and hash tables maybe.

As a former art school hippie I regularly start to get creeping FOMO regarding the NFT train, and feel like Im fighting the future or being stubborn.

Then I remember NFT / Crypto advocates are the ones fighting the future with this sad attempt to impose clunky energy consuming systems of false scarcity on digital systems that undermine that kind of old-world scarcity on a foundational level.

Again, I don't know what I'm talking about but Im enjoying learning more from these threads / posts.

[miracle2k]

Fomo is real, but I'd encourage you to take another look. The space would benefit from more people with a background in the arts for sure.

[basch]

Philosophically, I think there is something there. How do you create scarcity in a digital infinitely copyable world, without an authority figure. With baseball cards and pokemon cards, you can create artificial scarcity by only printing so many in a run. NFT scarcity is really no sillier than baseball card scarcity. The original creator says "this collection has x amount." What makes that matter is that they said so, and the community believed them that their decision was important. Pokemon could print a "rare" card for every person on the planet, but that ruins game mechanics. In digital games, you can control scarcity with a central authority. EA or Ubisoft or Blizzard or Microsoft can only issue so much of an item, and they distribute them, and you cant copy it because the authority keeps track.

In a decentralized world, a digital yet scarce item can be created, distributed, and reused. A game can go under, and a new game can pop up and respect the accumulated wealth of the community. A game can fork, where half of the community plays one teams version, and half plays a different one, with nobody losing their assets. A rogue developer can entice people to play by inviting people to reuse tools they acquired from a rivals game. A counterfeiting blacksmith can forge their own weapons, and a dark side community can vote to allow them in game, while a light side community can vote to only allow official weapons. What it will all come down to is consensus, the developers (and players voicing through where they spend their attention) of the game deciding which items should be allowed to be imported and which shouldnt. IMHO, there is something cool about the player stats of an RPG being isolated and separated from the game itself, and always owned by the player not the game company.

From an investment perspective, I can see why it looks as dumb as anything in the physical speculative art world. But as a game mechanic, it does seem to offer a useful utility that previously depended on some server staying up forever or trust in a closed system. This is a brink or cusp, where theres a good idea out there somewhere, and maybe someone has or hasnt executed on it yet, but if it has been made into something truly useful, it still isnt popular enough to be well know by us plebs yet.

They also, more simply, act as a membership card or vip pass. You can spend money to join a club, and then you get the corresponding experience that comes with it. Take for example the Matrix NFT. I fully expect there to be some somewhat cool experiences that real people get to really experience by consenting and paying to join that social experiment. Sure it could work roughly as well as a database entry at a central authority, but decentralization is one way to allow easy transfer of your membership to someone new when youre done, without the game developer having to care or keep track of who is who. It turns into Willy Wonka, whoever holds a golden ticket is allowed in, copying tickets isnt possible.

[slg]

> How do you create scarcity in a digital infinitely copyable world

Your premise rests on this question. My counter is what is the value in creating scarcity beyond just trying to make money? Your examples are about people investing in money and not losing those assets. Your experience example is not really digital scarcity if I understand your hypothetical correctly. It is about a real physical scarcity, the number of people who will be let into the experience, being represented in a digital world. There is no new innovation there.

To me the idea of creating scarcity out of something that is not scarce is done for one and only one reason, for a financial benefit.

[basch]

>what is the value in creating scarcity beyond just trying to make money?

Gameplay balancing.

We've crossed a very blurred line of gaming, role play, and real life. Whos to say which is which anymore.

I dont think profitability and production of gaming are mutually exclusive. Why cant game creators also make money for their work?

[slg]

I guess I could have phrased that a little differently so you couldn't pull a quote out of context and miss my point regarding scarcity in a gaming context. In the context of games I was referring to decentralized scarcity. I can recognize the example of a game being better if not everyone has the same cards (but this is still financially motivated since Pokemon is a profit making endeavor). But in that context, what value does decentralization have? Why is decentralized Pokemon better than centralized Pokemon in a way that doesn't boil down to at least one of the parties having a financial interest in decentralization? The whole idea of "forking games" seems pointless to me. If there is demand for a fork, why wouldn't a different centralized version satisfy it? The only added value is the preservation of financial stake in the game. One again the idea of scarcity leads back to financial gain.

[basch]

How often do we see game servers shut down where the game isnt playable anymore? I think there is something cool about the accumulation of in game assets being in a persons personal owned wallet, and not an account on the game server. That dichotomy has consumer benefits.

A game company can disappear, and the players can pick right up where they left off, with a new game, remake, or a reverse engineered copy of the server.

