9 ms·

Is it just me, or NFTs is just useless bragging rights about ownership of digital goods which can't be owned? You can make unlimited indistinguishable copies of

• scambier 6y ago
  > Do people really care who pretends to own it They absolutely don't. There's no art collectors or amateurs in this game, only speculators.
  • Theodores 6y ago
    Christie's commissioned the Beeple work to sell as an NFT. Why would an auction house do that? There is more to it than speculation. There is a con where something went on. Maybe the auction house commissioned the money to pay for it and had a 69.3 million fee. It saddens me that journalists have chosen not to follow the money and ask the questions.
    • pjc50 6y ago
      > Christie's commissioned the Beeple work Did they? I thought it was his investor "Metakovan" who commissioned it. Following the money is rather hard in an all-pseudonym system.
• chartpath 6y ago
  Wasn't there an app on iOS way back at the start that was just an image of a ruby/gem of some kind that cost $999? Some people actually bought it before Apple took it off the App Store.
  • Someone 6y ago
    $999.99 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich)
    • dylan604 6y ago
      I always thought the natural follow up/copy cat app name should have been "More dollars than sense"
  • lukifer 6y ago
    This story is also a good parable of why Veblen goods [0] distort GDP as a measure of value creation. If Apple had decided to lean in to that market, raising the maximum app price to $1M, and those same 8 purchasers who bought the original I Am Rich purchased I Am Rich 2.0: would anyone really believe that that $8M of real-world value was created? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
• lukifer 6y ago
  Accelerating inequality has led to a conundrum for the rich in addition to the obvious consequences for the poor: what do you actually do with that obscene wealth? [0] You can only consume so much luxury, and sitting on dollars results in tax liability and/or gradual depreciation. Gambling it on speculative assets and bragging-rights positional goods (whynotboth.gif) is pretty much the only game in town, especially when everyone else is doing it, and you can tell yourself a Greater Sucker story (which may or may not resemble a game of Chicken / "Push Your Luck"). NFTs and crypto are obviously realms for this to play out, but this same force is at work for speculative investing in startups as well. For every startup with a value prop, a market, and a revenue model, there are a dozen who are flush with cash solely for the purpose of attracting Greater Suckers, fueled by the same motive to park and/or gamble an asset portfolio. [0] https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/karen-petrou-wealth-inequality-fed/ https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/karen-petrou-wealth-inequal...
  • mdoms 6y ago
    If I knew anything about Roman history I'm almost certain I could draw a parallel to the fall of Rome here.
    • hellothrow4418 6y ago
      Just FYI. There's 'The History of Rome' podcast by Mike Duncan [1]. 'AntennaPod' is a great FLOSS podcast app. Available on Fdroid too [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Rome_(podcast) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Rome_(podcast) [2] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.danoeh.antennapod/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.danoeh.antennapod/
  • jb1991 6y ago
    I find this quite a beautiful analysis.
  • meowface 6y ago
    Yeah. Cryptocurrency and "Web 3.0" is absolutely not all zero-sum, and I'm overall optimistic in the long-term, but much like the existing finance industry, a high percentage is definitely zero-sum or close enough on net. People compare NFTs to trading cards. But if you already think those things are basically useless zero-sum speculative Greater Fool insert-other-overused-but-apt-buzzwords bullshit, your opinion of NFTs won't be improved much. NFTs, in their current state and hype wave, are probably a little like the dotcom bubble. It definitely doesn't imply the internet and the world wide web are bubbles, but it implies a major disconnect of some kind. I'm more interested in the future of semi-fungible tokens and novel, creative uses of NFT/SFT smart contracts. Plus just smart contracts in general.
• blueline 6y ago
  at least a louis vuitton bag can actually hold things in it, and you can't get an identical free one by right clicking an existing one and clicking "Save image"
  • dylan604 6y ago
    or you can go to that part of town where you can get much cheaper knock offs of the LV bag. actually, there's several apps that are filled with these sellers that make it practically as easy as right clicking
• seibelj 6y ago
  > Is it just me Given every post on crypto / blockchain / NFT on HN is full of these exact same comments showing utter disbelief and bewilderment, for the past 10 years, the answer is “No, everyone here thinks like you.”
