14 ms·

NFT Canon

85 points by n3on_net 6y ago

bko 6y ago
It might be covered in one of the resources, but when people talk about NFTs, they just mean some token on Ethereum that the issuer of said coin say is "the" product. For instance, the NFT for "the first tweet" that sold is just someone created an Ethereum token and said "this one is the first tweet", presumably w/ some text in the token that states the tweet. In that regard, its kind of centralized. There can be multiple NFTs that claim to be tweets. There's no naturally definitive "twitter" token, unless it's managed by Twitter itself. But you're relying on the issuer of the coin to say "I am the NFT coin" and everyone to agree. Real world NFTs (e.g. art and collectibles) are unique in that there is no dispute about what the original is. The art was created by the artist or its a forgery. In that regard NFTs rely on some issuing entity that bestows upon itself an arbitrary form of ownership. I can make my own Twitter token and if I get someone to buy a coin for an absurd amount (insider dealing?), and convince reports to write about it, I can be "the twitter nft" Or am I thinking of this incorrectly?
- lukebuehler 6y ago
  Yep, another way to put it is that any NFT is worthless unless it is tied to some network effect. This can be merely social convention, e.g. an artist announcing that this is his Ethereum address, or an auction house acting as an intermediary. But it could also be a network effect based on software, e.g., a game, or something in between like the original CryptoKitties.
  - bko 6y ago
    Yeah, that's what I figured. I get the idea of it being tied to a game, but you don't really get the benefit of block chain, except for making the token sellable without having to go through the proper market channels. Overall I'm very bullish on crypto as digital gold, less so on Ethereum style apps and even less so on NFTs. It's an interesting litmus test. I see a lot of crypto enthusiasts speak highly about NFTs which I find odd. They generally have very well thought out and reasoned arguments for Bitcoin as a digital store of wealth, but then they go into NFTs and talk about scarcity. But the scarcity of Bitcoin is only valuable because it is the defacto digital currency, due to it's survival up to this point. It has dealt with governance issues, was built of strong cryptographic principals and most importantly stood the test of time (lindy effect). Then they speak about NFTs in a vague way as though they're naturally authoritative without pointing out the obvious: you don't actually own the digital asset you're buying. If it actually had some real concept of ownership (e.g. owning a tweet allows me to delete the tweet), then it would be a different story. But as it stands now I don't see the value. The cheer leading from the crypto community is odd and makes me question their principals. I'd be happy to be proven wrong and have someone steelman the argument for NFTs without relying on "its a scarce asset and people want to own scarce assets". It's also very early days in NFTs, so ten years from now if the Twitter tokens are still selling for millions, I'd be more willing to agree as it would have Lindy effect by that point.
    - xur17 6y ago
      > I see a lot of crypto enthusiasts speak highly about NFTs which I find odd. They generally have very well thought out and reasoned arguments for Bitcoin as a digital store of wealth, but then they go into NFTs and talk about scarcity. I've seen the opposite - most crypto enthusiasts I have spoken to don't seem to understand NFTs at all / why they are considered valuable by other people. I fit into that camp. > Overall I'm very bullish on crypto as digital gold, less so on Ethereum style apps and even less so on NFTs. I'm quite bullish on Ethereum style "defi" apps - once we finally have decent layer 2 options and software deployed on layer 2, I think interest rates on stablecoins will be a large incentive for folks to start onboarding. The big remaining piece then is convincing people to spend their stable coins at stores - I would expect some level of "rewards" paid by the store would be sufficient. Essentially, an app that you can deposit funds into, earn interest that is well above what your bank account pays, and earns rewards that are competitive (or ideally beat) with credit cards.
      - warkdarrior 6y ago
        > Essentially, an app that you can deposit funds into, earn interest that is well above what your bank account pays, and earns rewards that are competitive (or ideally beat) with credit cards. That would be fantastic! Give me 10% interest on my wallet, and 10% "cashback" for my purchases with crypto, and I'll switch my whole financial life to crypto.