Why cant financial gain be a PART of the whole? People can both collect pokemon cards, and play with them. It's not mutually exclusive that you have to declare youre one or the other. Although NFTs probably should include a "you opened the wrapper" function, to create additional scarcity as people destroy the value of their items by making them less digitally pristine.

[jshen]

Who balances the game in a decentralized world?

[basch]

The game creators and the market.

In the same way that the market will refuse to believe I printed an authentic pokemon card, the game players decide which printers/minters are valid game token producers. If the community decides to respect a certain game production team, that becomes reality. A game company being in charge only lasts as long as the players believing in them. It's the polar express basically.

[cbm-vic-20]

I can definitely see the use-case for things like Pokemon or Magic: The Gathering cards, the NFT being issued for each individual copy, and signed by the game company. This way, rare cards can remain rare, can be used to play a game, and ultimately, can be traded/sold just like physical cards. The paper trail leading back to the company will be recorded in the blockchain.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> How do you create scarcity in a digital infinitely copyable world, without an authority figure.

This is a problem created to fit the solution. Why in the name of God would anyone want to re-introduce scarcity into a post-scarcity space? Such a person is so narcissistic, so greedy, so sociopathic that they would deny others something they could have for nothing in order to enrich themselves. It is sickening.

> A game can go under, and a new game can pop up and respect the accumulated wealth of the community.

People keep saying this and it makes no goddamned sense. They didn't accumulate any wealth, they accumulated some entries in a database somewhere. A developer could even more easily just make a game that uses those assets without all the artificial scarcity.

[kranke155]

Making closed source software is a way to create scarcity in a post scarcity space. Are you innocent of that too?

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Closed source software can still be copied, even if you charge money for it. I have never created any software that utilized any form of DRM. Hell, most of the code I write is public domain, making it even more free than most open source software.

Besides, I'm not saying we shouldn't compensate creators. Unfortunately even though the digital world is post scarcity the one where our bodies reside is not and creators need to eat. However, I don't believe that shoving scarcity into a post-scarcity space is the way to go about that.

[kranke155]

So you agree that DRM is a way to enforce scarcity in a post scarcity world ?

Your words - my software can be copied even though I sell it.

exactly the same with NFTs.

My Digital art can be copied even though I sell it as an NFT.

NFTs don’t enforce scarcity at all, not of the artwork itself.

[joshmarlow]

I have pretty mixed feelings about NFTs in general.

But I am intrigued by the use case of allowing a large number of individuals to patron a given artist (and give them recurring income on subsequent resale of their work). All else being equal, I would prefer to live in a society where artists and other makers have time to follow their passion and create instead of spending their time on some job just to pay the bills.

So to the extent that NFTs can enable that, I'm tentatively onboard.

[anamexis]

> So to the extent that NFTs can enable that, I'm tentatively onboard.

And what extent is that? There are plenty of ways to send money to an artist, both with crypto and without. What value do NFTs add, as far as patronizing artists?

[joshmarlow]

It's possible - if not common - to setup the underlying smart contract to send some amount of funds back to the creator when an NFT changes hands. So that turns selling a piece of art once to pay the bills into selling it once and then subsequently collecting royalties (potentially indefinitely).

As far as I know, that's a pretty novel offering.

EDIT: for grammar

[anamexis]

But at the end of the day, you're not reselling the art, you're reselling the NFT.

There's nothing that makes this capability unique to NFTs or crypto - you could sell a license to an artwork that has similar terms.

[joshmarlow]

> There's nothing that makes this capability unique to NFTs or crypto

Yeah, you're probably right here.

This is a slight pivot in discussion but - you're right, the proper license agreement (if enforced) would give a similar effect. And there's a strong argument that NFTs, DAOs for gathering capital, etc are just serving functions similar to Patreon or Kickstarter.

But there are a lot of projects popping up and getting varying degrees of attraction in the crypto space.

Maybe crypto isn't making many new things possible - but it might be making lots of things a little easier?

[npteljes]

Supporting artists is fine, but it also facilitates a lot of art theft. Random article:

https://www.businessofbusiness.com/articles/nfts-turning-art...

[Hjfrf]

In the current iteration, they don't solve that problem.

You still need a centralised entity to enforce ownership, making the blockchain redundant.

A future attempt might be better, maybe.

[joshmarlow]

You're not wrong. It's an imperfect solution right now; but it is a step in exploring what's possible. And exploratory steps are really helpful for iterating on a good solution.

[kranke155]

You’ve nailed it.

People don’t understand what artists used to have to do to make a living. They complain about carbon usage yet I know many talented artists who had to work for BP, Shell and ICE car companies so they could pay their rent. On Tezos the chain is low carbon usage anyway.

