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NFTs are dumb for physical items. Who enforces the ownership? Ok so your NFT says you own it. So the centralized governmental police force has to ensure the act

NFTs are dumb for physical items. Who enforces the ownership? Ok so your NFT says you own it. So the centralized governmental police force has to ensure the actual NFT? Defeats the decentralized purpose lol. NFTs are dumb mostly. Digital collector items, ok I get it

whateveracct 6y ago
Even for digital collector items, it's dubious. Even NBA Topshot, the golden child of NFTs right now, is only useful when backed by NBA centralized infrastructure. There's a _little_ value of decoupling the ownership from the centralized infra that controls the thing you own..but tbh it's not much different than an NFT for a physical trading card lol.
the_gastropod 6y ago
But even for digital collectors items, it still seems dumb to me. Digital things can be copied. There's nothing you can do to prevent copying the payload. And only outside legal authorities can enforce property rights, making the whole blockchain part of it redundant.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  I guess we'll just have to wait for the first person to feel robbed and ask for re-evaluation of the NFT collectible principle.. then it will go away.
ptmcc 6y ago
Precisely, there's zero linkage to the physical world from an NFT unless it's recognized and enforced by some sort of central authority. At which point it's orders of magnitude easier and more efficient to use a centralized database. I did some contract work with an Ethereum NFT startup several years ago (now defunct), before the recent hype, and the only "value" proposition was that they were selling "genuine" NFTs blessed by particular large consumer brands. Behind the scenes it was all a centralized SQL server that only touched the blockchain when you exported your tokens to a private wallet because that was slow and expensive -- and turns out almost no one actually cared about that part. As long as you left your tokens in custodianship of the company, the company technically owned them as far as the blockchain was concerned. And then even for digital goods where the concept of the "original" is meaningless when exact digital duplicates are zero-cost, just... who cares? What do even own, and why should anyone else respect your "ownership"? All this NFT noise just feels like those scams where you "buy" a plot of land on the moon or name a star. No authoritative body in the world recognizes that claim, and if we ever start colonizing the moon you can be sure as shit that no entity is going to respect your "ownership". It all feels very regressive in the face of decades of efforts of open source and work to liberalize things like copyrights and fair use in software and digital goods and services. Not to mention that it is an environmental disaster.
- randomopining 6y ago
  Yeah lol I agree. But I thought I might be dumb. Someone I follow who is always right is big on them. Their argument is that people buy expensive and rare shit just to have it and project superiority. Thus “owning” the HD Clíp of Lebron slam dunking is like cred they are willing to pay USD for.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  > there's zero linkage to the physical world from an NFT unless it's recognized and enforced by some sort of central authority Not at all the case. All the artist needs to do is publicly declare that they listed their art on an NFT platform, such as Rarible or Zora or what have you and that's enough. Direct communication with the fans is all that's needed, no central authority required. Not all NFTs are created equal. Some have all the data necessary to reproduce the work of art embedded right on the blockchain, such as Euler Beats: https://eulerbeats.com/ https://eulerbeats.com/ . Others use IPFS hashes and embed the hashes on the NFT itself, so all you need is a single server in the world serving up that file and you can validate authenticity. An NFT is sort of like a signed, autographed copy of something. Sure, I can have a reproduction of the Mona Lisa printed for about $50, but can I have the original canvas that Da Vinci himself painted on for $50? Of course not. When I was a kid, I liked to collect baseball cards. I knew a mint condition Mickey Mantle rookie card was exceedingly rare and valuable. A signed and rare card can go for tens of thousands or more dollars. Signed baseballs or gloves can also have additional value compared to the underlying physical item. What is it about the signature that changes the value of something? You know that the player themselves interacted with that item. That is the case with NFTs. They won't be going away. You can try to mint a copy of an NFT, but it will always have a later timestamp than the first one, and it won't have the original block number, so it's quite easy to root out counterfeits.
  - notJim 6y ago
