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It's stupid at face value. No pyramid required. You cannot intrinsically link real world items to tokens. The source of truth is the real world, not the token.

It's stupid at face value. No pyramid required. You cannot intrinsically link real world items to tokens. The source of truth is the real world, not the token. Add an unlimited supply of unique things, and how could anyone expect to make money from this?

spacemanmatt 6y ago
Beeple did pretty well
- graeme 6y ago
  Beeple’s business partner bought the NFT. We have no idea how much went to Beeple. All we know if Christie’s got $9 million.
  - CryptoPunk 6y ago
    Source on Beeple's business partner buying it?
    - y-satellite 6y ago
      https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beeple-art-buyer-and-his-nft-defi-scheme/ https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beepl... Particularly the "Number Go Up" section, which shows that the buyer also runs (and owns a majority of) a crypto token called "B20", which curiously enough, Beeple also has a 2% stake in.
      - CryptoPunk 6y ago
        That's not proof of them being business partners.
smitty1e 6y ago
Mostly agree, but 'value' is a social construct, and as long as there is a subsequent rube, then NFTs will be NiFTy.
capableweb 6y ago
If you're thinking that the purpose of NFTs is to link real world items to tokens, you have a very weird view and would do you better to continue reading up on NFTs. In its most basic form, a NFT is simply a cryptocurrency token with the total supply of 1. Nothing more, nothing less. Anyone claiming anything else clearly don't know what they are talking about. The source of truth is the token, as it's only about the token.
- twic 6y ago
  That belief is incorrect, but extremely common, so it's dubious to describe it as weird. Indeed, the fact that so many people hold that belief is at the root of the whole NFT situation.
  - PragmaticPulp 6y ago
    Can you explain the correct version from your perspective? It doesn’t clarify anything if you just declare someone else incorrect but won’t say why.
    - twic 6y ago
      What capableweb said is correct. NFTs do not confer any ownership of, rights over, or special access to anything else, real-world out digital. When you buy an NFT of an artwork, you aren't buying the artwork, you are only buying the NFT. As far as I know, the inventors of NFTs do not claim that they do. But it seems like a lot of people talking about and perhaps buying NFTs don't understand that.
      - NoOneNew 6y ago
        In your description, what's the difference between an NFT and a gag USD million bill with Bush, Obama, Trump or Biden's face on it? This makes it even harder to understand why anyone should care. Hell, it starts to make the people who thought Beanie Babies were a long term investment seem smart.
ddeyar 6y ago
So you say that ownership should be kept in physical contracts? There are usecases when you are the owner of something which is not in your physical possession. I don't care about that NFT stuff, collectible can make sense or not. What bothers me is to do it with so much energy consumption. When you are attracted to lose money, then just do it environment friendly. https://medium.com/tqtezos/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake-the-ecological-footprint-c58029faee44 https://medium.com/tqtezos/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake-t... Tezos has what it needs for that. NFTs on Tezos: https://kalamint.io/ https://kalamint.io/ https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/ https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/ Minting a NFT costs about 1 cent
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  NFTs don’t sell ownership. They sell NFTs. It’s like creating a contract that sells the contract itself. Then maybe you stamp a photo of Michael Jordan on the cover and call it a Michael Jordan contract, even though the contract doesn’t give the buyer any rights to anything Michael Jordan related, except the contract itself. Then you can go out and make more Michael Jordan contracts, because there’s nothing in the first contract stopping you from making more. So yes, actual ownership must be done with real physical contracts still if you want to enforce things in the real world. NFTs can only enforce things within the NFT itself, which is useless for real-world ownership.
  - ddeyar 6y ago
    The contract would give the buyer rights to use the content. When I'm the owner of a physical Picasso then I have the right to sell t-shirts with the motive on it. If someone else would do that, I could sue him. The same idea is behind this NFT hype, you buy the right to use the content. As far as I understand it.
    - PragmaticPulp 6y ago