[karmakaze]

NFTs are not about giving, they're about having.

[karmakaze]

Perhaps not as self-evident as I thought:

Artificial scarcity--having something others can't.

[timcott]

For a digitally savvy community, HN takes on NFTs are surprisingly backwards looking. NFTs most people have seen/heard of are just links to a JPEG with little to no utility. That has caused all the hype/OpenSea volume, but there are many interesting crypto projects that ascribe utility to NFTs (but are also much less accessible).

Interesting NFTs are those that: prove identity, serve as a key to a private community, yield tokens with utility, prove ownership of an asset that generates royalties, augment a gaming experience, etc.

What's unique about how NFTs solve existing problems is fundamental to crypto - the data layer is open source, so everything is composable. Maybe the folks here working for large cap tech firms in effort to monetize proprietary data are offended by that.

[58x14]

I cite ENS (ens.domains) as one of the bedrock technologies in this next cycle. Identity is the biggest flaw in our current social media / search engine / information discovery paradigm.

In the next two weeks, I'll have my PGP keys discoverable, on blockchain, two clicks away from anyone with (unrestricted) internet access. Just find me at joshjames.eth and boom, you can virtually guarantee a secure communication channel with me. Outside of a physical abduction or hardware compromise of my private keys, this pattern no longer requires a middleman to host my pubkey.

[wmf]

Interesting NFTs are those that: prove identity, serve as a key to a private community, yield tokens with utility, prove ownership of an asset that generates royalties, augment a gaming experience, etc.

If those things want to be taken seriously they need to divorce themselves from the term "NFT", demonstrate that blockchain is necessary, and use the best tech (e.g. privacy-preserving zero-knowledge protocols for anything involving identity/authentication/authorization).

[malshe]

What are some examples where NFTs have solved or are solving fundamental problems?

[exdsq]

NFTs help solve a few of the problems in reselling gig tickets

1. Royalties paid to the band

2. Allow you to check they're authentic tickets

3. Allow you to sell them online to people in a trusted away (atomic transactions for money, so no you send it then I pay/you pay then I sent it)

[Gigachad]

You can do all 3 much easier with a database.

[me_me_mu_mu]

It makes for mega cringe lords like Gary Vee. Dude is like 60 and dresses like a Fortnite teenager so he can peddle NFTs to kids as an investment strategy. I always found him to be annoying and the NFT space basically confirmed it.

[Aloha]

He's 46. I think NFT's are laughable, but if you're gonna play the agism card, at least get the details right.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Don't know who this guy is but just looked him up online. As someone in their mid 40s, scares me if some people think this is what a 60 year old looks like...

[afterburner]

Just Gen X being called boomers, once again

[kilroy123]

It's comments like this, which reaffirm my fears of staying in this industry for too long.

I'm only in my mid-30s but I'm deathly afraid to stick around to see what the mid-40s or 50s will be like.

[dqpb]

Jeans and tshirt?

[dorkwood]

I'm worried about what I'll have to start wearing once I turn 46. Maybe a cardigan, or a vest?

[costcofries]

Not surprised that this is the top comment, it seems to be the overwhelming sentiment on HN, which is unfortunate. My perspective is that it's very early for NFTs and the large majority (you included) are fixating on what you're seeing in the space today, or put differently, you're being shortsighted.

Mark your comment down and revisit it in a few years, having an opinion on the sidelines is just fine. Now let the downvotes commence.

[simias]

We've been hearing this tune from cryptoenthusiasts for over a decade now, maybe you should revisit your comments from a few years ago?

If you dig in my own comments on this website you can probably find discussions from 2017 or even earlier where I ask when people think that cryptocurrency tech is going to finally deliver something useful. It's always "one or two years from now". It's always "we're early". Remember ICOs? Remember how it was going to revolutionize IoT? Remember dapps? Remember lightning? It's been around the corner for years now.

Can you think of a single other technical innovation that required so much faith and patience before it delivered? Maybe self-driving cars, but even then I'd argue that it made immense progress compared to blockchain technology.

In the end you can hype it as much as you want, it's still fundamentally just a crappy, slow, extremely inefficient append-only database that's only relevant because it's super good at supporting pyramid schemes.

[58x14]

Really have to challenge this comment.

"We're early" in the internet had the dotcom bubble, the development of mobile 3G infrastructure and devices, the advent of smartphones, the VC-fueled app craze, and then eventually, now. The innovation mostly occurred in certain geographical areas, under the control of a relatively small population, with global impact.

