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I like the concept of NFTs as it pertains to allowing artists more "control" over their works but I see no value in NFTs as a means of investing or really anyth

I like the concept of NFTs as it pertains to allowing artists more "control" over their works but I see no value in NFTs as a means of investing or really anything other than the modern pet rock. That being said, I still think it would be cool to own one as a novelty.

nocommentguy 5y ago
> I see no value > I still think it would be cool to own one Cool enough to pay more than $0? Perhaps there could be an NFT so cool-to-own for you that you would VALUE it at $1?
dogman144 5y ago
Gaming skins and the general market around in-game transactions for purely digital goods indicate what the market looks like. People are paying quite a fair bit for purely digital goods, and it doesn’t seem like a leap to say they’ll pay for discrete digital good s: “the only skin of this kind in Fortnite”
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  But there's nothing stopping Fortnite from developing that right now without the need for a NFT. Sure you guarantee uniqueness with the token, but they can later create an identical skin with a new token. I really don't know what this buys that sort of transaction.
  - shawnz 5y ago
    Fortnite already has the infrastructure to do such a thing, but with NFTs, the infrastructure is open to anyone.
    - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
      That's true, but what's in it for Fortnite? That skin only really has value while the lights are on. I suppose it would have a "proof of purchase" appeal after the fact where the totally useless item can keep getting traded even after the servers are shut, but unless that proves to be of great monetary value I don't know why Epic would care.
      - shawnz 5y ago
        I didn't mean to say that people will make NFTs for Fortnite skins (and I don't think that's what the other poster is saying either, but maybe I'm wrong). Rather, people will probably make NFTs for art or social events or similar. The fact that people are buying essentially useless/decorative skins on Fortnite today is just evidence that such a market could be successful at all.
        SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
        Fair enough. I may be misunderstanding the point.
        dogman144 5y ago
        Agreed, this summarizes my view as well. The criticism above are valid, but at a base level: people are paying for exclusive, purely digital goods. Them paying unique, purely digital goods, doesn’t seem like a stretch. This is putting aside questions of product dev and incentives for somewhere like Fortnite. It arguably has the incentives to sell unique skins, and the blockchain/NFT use is at minimum a solid marketing ploy, at maximum actually worth doing if they do charge out the a* for a unique skin as the customer would want to know it’s as such.
  - ehnto 5y ago
    They could also release the same skin without any token even after someone paid for it, the token means nothing. The token is a gesture.
    - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
      Yeah, I was making the assumption they created new rules and were playing by them, but yes, like the article says, you can share the images as much as you want. It's only the token that's the non-reproducible bit.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    They could also ignore the tokens too. This is another off chain issue, there’s no guarantee that something outside the blockchains is obligated to respect what the blockchain says reality should be.
- criddell 5y ago
  > the only skin of this kind in Fortnite An NFT doesn't say anything about the uniqueness of the underlying digital good, it only shows who owns it. That Fortnite skin can still be duplicated endlessly.
  - pradn 5y ago