      NFTs don't transfer real-world rights. They only transfer the NFT itself. You could potentially create a real-world contract that ties ownership of the real-world asset to whoever holds the NFT, but that would introduce real-world legal issues like voiding the NFT in the event that it was transferred fraudulently and so on. It seems a lot of people have been misled into believing that NFTs are something they're not. NFTs are like a special URL that points to some other content. You can trade that URL, but the content being pointed to still exists separately.
Havoc 6y ago
>You cannot intrinsically link real world items to tokens. Patents & trademarks?
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Not blockchain tokens. The interesting facets all come from the legal consequences of ignoring them, not the serial number or whatever.
- arcturus17 6y ago
  Those are (a) very heavily regulated by definition and (b) means to an end, which is to create societal good, ie, foster innovation (I don’t want to argue whether that’s actually the case - I’m just taking the statu quo position) Could one say the same about tokens?
  - adnzzzzZ 6y ago
    Yes. a) is very heavily regulated by the chain/protocol used to make the tokens work and b) would be to introduce scarcity to digital items, which possibly creates good and fosters innovation (I similarly don't want to argue whether that will actually be the case) in fields which benefit from scarcity.
    - piva00 6y ago
      What kinds of innovation are we talking about?
    - ben_w 6y ago
      b isn’t the case, because a is entirely self-referential. Anyone can any any time create a new private key, so you can only trust things signed with private keys you already trust. That trust can be another private key signing it, but ultimately the foundation of the trust is in the physical world where someone can lock you up for breaking rules. I’m equivocating if this is the is/ought problem or the Münchhausen trilemma, kinda feels like both.
mc32 6y ago
Pyramid scheme or Money Laundering instrument? In any event I can’t see authorities keeping a blind eye on this.
- curation 6y ago
  They keep a blind eye on superyachts.
- mysterydip 6y ago
  That was my thought on it. What easier way to launder money than with virtual items of arbitrary value? "Man pays thousands for bicycle tire" would raise many eyebrows. "Man pays thousands for NFT picture of bicycle tire" just makes people laugh and shake their heads.
  - hprotagonist 6y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/7y3cdi/cmv_modern_art_is_nothing_but_a_massive_money/ https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/7y3cdi/cmv_mo... why bother with involving a computer and a hard to modify paper trail?
    - orwin 6y ago
      Its easier, and you can lauder the money across millions of NFTs.
- bradleyjg 6y ago
  It takes authorities a long time to catch up. We still have ransomware attacks despite authorities having all the tools necessary to shut off the payment channels.
arbitrage 6y ago
This felt really scammy to me. Like straight out of the grifters' handbook.
Nextgrid 6y ago
> You cannot intrinsically link real world items to tokens. The source of truth is the real world, not the token. This is also why every project do to X but with blockchain (like solving counterfeiting/authenticity, copyright, etc) is either stupid or a con using a buzzword to try and solicit investment or media attention. The reason blockchains work for cryptocurrencies is because the source of truth is the blockchain itself. This breaks down in the real world where the state of the real world is the source of truth and you'd need a trusted, centralized entity to bridge the two worlds, but at this point why use a blockchain instead of a database if you're going to trust a single entity anyway?
- Alex3917 6y ago
  Blockchain doesn’t need to make it impossible to counterfeit real-world items to be useful, it just needs to reduce counterfeiting levels by reducing the profitability. It’s more than capable of doing that. If you can only sell at most one counterfeit item per authentic item, that’s already a multi-trillion dollar innovation.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    I still can't see how a blockchain here would do something that a database wouldn't. A DB of authentic serial numbers with a way to mark them as claimed is all you need. If your new widget's serial is already marked as claimed on the manufacturer's website then you most likely have a counterfeit, no blockchain necessary.
    - ses1984 6y ago
      What if you want to sell your thing? Who is hosting this db?
      - SCHiM 6y ago
        You are, as a saas I think. I mean, this gives you all the control, you can charge for all sorts of services and "value adds". There's no reason you, as the maker of this software, would want this available as a block chain. Unless you also create a token and start having people speculate on your anti-counterfeiting blockchain? That's what it looks like to me anyway.
delaaxe 6y ago
NFTs are not meant for physical items, they’re digital certificates. People literally burnt a Banksy painting before auctioning its NFT.
- mrleinad 6y ago
