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Jack Dorsey is attempting to sell his first tweet as an NFT
- fullshark 6y ago2.5 million leading bid right now. https://v.cent.co/tweet/20?s=u_o https://v.cent.co/tweet/20?s=u_o
- snicksnak 6y agoThe highest bidder claims he is willing to go up as high as 10 million.
- captain_price7 6y agoThat doesn't make absolutely any sense. What can he possibly hope to achieve by sharing this information?
- qqii 6y agoDissuade other people from bidding?
- eznzt 6y agoDoes that person even have that amount of money? From looking at his timeline it seems unlikely.
- aarongolliver 6y agoSeems like that's an ideal problem to solve using a blockchain/smart contracts (a distributed auction). If they can't verify these bids are real & will be paid out that seems like a complete failure of the technology. Edit: their website doesn't go into detail much at all, so I don't have high hopes for this
- qqii 6y agoYou're required to link your Web3 wallet to use it. I've not inspected their smart contact but it's probably safe to say these bets are real.
- qqii 6y agoThe offer is done through a smart contact and cannot be placed if you don't have the money. 1630 Ethereum isn't that unlikely, Ethereum was worth ~$120 last March so that's only ~$200k. That's probably nothing for the CEO of a cryptocurrency company (https://nitter.dark.fail/sinaEstavi https://nitter.dark.fail/sinaEstavi)
- qqii 6y agoSince Ethereum's price is a moving target that's 1630 Eth.
- juskrey 6y agoSelling his digital autograph, not the tweet. Selling the tweet would imply passing full control over the original.
- dzhiurgis 6y agoSo does it mean Twitter will also respect ownership based on whats on blockchain / contract? That would open up so many interesting avenues - new owner could delete, modify, hide it?
- roywiggins 6y agoHe's just selling something that amounts to an exclusive autographed copy as far as I can tell.
- sp332 6y agoNope, it's completely meaningless outside of the blockchain, and people who agree to comply with ownership recorded there.
- qqii 6y agoSince one of the people who's implicitly agreeing is the owner of the tweet and CEO of the platform, I find that gives it a decent amount of credence.
- sp332 6y agoSure but it doesn't automatically change who has control over the tweet, or make this tweet behave any differently from others on the platform.
- qqii 6y agoIt doesn't, but that also not what's valuable here. Take the recent grumpy cat NFT as an example, what's being sold is just an the original grumpy cat image except the NFT creator is verified to be the cat's owner. It doesn't give the purchaser any rights but it still sold for a decent amount. What's valuable is that it was created by the owner, not any rights or control.
- lgeorget 6y agoThat's not what I get from the last sentence of the article. Apparently you just gain the exclusivity of the right to claim that you own the tweet. But @jack can delete the tweet and Twitter can shut down at any time and that doesn't grant the buyer a refund.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y agoI find the idea of NFT interesting. Right now, the way it operates it feels like a giant MLM scam ( and in a sense, that is exactly what it is ). Still, I can see potential future if it is accepted as a way to keep track of 'digital collectables'.
- perfmode 6y agowhat is a digital collectible? what is the value of a collectible? i can’t put my finger on it but feels like a strong bout of collective insanity high on ideas abusing language and metaphor and analogy to the point we no longer understand what is real and unreal
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y agoI understand your question, but at the end of the day, what is value? Why is a one can of soup more collectible than another physically identical can of soup beyond 'intangible' knowledge of it having been owned by a historical figure? In practical sense, things are worth only as much as someone is willing to pay, and someone is willing to pay 2.5m.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- spijdar 6y agoSure, it's all on a sliding scale, but I think GP's point is the lines are blurring into insanity. At least a can of soup is a tangible object and is more "realizable" to our beings than some information stored on a database in some FAANG datacenter. Depending on your perspective it's all ridiculous or all rational, but at least the can of soup can be interacted with "natively" by our bodies without needing a trillion dollar technology stack to even sense in the first place.
- Tossrock 6y ago"FAANG datacenter" really highlights the absurdity of including Netflix in the acronym - they have no data centers of their own, as they're built entirely on the AWS stack.