    Ownership of a Fortnite skin guarantees that only the owner can wear the skin. Owning an NFT doesn't guarantee exclusive use, as anyone can view the digital image/video/etc that the NFT has wrapped. I'm interested to know how prices for tradable goods changed as they are obsoleted by newer, shinier things, or by the game being abandoned altogether.
    - psychlops 5y ago
      I'm sure you already know the answer to how this will turn out. The price will be substantially discounted. I notice that the secondary market isn't making headlines, just these initial sales.
    - criddell 5y ago
      > Ownership of a Fortnite skin guarantees that only the owner can wear the skin. Is that guarantee in the cryptographic sense or policy sense?
      - pradn 5y ago
        Ownership in a "good enough to dictate the value of the object through its exclusivity." If the player base sees Fortnite renege on its promise of uniqueness, they'll revolt, or at least the price of these unique items will drop.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Which NFTs do literally nothing to solve.
px43 5y ago
Are you an art collector? Because I'm getting real tired of criticisms of NFTs that actually apply quite generally to the entire art collection space. I am not an art collector, but as I understand it, the most important thing that they care about, even before aesthetics of an art piece, is *provenance*. That is, who created it, and who has owned it since it was created. NFTs provide a nearly unforgeable cryptographic record of both of those things, and are therefore a perfect fit for this market.
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  > That is, who created it, and who has owned it since it was created. How do you link the provenance of a piece of art to an NFT? i.e what's the difference between an artist agreeing to the NFT being minted and a grifter creating an NFT on a marketplace that's trying to link it to the artist's work?
  - nocommentguy 5y ago
    The difference would be the artist’s agreement you just mentioned
    - ForHackernews 5y ago
      Yeah, but some bytes on a blockchain somewhere prove nothing about that.
      - nocommentguy 5y ago
        So? Did anyone claim that it does? How is provenance for physical works tracked? It’s just using a database with a nice composable public API. People are excited because you can use it in the context of other smart contracts, do it without permission from some art “authority”, and so on.
      - meowface 5y ago
        Right; impostor NFTs are rampant, unfortunately. I imagine solutions to mitigate this will become more common on the big platforms at some point. (I briefly considered maybe trying to work on one.) An NFT listing could contain some kind of publicly verifiable authenticity certificate issued by a separate (semi-?)decentralized service that just does things like authenticity verification. For example, they could perhaps have a procedure where an NFT minter (such as an artist) has to, among other things, sign and post some message across at least 5 social media accounts confirming they created a token with that contract address and token ID. If after ~10 days the claimed individual re-affirms the signed messages and no issues are found (e.g. account compromise), the certificate could be validated and the NFT could be marked as verifiably attributable. Theoretically, an NFT smart contract could also maybe even try to bake part of it into the logic and NFT metadata, rather than it being just at the platform level. We're really still in the early Wild West days of smart contracts, dapps, tokens, etc. It probably will feel a bit less sketchy in a few years. Maybe.
criddell 5y ago
> I see no value in NFTs as a means of investing Do you think people are investing in NFTs or gambling?
- ThaDood 5y ago
  A little bit of both.
ashtonkem 5y ago
You don’t see value in it because you don’t have any money you need to launder.
- ThaDood 5y ago
  I wish!