        xur17 6y ago
        10% cashback is probably pushing it unless the wallet is giving away "platform tokens" as a growth hack at the beginning. 2 to 3% is probably more realistic given what merchants pay credit card providers. Long term, if merchants were smart, they'd make their own reward systems on top of this to encourage usage.
      - MrMan 6y ago
        Why does defi imply higher interest rates?
- PretzelPirate 6y ago
  The confusion comes from how NFTs that represent images have become so popular right now (I believe it’s because it’s the easiest use case of an NFT and people want to make a quick buck). NFTs themselves are just a cryptographic representation of something unique. It can be a token that says “you own this image”, but it can also be an in-game virtual item, a software license, a digital trading card, etc... There is some level of centralization in many cases. For example, a trading card game will likely own the contract that can mint cards and own the art for the cards. Other services can read that contract to see what cards you own and use that data inside their own game logic (though probably not the images due to legal reasons). This would already be useful for something like Magic the Gathering where unofficial online services exist to play by whatever rules you want. The last time I used one, you just put your deck list in so everyone used the rarest cards. They may have evolved now to check your Magic Online account, but you can’t do that as easily in Magic Arena. Assuming the creators don’t limit your freedom in their smart contract, you can also buy, sell, or trade the NFT to whoever and for whatever you want unlike a centralized service which wouldn’t enable access to an open market outside of the game’s ecosystem.
  - rusk 6y ago
    Here’s the thing - if it relies on a central authority to say “this is the genuine article” why do you even need a blockchain? A PGP certificate or X.509 is arguably “a cryptographic representation of something unique” EDIT even something like a domain name - which is arguably a better example as only one of such a thing can actually exist in that only one owner can derive the value from it.
    - asimpletune 6y ago
      Because then it’s not on the blockchain. Yes, I could sell you a txt record, saying you own this hash, which represents a jpg, but then it’s not blockchain. Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because the blockchain is immutable? Like, I could change that txt record because I’m evil or something. That makes sense to me, in terms of technology.
      - 6y ago
- dls2016 6y ago
  > Real world NFTs (e.g. art and collectibles) are unique in that there is no dispute about what the original is. The art was created by the artist or its a forgery. In that regard NFTs rely on some issuing entity that bestows upon itself an arbitrary form of ownership. I can make my own Twitter token and if I get someone to buy a coin for an absurd amount (insider dealing?), and convince reports to write about it, I can be "the twitter nft" I think of NFTs as a fancy system of determining provenance: X bought hash Y from seller Z. Whether other people assign meaning/value to that transaction is subject to the usual whims of human nature.
- cma 6y ago
  > there is no dispute about what the original is Still though, the value of collectible goes up if you have extensive documentation proving it is the original, vs it just merely being the original, or worse, it being the original and someone else having extensive documentation convincingly making the case that their counterfeit is actually the original.
  - billytetrud 6y ago
    NFTs can't prove originality, only ownership. Since digital things are easily copied exactly, that's all you can do
    - kgwgk 6y ago