The progression of blockchain technology - and dare I say culture - is speedrunning the history of human communication, including currency. Mainstream attention is high, but not adoption of paramount fundamental tech like ENS for identity and reputation. I'm guessing critical mass sometime in the next 18-36 months.

I also worry you may be subject to observation bias and ensuing feedback loops; if you primarily encounter negative headlines around crypto, it reinforces your opinion. But there are treasure troves of data, assembled by tens of thousands of exceptionally talented engineers, researchers and philosophers, that are also available for your observation. I wonder, if you spent some time there, perhaps your opinions would be more plastic.

[simias]

>I'm guessing critical mass sometime in the next 18-36 months.

And I say in 2025 I'll be having the same discussion I had in 2017 and I'm having right now as somebody will reply to a comment I make on HN telling me that whatever cryptofad of the day is 18-36months away from mainstream adoption.

[exdsq]

Interesting way to describe a computer as a append-only database

[simias]

The blockchain is not a computer. Computers are computers, and since it's trustless every node has to recompute everything.

With enough spin you can make everything sound revolutionary. Smart contracts are effectively like stored procedures, just ridiculously wasteful.

[solean]

"Remember dapps?" There are plenty of useful dapps that exist today.

[zepto]

Such as?

[solean]

An obvious one would be permissionless lending/borrowing (Aave or Compound)

[zepto]

Not obvious as far as I can see. Just moving cryptocurrencies around isn’t necessarily useful.

[swalsh]

When I watched the president of the United States get kicked off every popular social media platform it clicked for me. I never voted for the guy, I never liked the guy. But he was still the president, and it didn't matter. The tech companies demonstrated how much power they truely had. NO ONE should have that much unchecked power.

Before 2020, I was interested in crypto as an academic exercise. In 2021, it became an urgant need. I don't think i'm alone, to me crypto is an exit from the large tech monopolies that dominate our world today.

[blueski]

Partially agree - but people have been excited about e.g. smart contracts for the last ~5 years, yet which consumer or B2B apps are using them now? When Web2 came along, Gmail, Maps and Facebook were immediately exciting and obviously better than what came before. How much longer do we need to wait for those Web3 killer apps, that appeal to users who aren't purely in it for token price speculation?

[MrPatan]

When Gmail came along, like a decade after the web started getting popular, there were countless people, very much like you now, telling everybody how much better their desktop email app was.

Nfts may or may not be the blockchain's killer app (I think they are), but the average person's track record identifying a technology's killer app is a tad less than perfect

[grumple]

> Nfts may or may not be the blockchain's killer app (I think they are)

How is a bit of data on a blockchain pointing to a URI a breakthrough? It's utterly ineffective at proving ownership of anything, since the data at the uri can be changed, or more likely - the entire server will disappear at some point in time. And then what about uris on the blockchain pointing to illegal material (things that are actually copyrighted by someone through the legal system, CP, etc)?

Obviously storing actual data on-chain is too costly as well (both financially on the large chains, and practically/environmentally on any of them).

Everyone I know who's into NFTs and crypto was a con artist before blockchain and they'll be con artists after. Wait until I tell you about the drug addict scammers I know that started a crypto coin of their own and got a friend who knows literally nothing about crypto to write their whitepaper.

[blueski]

I'd argue the exponential growth curves for Gmail, Maps, and Facebook (with no financial reward for the user) suggests there was a good appreciation of the utility. When will get an equivalent Web3 app that isn't predominantly driven by price speculation? What will this look like?

[kranke155]

That’s not here yet but dapps do have millions of users already.

[blueski]

Which stand the best chance of going mainstream, with those who don't care about the underlying technology or price speculation?

[pyrale]

I don't see how promoting artificial scarcity is going to become a good idea in a few years. Just because the implementation is shit nowadays doesn't mean we should be happy to see better implementations in the future.

[costcofries]

I'm a hobbyist photographer. I have been publishing my photographs to unsplash for the last 4 years. I have over 100 photos on Adobe contributor. The former has delivered me ZERO inbound or monetary value, just over 3 million downloads of my work. The latter has given me returns I could buy coffee with.

NFTs open a new World of opportunity for me. Not only can other humans easily collect, and compensate me for my work, I also have a whole new stream for consuming royalties. Now think further about the ecosystem potential and all the third parties that consume my unsplash content for free today, NFTs can change that.

[blueski]

In what sense do the purchasers of your NFTs have "ownership" of your work - what could they do with it that I could not, and how is this legally enforced? If NFTv2 comes out in a year with 10x the financial rewards, will you commit to not offering the same pieces again?

[pyrale]

What led you to make your photos available under a free sharing license, if you were expecting returns?

