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I would describe myself, usually, as not a jealous man. I don't recollect the last time I've felt jealousy. But, something about NFTs provokes anger within me.

I would describe myself, usually, as not a jealous man. I don't recollect the last time I've felt jealousy. But, something about NFTs provokes anger within me. Maybe that anger is jealously. It feels like NFTs are a mockery of the "market" for lack of a better word. When I think of what I would need to sell (items or time doing labor) to get these amounts and how incredibly useless NFTs actually are... It's frustrating. I don't feel this way about inherited wealth, or people who got money through the lottery, or for being famous reality show people, but something about NFTs really rubs me the wrong way.

bloak 5y ago
I remember some of the people who worked hard designing the hardware and software that went into feature phones being outraged, perhaps in a similar way, by the stupid amounts of money people were spending on ringtones at that time (about 20 years ago).
- iamben 5y ago
  And yet now I don't know anyone with a 'novelty' ringtone. Even though it's ludicrously simple to choose a song or whatever else - literally everyone I know, or strangers whose phone rings - it's a vibrate or a ring.
heavyset_go 5y ago
Technology like NFTs being promoted in the way that they have been impacts the rest of the market. Not only do they manipulate relative values of legitimate applications of technology, they make people distrust the entire tech sector once the hype cycle dies down. Look at blockchain today versus 4-5 years ago. There might actually be some legitimate uses for the technology, but that market has been soiled by the scammers and their ICOs. At least that's where my frustration comes from.
beforeolives 5y ago
Right - seeing so much money thrown around with so little backing/reason/substance doesn't really motivate you to go back to your life and put in a full workweek in exchange for whatever your salary is.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  There seem to be 2 economies: There's the 1% (0.1%?) economy where there is a lack of productive places to "put" money that might generate a return so people are buying up any shiny, new thing that comes along. Then there's the 99% economy where people need to buy food/clothing/shelter and money is getting increasingly tight. It's almost as if transferring some of the (marginally useless) money from the 1% to the 99% might actually be a better investment in the future than some of these dubious "assets". But there's no NFT for that.
  - closeparen 5y ago
    Your model for 1% should be “professional couple that owns a pretty good home in an expensive city” not “casually drops multiple hundreds of thousands on nonsense.” That’s like Saudi prince level wealth.
sumtechguy 5y ago
I am more bewildered as I try to figure out where the value is coming from. An NFT as far as I can tell is just saying 'yes I own this thing'. But the original creator still owns everything really relevant about that thing anyway. What are they buying? Are there any relevant resources out there that lay out where the value is derived?
- kbelder 5y ago
  As near as I figure, it's not even 'yes I own this thing'. It's 'I own the NFT that refers to that thing', which only happens to connote ownership by convention. IE... somebody could sell the object and keep the NFT, or vice versa. There's no legal concept tying the NFT to ownership of the object, except perhaps indirectly via contract.
  - DennisP 5y ago
    William Shatner is working with a startup that actually has a legal framework around NFTs, where the NFT denotes ownership of a collectible in a vault. You can trade the NFT around but the current owner can redeem it and take delivery of the physical item. It's similar to what's been done in the high-end art world for years. People who buy a $50M painting don't usually hang it on their walls, they just leave it in a vault and get their name recorded on a public art registry saying they own it. Seems like a similar legal framework granting NFT owners either copyright ownership or a usage license could be interesting.
    - jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
      >You can trade the NFT around but the current owner can redeem it and take delivery of the physical item. What happens if someone buys my NFT but I refuse to deliver the physical item? It seems we need to pull in the legacy legal system to enforce the transfer, at which point I wonder what value the blockchain added in the first place.
      - DennisP 5y ago
tailspin2019 5y ago
