5 ms·

No matter how much i read into NFTs, i cant wrap my head around the idea. It just sounds like a scam.

coldcode 6y ago
As a digital artist I find them highly intriguing to consider. As a person I still can't figure out why people would be paying me for a hash and not actually get anything.
- iamacyborg 6y ago
  Yeah, I just don't understand why people would pay tens of thousands of pounds for a .jpg or .gif
  - AlwaysBCoding 6y ago
    1. Money Laundering: If you made money from a pump and dump or something otherwise nefarious that you want to convert back to USD and explain away, a good way is to mint digital art and sell it to yourself. Then when you report it to the IRS you made $100,000 from selling digital artwork to an anonymous buyer instead of from insider trading a low market cap coin. This is not so different from how art works in meatspace (see Mark Rothko). 2. Charity: It's hard to really grok this if you don't live in the crypto world but people make insane amounts of money from Ethereum. I know multiple people who are under 30 and have each made upwards of $500,000,000 from buying ETH in the presale / insider trading in bull markets. Generally someone who bought into the ETH presale is a mega crypto bull and keeps a large percentage of their net worth in crypto. It's trivial for them to support artists by buying their artwork for a minuscule fraction of the money they've made. What sounds like "buying a .jpg for thousands of dollars" to someone not in this world, is more like the crypto equivalent of tipping a live streamer a bit on twitch.
  - throwaway744678 6y ago
    I don't understand it either, but they actually pay for a certificate of ownership of a .jpg or .gif, whatever this means.
- kybernetikos 6y ago
  First of all - you're right. Second of all - why do people pay more for a limited edition print than a normal print?
- eoo 6y ago
  I think it's really similar to art. It's more about your relationship with the artist or the emotion that makes you want to own the original... And of course, the art market.
- jcfrei 6y ago
  See my previous answer for a possible reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26288948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26288948
- bambax 6y ago
  It's speculation. People who buy highly expensive pieces of art and store them in a vault in Geneva* don't enjoy them in any way. It's a value store. Why not buy Bitcoins instead? I think it has to do with the cool factor. It feels probably better to own an NFT than a Bitcoin, as it feels different to own actual art than stock in the Coca-Cola company. (I can only guess though, I have never owned any of those.) * https://www.crozier.ch/en/services/art-storage https://www.crozier.ch/en/services/art-storage
paulcole 6y ago
Can you wrap your head around the idea of BTC? If so, I’d be curious to know how you think they’re different.
Tenoke 6y ago
It's a digital unfakeable deed to an asset, that asset being a trading card, artwork or something else. It's no more of a scam than selling the rights to say a song you made. Although in both cases some might scam by selling/using stuff they don't own.
- iamben 6y ago
  Except if I bought the rights to a song (like Hipgnosis Songs Fund are doing, for instance), I could profit off them as the song is mine. As far as I understand, for the most part with NFTs, it's more akin to buying a baseball card - I can't reproduce or profit off it, I just 'own' it.
  - Tenoke 6y ago
    Depends how you set it up. Both are possible, just how you can sell both the rights to own an instance of it and the rights to sell.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  One major scam that's lower effort here is that you can simply sell someone else's digital art. Selling physical art forgeries has always been a thing but the risks involved in doing it (i.e. what if you get caught) and the costs (faking a detailed painting isn't EASY) mean it's not as attractive as just grabbing some Japanese or Chinese artist's stuff off Pixiv and selling it as an NFT to english speakers, where the original artist may never find out about it.
  - Tenoke 6y ago
    The comparison isn't so much physical art as selling someone else's photos or songs or game assets on the internet which doesn't involve crypto.
- Lazare 6y ago
  > It's a digital unfakeable deed to an asset, that asset being a trading card, artwork or something else. Well...no. Quite the opposite. The art is an asset. NFTs are not the artwork, and they're not a deed to the artwork. Buying an NFT gives you ownership of the NFT; it doesn't give you ownership of the artwork. Selling digital unfakeable deeds to an artwork, and trading those deeds on the blockchain, sounds really cool. That might have value! But to the best of my knowledge, nobody has done that, largely because it's utterly impossible and we have no idea how to even go about trying to do it. And in any case, NFTs certainly aren't that. You're not buying and selling the artwork, you're buying and selling a numbered acknowledgement that the artwork exists.
abledon 6y ago
upload all: - .pngs are you're 8 year old self may have left in your parents windows MyDocuments folder, - scratch files your 14 year old self made at VFX camp - any unused game assets that you have made for Unity/Godot e.g. http://cryptoart.wtf/#https://superrare.co/artwork-v2/spherical-healing-13396 http://cryptoart.wtf/#https://superrare.co/artwork-v2/spheri... (assign a GPT3 generated phrase, being fed some texts from the cubism,dada era (duchamp, picasso etc...) ) make 400$! This thing is gonna get flooded
- andybak 6y ago
  Already started to happen. People have been posting complaints about junk or low-effort NFTs on Twitter a lot recently. And I'm sitting on Marcel Duchamp's toilet chuckling to myself.
- PebblesRox 6y ago
  I thought each token cost over a hundred dollars to mint. Otherwise I'd play around with adding a few things. As it is, it's gambling to see if someone will want to pay you more for what you minted than the cost to mint it, right?