nocommentguy 5y ago

> I see no value > I still think it would be cool to own one Cool enough to pay more than $0? Perhaps there could be an NFT so cool-to-own for you that you would VALUE it at $1?

dogman144 5y ago

Gaming skins and the general market around in-game transactions for purely digital goods indicate what the market looks like. People are paying quite a fair bit for purely digital goods, and it doesn’t seem like a leap to say they’ll pay for discrete digital good s: “the only skin of this kind in Fortnite”

SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
But there's nothing stopping Fortnite from developing that right now without the need for a NFT. Sure you guarantee uniqueness with the token, but they can later create an identical skin with a new token. I really don't know what this buys that sort of transaction.
- shawnz 5y ago
  Fortnite already has the infrastructure to do such a thing, but with NFTs, the infrastructure is open to anyone.
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    That's true, but what's in it for Fortnite? That skin only really has value while the lights are on. I suppose it would have a "proof of purchase" appeal after the fact where the totally useless item can keep getting traded even after the servers are shut, but unless that proves to be of great monetary value I don't know why Epic would care.
    - shawnz 5y ago
      I didn't mean to say that people will make NFTs for Fortnite skins (and I don't think that's what the other poster is saying either, but maybe I'm wrong). Rather, people will probably make NFTs for art or social events or similar. The fact that people are buying essentially useless/decorative skins on Fortnite today is just evidence that such a market could be successful at all.
      - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
        Fair enough. I may be misunderstanding the point.
      - dogman144 5y ago
        Agreed, this summarizes my view as well. The criticism above are valid, but at a base level: people are paying for exclusive, purely digital goods. Them paying unique, purely digital goods, doesn’t seem like a stretch. This is putting aside questions of product dev and incentives for somewhere like Fortnite. It arguably has the incentives to sell unique skins, and the blockchain/NFT use is at minimum a solid marketing ploy, at maximum actually worth doing if they do charge out the a* for a unique skin as the customer would want to know it’s as such.
- ehnto 5y ago
  They could also release the same skin without any token even after someone paid for it, the token means nothing. The token is a gesture.
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    Yeah, I was making the assumption they created new rules and were playing by them, but yes, like the article says, you can share the images as much as you want. It's only the token that's the non-reproducible bit.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  They could also ignore the tokens too. This is another off chain issue, there’s no guarantee that something outside the blockchains is obligated to respect what the blockchain says reality should be.
criddell 5y ago
> the only skin of this kind in Fortnite An NFT doesn't say anything about the uniqueness of the underlying digital good, it only shows who owns it. That Fortnite skin can still be duplicated endlessly.
- pradn 5y ago
  Ownership of a Fortnite skin guarantees that only the owner can wear the skin. Owning an NFT doesn't guarantee exclusive use, as anyone can view the digital image/video/etc that the NFT has wrapped. I'm interested to know how prices for tradable goods changed as they are obsoleted by newer, shinier things, or by the game being abandoned altogether.
  - psychlops 5y ago
    I'm sure you already know the answer to how this will turn out. The price will be substantially discounted. I notice that the secondary market isn't making headlines, just these initial sales.
  - criddell 5y ago
    > Ownership of a Fortnite skin guarantees that only the owner can wear the skin. Is that guarantee in the cryptographic sense or policy sense?
    - pradn 5y ago
      Ownership in a "good enough to dictate the value of the object through its exclusivity." If the player base sees Fortnite renege on its promise of uniqueness, they'll revolt, or at least the price of these unique items will drop.
ashtonkem 5y ago
Which NFTs do literally nothing to solve.

px43 5y ago

Are you an art collector? Because I'm getting real tired of criticisms of NFTs that actually apply quite generally to the entire art collection space. I am not an art collector, but as I understand it, the most important thing that they care about, even before aesthetics of an art piece, is *provenance*. That is, who created it, and who has owned it since it was created. NFTs provide a nearly unforgeable cryptographic record of both of those things, and are therefore a perfect fit for this market.

alfiedotwtf 5y ago
> That is, who created it, and who has owned it since it was created. How do you link the provenance of a piece of art to an NFT? i.e what's the difference between an artist agreeing to the NFT being minted and a grifter creating an NFT on a marketplace that's trying to link it to the artist's work?
- nocommentguy 5y ago
  The difference would be the artist’s agreement you just mentioned
  - ForHackernews 5y ago
    Yeah, but some bytes on a blockchain somewhere prove nothing about that.
    - nocommentguy 5y ago
      So? Did anyone claim that it does? How is provenance for physical works tracked? It’s just using a database with a nice composable public API. People are excited because you can use it in the context of other smart contracts, do it without permission from some art “authority”, and so on.
    - meowface 5y ago
      Right; impostor NFTs are rampant, unfortunately. I imagine solutions to mitigate this will become more common on the big platforms at some point. (I briefly considered maybe trying to work on one.) An NFT listing could contain some kind of publicly verifiable authenticity certificate issued by a separate (semi-?)decentralized service that just does things like authenticity verification. For example, they could perhaps have a procedure where an NFT minter (such as an artist) has to, among other things, sign and post some message across at least 5 social media accounts confirming they created a token with that contract address and token ID. If after ~10 days the claimed individual re-affirms the signed messages and no issues are found (e.g. account compromise), the certificate could be validated and the NFT could be marked as verifiably attributable. Theoretically, an NFT smart contract could also maybe even try to bake part of it into the logic and NFT metadata, rather than it being just at the platform level. We're really still in the early Wild West days of smart contracts, dapps, tokens, etc. It probably will feel a bit less sketchy in a few years. Maybe.

criddell 5y ago

> I see no value in NFTs as a means of investing Do you think people are investing in NFTs or gambling?

ThaDood 5y ago
A little bit of both.

ashtonkem 5y ago

You don’t see value in it because you don’t have any money you need to launder.

ThaDood 5y ago
I wish!