NFTs are like the modern day equivalent of Tracy Emin’s unmade bed [0] It’s funny to think back at how many people were horrified about that being considered “art” at the time. Compared to {what I see as} the complete lack of *actual value* in some of these high profile NFTs, I’d say that bed now looks like the highest of high art. I appreciate I might be missing something, but I do not understand one bit of the psychology behind NFT sales like this. I don’t understand where even the perceived value is. Unless it was bought by that guy that refused to sit in the front of his Tesla, perhaps to watch on his headrest display while streaming the cops chasing him… [0] https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/emin-my-bed-l03662 https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/emin-my-bed-l03662
- 1cvmask 5y ago
  And how about Duchamp’s Fountain and Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist%27s_Shit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist%27s_Shit
  - B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
    Truly, it goes back quite some way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece And that's what we have on record today. I can imagine some hominid tribe prized the perfectly straight banana, or whatever, beyond belief.
benlivengood 5y ago
It's righteous anger at a waste of resources and critical lack of understanding. NFTs aren't commodities or assets, they're just conspicuous consumption. Dramatically showing off how much money a person can waste on an illusion is cringe-worthy. It makes me annoyed in the same way pay-to-play games annoy me.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  Yup. Especially since a lot of people have made gazillions in crypto for doing no labor so spending this sort of “funny money” as a lark is a frustratingly common occurrence.
  - merpnderp 5y ago
    Why must they do labor to earn money? If I mow lawns for a summer, then invest in a lawn mower which I then lease out to someone else to mow lawns, am I not entitled to the lease money because I'm not doing the labor? Investing the fruits of one's labor is widely considered a human right, and is even explicitly listed in the Declaration of Human Rights. And hedging ones investments with gold, silver, bonds or crypto is not an unreasonable thing to do.
    - UncleMeat 5y ago
      Striking it rich on doge or whatever is still meaningfully different than investing in rentals.
- idoh 5y ago
  Agreed, and it's a very weird type of conspicuous consumption. You can't really hang the NFT on your wall, or drive up to a fancy dinner in an NFT. I guess you can brag about it?
  - B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
    Don't they have a trophy wall in Instafachatwiktok? They should.
Freak_NL 5y ago
For most of us there is a disconnect between what we perceive as valuable to society and what is valuable in monetary terms. And yes, if someone can gain enormous sums of money by a stroke of dumb luck (in this case having made a video that went viral because it was just at the right time) than that tends to rub people who strife for fairness in life the wrong way. About inherited wealth: once you grok the ideological arguments for heavily taxing inheritances, and then also realize that above a certain threshold people can just spend a minute fraction of that wealth to ensure that those rules don't apply to them and their offspring, you might feel the same way depending on your idealogical outlook. The idea that taxation is unfair or even theft is very pervasive in society though, and it is such a sucesful memetic device that people who stand to lose the most by it are often staunch supporters of tax evasion. The idea being that just as with the lottery, one day they too might hit it big time, and then they too would benefit! Statistically, this is unlikely to the point of being negligible, but it is easier on the mind than understanding the situation for what it really is.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Yeah, we're all living in some kind of clown world. Even in the irrational cryptocurrency market we have utterly insane stuff like DOGE being valued at almost one dollar because Elon Musk made memetic tweets. There's no point in arguing with it, better to profit off of it.
bigdollopenergy 5y ago
I recently heard someone say "I'm not stupid enough to make money in this market", and I think it rings very true. With the short squeeze speculation on stocks, the crypto run+crash and NFT's. The market is a very confusing place nowadays. You'd have to be bonkers to invest in these things on paper, but yet, lot's of people are making bank from it every day (and vice versa). NFT is probably the most confusing of the bunch. I understand the technology and what it actually is, but I see little to no value in it. I strongly suspect that the vast majority of these NFT sales are just people buying from themselves to inflate perceived value or just money laundering. That said, it actually looks like this false hype has turned into real hype somehow and people are actually making money from this. NFT's are probably the closest thing we'll see to Tulip mania for long time, at least cryptocurrency has some (largely unrealized) utility and potential to become something widely used in the future. In order to make lot's of money nowadays, you shouldn't ask yourself "What is actually going to make a profit and/or provide utility in the future?" but rather "What are all the stupid people going to pile in on next so i can get in and out before it crashes?".