• quesera 6y ago
  It is not just you. But, NFT's are selling "participation". You are not John Cleese, and you're not even all that funny. But you're an enormous fan, and happen to control an adequately-large amount of cash. In the same way that you can hire Elton John to pretend to be your friend for a few hours, and play at your wedding, etc, you can also "buy in" to a very public partcipation in some art, or joke, or both ... at no meaningful cost to you. Surely the market is limited. But people have paid a lot of money for a piece of toast, too. In this case, it's no weirder than Cleese selling his socks for charity. Or profit! Who cares? Eat the rich, it's all good.
• pfortuny 6y ago
  In “the bonfire of the vanities” by Tom Wolfe, this is ridiculed with the auction for an absurd statue which will become priceless because the author has suggested is going to commit suicide (or has alreay, I forget). The auction is hilarious.
• sago 6y ago
  I don't disagree with your conclusions. But I think it is easy to oversimplify this. Until it is obviously just... obvious. I think reality is more interestingly complicated. > ownership of digital goods which can't be owned? One interesting fact it is what the ownership means legally. If there was a successful image that an expensive NFT owner had, it wouldn't surprise me to see some legal shenanigans. This has not been tested yet. Capability does not give you the rights to make copies of digital art. "Can't be owed" is a rather brave claim I think. > You can make unlimited indistinguishable copies Interestingly it is not dissimilar to a lot of physical art. To the extent that some 'restorations' of damaged art contain a lot of paint of the restorer rather than the original artist. I believe there are many professionals who are capable of creating something visually indistinguishable from the Mona Lisa, say. Without specialised equipment you would have a very hard time telling reality from a good copy. So I am forced to conclude (what dealers will say quite explicitly) that most of the value is in the provenance not the physicality. "NFT is rubbish" becomes less obvious, to me.
  • manigandham 6y ago
    No physical item can be copied exactly with the same arrangement of atoms. There will always be an original. Digital items have no original. The bytes are constantly copied, even in the creation itself. And every viewing creates another copy. And these copies have perfect fidelity. That's the difference.
• masklinn 6y ago
  > Is it just me, or NFTs is just useless bragging rights about ownership of digital goods which can't be owned? You can make unlimited indistinguishable copies of an image. Do people really care who pretends to own it? In my understanding the NFT doesn't even cover the ownership of anything except the NFT itself. It's like owning a sheet of paper you write "certificate of authenticity" at the top on in sharpie, then sign yourself. You should probably write the bits in the middle in crayon. > I mean I guess if you look at show of brands like Luis Vuiton (sp?) There are plenty of people willing to pay for said bragging rights. Merch is at least an actual thing you can own and use, or get pleasure from by looking at (for works of arts e.g. prints & posters, limited run or not), sometimes tied to life events or memories (e.g. band, museum, or tourism spot merch).
  • koonsolo 6y ago
    I would much rather own this (now famous) NFT that John Cleese sold, than anything from Luis Vuiton.
• basch 6y ago
  All of the replies to you didnt really touch on what they are, a store of value. It's fair to think of them more like savings accounts. You can buy a replica of a piece of art to look at it. You buy the original to store value. You hope it may appreciate as well. It could end up worthless. But until someone says otherwise, it has the value stored in it. It's just like baseball cards. You can make unlimited indistinguishable copies, but you don't. The date they are printed matters for some reason. Who owned it previously, its last sale price at auction is part of its history and thus its value. Sorare/ubisoft also has a much better value proposition. Theyve combined draftkings and pokemon into a live betting market with collectable cards that you can use to play a game, to win more. The early generation may be simple digital art, mostly worthless, but there will be more innovation to come. Part of the reason I think NFTs are the real deal is because I think the value of art is often stupid, and yet it still has value. Even if 99% of NFTs turn into nothing, there will be some early art from people that arent famous yet, that is someday found. I have no doubt there is an immense amount of mystery being planted, waiting to be uncovered. Whatever stupidity and hype and storytelling and history around artwork, that I dont understand, will translate to this realm as well. The lack of decay, fire damage, traditional theft, and loss will be an interesting wrinkle.
  • lalaland1125 6y ago
    Why would you store value in something as unstable as an NFT? NFTs are 100% speculation so the price is basically arbitrary.
    • basch 6y ago
      Is physical art any different? If anything this is a democratization of the wealthy auction scene. A new tier of field to play. Alternative assets come in all shapes in sizes. I can store wealth in gold, comics, wine. Why not my name on a ledger listed as owner of nothing in particular other than the price I paid for it? The amount of hate they get on HN should be a clue that everyone is being over analytical and logical, and missing out on analyzing them through human behavior. They arent a robotic math problem, they are behavioral economics. I can't wait to see an investable etf of sorts that lets people invest in a collection of NFTs like they would bonds. Youll have "curators"/"fund managers" assembling and storing a vast array of art, allowing people to diversify and own fractional shares of a bunch of art. Does it sound stupid? Absolutely? Which is why it's just crazy enough to work.