  So they not only destroyed art, but also wasted energy on creating the NFT, adding to global warming. If there's anything that's not absolute evil in all that, I fail to see it.
  - CryptoPunk 6y ago
    Please, stop calling any non-essential use of energy that you're looking to smear, "evil". Are movies, which consume energy in their production and consumption, also evil? Video games? No, because you personally see the entertainment they provide as redeeming? If people want to expend their own resources on NFTs, that's entirely their right to do so, and calling it evil because the process consumed energy is absurd. If you have a problem with CO2 emission, by all means advocate for laws requiring energy production to not emit CO2 as a by-product. But to single out some non-essential activity that you personally don't like because of the imagined motives of those behind it, while ignoring every other non-essential activity that uses energy, is disingenuous and irresponsible.
    - JPKab 6y ago
      I really resent the community of grifters like yourself constantly pushing the stuff and defending its excesses. I recently saw Twitter thread where a big pusher of NFTs was moaning on about how the real issue is we didn't create enough nuclear power plants and now we're blaming NFTs for this. It's blatantly obvious that this is all a pyramid scheme capitalizing on people's complete ignorance and optimism with crypto. Enjoy your pyramid scheme and I hope you make out like a bandit and eventually develop a conscience for the people you're grifting.
      - CryptoPunk 6y ago
markkat 6y ago
A house is linked to a title. The title is a paper token.
- bradleyjg 6y ago
  That proves too much. There’s nothing inherent in the paper that grants any rights and privileges. It’s the legal system that does that. A digital token is either meaningless (if the legal system doesn’t recognize it) or massive overkill (if the legal system treats it the same as a wet signature).
  - _huayra_ 6y ago
    It's not only the legal system, but the military / police components of a country that enforce private property too.
  - markkat 6y ago
    The legal system will recognize it, and attribution protocols are being built. Removing middlemen like title companies is an efficiency, not overkill.
    - bradleyjg 6y ago
      Title companies are fading away with the advent of digital land registries (using plain old boring databases). As usual for “like X but with a blockchain” this is a solution in search of a problem. Because despite all the protestations to the contrary the real motivation for crypto is not providing useful goods or services in exchange for reasonable compensation, it is getting rich by being an early adopter.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  I can take the title to a court and say “this proves that house is mine, give it back”.
cosmodisk 6y ago
I'm sure all the new marketplaces facilitating it are making tons of it right now.
rory 6y ago
It does seem really stupid, but I don't see how it's substantively different than (also stupid-seeming) physical collectibles like baseball cards or Bearbricks. The supply of the "special" versions of those two collectibles is also constrained in a totally artificial manner.
- stephen_g 6y ago
  At least you actually own a real object in that case. Not a token with a link to a JPEG that may disappear from wherever it’s hosted eventually...
- danaris 6y ago
  At least if you have a really rare baseball card, a) You have the physical card. It is in your possession, and the only way for you to lose it is for something physical to happen to it. b) You can look at and enjoy the card in its physicality. You can show it to others, and the only reason that is the case is that it is physically in your possession. Contrast that with NFTs, where all you "own" is the idea of owning a thing. If the thing your particular NFT says you own is a digital image, anyone can still see that image, and it can be deleted from the internet without your permission or any warning. You lose the exclusivity that's the main draw of owning something rare and special, and you don't have any practical control over the thing either.
  - rory 6y ago
    I guess, but if the point is interacting with the physical card, why are "counterfeit" cards worthless? Can't you interact with them in the exact same way as the "real" baseball card the counterfeit is copying? It seems like the value is all in the idea of owning one instance of a limited run.
    - Hamuko 6y ago
      >why are "counterfeit" cards worthless? They're not worthless, they're worth less. I could easily hang up a counterfeit Mona Lisa on my wall and get a kick out of it. And if I stop getting a kick out of it, I can put it on Craigslist for $100 afterwards. Of course, there's absolutely no history behind the painting as it wasn't painted by the renaissance man. No one would pay to see it because it would be about as significant as a JPEG of the Mona Lisa. However, that doesn't mean that it's worthless. Even that JPEG can make for a good phone wallpaper.