- daniellarusso 5y ago
  So, I have been working on a very stupid idea for some time now, that actually started as a social fart sharing app, record your farts, etc. Then, I needed a way to make sure people were actually sharing farts, and not other noises (like burps or dog barks). So, ML to the rescue. Train on a corpus of real fart audio and other sounds. But then, I needed to make sure the farts were not copies or derivative works. So, audio fingerprinting. Then, I figured why not throw in blockchain (does not need to be distributed to be able to use the buzzword), to ensure the verified, original farts could not be tampered with. Now, I believe I have a way for anybody to create unique content that can be ‘converted’ into an NFT. Investors? Possibly you!
  - paradygm 5y ago
    Someone already beat you to it https://nypost.com/2021/03/18/nyc-man-sells-fart-for-85-cashing-in-on-nft-craze/ https://nypost.com/2021/03/18/nyc-man-sells-fart-for-85-cash...
daniellarusso 5y ago
Look at sneakers on stockx.com. https://stockx.com/nike-dunk-sb-low-paris https://stockx.com/nike-dunk-sb-low-paris That is an $80k shoe currently. If you can get somebody to buy it, that is what it is worth.
OJFord 5y ago
The dumbest thing about them in my haven't-been-bothered-to-so-much-as-search-for-them understanding (first and only really heard about them from Matt Levine's Money Stuff column) is that.. I can represent a painting or whatever as md5sum, sha256sum, anything else sum; take the photo again or compress it first? Unless I really should read up on it because I'll be blown away, just seems like any uniqueness necessarily hinges entirely on hoe you choose to encode a thing, which is arbitrary, meaningless, and pointless? But then, I haven't made any money from it, people have, what do I know.
- jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
  It's worse than that. I can take the same exact digital image and issue 2 different NFTs for it on the same blockchain. Only the NFT itself is "provably unique" not the thing it represents.
jonas21 5y ago
I mean, sure, they make a mockery of the art market. But the art market seems to have had no trouble making a mockery of itself before NFTs came along. Like, why is this worth $58 million? It's a 10-foot tall balloon animal. https://www.doublestonesteel.com/blog/art-and-sculpture/koons-balloon-dog-orange/ https://www.doublestonesteel.com/blog/art-and-sculpture/koon... Or why is this worth $200 million? It's something a 5-year-old would make if you gave them an unlimited amount of finger paint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_17A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_17A At least NFT creators tend to be honest about how ridiculous they are (see any interview with Beeple, for example), as opposed to conventional artists who like to pretend there's some sort of objective reason why their work is so highly valued.
- oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
  With the art market, at least you're buying something. Ownership is being transferred. As far as I can tell (I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong), with NFTs you're effectively buying nothing. The seller could just turn around tomorrow and make whatever it is you have worth literally nothing (if it wasn't already).
  - adflux 5y ago
    For most NFTs you are essentially buying a record which links to an url on a platform. The video is not encoded in the nft
    - oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
      Exactly, and the URL could 404 tomorrow or redirect to goatse or download malware ...
    - atleta 5y ago
      Well, I guess you could include some kind of hash/checksum too. That could prove your 'ownership' without any platform whatsoever. (It doesn't make it more meaningful, but at least decreases the dependency on whoever owns the platform hosting the link.)
oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
I think the difference is that, with NFTs, you know someone else is losing out BIG time and, being a compassionate human being, you feel sad that they're being taken advantage of. In the cases of inherited wealth and the lottery, huge numbers of people are losing out to an infinitesimal degree, so it doesn't seem as bad.
- mionhe 5y ago
  How are huge amount of people losing out if someone passes money to their children, exactly? Was the money supposed to be given to the government and redistributed? And as for the lottery, the reason that states/countries have lotteries is because they make buckets of money off of them. Is the state at fault, then? While I personally think it's a waste of money to participate, people choose to give money to the lottery, and are told up front what the odds are of winning, which are very bad.
  - oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