- fermienrico 6y agoIs it just me or recently in last year or so I am noticing more and more of ... I don't know what to call these: - Baseball/pokemon card auctions - Bitcoin and crypto in general - Meme stocks - and now this NFT stuff It is all exploding. Usually, this was limited to much smaller stage and scale, besides may be the art world. Ofcourse auctions are older than the dust, I am just noticing increasing pyramid-schemes/tokens/scarcity-driven-value-stores and personalities such as deepfuckingvalue/elon/chamath/etc. Is there an underlying pattern here?
- jowsie 6y agoIt's basically MLM's but instead of tupperware they're peddling FOMO.
- bitdizzy 6y agoFinancialization of everything until tokens themselves become financialized.
- Pxtl 6y agoIsn't "tokens themselves become financialized" basically Bitcoin?
- ralusek 6y agoGrowing distrust of institutions. General increase in postmodern philosophy, deconstructing concepts of inherent value. Stock market valuations increasingly decoupling from underlying business to the point that everyone realized we were just betting on abstract entities. Large portion of the population not earning enough for traditional investment vehicles to net returns that would meaningfully impact their lives, so instead going for YOLO meme investments for a marginally slim chance at completely changing their lives. I'm sure there're more reasons.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Ekaros 6y ago
- outside1234 6y agoWhy would anyone want a digital autograph? It is not like you can frame this in your living room - what is the appeal?
- thrill 6y agoWell, if you own the rights to something, you can control the commercial use of it (assuming non-commercial use is not worth the effort to restrict). I leave the commercial utility of Jack's first tweet as an exercise for others (because I have no clue).
- roywiggins 6y agoSure, but that's a legal right that lives in law, not on the blockchain. And I'd be shocked if this NFT actually included that sort of ownership as part of the deal.
- VectorLock 6y agoI don't think NFTs almost ever attach any intellectual property or copyright ownership to possession of the NFT. It's more like a collectors card of some thing. Purely abstract.
- sp332 6y agoIt's exclusivity. This is just creating something exclusive purely to be exclusive.
- Klwohu 6y agoThis is silly.
- ineedasername 6y agoWhat you are purchasing is a digital certificate of the tweet, unique because it has been signed and verified by the creator So basically it's an odd form of a digital autograph associated with this tweet, that the owner presumably agrees not to autograph again and sell to other people.
- quantified 6y agoWhat happens if the autograph owner emails the hash to their friends? What does “own” mean here? They can all print it and frame it on the wall. Meanwhile Twitter’s data systems go down and the tweet disappears, no one “has” the actual tweet. I wouldn’t mind having $2M I didn’t need to bid on this level of abstraction.
- ineedasername 6y agoI guess you could print out the hash & get Dorsey to sign it by hand as well. That should be part of the deal. That way you know it's the one. Also, in the highly unlikely event of a hash collision, the Dorsey hash wins and the other hash has to go back to to /dev/null, metaphorical head held down in shame.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoDoesn't that completely defeat the point of the NFT if the thing you really need to prove ownership is a signed autograph from the author? We've valued signed autographed copies of original works highly for a very long time without NFTs.
- moonbug 6y agoalways suspected he was a wrong'un.
- mrwh 6y agoMakes me think of Civilization, the game, somehow (which I used to spend far too much time playing and now have officially Given Up). You start money constrained, but by the endgame there's typically so much cash floating around that it ceases to have the same meaning. So what is the person buying here? An anecdote; except that the better the anecdote comes across the more that it's an investment too. Seems like madness to me, but then I am very much not at the silly money stage. Money still means shelter, rather than a way to keep score.