      For a very sui generis definition of ownership.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  It's a simulacrum, in the post-modern sense. For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, a simulacrum is a copy of something that has itself become hyper-real and usurped the reality of the original. The canonical example is Disney World, which is a copy of Disneyland, which is itself a copy of many elements of Americana (Louisiana Bayou, the frontier West, Main Street USA, etc.) Disney World has eclipsed Disneyland in visitors, which itself has eclipsed visits to various small town main streets or the Louisiana bayous. You plan a family vacation to Disney World, you don't plan a trip to Bumfuck, Wyoming. Even though it's a copy of a copy (and a poor one at that), its reality has eclipsed that of the original, just because the original is hard to get to and kind of boring. Similar with NFTs. Yes, you can make an NFT of the Mona Lisa and claim that you have the only one. Yes, you're a lying swindler and probably a bad person. But your copy is much easier to trade, move around, and store than the actual Mona Lisa. And just as there's only one original Mona Lisa, there's only one original NFT of the Mona Lisa, so your copy still has the same scarcity. As more capital comes onto the blockchain, your NFT is likely to acquire its own hyper-reality and become the Mona Lisa, and the original painting will be hidden away in a museum somewhere and disappear from trading.
  - Judgmentality 6y ago
    > And just as there's only one original Mona Lisa, there's only one original NFT of the Mona Lisa I apologize if I'm misunderstanding, but can't you create as many NFTs of the Mona Lisa as you want? What's to stop someone from just creating a second one, even the original owner of the Mona Lisa? You can't copy the Mona Lisa (at least not in such a way as to call it the original), but you can make another NFT of the real Mona Lisa and...as far as I can tell it's just as good. I realize you can't copy the chain that's already descended from the first NFT, but why does that matter? You can still say this is a genuine NFT for the real Mona Lisa, and the problem is you can make as many of those as you want. Or at least that's how I understand it. Copying something digital is very different from copying something molecular. A digital copy is as good as the original. A molecular copy is almost certainly possible to distinguish, and if you can't you may as well not have an original.
    - 6y ago
- makomk 6y ago
  In reality, I think a lot of art these days isn't created by the artist, at least not mostly - it's created by their technicians or students or other people they employ and then just given their blessing, maybe with a few last finishing touches. The thing that makes it not a forgery is literally the artist's blessing; in principle you could even have a "forgery" that was created by the same person as the genuine article. This isn't widely advertised for obvious reasons but it isn't exactly a secret either, and it's not really a new thing - the actual creation of some of the classic, famous fine art paintings was a lot like this too and it makes verifying authenticity very interesting.
- Igelau 6y ago
  > am I thinking of this incorrectly? You've got it, more or less. The "surely I must be missing something" reaction is actually indicative of the correct understanding: the emperor has no clothes. NFT: No Fscking Thing
heckerhut 6y ago
Haters dropping the same tired BS on NFTs in 3 2 1
- ptudan 6y ago
  HN is not the place to discuss crypto. As a whole, the comments are consistently bearish.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nickysielicki 6y ago
"It's time to build" sitting prominently at the top of the page is just adding insult to injury, here.
moonbug 6y ago
NFTs are bullshit.
- king_magic 6y ago
  Yes they are, and I cannot begin to understand the insane support for them.
  - dboreham 6y ago
    There has clearly been an orchestrated PR blitz in the past few weeks to make NFTs "a thing". So the "support" is Astroturf.
riskneutral 6y ago
This makes it clear to me that a16z are in the same league as penny stock pumping grifters. It does seem obvious in retrospect.
choppaface 6y ago
Uhhh this isn’t a canon so much as a cannon for a VC to inject their own financial incentives into your thinking. Even if they’re wrong about what they cite, any conversation or discussion just draws more attention to them versus the competition. If you want to learn about NFTs, do you own research. Don’t lend your critical thinking resources to an investor unless they’re paying handsomely.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jcpham2 6y ago
Absolutely delighted that cryptocurrency has spawned this larger conversation of digital ownership and proof of work, proof is stake, etc. This is great stuff to read other people discuss and curate on the internet now 10 or 11 years in.
dvt 6y ago