    > How are huge amount of people losing out if someone passes money to their children, exactly? In the context that, otherwise, it would go to the state in taxation and everyone would benefit to a tiny extent. > Is the state at fault [for running the lottery] I'm not sure what you mean by 'at fault', exactly. As you say, people participate of their own accord. The only thing that you could take slight issue with is the "are told up front what the odds are of winning" because (many? most?) humans are notoriously bad at rationalising probabilities, especially astronomically low ones such as the chance of profiting from a lottery.
tareqak 5y ago
> I don't feel this way about inherited wealth, or people who got money through the lottery, or for being famous reality show people, but something about NFTs really rubs me the wrong way. This paragraph interests me deeply. It is clearly a personal feeling and one that I have empathy for. However, a few things came to my mind when I read it. 1) You and I were born into a world where inheritance, lotteries, and celebrities existed, but NFTs were invented in our lifetime. Is it the newness/novelty of NFTs at issue? 2) Suppose the answer to 1) is no i.e. I am not troubled by the newness of NFTs. Alright, instead let’s imagine the first incidence of inheritance, or lotteries, or celebrity status that yielded material/monetary reward. Did people feel similarly about these ways of acquiring money back when these ways were novel? 3) What about applying the general idea of finding/inventing/innovating to create new industries e.g. advertising technology? Some people have similar feelings about the nominal value being created versus the perceived value of a whole host of activities: venture capital, e-sports, advertising, sex work, content creation, financial services/instruments, the creative arts and their subfields, etc. You can search for posts and comments on this forum expressing exactly that on each of the examples I listed. 4) What do we call it? I would say the word jealousy captures one side of the dimension where perceived value doesn’t match up with actual value that was exchanged (perceived value is less than the value exchanged). 5) Why do we do it? Why do we judge the perceived fairness of transactions that we are not party to? 6) Now, back to the initial question: what makes some forms of wealth transfer fair and others not?
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > Why do we do it? Why do we judge the perceived fairness of transactions that we are not party to? How could we not? Someone dropping millions of dollars on a useless token really puts into perspective the value of my actual work and contributions to society. If literally nothing is worth millions, I must be worth less than nothing because I'm certainly not getting paid millions.
betwixthewires 5y ago
That's because you're not seeing what they are. Imagine buying a painting for a million dollars. Or a hand crafted watch. The markets for these talk a whole lot about the intrinsic value, the workmanship, the creativity. And people do love them for those things, but that's not why they pay so much for them. Imagine being able to park a retirement fund into something that fits in your pocket. You can't even do that with gold bricks. But you can do that with watches. It's just a way to store a very large amount of money in something you can take with you anywhere in the world without anyone noticing. NFTs are even smaller than a watch. They're just the new version of the art dealing hustle that has been going on for centuries.
- shostack 5y ago
  I thought you were about to say they are fantastic money laundering vehicles.
ffggvv 5y ago
not sure about this one but if it makes you feel better most of those high profile ones are either blatant money laundering or advertisements in disguise. for instance the beeple one that sold for a lot was purchased by a guy who runs and nft website as basically an advertisement for his site. who knows if they even had a prior deal before the auction where the artist would return some of the money
ezoe 5y ago
I think it's more of a moral problem. Would you commit a fraud to earn money? If you start selling a proof of flat earth, 5G tower cause the COVID-19, a herb that cure cancer or similar nonsense, there are people willing to pay a huge money for. But would you? NFT in its current implementation is totally bullshit. They relies on SaaS wallet service rather than running full Ethereum node, and instead of embed all data to Ethereum blockchain, they relies on traditional HTTP server hosted by... wallet service itself! If you relies on a central authority, there are better and more efficient services to use. But oh the ignorance and speculation.
vwcx 5y ago
The flip side to this jealousy, like many things in life, is the unsexy realities: even an investment in an index fund this past year would’ve outperformed the average year’s ROI several times over. The upside is right there, available just by following the same common sense, safe investing advice being preached for decades. Definitely not as fun as making millions on meme’d speculation.

