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by robonerd 1449 days ago
How do otherwise intelligent people come to believe things this stupid? An NFT is a glorified receipt, the most it can possibly do is prove you purchased something but you can already do that with regular fucking receipts and credit card statements.

Seriously, I want to know. How did this happen to you? Was your common sense dazzled by math?

5 comments

Please don't take HN threads into hellish generic flamewars. We've been through this a thousand times already. Pouring out a whole bunch more gasoline and setting it on fire is exactly what you should not be doing here. We want curious conversation.

Personal attack is also completely off limits, and you did it more than once in this thread. No more of this, please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: it turns out that you've been breaking the site guidelines so badly and so repeatedly that I've banned the account.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll use HN as intended in the future. Among other things, that means no more comments remotely like these:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32005073

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32005050

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31992691

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32010891.)

I can't believe I'm going to defend NFTs, but ... _if_ copyright law were satisfied that you aren't infringing if you purchased perpetual access to a copy--digital or otherwise--then "a glorified receipt" could be all that was needed _if_ the system honoured users with a right to access, on any system on which it was available, for cost, a work that has been legally purchased.

In USA, I can't see why proof of purchase and TPB wouldn't be enough. Platform issues don't negate the rights you purchased.

When you buy stuff on these digital stores, you agree to pay for an indefinite license to the content. So it can be pulled at any time.

Why would these stores use NFTs attached to ownership licenses when they could just reword their ToS to include ownership. They don’t want to sell ownership to begin with so they would never use NFTs either.

the discussion is about the benefits of a solution (prescriptivism) rather than the process of implementing it, and getting stakeholders to agree

it's not very insightful to say that people like money and will seek it or avoid losing it (descriptivism)

As usual, Crypto shills push these extremely complicated technical solutions to problems which have very simple economic/legal solutions. The problem here is that companies are not selling ownership. NFTs do nothing for this because companies are still not selling ownership.
You could even have the content shared over public BitTorrent networks, encrypted with a symmetric key and then store a personalised asymmetric decryption key (the symmetric key encrypted using the owner wallets public key, ensuring only the current owner can derive it from the public NFT data) in the NFT. You would re-compute this asymmetric key for the new owner during the TransferNFT function and store it in the contract.

Yeah, the symmetric key would probably leak quickly, and the content decrypted and shared, the point here is to make the system so convenient and simple that it discourages piracy, which you can never fully beat anyway.

Maybe they are thinking of BAYC and yugalabs.

Yugalabs[0] assign copyright license to whoever owns the NFT on the chain forever.

So if someone mints a NFT, they get a perpetual license to use it however they like. The downside is if they lose the NFT for any reason such as theft, they lose the license as well.

Other NFT projects of yugalabs store data on chain or use a separate storage chain built for permanence. This basically means they cannot take the content down once they have uploaded it and attached it to a NFT.

However this doesn't solve anything unless corporations are forced to accept it as the only way to sell content.

One big problem it may solve for corporations is uniqueness and validation of all license in existence through a ledger. If a company sells their content exclusively via NFT, they can take advantage of immutable receipt system and built in programming capabilities to embed royalties on transfer. This would make it hard for people to sell their copies without giving companies a cut. Legally, that is. Nothing stops them from ripping off a copy and selling it but it would be easy to prove it is invalid and enforce via legal system.

0] Yugalabs is a big NFT IP company valued at 4 billion. They are behind monkey jpegs which are called BAYC.

And I want to know what drives a person like you to post toxic comments like this.

Why not just say "An NFT is a glorified receipt, the most it can possibly do is prove you purchased something but you can already do that with a regular receipt." without the rude and spiteful attitude?

You're asking me why I'm not kind to somebody who has fallen for / is shilling for an absurd scam? I slam the door on Jehovah Witnesses too.
> otherwise intelligent people

[citation needed]