Paradigma11 6y ago
Why would you not be able to attach certain rights to tokens that you mint and sell?
koonsolo 6y ago
Real world item (person): Honus Wagner Link item: 1909 T206 baseball card Value: $2 million Why don't you start printing these baseball cards and sell them? Ha, but you say the baseball card is a real physical item, and a NFT is not. Well, an NFT is as real as the movie I watch on YouTube, the song I listen to on Spotify, and the numbers my bank shows. But now you say the baseball card was part of a game, and so it's value is not from the person but from the collection game itself. Well, a lot of NFT's are also part of a collectible game. Would love to hear the difference between a "physical" item and a "digital" item, or a "physical link to a physical item" or a "digital link to a physical (or digital) item".
- koonsolo 6y ago
  Downvotes without any discussion. Unfortunately getting used to that for crypto topics on HN.
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 6y ago
    Millennials just don't understand ... world is becoming digital very fast.
- bradleyjg 6y ago
  > Ha, but you say the baseball card is a real physical item, and a NFT is not. Well, an NFT is as real as the movie I watch on YouTube, the song I listen to on Spotify, and the numbers my bank shows. It’s not an issue of realness. Of course an NFT is real, it’s a long number and is just as real as 3 or PI or any other number.[1] The issue is instead ownership. When I own a baseball card I have a physical card no one can take from my house/vault/whatever without the police getting involved. When I own the copyright to a movie I can choose to let other people watch it or not. When I own an NFT it means there’s a blockchain somewhere that says I own a particular number. As long as the blockchain is still in existence I can prove that the blockchain says I own the number and I can transfer that number to you. That’s not exactly nothing but it’s pretty darn close. It smells like a scam. You do raise a good point that it smells like a scam in the same way that a lot of consciously created collectibles do. Once comic books, baseball cards, or stamp producing nations started pushing their products as something people should buy because they’d appreciate in value they started to feel a lot scummier (and not conincidently the items in question rarely increased in value the way organic collectibles had.) So, sure if you can get someone to pay you a lot of money for the “ownership” of some 256 digit number in some blockchain somewhere by claiming it represents the star Vega, as long as you don’t lie I suppose it shouldn’t be a crime. But you can’t expect the rest of us to respect the way you’ve chosen to make a living. You are going to get downvotes because you are promoting a disreputable activity. [1] Hope you appreciate the effort it took not to make a math joke here.
manojlds 6y ago
But NFTs can also be for digital items, which is where I was first introduced to them - like cryptokitties and other games.
- setpatchaddress 6y ago
  In games, you have the thing of value itself. It’s not an NFT just because it’s digital.
  - manojlds 6y ago
    But how do you sell it to someone else?
kerng 6y ago
It's not linking to real world items, but to digital assets. But it doesn't really. I learned the other day that NFT standards don't even store a hash of the digital asset. So, ransomware will wipe out a lot of NFTs one day, because the blockchain smart contracts dont know (have any cryptographic proof) what digital asset they hold. Herr an article that was posted the other day: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2021/broken-nft-standards/ https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2021/broken-nft-standar...
rdiddly 6y ago
I will happily ignore NFTs, but look at money itself - it's a token too. It was supposed to represent and be coupled to real-world productive activity, but clearly there are many cases where the two have become decoupled. A price can be below the intrinsic worth of the item, and can be almost arbitrarily high. The source of truth is supposedly the item, the productive work that went into it, but in a heavily financialized economy, a lot of people make more money from mere price fluctuations than from productive activity.
cifu69 6y ago
the source of true is always concensous. the best example i can give you es bitcoin. nevertheless seeing NFTs as non-physical is also not true, every thing that operates in the blockchain is sustend onto de nodes thoso nodes are sustend by computers, and those computers are physical. it doesnt matter wheather fot the computers are 1s and 0s and the end of the day they are link to the reality
dmingod666 6y ago
Do you notice how many of your real world identities are linked to an entry in a database? How much of your assets are entries in a database. What is missing is centralization and consensus of validity, db entries linking to the real world is done everyday.