- cs702 6y agoSociety deems that an original work of art by, say, Pablo Picasso is more valuable than an indistinguishable copy by an unknown or lesser known artist. Making a good copy of a Picasso is not that difficult. Go to any decent art school, and you will find artists who can competently forge a Picasso. Many owners of Picasso artwork in fact display forgeries, which they call "replicas" in polite company, and keep the original works in secure storage, safe from any possible damage. Most people cannot distinguish between an original work and its forgery anyway. In fact, even expert collectors are routinely fooled by forgeries![a] The authenticity of many works of art can be ascertained only by looking at provenance, documentary evidence, and historical context -- an imprecise process riddled with human bias and error. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are like authentic works of art, except that their authenticity, contents, ownership, and provenance (including date of origin) are protected by strong cryptography, making forgeries impossible for all practical purposes. And society deems that an NFT representing the authentic first tweet by Jack Dorsey -- with its contents, ownership, and provenance protected by cryptography -- is more valuable than an indistinguishable copy of the tweet made by an unknown or lesser known person. -- [a] For example, see https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=fake%20picasso https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=fake%20picasso and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_forgery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_forgery
- xref 6y agoThe analogy breaks down at a copied painting being hard to distinguish but a copied piece of digital art is literally impossible to distinguish, right down to its hash. People who collect Picasso’s want the piece the artists hands truly created, that’s why copies hold no real value. By copying digital art you _are_ getting the work the artists hands created, the identical hash can prove it.
- fullshark 6y agoMost of them want it for investment purposes + to be able to impress their peers/strangers. This might provide that same utility.
- qqii 6y agoNFT art pieces have an associated file that can be copied but the (nft token, public key) pair on the blockchain is unique, where the NFT token is created with a public key associated with the artist. Your copy of the associated file is just a copy of the file. You cannot associate another public key with the nft token. As far as we know this is the only reasonable and foolproof way to define digital ownership, digitally.
- pmlnr 6y agoTo me the absolute insanity of a unique digital thing in 2021 is that digital storage mediums are utterly, insanely fragile, even compared to paper, let alone a laser engraved corrosion resistant metal sheet. I understand unique value in a Black Lotus Magic the Gathering card, which will easily outlast any digital storage media you can buy today. Aren't we getting a little ahead of ourselves by unique digital things when there isn't even a way to store it without a global network, slurping silly amounts of energy, and of what's hardware requirements is crippling the semiconductor availability?
- qqii 6y agoDigital redundancy requires replication, which means a global network. Redundancy isn't enough as it also requires consensus and security. Sprinkle some ownership via asymmetric cryptography and oh look, we've described destributed ledger technology. Most Art NFTs that enter the news cycle runs on ethereum. Ethereum not only processes NFTs but a multitude of other transactions for other projects and is a order of magnitude more energy efficient and already moving to become more energy efficient. This specific platform in on the Matic L2 sidechain which is again an order more efficient. There's even a specific blockchain called Flow by the creator of the first NFTs that are designed for NFTs.
- rektide 6y agoWhat a sham. People are so desperate to turn the unlimited, powerful realm of computing into such a limited, restricted, constrained, zero-sum system. I'm already exhausted by NFT. There's going to be decades & decades of people insisting this petty silly act is meaningful, has value. They'll be right, but only because they recruit others to their small world thinking, to their narrowed horizons, focused on property & proprietary. Decades of endlessly hearing excitement about capturing the great & vast digital, about using society to make real, enforce their fabricated & fictitious sense of scarcity & limits & constraints. Decades & decades of listening to zero-sum mentality, watching just enough people get roped in, suckered into this concocted belief system. These jokers are going to make L. Ron Hubbard look both moral & amateur. This new religion gives me the creeps, this anti-use of freedom. This is such the opposite of hope, & capability, & democratic power that the internet represented, a closing of access, a system of restricting, not the opening of frontiers, the ever-expanding availability that shaped all my decades under Moore's law. This saga is such a sad one. And it's only just beginning, opening salvos like this: telling us that only the wealthy will own the digital.
- mimikatz 6y agoCan I sell the NFT of my retweet?
- bbno4 6y agoMods: Dorsey is mentioned twice in title.
- kore 6y agoThe article is misrepresenting the situation. Jack Dorsey isn't attempting to sell anything here. The site allows anybody to make an offer, unsolicited, on a tweet of their choosing. Jack can choose to accept the offer if he wishes, but he's not the one who initiated this. It's all in their FAQ.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoThis kind of thing turns up in post-scarcity sci-fi works. Are we really post-scarcity, yet? All of us on this planet?