> Not only can other humans easily collect, and compensate me for my work

They could have done it before, what makes you think this technical change will make people want to fund artists more, beyond a momentary financial mania?

[costcofries]

1. The goal with Unsplash has always been marketing exposure and inbound traffic, though unfortunately it just doesn't really exist. So, why are my photos still there? It feels counterproductive to remove something that has ranked so well, for so long, on the platform.

2. Just my opinion - I believe that over time people will increasingly value digital assets, I don't think we're even close to understanding their utility. NFT collectors are a growing segment for artists and things like virtual galleries will represent new places to showcase and share those collections.

Edit - I think people should make an effort to distinguish between visual and "technical or attributable" ownership. Too often these threads on NFTs are, "how do you own something if I can copy it" (the picture). That's missing the point. I don't care if you replicate my NFT and its visual identity, I will always be the owner of the underlying attribute and the evolution of that attribute.

[abduhl]

Then put your hobby where your mouth is. Pull all of your photos from the past 4 years from unsplash and mint NFTs for them.

[costcofries]

That's exactly what I'm doing :)

[timmg]

If I were to buy one of your NFTs, what does that get me?

Do you confer a license to the photo that I can use elsewhere? Can I use it in an ad? Can I sell copies of it?

[swalsh]

NFT's aren't about artificial scarcity, they give owners rights. Being able to control a digital asset is important. Take the ENS (it's like a domian service). Having exclusive control over a domain is not scarcity, it's what makes it practical.

To get in the right mindset, you should stop thinking of NFT's as pictures. That's not the primary use case. It's a stupid game that became popular. NFT's are just tokens on the open blockchain that you can exclusively control.

[zepto]

> they give owners rights

Generally not.

> NFT's are just tokens on the open blockchain that you can exclusively control.

Exactly this, and nothing more.

[officeplant]

I believe a lot of us would be more excited if they weren't also a frustrating grifter paradise.

People rant and rave about how this is a huge when for digital artists while ignoring the darker side. I see more and more small artists venting their frustrations in fighting with the NFT markets to get their stolen art taken down. Also in dealing with crypto bros cyberbullying them for refusing to participate in this whole crypto shit show.

[kranke155]

The stolen art thing is a problem screaming for a technical solution.

Outside of that, 99% of the artist I know are super happy NFTs exist and they can make money out of them.

[zepto]

How many artists do you know?

[kranke155]

Quite a few since I’m a digital artist myself.

[zepto]

That isn’t an answer to my question, but it does explain your financial interest in defending NFTs throughout this thread.

[nradov]

I agree NFTs are dumb, but some artists are getting paid huge amounts of real money for selling NFTs. If the artists can find suckers willing to pay then good for them.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/11/22325054/beeple-christies...

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Sure, that's fine enough if they're ok with being the kind of person who'd do that sort of thing. I'm not even going to make a big stink about how they probably shouldn't do that.

But when they come in here and try to tell us all how this incredible new technology is going to revolutionize the world, that's obvious bullshit.

[mc32]

To me NFTs are like selling “rights” to stars in galaxies far away.

It’s nice that you can say you “own” your very own star as stipulated by the star rights granting corporation, but in reality it means nothing other than you can say so… but I can claim a million other stars without needing a corporation and no one can take them away from me but also anyone else can make a claim on the same stars.

[kranke155]

True but what if in buying those stars you were supporting space research?

That’s all NFTs are right now - a novel way to invest in artists. And that’s remarkable, and good enough for me.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

I can do that without "buying" a star. It is actually possible to just give money to people, NFTs didn't invent it.

[miracle2k]

Convince more people to just hand out money to artists then!

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Look, if people are just saying NFTs are a human psychology hack to get people to donate more money to artists, then that's fine, but call a spade a spade. Don't blow smoke up my ass about how it's a game changing revolutionary technology that does things that simply can't be done without it.

[kranke155]

“Hacking human psychology of money” But that’s exactly what it is. It is revolutionary for the people who couldn’t do it before.

[mc32]

That’s fine, but in many cases people believe these are investment instruments rather than seeing them as a donation. If these purveyors made it clear these were Donations, then yeah, that’s okay.

Maybe Wikipedia can sell NFYs to “articles” and avoid the donation button?

[kranke155]

I think it’s pretty clear there’s a market for them, which attracted a bunch of knobs. But yes I see them as a direct way to fund artist’s work, particularly digital artists, who before this had to content with likes on Instagram! An NFT is a way to say “hey I like this so much I’ll pay you to keep doing it”

[mc32]

What makes it a better solution than a donation button?