• prepend 6y ago
  It’s the natural extension of luxury branding where just having LV would raise the price from $100 to $1,000. So may as well strip away all vestiges of reality and just allow the bullshit signaling part to be sold by itself. Perhaps with people focusing on that, we can get more quality products IRL. I went to an eye exam where the optometrist was wearing arcteryx gear during my exam. Perhaps she was going to jet off to some location where that stuff was needed, or perhaps she just liked it for fashion. But nonetheless, when people start wearing things that need real quality for non-quality reasons eventually brands start wising up and selling at the same price but with worse quality.
  • jancsika 6y ago
    > optometrist was wearing arcteryx gear during my exam Arcteryx pieces feel great on, the same way avocados taste great in your mouth. And just like you'd likely be misleading people by using an avocado as an example of the average fruit, you are misleading people by using Arcteryx to stand in for technical outdoorwear. Hell, that holds even if your optometrist was wearing a fucking rain shell in the office. Compare: 1. jacket made of mostly straight, rectangular pieces of material sewn together, then taped at the seams (which can rub against your skin) in order to make it waterproof, probably with long arms so it doesn't ride up when you raise yours (e.g., you end up with wrinkly, noisy sleeves) 2. jacket with fused seams, made of pieces that are fabricated to fit together and follow the contour of the human body, with thicker material fused only in those areas that were measured to be high abrasion Number 2 is obviously the wrong garment to wear inside a climate controlled building. But it feels so much better than your run-of-the-mill slicker that I could see someone in and out of a building deciding to simply leave it on for a bit. In other words, the technical specs responsible for those differences match "real quality reasons" for someone to decide to wear it for longer periods, even in conditions for which the garment wasn't designed. And if it wasn't a rain shell, it's likely the piece was comfortable, breathable, didn't look like the average piece of outdoorwear, and was perfectly fitting for the conditions of an optometry office. (I own probably four of their Delta LT fullzips which are so light I sometimes forget to stop wearing them in the early summer.)
    • prepend 6y ago
• playingchanges 6y ago
  I think the idea is that a lot of these come with publishing contracts built in so the artist receives a royalty if the token changes hands and the current owner has the rights to license the art. For example if I sell you a song as an nft you could then license the song to Budweiser to use in a commercial and we both get paid. Think about how difficult this would be to arrange without the nft to handle the contract.
  • setpatchaddress 6y ago
    Song publishing seems like a bad example here — it’s insanely easy to make that arrangement in practice because there is an existing real world payment / licensing structure for exactly that transaction.
  • sneak 6y ago
    > I think the idea is that a lot of these come with publishing contracts built in so the artist receives a royalty if the token changes hands and the current owner has the rights to license the art. I've not seen a single NFT that comes with an associated copyright license to the underlying work. Additionally, the artist only receives a royalty if the token is sold on these marketplaces that enforce the royalty. There's no such thing preventing a private sale that doesn't pay it.
    • djoldman 6y ago
      Isn't it possible to actually code it into the ethereum contract to send eth to a wallet when it's traded?
      • tsimionescu 6y ago
        How would that matter if it's traded off chain?
      • sneak 6y ago
        In theory. I've not seen a contract that does that, however. This doesn't mean they couldn't exist, just that (in my current understanding) it's not part of the ERC-721 spec.
• sharpneli 6y ago
  They’re even more useless than that. They’re exactly like those webpages that sell you a certificate that you own a particular star. It’s literally that. Someone giving you a slip of paper ”You own Mona Lisa” and nothing more. The actual piece of art is elsewhere. Copyrights are not affected etc.
• zokier 6y ago
  If you think it more like as Patreon then it makes much more sense. The ownership of the artwork (or whatever) is irrelevant. Similarly that Patreon members might get their names in the credits of a youtube video, token owners get their name in the blockchain. The key here is that both are public displays of support to the artist and not much more.
• PretzelPirate 6y ago
  The issue is that everyone equates NFTs with NFT art. NFT art can’t have a tie in as part of a virtual world where people want to show ownership of specific digital items, but NFTs in general are more useful, especially for all-digital items. Something like cards in Gods Unchained is a better NFT example than a picture.
• drcode 6y ago
  Some people would love to pay for a direct connection to an artist and their work. It has emotional value.