    > All the artist needs to do is publicly declare that they listed their art on an NFT platform, such as Rarible or Zora or what have you and that's enough. What happens if the artist declines to participate in the NFT marketplace, or (gasp!) even in social media altogether? In practice, one of the things that can happen is someone impersonates them, steals their art, mints tokens for it, and the artist gets nothing.
notJim 6y ago
Digital goods as NFTs have exactly the same problems as physical ones. There was a case where someone stole a JPEG of someone else's art off their website, minted an NFT, and sold it, claiming to be the original artist. You still need a centralizing authority (like with NBA Top Shot) to ensure authenticity and prevent fraud. The one maybe advantage I can see of decentralized is that the secondary market doesn't have to be governed by the rules of the centralizing authority. In other words, maybe the authority provides for the initial minting of the good (ensuring authenticity, which can subsequently be verified using the blockchain), but don't have to be involved in the secondary sales.
- ziml77 6y ago
  This isn't one case of stealing digital art. A lot of work is being scraped off of twitter causing artists to go into protected mode. I've been seeing a ton of hate for NFTs among artists.
usehackernews 6y ago
There’s a massive forgery issue with physical items - Shoes, Fashion Brands, Art. The benefit of NFT for psychical goods isn’t so much proving who the current owner is as much as it is proving the historical ownership so the authenticity of an item can be ensured. You don’t need a central government for this. For example, as long as you know Nikes address, I can confirm a shoe I want to buy is truly authentic by verifying that address is the original owner.
- randomopining 6y ago
  How do you attach a digital address to a physical item? Let’s say I buy a Nike shoe and then give 10 fake Nike shoes the same digital address. They are amazing fakes. Same issue as today right? Unless there is a clever crossover to convert from digital verification to physical and back... seems worthless to me.
  - drcode 6y ago
    Well, for any collectible item an important factor is "provenance", i.e. is there a legitimate reason to believe the item originated from a credible source. At least nfts now require people to also forge the provenance, which provides an additional hurdle to forgers (my best attempt to steelman the "pro nft" argument) For instance, if a great great grandson of Henry VII sells a medallion that he claims belonged to his ancestor, that would have more weight than a similar medallion from a random individual, because it's far less likely for a relative to also be a blatant forger. In theory at least, nfts provide a similar (limited) assurance.
    - TheCapeGreek 6y ago
      The difference is provenance with NFTs is about the NFT itself, but not the item. Like mentioned elsewhere here, block # and timestamp will differ. But digital items don't have provenance. To put it another way: the analogue is not original medallion vs new fake one. They're both 100% identical medallions in every conceivable way, but the receipt for one is older than the other. I don't know about you but I don't give a damn if your receipt is older than mine if the items are not unique in any way.
delaaxe 6y ago
They're not meant for physical items. Never really understood that tokenized real estate thing
dgellow 6y ago
I think about it as a post-modern art performance. The goal of NFTs is to deconstruct the concept of ownership. It’s absurd by design, and relies purely on faith, forcing us to consider its deep implication in our lives and societies. I don’t know if I’m writing this as a joke or not :)
- twox2 6y ago
  I think you are right on. The world is struggling to define what "digital ownership" means. Enter NFTs. I think they are here to stay as a baseline even after it bubbles up and pops.
glitchc 6y ago
Concur, NFTs are only good for digital assets, which was the driving rationale behind Ethereum in the first place (a distributed place to capture digital assets so that one party could not unilaterally decide to modify or delete them).
Anon1096 6y ago
The real interesting NFTs are those that don't even try and pretend to have a claim to a real-world item. For example, you can currently buy an NFT for a destroyed Banksy piece (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/banksy-nft-injective-destroy-art-digital-token/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/banksy-nft-injective-destroy-ar...). I mean if this isn't evidence of a cryptomania I don't know what is. I think the most saddening part is that almost everyone pushing NFTs are pushing a get-rich-quick scheme, and trying to get as many un- or misinformed people in on the scam as possible. Lately I've seen relatives buying art NFTs thinking that they get some kind of ownership in a piece of digital artwork (and no, they don't get the copyright. That stays with the artist.) Honestly, once Jack Dorsey sells his first tweet, he just sell it again. What's stopping him? He got 2.5MM for it one time and gets to keep ownership. Why not just keep selling an NFT to the fabled First Tweet and rake in the cash. This is clearly an irrational market and seeing how crazy it can get would be amazing.