[kranke155]

People didn’t use the donation buttons.

Now that you have a market for it, people use it. Something something human nature.

[Alex3917]

> I view NFTs as one of the dumbest things to come out of the crypto space.

To understand the space, you need to come to terms with the fact that asking "is this a legitimate human need" isn't a useful or relevant question. Instead, you need to ask, "for people who are already demonstrating that they have this human need, does this technology enable that need to be met more efficiently."

You might think the human need isn't legitimate, and it might not be legitimate, but if you think that way you're going to miss what's happening.

It's the same as the lesson from the Paul Graham and Fred Wilson AirBnB exchange, where just because you personally don't have the need doesn't mean that the need doesn't exist.

[YorickPeterse]

Let's be realistic here: there's no need for NFTs other than fear of missing out, and money laundering.

[Guest42]

1. There isn’t a need and it can’t be demonstrated via handwaving.

2. Investing in the imaginary shouldn’t be peddled by charlatans.

3. Comparing to Airbnb is inaccurate and intentionally misleading.

4. Sentences 1-2 are circular.

[blueboo]

That’s an extraordinarily weak and broad argument. Of course a lack of personal appeal doesn’t imply non-existence. Don’t rely on that for affirmative investment strategy!

Airbnb is a useful example, though; consider its context of hotels, VRBO, couchsurfing. These are proven human needs with associated economics that starkly contrast with the precedent for NFTs - Tumblr likes and retweets.

[ozgune]

> I view NFTs as one of the dumbest things to come out of the crypto space. I see the use cases, but frankly I don’t think it’s innovative nor does it solve something in a really unique way.

I think the original comment isn’t arguing that “this isn’t a legitimate human need.” I think it’s arguing that neither the tech is innovative nor the offered solution is unique.

[yks]

Need on the side of issuers obviously exists, they can make money. At the same time we see that most of the potential users, such as gamer community at large, are overwhelmingly against NFTs. So this need is clearly being manufactured, which can succeed or not, remains to be seen.

[boatsie]

I had this opinion too, but if you think about something like trading cards or any other “limited” collectibles that were mass produced, rather than one of a kind art, it’s sort of the same thing with regards to artificial scarcity.

[allenu]

I think this is where a lot of us don't see the similarity between artificial and real scarcity. The real scarcity of physical collectibles is not only due to their limited numbers, but also, I believe, due to the fact that they are physical objects that can degrade in quality or be lost entirely. That's a world of difference from digital bits that are just not allowed to be copied.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> if you think about something like trading cards or any other "limited" collectibles that were mass produced

You mean like Beanie Babies? "limited" collectible physical objects that went up and up in value.

Never heard of them? Yeah, that's because they stopped going up in value. Then stopped having value at all. It was about 20 years ago, who remembers that?

[echelon]

They're limited in the sense that pogs were limited.

When Kellog's is making NFTs, it devalues the entire platform.

Trading cards aren't a fitting analogy, because only a few companies were/are in that business, and they each ran specific product lines. They're more similar to old lego sets in that sense.

NFTs are pogs.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> Trading cards aren't a fitting analogy, because only a few companies were/are in that business

The irony is that being digital, bits not atoms, make it easy to make copies.

Oh you invented digital scarcity?

Now you have 1000 copies of the "digital scarcity" business.

[falcolas]

NFTs aren't trading cards.

They're receipts showing that you "own" the card on display in the public square. And more than one receipt can be minted for that card. The most you can hope for is the earliest timestamp on the receipt.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I think NFTs are bullshit, but I don't think the "And more than one receipt can be minted for that card" is as much of a problem as people think it is.

For example, it wouldn't be hard for an artist to publish a video saying "Hey folks, this is my public key, and these are the NFTs for these pieces of art", and then publish that video in multiple forums like Twitter, YouTube, etc. Then if someone tried to come up with different NFTs for the same pieces of art, the NFT holder could just point to the video (and, as you say, if the artist was malicious and tried to dupe his own NFTs, the earlier one would win).

This kind of "identity validation" is all over the cryptography space already - that's basically how Keybase proofs work. Heck, lots of HN commenters put their proofs in their HN account signatures.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> For example, it wouldn't be hard for an artist to publish a video saying "Hey folks, this is my public key, and these are the NFTs for these pieces of art"

So then how do we know that artist actually created that art? For all we know, that artist took someone else's work and was just the first to mint NFTs for it on that particular chain. Maybe the legitimate artist minted NFTs on a different chain later so nobody will ever believe they created it because of the timestamp.

As I understand it, this sort of 'theft' is happening all the time right now.