spacemanmatt 6y ago

Beeple did pretty well

graeme 6y ago
Beeple’s business partner bought the NFT. We have no idea how much went to Beeple. All we know if Christie’s got $9 million.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  Source on Beeple's business partner buying it?
  - y-satellite 6y ago
    https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beeple-art-buyer-and-his-nft-defi-scheme/ https://amycastor.com/2021/03/14/metakovan-the-mystery-beepl... Particularly the "Number Go Up" section, which shows that the buyer also runs (and owns a majority of) a crypto token called "B20", which curiously enough, Beeple also has a 2% stake in.
    - CryptoPunk 6y ago
      That's not proof of them being business partners.

smitty1e 6y ago

Mostly agree, but 'value' is a social construct, and as long as there is a subsequent rube, then NFTs will be NiFTy.

capableweb 6y ago

If you're thinking that the purpose of NFTs is to link real world items to tokens, you have a very weird view and would do you better to continue reading up on NFTs. In its most basic form, a NFT is simply a cryptocurrency token with the total supply of 1. Nothing more, nothing less. Anyone claiming anything else clearly don't know what they are talking about. The source of truth is the token, as it's only about the token.

twic 6y ago
That belief is incorrect, but extremely common, so it's dubious to describe it as weird. Indeed, the fact that so many people hold that belief is at the root of the whole NFT situation.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  Can you explain the correct version from your perspective? It doesn’t clarify anything if you just declare someone else incorrect but won’t say why.
  - twic 6y ago
    What capableweb said is correct. NFTs do not confer any ownership of, rights over, or special access to anything else, real-world out digital. When you buy an NFT of an artwork, you aren't buying the artwork, you are only buying the NFT. As far as I know, the inventors of NFTs do not claim that they do. But it seems like a lot of people talking about and perhaps buying NFTs don't understand that.
    - NoOneNew 6y ago
      In your description, what's the difference between an NFT and a gag USD million bill with Bush, Obama, Trump or Biden's face on it? This makes it even harder to understand why anyone should care. Hell, it starts to make the people who thought Beanie Babies were a long term investment seem smart.

ddeyar 6y ago

So you say that ownership should be kept in physical contracts? There are usecases when you are the owner of something which is not in your physical possession. I don't care about that NFT stuff, collectible can make sense or not. What bothers me is to do it with so much energy consumption. When you are attracted to lose money, then just do it environment friendly. https://medium.com/tqtezos/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake-the-ecological-footprint-c58029faee44 https://medium.com/tqtezos/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake-t... Tezos has what it needs for that. NFTs on Tezos: https://kalamint.io/ https://kalamint.io/ https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/ https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/ Minting a NFT costs about 1 cent

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
NFTs don’t sell ownership. They sell NFTs. It’s like creating a contract that sells the contract itself. Then maybe you stamp a photo of Michael Jordan on the cover and call it a Michael Jordan contract, even though the contract doesn’t give the buyer any rights to anything Michael Jordan related, except the contract itself. Then you can go out and make more Michael Jordan contracts, because there’s nothing in the first contract stopping you from making more. So yes, actual ownership must be done with real physical contracts still if you want to enforce things in the real world. NFTs can only enforce things within the NFT itself, which is useless for real-world ownership.
- ddeyar 6y ago
  The contract would give the buyer rights to use the content. When I'm the owner of a physical Picasso then I have the right to sell t-shirts with the motive on it. If someone else would do that, I could sue him. The same idea is behind this NFT hype, you buy the right to use the content. As far as I understand it.
  - PragmaticPulp 6y ago
    NFTs don't transfer real-world rights. They only transfer the NFT itself. You could potentially create a real-world contract that ties ownership of the real-world asset to whoever holds the NFT, but that would introduce real-world legal issues like voiding the NFT in the event that it was transferred fraudulently and so on. It seems a lot of people have been misled into believing that NFTs are something they're not. NFTs are like a special URL that points to some other content. You can trade that URL, but the content being pointed to still exists separately.