whateveracct 6y ago

Even for digital collector items, it's dubious. Even NBA Topshot, the golden child of NFTs right now, is only useful when backed by NBA centralized infrastructure. There's a _little_ value of decoupling the ownership from the centralized infra that controls the thing you own..but tbh it's not much different than an NFT for a physical trading card lol.

the_gastropod 6y ago

But even for digital collectors items, it still seems dumb to me. Digital things can be copied. There's nothing you can do to prevent copying the payload. And only outside legal authorities can enforce property rights, making the whole blockchain part of it redundant.

agumonkey 6y ago
I guess we'll just have to wait for the first person to feel robbed and ask for re-evaluation of the NFT collectible principle.. then it will go away.

ptmcc 6y ago

Precisely, there's zero linkage to the physical world from an NFT unless it's recognized and enforced by some sort of central authority. At which point it's orders of magnitude easier and more efficient to use a centralized database. I did some contract work with an Ethereum NFT startup several years ago (now defunct), before the recent hype, and the only "value" proposition was that they were selling "genuine" NFTs blessed by particular large consumer brands. Behind the scenes it was all a centralized SQL server that only touched the blockchain when you exported your tokens to a private wallet because that was slow and expensive -- and turns out almost no one actually cared about that part. As long as you left your tokens in custodianship of the company, the company technically owned them as far as the blockchain was concerned. And then even for digital goods where the concept of the "original" is meaningless when exact digital duplicates are zero-cost, just... who cares? What do even own, and why should anyone else respect your "ownership"? All this NFT noise just feels like those scams where you "buy" a plot of land on the moon or name a star. No authoritative body in the world recognizes that claim, and if we ever start colonizing the moon you can be sure as shit that no entity is going to respect your "ownership". It all feels very regressive in the face of decades of efforts of open source and work to liberalize things like copyrights and fair use in software and digital goods and services. Not to mention that it is an environmental disaster.

randomopining 6y ago
Yeah lol I agree. But I thought I might be dumb. Someone I follow who is always right is big on them. Their argument is that people buy expensive and rare shit just to have it and project superiority. Thus “owning” the HD Clíp of Lebron slam dunking is like cred they are willing to pay USD for.
chrisco255 6y ago
> there's zero linkage to the physical world from an NFT unless it's recognized and enforced by some sort of central authority Not at all the case. All the artist needs to do is publicly declare that they listed their art on an NFT platform, such as Rarible or Zora or what have you and that's enough. Direct communication with the fans is all that's needed, no central authority required. Not all NFTs are created equal. Some have all the data necessary to reproduce the work of art embedded right on the blockchain, such as Euler Beats: https://eulerbeats.com/ https://eulerbeats.com/ . Others use IPFS hashes and embed the hashes on the NFT itself, so all you need is a single server in the world serving up that file and you can validate authenticity. An NFT is sort of like a signed, autographed copy of something. Sure, I can have a reproduction of the Mona Lisa printed for about $50, but can I have the original canvas that Da Vinci himself painted on for $50? Of course not. When I was a kid, I liked to collect baseball cards. I knew a mint condition Mickey Mantle rookie card was exceedingly rare and valuable. A signed and rare card can go for tens of thousands or more dollars. Signed baseballs or gloves can also have additional value compared to the underlying physical item. What is it about the signature that changes the value of something? You know that the player themselves interacted with that item. That is the case with NFTs. They won't be going away. You can try to mint a copy of an NFT, but it will always have a later timestamp than the first one, and it won't have the original block number, so it's quite easy to root out counterfeits.
- notJim 6y ago
  > All the artist needs to do is publicly declare that they listed their art on an NFT platform, such as Rarible or Zora or what have you and that's enough. What happens if the artist declines to participate in the NFT marketplace, or (gasp!) even in social media altogether? In practice, one of the things that can happen is someone impersonates them, steals their art, mints tokens for it, and the artist gets nothing.