- JshWright 6y agoNFTs are the cryptocurrency equivalent of those companies that will sell you a star. Sure... there is something written down somewhere that you "own" something. In any practical sense, it's completely meaningless.
- blueboo 6y agoI agree, but a historical post in the past is somewhat unlike a piece of art media like a bitmap or animation. Consider the Herbert quote... "The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it." If Dorsey agrees that the "owner" has the prereogative to destroy (delete) it, they plausibly "own" it insofar as they control its existance.
- atweiden 6y agoMuch of cryptocurrency is better understood as nouveau billionaire “artwork” than meaningful technology.
- Inception 6y agoThis isn't a fair comparison and there will be plenty of use-cases that go beyond tweets and art. For example, the Dallas Mavericks are exploring issuing their season tickets as NFTs and charging a fee everytime a ticket is resold to disincentivize scalpers.
- Animats 6y agoThat's definitely true for some of them. Genies [1] being one. See their "you own nothing" terms of service. Same for Yellowheart.[2] Both reserve the rights to take your "ownership" away at will. This is seen by some as a way to put some teeth into the "licensed merchandise" business. Mark Cuban, who owns some sports team, is into that. Non-fungible tokens are not regulated investments. Fungible tokens are either a security or a commodity, and the SEC and the CFTC don't like pump and dump promotions of them. But you can pump and dump Beanie Babies or sneakers or Authorized NBA Merchandise all you want, constrained only by weak false advertising laws. The first NFT crash has already happened.[3] Enthusiasts are now talking about "taking advantage of the volatility of the market". Unlike fungible items, there won't be one price and a liquid market. Reselling will look more like early eBay, with people trying to unload their "antiques". You can still trade Beanie Babies on eBay. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Animats&next=26288803 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Animats&next=2628880... [2] https://www.yellowheart.io/kol/terms_and_conditions.pdf https://www.yellowheart.io/kol/terms_and_conditions.pdf [3] https://youtu.be/thWPoiQGsow https://youtu.be/thWPoiQGsow
- rospaya 6y agoShoehorning the physical concept of ownership into the digital, making one less place safe of the burden of commercialization and expectation of payment.
- qqii 6y agoThe digital already has the concept of ownership (like DMCA?). What's new is that the enforcement is also digital.
- NiceWayToDoIT 6y agoI know I will get a lot of negative points for this one, call me old or whatever, I do not get it. Seriously I have not heard anything stupid as this... while other starving billionaires acting out, historically is this equal as time when Marie-Antoinette said “Let them eat cake”? Sorry, I just do not get it $2.5 million for someone else Tweet that will stay his. Seriously, WTF is wrong with this world!?
- hiimtroymclure 6y agoI am more into crypto than most and I do not get NFT collectibles...at least pet rocks you could hold lol
- qqii 6y agoSticking specifically to art, NFTs solve a problem with digital art (non fungiblility) and some platforms provide artists with new benifits (tracking ownership, price and commission on sales, etc). I think it's an especially crypto centric mindset to not see their value but if we take crypto aside do you appreciate works of art, collectable cards or limited edition runs as having value above their fungible copies (copy of art, copy of card, same product but regular edition)?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hiimtroymclure 6y agoyou are completely right and im the definition of the pot calling the kettle black. Ive collected all kinds of things throughout my life that many would deem stupid/garbage. To each, their own. I love blockchain for transparency/authenticity aspects. I just struggle with the collector side of it not being physical things for me to hold. It just doesn't feel real to me in the digital world.
- qqii 6y agoThat's fair. I also struggle to understand why people buy cosmetic upgrades in games.
- qqii 6y agoThis was discussed earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26365579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26365579 Here is the documentation on ERC-721 (NFTs): https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc-721/ https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc...
- iamleppert 6y agoRich white man sells something worth absolutely nothing and having no value for millions; is hero. Film at 11.
- ablekh 6y ago"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein
- yazfield 6y agoWesterners are crazy
- Triv888 6y agoThis is like some of those pre-mined crypto coins
- ChrisArchitect 6y ago[dupe] further discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26365579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26365579