[falcolas]

An artist can create as many instances of an NFT as they want, even after selling "number 1". It's not malicious, it's a feature of the platform.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> An artist can create as many instances of an NFT as they want

Not just "an artist", anyone can. And they do. Many artists' works are being exploited in this way without their consent or even knowledge.

[cbm-vic-20]

Indeed, this also happens in the physical world. Many artists create multiple, individually numbered prints/copies of their artwork.

[Simon_O_Rourke]

The emperor has no clothes when it comes to NFTs. Mass illusions of rareity of what is just simply a string of ones and zeros.

[swalsh]

/*

FYI, the down arrow is not an indication of agreement, it is an indication of quality. If you disagree with me, at least have the common courtesy to comment.

*/

It's a shame the acronym NFT has become synonymous with digital images. As a concept it's a huge idea with so much potential. The issue is people now hear NFT, and their mind shuts down thinking it's some stupid monkey picture thing.

Everything you can do with an NFT, you COULD do with a centralized database. The problem is then you have to trust that database. You have to trust the person running it, you have to trust they will still be in business, you have to trust the person running it will allow other people to connect to it (or get stuck in their walled garden).

We're pretty far into this Web 2.0 experiment with centralized services. The experiment is over, the results are in. We can't trust them.

Does decentralization solve all problems? No absolutely not. Does it have a whole new set of problems? yes, but hopefully we can work through most of them. To me, the trade off of a more open ecosystem is worth it. If email was created in Web 2.0 it probably would have been stored in a database, and there would be little accessibility outside whoever created it. It would look like whatsapp.

What NFT's give us, is the ability to own a unique digital assets in an open system and not have to rely on ad driven business models. It's a digital asset which can be ANYTHING.

[grumple]

> The problem is then you have to trust that database. You have to trust the person running it, you have to trust they will still be in business, you have to trust the person running it will allow other people to connect to it (or get stuck in their walled garden).

That's just it. I do trust the bank. The bank has stood for several human lifetimes (might have changed names, but the same bank). They have overwhelmingly served people reliably. The deposits are insured by the government that has stood for several human lifetimes. They are accountable legally and practically. Bad transactions can be reversed thanks to the trusted processors, banks, and government.

> We're pretty far into this Web 2.0 experiment with centralized services. The experiment is over, the results are in. We can't trust them.

What on earth are you talking about? I've never had money taken from my bank account without my permission. Those few cases of fraud I've experienced have been detected and resolved swiftly, with little activity required from me.

Meanwhile with a blockchain you have to trust the majority of unknown actors. People I don't know, from states where theft of my money might go unprosecuted, if the actor can even be detected. Bad transactions cannot be reversed. Fraud? I'm SOL. And then there's the fact that crypto enables ransomware. And the environmental costs. Absurd.

> What NFT's give us, is the ability to own a unique digital assets in an open system and not have to rely on ad driven business models. It's a digital asset which can be ANYTHING.

We already have this in the US and other nations, it's called copyright, and the courts will enforce it as well as they can. NFTs do not provide an enforcement mechanism, they still rely on the legal system, and a pointer to a uri does not prove what object was originally at that uri.

[exdsq]

NFTs in regards to digital licences and tickets to events are game-changers in my eyes. I wish the focus was on that instead of on jpegs. If anyone is working on these, or wants to work on these, I'd be keen to collaborate.

[llimos]

Both of those have a central authority that is granting the relevant rights. What's the advantage of an NFT over letting that central authority manage it in a centralized database? And if they won't agree to facilitate transfers, why would they agree to release the license/ticket as an NFT to begin with?

[exdsq]

Bands != Ticket Master. Right now the easiest way to release tickets is through a central authority that takes fees to manage them, and then control the resale market. You can take the tickets elsewhere like Stubhub but that introduces 25% in fees to have insurance that if your tickets aren't valid and don't get you into the venue, you can have a refund. It's still impossible to check the tickets you purchase on these sites are authentic too - ticket fraud is a wide-spread multi-million dollar issue in the resale market (as you will see in the news from time to time).

If you move this to NFTs you have a few advantages. The workflow would look like this: Band creates NFTs (maybe via a website?) and they now exist in the bands wallet. Band puts them up for sale with a smart contract. Fans buy the tickets. Fans can attend the gig by showing the ticket is in their wallet to enter. Fans can resell the tickets if they're allowed to via another smart contract with the a small royalty going back to the band. Don't want the ticket to be resellable? Add a boolean flag to the NFT in its metadata. Want to check the ticket is authentic? Check it's tx history back to the bands minting (or check the NFT address exists in the list of valid tickets on the bands sale site or something). There are some UX issues here but they should all be solvable. Use a chain like Avalanche and the tx fees are $0.02 at the moment.