As a digital artist I find them highly intriguing to consider. As a person I still can't figure out why people would be paying me for a hash and not actually get anything.

iamacyborg 6y ago
Yeah, I just don't understand why people would pay tens of thousands of pounds for a .jpg or .gif
- AlwaysBCoding 6y ago
  1. Money Laundering: If you made money from a pump and dump or something otherwise nefarious that you want to convert back to USD and explain away, a good way is to mint digital art and sell it to yourself. Then when you report it to the IRS you made $100,000 from selling digital artwork to an anonymous buyer instead of from insider trading a low market cap coin. This is not so different from how art works in meatspace (see Mark Rothko). 2. Charity: It's hard to really grok this if you don't live in the crypto world but people make insane amounts of money from Ethereum. I know multiple people who are under 30 and have each made upwards of $500,000,000 from buying ETH in the presale / insider trading in bull markets. Generally someone who bought into the ETH presale is a mega crypto bull and keeps a large percentage of their net worth in crypto. It's trivial for them to support artists by buying their artwork for a minuscule fraction of the money they've made. What sounds like "buying a .jpg for thousands of dollars" to someone not in this world, is more like the crypto equivalent of tipping a live streamer a bit on twitch.
- throwaway744678 6y ago
  I don't understand it either, but they actually pay for a certificate of ownership of a .jpg or .gif, whatever this means.
kybernetikos 6y ago
First of all - you're right. Second of all - why do people pay more for a limited edition print than a normal print?
eoo 6y ago
I think it's really similar to art. It's more about your relationship with the artist or the emotion that makes you want to own the original... And of course, the art market.
jcfrei 6y ago
See my previous answer for a possible reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26288948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26288948
bambax 6y ago
It's speculation. People who buy highly expensive pieces of art and store them in a vault in Geneva* don't enjoy them in any way. It's a value store. Why not buy Bitcoins instead? I think it has to do with the cool factor. It feels probably better to own an NFT than a Bitcoin, as it feels different to own actual art than stock in the Coca-Cola company. (I can only guess though, I have never owned any of those.) * https://www.crozier.ch/en/services/art-storage https://www.crozier.ch/en/services/art-storage

paulcole 6y ago

Can you wrap your head around the idea of BTC? If so, I’d be curious to know how you think they’re different.

Tenoke 6y ago

It's a digital unfakeable deed to an asset, that asset being a trading card, artwork or something else. It's no more of a scam than selling the rights to say a song you made. Although in both cases some might scam by selling/using stuff they don't own.

iamben 6y ago
Except if I bought the rights to a song (like Hipgnosis Songs Fund are doing, for instance), I could profit off them as the song is mine. As far as I understand, for the most part with NFTs, it's more akin to buying a baseball card - I can't reproduce or profit off it, I just 'own' it.
- Tenoke 6y ago
  Depends how you set it up. Both are possible, just how you can sell both the rights to own an instance of it and the rights to sell.
kevingadd 6y ago
One major scam that's lower effort here is that you can simply sell someone else's digital art. Selling physical art forgeries has always been a thing but the risks involved in doing it (i.e. what if you get caught) and the costs (faking a detailed painting isn't EASY) mean it's not as attractive as just grabbing some Japanese or Chinese artist's stuff off Pixiv and selling it as an NFT to english speakers, where the original artist may never find out about it.
- Tenoke 6y ago
  The comparison isn't so much physical art as selling someone else's photos or songs or game assets on the internet which doesn't involve crypto.
Lazare 6y ago
> It's a digital unfakeable deed to an asset, that asset being a trading card, artwork or something else. Well...no. Quite the opposite. The art is an asset. NFTs are not the artwork, and they're not a deed to the artwork. Buying an NFT gives you ownership of the NFT; it doesn't give you ownership of the artwork. Selling digital unfakeable deeds to an artwork, and trading those deeds on the blockchain, sounds really cool. That might have value! But to the best of my knowledge, nobody has done that, largely because it's utterly impossible and we have no idea how to even go about trying to do it. And in any case, NFTs certainly aren't that. You're not buying and selling the artwork, you're buying and selling a numbered acknowledgement that the artwork exists.

abledon 6y ago

upload all: - .pngs are you're 8 year old self may have left in your parents windows MyDocuments folder, - scratch files your 14 year old self made at VFX camp - any unused game assets that you have made for Unity/Godot e.g. http://cryptoart.wtf/#https://superrare.co/artwork-v2/spherical-healing-13396 http://cryptoart.wtf/#https://superrare.co/artwork-v2/spheri... (assign a GPT3 generated phrase, being fed some texts from the cubism,dada era (duchamp, picasso etc...) ) make 400$! This thing is gonna get flooded

andybak 6y ago
Already started to happen. People have been posting complaints about junk or low-effort NFTs on Twitter a lot recently. And I'm sitting on Marcel Duchamp's toilet chuckling to myself.
PebblesRox 6y ago
I thought each token cost over a hundred dollars to mint. Otherwise I'd play around with adding a few things. As it is, it's gambling to see if someone will want to pay you more for what you minted than the cost to mint it, right?