Havoc 6y ago

>You cannot intrinsically link real world items to tokens. Patents & trademarks?

maxerickson 6y ago
Not blockchain tokens. The interesting facets all come from the legal consequences of ignoring them, not the serial number or whatever.
arcturus17 6y ago
Those are (a) very heavily regulated by definition and (b) means to an end, which is to create societal good, ie, foster innovation (I don’t want to argue whether that’s actually the case - I’m just taking the statu quo position) Could one say the same about tokens?
- adnzzzzZ 6y ago
  Yes. a) is very heavily regulated by the chain/protocol used to make the tokens work and b) would be to introduce scarcity to digital items, which possibly creates good and fosters innovation (I similarly don't want to argue whether that will actually be the case) in fields which benefit from scarcity.
  - piva00 6y ago
    What kinds of innovation are we talking about?
  - ben_w 6y ago
    b isn’t the case, because a is entirely self-referential. Anyone can any any time create a new private key, so you can only trust things signed with private keys you already trust. That trust can be another private key signing it, but ultimately the foundation of the trust is in the physical world where someone can lock you up for breaking rules. I’m equivocating if this is the is/ought problem or the Münchhausen trilemma, kinda feels like both.

mc32 6y ago

Pyramid scheme or Money Laundering instrument? In any event I can’t see authorities keeping a blind eye on this.

curation 6y ago
They keep a blind eye on superyachts.
mysterydip 6y ago
That was my thought on it. What easier way to launder money than with virtual items of arbitrary value? "Man pays thousands for bicycle tire" would raise many eyebrows. "Man pays thousands for NFT picture of bicycle tire" just makes people laugh and shake their heads.
- hprotagonist 6y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/7y3cdi/cmv_modern_art_is_nothing_but_a_massive_money/ https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/7y3cdi/cmv_mo... why bother with involving a computer and a hard to modify paper trail?
  - orwin 6y ago
    Its easier, and you can lauder the money across millions of NFTs.
bradleyjg 6y ago
It takes authorities a long time to catch up. We still have ransomware attacks despite authorities having all the tools necessary to shut off the payment channels.

arbitrage 6y ago

This felt really scammy to me. Like straight out of the grifters' handbook.

Nextgrid 6y ago

> You cannot intrinsically link real world items to tokens. The source of truth is the real world, not the token. This is also why every project do to X but with blockchain (like solving counterfeiting/authenticity, copyright, etc) is either stupid or a con using a buzzword to try and solicit investment or media attention. The reason blockchains work for cryptocurrencies is because the source of truth is the blockchain itself. This breaks down in the real world where the state of the real world is the source of truth and you'd need a trusted, centralized entity to bridge the two worlds, but at this point why use a blockchain instead of a database if you're going to trust a single entity anyway?

Alex3917 6y ago
Blockchain doesn’t need to make it impossible to counterfeit real-world items to be useful, it just needs to reduce counterfeiting levels by reducing the profitability. It’s more than capable of doing that. If you can only sell at most one counterfeit item per authentic item, that’s already a multi-trillion dollar innovation.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  I still can't see how a blockchain here would do something that a database wouldn't. A DB of authentic serial numbers with a way to mark them as claimed is all you need. If your new widget's serial is already marked as claimed on the manufacturer's website then you most likely have a counterfeit, no blockchain necessary.
  - ses1984 6y ago
    What if you want to sell your thing? Who is hosting this db?
    - SCHiM 6y ago
      You are, as a saas I think. I mean, this gives you all the control, you can charge for all sorts of services and "value adds". There's no reason you, as the maker of this software, would want this available as a block chain. Unless you also create a token and start having people speculate on your anti-counterfeiting blockchain? That's what it looks like to me anyway.

delaaxe 6y ago

NFTs are not meant for physical items, they’re digital certificates. People literally burnt a Banksy painting before auctioning its NFT.