NFTs just happen to be the token du jour, and it's a bit sad that a16z is peddling them. There's nothing of value here, and no one will care in 4 years. Remember Crypto Kitties[1]? Don't worry, no one else does either. The idea of "proof of ownership" makes no sense in a digital context, anyway, and the best way forward (if actually trying to solve this problem) isn't with some pump-and-dump token, but rather with DRM-style certificates. But no one's really trying to solve the problem of digital ownership, provenance, chain of custody, or original verifiability, they're just trying to get rich. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoKitties/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoKitties/
- _red 6y ago
  Well, they are pushing them because in general traditional VC's completely missed out on the initial crypto boom. NFT's are their manufactured attempt to build a Crypto V2 market they think they can control. 90% of the stories you read about in the press about NFT's are placed there by these same VC investors. They are desperately trying to viral market fomo response for their useless tokens....sorry their authentic original JPG's.... Its really quite sad.
- miracle2k 6y ago
  Whatever you think about NFTs, there are plenty of earnest people in the space; they have been trading, building and podcasting for years without any mainstream attention, or in fact, without making money. And yes, people are still trading Cryptokitties.
  - echelon 6y ago
    People are still working on Commodore 64, but that doesn't make it a logical next step for our industry or the internet.
  - heterodoxxed 6y ago
    | there are plenty of earnest people in the space Of course there are. Scams wouldn't work if everyone involved was in on it.
- 6y ago
CynicusRex 6y ago
“A man who is rich but ignorant he called a sheep with golden fleece.” —Diogenes the Cynic: Sayings and Anecdotes, with Other Popular Moralists by Robin Hard, §326.
- pilaf 6y ago
  My English is probably lacking (not a native speaker), but I can't parse that sentence for the life of me, let alone understand what it means. Curiously enough, googling it brings up exactly two results: the book you cite and this HN thread.
  - cyclopus 6y ago
    The he is referring to Diogenes, an ancient philosopher. And Diogenes is calling rich but ignorant men sheeps with golden fleeces. "A man who is rich but ignorant he[Diogenes] called a sheep with golden fleece."
    - pilaf 6y ago
      Makes sense now, thanks. I had assumed it was a direct quote by Diogenes himself.
russellbeattie 6y ago
I don't think I would have ever have predicted that having control over a line of data in a shared database running on just 8,000 computers would be so valuable. "See this database entry? It's yours. In order to change it, you need this little JSON file and a password. Got it? Great. That will be $69 million please."
malthaus 6y ago
NFT are null pointers with a random price tag
- echelon 6y ago
  They're more like barcodes. I wouldn't pay 60 million for a barcode.
jakemauer 6y ago
The only way that NFTs make sense to me is in some sort of impossible to implement DRM-like system where ONLY the current owners of the media can display it or utilize it. If buying an NFT of a piece of art meant that I could digitally display the file in full resolution, or if it otherwise afforded me some tangible benefit during the period of ownership, I could see it making sense. As of right now NFTs are basically donations to the artist with more steps and about 1000x the carbon footprint.
- gnopgnip 6y ago
  The utility of art or collectibles is a very small portion of the value. A game worn Michael Jordan jersey you paid $100k for has essentially the same utility as a <$100 jersey. It is valuable because it is scarce, and the provenance
  - jancsika 6y ago
    Sure. But suppose you ripped that jersey into a thousand pieces, and sold each separately. People might still buy it, because those pieces as a whole were in fact a Michael Jordan jersey at some point. A piece of that history is cheaper to own than the entire thing. Now suppose you rip it into 100 million pieces and create non-fungible tokens where each tiny piece could be scanned with a phone, identified, and associated with an arbitrary blob of data. Now it's a race of a savvy PR team against the public's hazy and soon-to-be waning interest in what-- if anything-- is the value of one of those microscopic jersey specs. "Something something Michael Jordan," got you to distract a captive audience from Candy Crush for five seconds. What happens next has absolutely nothing to do with Michael Jordan, and everything to do with P.T. Barnum. Edit: clarification
- sbhagat 6y ago
  It's not impossible, and we completely agree that this is needed. We're building this over at masterfile.co via our OpenDRM technology.
  - jtsiskin 6y ago
mis1988 6y ago
"It's time to build... Or make NFTs or whatever."