notJim 6y ago

Digital goods as NFTs have exactly the same problems as physical ones. There was a case where someone stole a JPEG of someone else's art off their website, minted an NFT, and sold it, claiming to be the original artist. You still need a centralizing authority (like with NBA Top Shot) to ensure authenticity and prevent fraud. The one maybe advantage I can see of decentralized is that the secondary market doesn't have to be governed by the rules of the centralizing authority. In other words, maybe the authority provides for the initial minting of the good (ensuring authenticity, which can subsequently be verified using the blockchain), but don't have to be involved in the secondary sales.

ziml77 6y ago
This isn't one case of stealing digital art. A lot of work is being scraped off of twitter causing artists to go into protected mode. I've been seeing a ton of hate for NFTs among artists.

usehackernews 6y ago

There’s a massive forgery issue with physical items - Shoes, Fashion Brands, Art. The benefit of NFT for psychical goods isn’t so much proving who the current owner is as much as it is proving the historical ownership so the authenticity of an item can be ensured. You don’t need a central government for this. For example, as long as you know Nikes address, I can confirm a shoe I want to buy is truly authentic by verifying that address is the original owner.

randomopining 6y ago
How do you attach a digital address to a physical item? Let’s say I buy a Nike shoe and then give 10 fake Nike shoes the same digital address. They are amazing fakes. Same issue as today right? Unless there is a clever crossover to convert from digital verification to physical and back... seems worthless to me.
- drcode 6y ago
  Well, for any collectible item an important factor is "provenance", i.e. is there a legitimate reason to believe the item originated from a credible source. At least nfts now require people to also forge the provenance, which provides an additional hurdle to forgers (my best attempt to steelman the "pro nft" argument) For instance, if a great great grandson of Henry VII sells a medallion that he claims belonged to his ancestor, that would have more weight than a similar medallion from a random individual, because it's far less likely for a relative to also be a blatant forger. In theory at least, nfts provide a similar (limited) assurance.
  - TheCapeGreek 6y ago
    The difference is provenance with NFTs is about the NFT itself, but not the item. Like mentioned elsewhere here, block # and timestamp will differ. But digital items don't have provenance. To put it another way: the analogue is not original medallion vs new fake one. They're both 100% identical medallions in every conceivable way, but the receipt for one is older than the other. I don't know about you but I don't give a damn if your receipt is older than mine if the items are not unique in any way.

delaaxe 6y ago

They're not meant for physical items. Never really understood that tokenized real estate thing

dgellow 6y ago

I think about it as a post-modern art performance. The goal of NFTs is to deconstruct the concept of ownership. It’s absurd by design, and relies purely on faith, forcing us to consider its deep implication in our lives and societies. I don’t know if I’m writing this as a joke or not :)

twox2 6y ago
I think you are right on. The world is struggling to define what "digital ownership" means. Enter NFTs. I think they are here to stay as a baseline even after it bubbles up and pops.

glitchc 6y ago

Concur, NFTs are only good for digital assets, which was the driving rationale behind Ethereum in the first place (a distributed place to capture digital assets so that one party could not unilaterally decide to modify or delete them).

Anon1096 6y ago

The real interesting NFTs are those that don't even try and pretend to have a claim to a real-world item. For example, you can currently buy an NFT for a destroyed Banksy piece (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/banksy-nft-injective-destroy-art-digital-token/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/banksy-nft-injective-destroy-ar...). I mean if this isn't evidence of a cryptomania I don't know what is. I think the most saddening part is that almost everyone pushing NFTs are pushing a get-rich-quick scheme, and trying to get as many un- or misinformed people in on the scam as possible. Lately I've seen relatives buying art NFTs thinking that they get some kind of ownership in a piece of digital artwork (and no, they don't get the copyright. That stays with the artist.) Honestly, once Jack Dorsey sells his first tweet, he just sell it again. What's stopping him? He got 2.5MM for it one time and gets to keep ownership. Why not just keep selling an NFT to the fabled First Tweet and rake in the cash. This is clearly an irrational market and seeing how crazy it can get would be amazing.