mrleinad 6y ago
So they not only destroyed art, but also wasted energy on creating the NFT, adding to global warming. If there's anything that's not absolute evil in all that, I fail to see it.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  Please, stop calling any non-essential use of energy that you're looking to smear, "evil". Are movies, which consume energy in their production and consumption, also evil? Video games? No, because you personally see the entertainment they provide as redeeming? If people want to expend their own resources on NFTs, that's entirely their right to do so, and calling it evil because the process consumed energy is absurd. If you have a problem with CO2 emission, by all means advocate for laws requiring energy production to not emit CO2 as a by-product. But to single out some non-essential activity that you personally don't like because of the imagined motives of those behind it, while ignoring every other non-essential activity that uses energy, is disingenuous and irresponsible.
  - JPKab 6y ago
    I really resent the community of grifters like yourself constantly pushing the stuff and defending its excesses. I recently saw Twitter thread where a big pusher of NFTs was moaning on about how the real issue is we didn't create enough nuclear power plants and now we're blaming NFTs for this. It's blatantly obvious that this is all a pyramid scheme capitalizing on people's complete ignorance and optimism with crypto. Enjoy your pyramid scheme and I hope you make out like a bandit and eventually develop a conscience for the people you're grifting.
    - CryptoPunk 6y ago

markkat 6y ago

A house is linked to a title. The title is a paper token.

bradleyjg 6y ago
That proves too much. There’s nothing inherent in the paper that grants any rights and privileges. It’s the legal system that does that. A digital token is either meaningless (if the legal system doesn’t recognize it) or massive overkill (if the legal system treats it the same as a wet signature).
- _huayra_ 6y ago
  It's not only the legal system, but the military / police components of a country that enforce private property too.
- markkat 6y ago
  The legal system will recognize it, and attribution protocols are being built. Removing middlemen like title companies is an efficiency, not overkill.
  - bradleyjg 6y ago
    Title companies are fading away with the advent of digital land registries (using plain old boring databases). As usual for “like X but with a blockchain” this is a solution in search of a problem. Because despite all the protestations to the contrary the real motivation for crypto is not providing useful goods or services in exchange for reasonable compensation, it is getting rich by being an early adopter.
ceejayoz 6y ago
I can take the title to a court and say “this proves that house is mine, give it back”.

cosmodisk 6y ago

I'm sure all the new marketplaces facilitating it are making tons of it right now.

rory 6y ago

It does seem really stupid, but I don't see how it's substantively different than (also stupid-seeming) physical collectibles like baseball cards or Bearbricks. The supply of the "special" versions of those two collectibles is also constrained in a totally artificial manner.

stephen_g 6y ago
At least you actually own a real object in that case. Not a token with a link to a JPEG that may disappear from wherever it’s hosted eventually...
danaris 6y ago
At least if you have a really rare baseball card, a) You have the physical card. It is in your possession, and the only way for you to lose it is for something physical to happen to it. b) You can look at and enjoy the card in its physicality. You can show it to others, and the only reason that is the case is that it is physically in your possession. Contrast that with NFTs, where all you "own" is the idea of owning a thing. If the thing your particular NFT says you own is a digital image, anyone can still see that image, and it can be deleted from the internet without your permission or any warning. You lose the exclusivity that's the main draw of owning something rare and special, and you don't have any practical control over the thing either.
- rory 6y ago
  I guess, but if the point is interacting with the physical card, why are "counterfeit" cards worthless? Can't you interact with them in the exact same way as the "real" baseball card the counterfeit is copying? It seems like the value is all in the idea of owning one instance of a limited run.
  - Hamuko 6y ago
    >why are "counterfeit" cards worthless? They're not worthless, they're worth less. I could easily hang up a counterfeit Mona Lisa on my wall and get a kick out of it. And if I stop getting a kick out of it, I can put it on Craigslist for $100 afterwards. Of course, there's absolutely no history behind the painting as it wasn't painted by the renaissance man. No one would pay to see it because it would be about as significant as a JPEG of the Mona Lisa. However, that doesn't mean that it's worthless. Even that JPEG can make for a good phone wallpaper.