85 points by n3on_net 6y ago

bko 6y ago

It might be covered in one of the resources, but when people talk about NFTs, they just mean some token on Ethereum that the issuer of said coin say is "the" product. For instance, the NFT for "the first tweet" that sold is just someone created an Ethereum token and said "this one is the first tweet", presumably w/ some text in the token that states the tweet. In that regard, its kind of centralized. There can be multiple NFTs that claim to be tweets. There's no naturally definitive "twitter" token, unless it's managed by Twitter itself. But you're relying on the issuer of the coin to say "I am the NFT coin" and everyone to agree. Real world NFTs (e.g. art and collectibles) are unique in that there is no dispute about what the original is. The art was created by the artist or its a forgery. In that regard NFTs rely on some issuing entity that bestows upon itself an arbitrary form of ownership. I can make my own Twitter token and if I get someone to buy a coin for an absurd amount (insider dealing?), and convince reports to write about it, I can be "the twitter nft" Or am I thinking of this incorrectly?

lukebuehler 6y ago
Yep, another way to put it is that any NFT is worthless unless it is tied to some network effect. This can be merely social convention, e.g. an artist announcing that this is his Ethereum address, or an auction house acting as an intermediary. But it could also be a network effect based on software, e.g., a game, or something in between like the original CryptoKitties.
- bko 6y ago
  Yeah, that's what I figured. I get the idea of it being tied to a game, but you don't really get the benefit of block chain, except for making the token sellable without having to go through the proper market channels. Overall I'm very bullish on crypto as digital gold, less so on Ethereum style apps and even less so on NFTs. It's an interesting litmus test. I see a lot of crypto enthusiasts speak highly about NFTs which I find odd. They generally have very well thought out and reasoned arguments for Bitcoin as a digital store of wealth, but then they go into NFTs and talk about scarcity. But the scarcity of Bitcoin is only valuable because it is the defacto digital currency, due to it's survival up to this point. It has dealt with governance issues, was built of strong cryptographic principals and most importantly stood the test of time (lindy effect). Then they speak about NFTs in a vague way as though they're naturally authoritative without pointing out the obvious: you don't actually own the digital asset you're buying. If it actually had some real concept of ownership (e.g. owning a tweet allows me to delete the tweet), then it would be a different story. But as it stands now I don't see the value. The cheer leading from the crypto community is odd and makes me question their principals. I'd be happy to be proven wrong and have someone steelman the argument for NFTs without relying on "its a scarce asset and people want to own scarce assets". It's also very early days in NFTs, so ten years from now if the Twitter tokens are still selling for millions, I'd be more willing to agree as it would have Lindy effect by that point.
  - xur17 6y ago
    > I see a lot of crypto enthusiasts speak highly about NFTs which I find odd. They generally have very well thought out and reasoned arguments for Bitcoin as a digital store of wealth, but then they go into NFTs and talk about scarcity. I've seen the opposite - most crypto enthusiasts I have spoken to don't seem to understand NFTs at all / why they are considered valuable by other people. I fit into that camp. > Overall I'm very bullish on crypto as digital gold, less so on Ethereum style apps and even less so on NFTs. I'm quite bullish on Ethereum style "defi" apps - once we finally have decent layer 2 options and software deployed on layer 2, I think interest rates on stablecoins will be a large incentive for folks to start onboarding. The big remaining piece then is convincing people to spend their stable coins at stores - I would expect some level of "rewards" paid by the store would be sufficient. Essentially, an app that you can deposit funds into, earn interest that is well above what your bank account pays, and earns rewards that are competitive (or ideally beat) with credit cards.
    - warkdarrior 6y ago
      > Essentially, an app that you can deposit funds into, earn interest that is well above what your bank account pays, and earns rewards that are competitive (or ideally beat) with credit cards. That would be fantastic! Give me 10% interest on my wallet, and 10% "cashback" for my purchases with crypto, and I'll switch my whole financial life to crypto.
      - xur17 6y ago
        10% cashback is probably pushing it unless the wallet is giving away "platform tokens" as a growth hack at the beginning. 2 to 3% is probably more realistic given what merchants pay credit card providers. Long term, if merchants were smart, they'd make their own reward systems on top of this to encourage usage.
    - MrMan 6y ago
      Why does defi imply higher interest rates?
PretzelPirate 6y ago
The confusion comes from how NFTs that represent images have become so popular right now (I believe it’s because it’s the easiest use case of an NFT and people want to make a quick buck). NFTs themselves are just a cryptographic representation of something unique. It can be a token that says “you own this image”, but it can also be an in-game virtual item, a software license, a digital trading card, etc... There is some level of centralization in many cases. For example, a trading card game will likely own the contract that can mint cards and own the art for the cards. Other services can read that contract to see what cards you own and use that data inside their own game logic (though probably not the images due to legal reasons). This would already be useful for something like Magic the Gathering where unofficial online services exist to play by whatever rules you want. The last time I used one, you just put your deck list in so everyone used the rarest cards. They may have evolved now to check your Magic Online account, but you can’t do that as easily in Magic Arena. Assuming the creators don’t limit your freedom in their smart contract, you can also buy, sell, or trade the NFT to whoever and for whatever you want unlike a centralized service which wouldn’t enable access to an open market outside of the game’s ecosystem.