bloak 5y ago

I remember some of the people who worked hard designing the hardware and software that went into feature phones being outraged, perhaps in a similar way, by the stupid amounts of money people were spending on ringtones at that time (about 20 years ago).

iamben 5y ago
And yet now I don't know anyone with a 'novelty' ringtone. Even though it's ludicrously simple to choose a song or whatever else - literally everyone I know, or strangers whose phone rings - it's a vibrate or a ring.

heavyset_go 5y ago

Technology like NFTs being promoted in the way that they have been impacts the rest of the market. Not only do they manipulate relative values of legitimate applications of technology, they make people distrust the entire tech sector once the hype cycle dies down. Look at blockchain today versus 4-5 years ago. There might actually be some legitimate uses for the technology, but that market has been soiled by the scammers and their ICOs. At least that's where my frustration comes from.

beforeolives 5y ago

Right - seeing so much money thrown around with so little backing/reason/substance doesn't really motivate you to go back to your life and put in a full workweek in exchange for whatever your salary is.

AlexandrB 5y ago
There seem to be 2 economies: There's the 1% (0.1%?) economy where there is a lack of productive places to "put" money that might generate a return so people are buying up any shiny, new thing that comes along. Then there's the 99% economy where people need to buy food/clothing/shelter and money is getting increasingly tight. It's almost as if transferring some of the (marginally useless) money from the 1% to the 99% might actually be a better investment in the future than some of these dubious "assets". But there's no NFT for that.
- closeparen 5y ago
  Your model for 1% should be “professional couple that owns a pretty good home in an expensive city” not “casually drops multiple hundreds of thousands on nonsense.” That’s like Saudi prince level wealth.

sumtechguy 5y ago

I am more bewildered as I try to figure out where the value is coming from. An NFT as far as I can tell is just saying 'yes I own this thing'. But the original creator still owns everything really relevant about that thing anyway. What are they buying? Are there any relevant resources out there that lay out where the value is derived?

kbelder 5y ago
As near as I figure, it's not even 'yes I own this thing'. It's 'I own the NFT that refers to that thing', which only happens to connote ownership by convention. IE... somebody could sell the object and keep the NFT, or vice versa. There's no legal concept tying the NFT to ownership of the object, except perhaps indirectly via contract.
- DennisP 5y ago
  William Shatner is working with a startup that actually has a legal framework around NFTs, where the NFT denotes ownership of a collectible in a vault. You can trade the NFT around but the current owner can redeem it and take delivery of the physical item. It's similar to what's been done in the high-end art world for years. People who buy a $50M painting don't usually hang it on their walls, they just leave it in a vault and get their name recorded on a public art registry saying they own it. Seems like a similar legal framework granting NFT owners either copyright ownership or a usage license could be interesting.
  - jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
    >You can trade the NFT around but the current owner can redeem it and take delivery of the physical item. What happens if someone buys my NFT but I refuse to deliver the physical item? It seems we need to pull in the legacy legal system to enforce the transfer, at which point I wonder what value the blockchain added in the first place.
    - DennisP 5y ago

tailspin2019 5y ago

NFTs are like the modern day equivalent of Tracy Emin’s unmade bed [0] It’s funny to think back at how many people were horrified about that being considered “art” at the time. Compared to {what I see as} the complete lack of *actual value* in some of these high profile NFTs, I’d say that bed now looks like the highest of high art. I appreciate I might be missing something, but I do not understand one bit of the psychology behind NFT sales like this. I don’t understand where even the perceived value is. Unless it was bought by that guy that refused to sit in the front of his Tesla, perhaps to watch on his headrest display while streaming the cops chasing him… [0] https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/emin-my-bed-l03662 https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/emin-my-bed-l03662

1cvmask 5y ago
And how about Duchamp’s Fountain and Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist%27s_Shit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist%27s_Shit
- B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
  Truly, it goes back quite some way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Fleece And that's what we have on record today. I can imagine some hominid tribe prized the perfectly straight banana, or whatever, beyond belief.

benlivengood 5y ago

It's righteous anger at a waste of resources and critical lack of understanding. NFTs aren't commodities or assets, they're just conspicuous consumption. Dramatically showing off how much money a person can waste on an illusion is cringe-worthy. It makes me annoyed in the same way pay-to-play games annoy me.

UncleMeat 5y ago
Yup. Especially since a lot of people have made gazillions in crypto for doing no labor so spending this sort of “funny money” as a lark is a frustratingly common occurrence.
- merpnderp 5y ago
  Why must they do labor to earn money? If I mow lawns for a summer, then invest in a lawn mower which I then lease out to someone else to mow lawns, am I not entitled to the lease money because I'm not doing the labor? Investing the fruits of one's labor is widely considered a human right, and is even explicitly listed in the Declaration of Human Rights. And hedging ones investments with gold, silver, bonds or crypto is not an unreasonable thing to do.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    Striking it rich on doge or whatever is still meaningfully different than investing in rentals.
idoh 5y ago
Agreed, and it's a very weird type of conspicuous consumption. You can't really hang the NFT on your wall, or drive up to a fancy dinner in an NFT. I guess you can brag about it?
- B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
  Don't they have a trophy wall in Instafachatwiktok? They should.