Paradigma11 6y ago

Why would you not be able to attach certain rights to tokens that you mint and sell?

koonsolo 6y ago

Real world item (person): Honus Wagner Link item: 1909 T206 baseball card Value: $2 million Why don't you start printing these baseball cards and sell them? Ha, but you say the baseball card is a real physical item, and a NFT is not. Well, an NFT is as real as the movie I watch on YouTube, the song I listen to on Spotify, and the numbers my bank shows. But now you say the baseball card was part of a game, and so it's value is not from the person but from the collection game itself. Well, a lot of NFT's are also part of a collectible game. Would love to hear the difference between a "physical" item and a "digital" item, or a "physical link to a physical item" or a "digital link to a physical (or digital) item".

koonsolo 6y ago
Downvotes without any discussion. Unfortunately getting used to that for crypto topics on HN.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 6y ago
  Millennials just don't understand ... world is becoming digital very fast.
bradleyjg 6y ago
> Ha, but you say the baseball card is a real physical item, and a NFT is not. Well, an NFT is as real as the movie I watch on YouTube, the song I listen to on Spotify, and the numbers my bank shows. It’s not an issue of realness. Of course an NFT is real, it’s a long number and is just as real as 3 or PI or any other number.[1] The issue is instead ownership. When I own a baseball card I have a physical card no one can take from my house/vault/whatever without the police getting involved. When I own the copyright to a movie I can choose to let other people watch it or not. When I own an NFT it means there’s a blockchain somewhere that says I own a particular number. As long as the blockchain is still in existence I can prove that the blockchain says I own the number and I can transfer that number to you. That’s not exactly nothing but it’s pretty darn close. It smells like a scam. You do raise a good point that it smells like a scam in the same way that a lot of consciously created collectibles do. Once comic books, baseball cards, or stamp producing nations started pushing their products as something people should buy because they’d appreciate in value they started to feel a lot scummier (and not conincidently the items in question rarely increased in value the way organic collectibles had.) So, sure if you can get someone to pay you a lot of money for the “ownership” of some 256 digit number in some blockchain somewhere by claiming it represents the star Vega, as long as you don’t lie I suppose it shouldn’t be a crime. But you can’t expect the rest of us to respect the way you’ve chosen to make a living. You are going to get downvotes because you are promoting a disreputable activity. [1] Hope you appreciate the effort it took not to make a math joke here.

manojlds 6y ago

But NFTs can also be for digital items, which is where I was first introduced to them - like cryptokitties and other games.

setpatchaddress 6y ago
In games, you have the thing of value itself. It’s not an NFT just because it’s digital.
- manojlds 6y ago
  But how do you sell it to someone else?

kerng 6y ago

It's not linking to real world items, but to digital assets. But it doesn't really. I learned the other day that NFT standards don't even store a hash of the digital asset. So, ransomware will wipe out a lot of NFTs one day, because the blockchain smart contracts dont know (have any cryptographic proof) what digital asset they hold. Herr an article that was posted the other day: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2021/broken-nft-standards/ https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2021/broken-nft-standar...

rdiddly 6y ago

I will happily ignore NFTs, but look at money itself - it's a token too. It was supposed to represent and be coupled to real-world productive activity, but clearly there are many cases where the two have become decoupled. A price can be below the intrinsic worth of the item, and can be almost arbitrarily high. The source of truth is supposedly the item, the productive work that went into it, but in a heavily financialized economy, a lot of people make more money from mere price fluctuations than from productive activity.

cifu69 6y ago

the source of true is always concensous. the best example i can give you es bitcoin. nevertheless seeing NFTs as non-physical is also not true, every thing that operates in the blockchain is sustend onto de nodes thoso nodes are sustend by computers, and those computers are physical. it doesnt matter wheather fot the computers are 1s and 0s and the end of the day they are link to the reality

dmingod666 6y ago

Do you notice how many of your real world identities are linked to an entry in a database? How much of your assets are entries in a database. What is missing is centralization and consensus of validity, db entries linking to the real world is done everyday.