- rusk 6y ago
  Here’s the thing - if it relies on a central authority to say “this is the genuine article” why do you even need a blockchain? A PGP certificate or X.509 is arguably “a cryptographic representation of something unique” EDIT even something like a domain name - which is arguably a better example as only one of such a thing can actually exist in that only one owner can derive the value from it.
  - asimpletune 6y ago
    Because then it’s not on the blockchain. Yes, I could sell you a txt record, saying you own this hash, which represents a jpg, but then it’s not blockchain. Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because the blockchain is immutable? Like, I could change that txt record because I’m evil or something. That makes sense to me, in terms of technology.
    - 6y ago
dls2016 6y ago
> Real world NFTs (e.g. art and collectibles) are unique in that there is no dispute about what the original is. The art was created by the artist or its a forgery. In that regard NFTs rely on some issuing entity that bestows upon itself an arbitrary form of ownership. I can make my own Twitter token and if I get someone to buy a coin for an absurd amount (insider dealing?), and convince reports to write about it, I can be "the twitter nft" I think of NFTs as a fancy system of determining provenance: X bought hash Y from seller Z. Whether other people assign meaning/value to that transaction is subject to the usual whims of human nature.
cma 6y ago
> there is no dispute about what the original is Still though, the value of collectible goes up if you have extensive documentation proving it is the original, vs it just merely being the original, or worse, it being the original and someone else having extensive documentation convincingly making the case that their counterfeit is actually the original.
- billytetrud 6y ago
  NFTs can't prove originality, only ownership. Since digital things are easily copied exactly, that's all you can do
  - kgwgk 6y ago
    For a very sui generis definition of ownership.
nostrademons 6y ago
It's a simulacrum, in the post-modern sense. For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, a simulacrum is a copy of something that has itself become hyper-real and usurped the reality of the original. The canonical example is Disney World, which is a copy of Disneyland, which is itself a copy of many elements of Americana (Louisiana Bayou, the frontier West, Main Street USA, etc.) Disney World has eclipsed Disneyland in visitors, which itself has eclipsed visits to various small town main streets or the Louisiana bayous. You plan a family vacation to Disney World, you don't plan a trip to Bumfuck, Wyoming. Even though it's a copy of a copy (and a poor one at that), its reality has eclipsed that of the original, just because the original is hard to get to and kind of boring. Similar with NFTs. Yes, you can make an NFT of the Mona Lisa and claim that you have the only one. Yes, you're a lying swindler and probably a bad person. But your copy is much easier to trade, move around, and store than the actual Mona Lisa. And just as there's only one original Mona Lisa, there's only one original NFT of the Mona Lisa, so your copy still has the same scarcity. As more capital comes onto the blockchain, your NFT is likely to acquire its own hyper-reality and become the Mona Lisa, and the original painting will be hidden away in a museum somewhere and disappear from trading.
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  > And just as there's only one original Mona Lisa, there's only one original NFT of the Mona Lisa I apologize if I'm misunderstanding, but can't you create as many NFTs of the Mona Lisa as you want? What's to stop someone from just creating a second one, even the original owner of the Mona Lisa? You can't copy the Mona Lisa (at least not in such a way as to call it the original), but you can make another NFT of the real Mona Lisa and...as far as I can tell it's just as good. I realize you can't copy the chain that's already descended from the first NFT, but why does that matter? You can still say this is a genuine NFT for the real Mona Lisa, and the problem is you can make as many of those as you want. Or at least that's how I understand it. Copying something digital is very different from copying something molecular. A digital copy is as good as the original. A molecular copy is almost certainly possible to distinguish, and if you can't you may as well not have an original.
  - 6y ago
makomk 6y ago
In reality, I think a lot of art these days isn't created by the artist, at least not mostly - it's created by their technicians or students or other people they employ and then just given their blessing, maybe with a few last finishing touches. The thing that makes it not a forgery is literally the artist's blessing; in principle you could even have a "forgery" that was created by the same person as the genuine article. This isn't widely advertised for obvious reasons but it isn't exactly a secret either, and it's not really a new thing - the actual creation of some of the classic, famous fine art paintings was a lot like this too and it makes verifying authenticity very interesting.
Igelau 6y ago
> am I thinking of this incorrectly? You've got it, more or less. The "surely I must be missing something" reaction is actually indicative of the correct understanding: the emperor has no clothes. NFT: No Fscking Thing