Essentially the whole man-in-the-middle central company that manages the creation, sales, resales, etc, becomes an open-source peer-to-peer infrastructure. This same thing could be true for game licenses or really any truly digital item. These assets become programmable and new business models are becoming viable while old business models are in theory obsolete - obviously this has some huge caveats: the UX on web3 sucks, we need to migrate from proof-of-work so it's not environmentally awful, and we need to disassociate ourselves with the scammy $1m NFTs. Also some edge cases need to be solved like how customer service will work if something goes wrong.

I mean the most fundamental thing about the blockchain and NFTs still blows my mind from time to time - these transactions are atomic and stop double-spend attacks. I can set up a transaction with you where you pay USDC and I send an NFT for a bands ticket, and we know for certain that at the end of the tx you're going to have that ticket and I'm going to have that money. No "you send it first, I don't trust you" or escrow service needed. The fact we can stick a Turing-complete program in the middle of that and add things like verification the ticket is from the set of authentic tickets, or that it's only valid if the USD is worth 1.25-1.30 Euros to avoid slippage, is just awesome (to me).

[Gigachad]

You assume that these ticket companies are providing no value for the fees they charge. Which I think isn’t a safe thing to assume. Everything you have listed here would be much much easier in a database.

Any kind of argument here would have to start with an explanation of why it wouldn’t be possible or practical to just start a new ticket company that does this all for free/very cheap.

[exdsq]

> Everything you have listed here would be much much easier in a database.

No, it isn't. How would you buy a ticket from me online when you don't know me? The only real option is to use stubhub which requires us to both create accounts, put our credit cards in, verify ourselves, you put the ticket up, me to buy it, and for me to not know the ticket is A. not been purchased by someone else B. authentic.

A decentralised app that runs this requires a smart contract to mint tickets and a smart contract to wrap reselling them, plus a web UI to tie it all together. An open source developer could build this and charge $1 per tx to maintain it.

What's the centralised alternative?

[acheron]

FYI, downvoting to disagree has always been ok on HN and the mods have reiterated that many times; first pg and then dang. Wherever you got the “down arrow is not an indication of agreement” thing, it wasn’t here.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

[hatware]

You get it. Everyone who says this is "dumb" said the internet, Facebook, Instagram, or Tik-tok was dumb too. Yet here they are.

Kinks need to be worked out, sure, but in ten to fifteen years artists will not be beholden to corporations. That is something to work towards and be very proud of.

[Gigachad]

There is a much much larger pile of garbage that was called dumb and just died off because it was.

[kranke155]

NFTs have been a revolution for digital artists. I can’t tire of saying this here. Look at Hic Et Nunc or even better FXhash on Tezos (a low carbon chain).

FXhash has created a generative art market like it’s never existed before, it’s created an amazing art scene without precedent I’ve ever seen. It also allows for generative art to interact with the blockchain to make every art piece unique.

IE if you mint on FXhash, each generative art piece is slightly different due to a randomising function in the art pieces. This means each and every NFT is unique since they all went through a slightly different values for some of their features. I highly recommend anyone criticising NFTs to think about this since it’s an absolutely groundbreaking achievement in digital art that just wasn’t possible before. The artists scene around FXhash is just incredible.

[Gigachad]

So I looked up FXhash and from what I gathered, people write a function to generate an image, and then it gets run with some random inputs so you get a bunch of similar but slightly different images out.

To call this an “absolutely groundbreaking achievement in digital art that just wasn’t possible before.” is comically absurd.

[kranke155]

Sure, then show me an open market where this was being done before at scale ?

[Gigachad]

Why does it have to be a market. Why does everything have to be about turning a profit. If you want computer generated art, I could show a billion examples. I could write my own function to generate a picture with no crypto technology.

If your argument boils down to “show me how people made lots of money on it”, then that is just confirming what I already believe. No substance, just profiting on hype.

[kranke155]

Sure thing Gigachad. Those darn artists are just making too much damn money! They should all live off the socialist UBI we’re so close to implementing right? Or maybe they should just live in poverty and not complain so much?

Just all these darn artists making money! How many artists salaries have you paid off this month with your salary Gigachad?

[daenz]

I'm firmly of the same opinion, but the one thing I could see value for them would be in crowdfunding prizes, for example, as patreon rewards for the development of a video game. In that scenario, they have "real value" to the recipients, and money is exchanging hands for a very targeted purpose. Plus the NFTs are relatively low effort/cost. That seems like a win for everyone, but it is a very niche scenario.