heckerhut 6y ago

Haters dropping the same tired BS on NFTs in 3 2 1

ptudan 6y ago
HN is not the place to discuss crypto. As a whole, the comments are consistently bearish.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

nickysielicki 6y ago

"It's time to build" sitting prominently at the top of the page is just adding insult to injury, here.

moonbug 6y ago

NFTs are bullshit.

king_magic 6y ago
Yes they are, and I cannot begin to understand the insane support for them.
- dboreham 6y ago
  There has clearly been an orchestrated PR blitz in the past few weeks to make NFTs "a thing". So the "support" is Astroturf.

riskneutral 6y ago

This makes it clear to me that a16z are in the same league as penny stock pumping grifters. It does seem obvious in retrospect.

choppaface 6y ago

Uhhh this isn’t a canon so much as a cannon for a VC to inject their own financial incentives into your thinking. Even if they’re wrong about what they cite, any conversation or discussion just draws more attention to them versus the competition. If you want to learn about NFTs, do you own research. Don’t lend your critical thinking resources to an investor unless they’re paying handsomely.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jcpham2 6y ago

Absolutely delighted that cryptocurrency has spawned this larger conversation of digital ownership and proof of work, proof is stake, etc. This is great stuff to read other people discuss and curate on the internet now 10 or 11 years in.

dvt 6y ago

NFTs just happen to be the token du jour, and it's a bit sad that a16z is peddling them. There's nothing of value here, and no one will care in 4 years. Remember Crypto Kitties[1]? Don't worry, no one else does either. The idea of "proof of ownership" makes no sense in a digital context, anyway, and the best way forward (if actually trying to solve this problem) isn't with some pump-and-dump token, but rather with DRM-style certificates. But no one's really trying to solve the problem of digital ownership, provenance, chain of custody, or original verifiability, they're just trying to get rich. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoKitties/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoKitties/

_red 6y ago
Well, they are pushing them because in general traditional VC's completely missed out on the initial crypto boom. NFT's are their manufactured attempt to build a Crypto V2 market they think they can control. 90% of the stories you read about in the press about NFT's are placed there by these same VC investors. They are desperately trying to viral market fomo response for their useless tokens....sorry their authentic original JPG's.... Its really quite sad.
miracle2k 6y ago
Whatever you think about NFTs, there are plenty of earnest people in the space; they have been trading, building and podcasting for years without any mainstream attention, or in fact, without making money. And yes, people are still trading Cryptokitties.
- echelon 6y ago
  People are still working on Commodore 64, but that doesn't make it a logical next step for our industry or the internet.
- heterodoxxed 6y ago
  | there are plenty of earnest people in the space Of course there are. Scams wouldn't work if everyone involved was in on it.
6y ago

CynicusRex 6y ago

“A man who is rich but ignorant he called a sheep with golden fleece.” —Diogenes the Cynic: Sayings and Anecdotes, with Other Popular Moralists by Robin Hard, §326.

pilaf 6y ago
My English is probably lacking (not a native speaker), but I can't parse that sentence for the life of me, let alone understand what it means. Curiously enough, googling it brings up exactly two results: the book you cite and this HN thread.
- cyclopus 6y ago
  The he is referring to Diogenes, an ancient philosopher. And Diogenes is calling rich but ignorant men sheeps with golden fleeces. "A man who is rich but ignorant he[Diogenes] called a sheep with golden fleece."
  - pilaf 6y ago
    Makes sense now, thanks. I had assumed it was a direct quote by Diogenes himself.

russellbeattie 6y ago

I don't think I would have ever have predicted that having control over a line of data in a shared database running on just 8,000 computers would be so valuable. "See this database entry? It's yours. In order to change it, you need this little JSON file and a password. Got it? Great. That will be $69 million please."

malthaus 6y ago

NFT are null pointers with a random price tag

echelon 6y ago
They're more like barcodes. I wouldn't pay 60 million for a barcode.

jakemauer 6y ago

The only way that NFTs make sense to me is in some sort of impossible to implement DRM-like system where ONLY the current owners of the media can display it or utilize it. If buying an NFT of a piece of art meant that I could digitally display the file in full resolution, or if it otherwise afforded me some tangible benefit during the period of ownership, I could see it making sense. As of right now NFTs are basically donations to the artist with more steps and about 1000x the carbon footprint.

gnopgnip 6y ago
The utility of art or collectibles is a very small portion of the value. A game worn Michael Jordan jersey you paid $100k for has essentially the same utility as a <$100 jersey. It is valuable because it is scarce, and the provenance
- jancsika 6y ago
  Sure. But suppose you ripped that jersey into a thousand pieces, and sold each separately. People might still buy it, because those pieces as a whole were in fact a Michael Jordan jersey at some point. A piece of that history is cheaper to own than the entire thing. Now suppose you rip it into 100 million pieces and create non-fungible tokens where each tiny piece could be scanned with a phone, identified, and associated with an arbitrary blob of data. Now it's a race of a savvy PR team against the public's hazy and soon-to-be waning interest in what-- if anything-- is the value of one of those microscopic jersey specs. "Something something Michael Jordan," got you to distract a captive audience from Candy Crush for five seconds. What happens next has absolutely nothing to do with Michael Jordan, and everything to do with P.T. Barnum. Edit: clarification
sbhagat 6y ago
It's not impossible, and we completely agree that this is needed. We're building this over at masterfile.co via our OpenDRM technology.
- jtsiskin 6y ago

mis1988 6y ago

"It's time to build... Or make NFTs or whatever."