Freak_NL 5y ago

For most of us there is a disconnect between what we perceive as valuable to society and what is valuable in monetary terms. And yes, if someone can gain enormous sums of money by a stroke of dumb luck (in this case having made a video that went viral because it was just at the right time) than that tends to rub people who strife for fairness in life the wrong way. About inherited wealth: once you grok the ideological arguments for heavily taxing inheritances, and then also realize that above a certain threshold people can just spend a minute fraction of that wealth to ensure that those rules don't apply to them and their offspring, you might feel the same way depending on your idealogical outlook. The idea that taxation is unfair or even theft is very pervasive in society though, and it is such a sucesful memetic device that people who stand to lose the most by it are often staunch supporters of tax evasion. The idea being that just as with the lottery, one day they too might hit it big time, and then they too would benefit! Statistically, this is unlikely to the point of being negligible, but it is easier on the mind than understanding the situation for what it really is.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

Yeah, we're all living in some kind of clown world. Even in the irrational cryptocurrency market we have utterly insane stuff like DOGE being valued at almost one dollar because Elon Musk made memetic tweets. There's no point in arguing with it, better to profit off of it.

bigdollopenergy 5y ago

I recently heard someone say "I'm not stupid enough to make money in this market", and I think it rings very true. With the short squeeze speculation on stocks, the crypto run+crash and NFT's. The market is a very confusing place nowadays. You'd have to be bonkers to invest in these things on paper, but yet, lot's of people are making bank from it every day (and vice versa). NFT is probably the most confusing of the bunch. I understand the technology and what it actually is, but I see little to no value in it. I strongly suspect that the vast majority of these NFT sales are just people buying from themselves to inflate perceived value or just money laundering. That said, it actually looks like this false hype has turned into real hype somehow and people are actually making money from this. NFT's are probably the closest thing we'll see to Tulip mania for long time, at least cryptocurrency has some (largely unrealized) utility and potential to become something widely used in the future. In order to make lot's of money nowadays, you shouldn't ask yourself "What is actually going to make a profit and/or provide utility in the future?" but rather "What are all the stupid people going to pile in on next so i can get in and out before it crashes?".

daniellarusso 5y ago
So, I have been working on a very stupid idea for some time now, that actually started as a social fart sharing app, record your farts, etc. Then, I needed a way to make sure people were actually sharing farts, and not other noises (like burps or dog barks). So, ML to the rescue. Train on a corpus of real fart audio and other sounds. But then, I needed to make sure the farts were not copies or derivative works. So, audio fingerprinting. Then, I figured why not throw in blockchain (does not need to be distributed to be able to use the buzzword), to ensure the verified, original farts could not be tampered with. Now, I believe I have a way for anybody to create unique content that can be ‘converted’ into an NFT. Investors? Possibly you!
- paradygm 5y ago
  Someone already beat you to it https://nypost.com/2021/03/18/nyc-man-sells-fart-for-85-cashing-in-on-nft-craze/ https://nypost.com/2021/03/18/nyc-man-sells-fart-for-85-cash...

daniellarusso 5y ago

Look at sneakers on stockx.com. https://stockx.com/nike-dunk-sb-low-paris https://stockx.com/nike-dunk-sb-low-paris That is an $80k shoe currently. If you can get somebody to buy it, that is what it is worth.

OJFord 5y ago

The dumbest thing about them in my haven't-been-bothered-to-so-much-as-search-for-them understanding (first and only really heard about them from Matt Levine's Money Stuff column) is that.. I can represent a painting or whatever as md5sum, sha256sum, anything else sum; take the photo again or compress it first? Unless I really should read up on it because I'll be blown away, just seems like any uniqueness necessarily hinges entirely on hoe you choose to encode a thing, which is arbitrary, meaningless, and pointless? But then, I haven't made any money from it, people have, what do I know.

jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
It's worse than that. I can take the same exact digital image and issue 2 different NFTs for it on the same blockchain. Only the NFT itself is "provably unique" not the thing it represents.

jonas21 5y ago

I mean, sure, they make a mockery of the art market. But the art market seems to have had no trouble making a mockery of itself before NFTs came along. Like, why is this worth $58 million? It's a 10-foot tall balloon animal. https://www.doublestonesteel.com/blog/art-and-sculpture/koons-balloon-dog-orange/ https://www.doublestonesteel.com/blog/art-and-sculpture/koon... Or why is this worth $200 million? It's something a 5-year-old would make if you gave them an unlimited amount of finger paint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_17A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_17A At least NFT creators tend to be honest about how ridiculous they are (see any interview with Beeple, for example), as opposed to conventional artists who like to pretend there's some sort of objective reason why their work is so highly valued.

oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
With the art market, at least you're buying something. Ownership is being transferred. As far as I can tell (I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong), with NFTs you're effectively buying nothing. The seller could just turn around tomorrow and make whatever it is you have worth literally nothing (if it wasn't already).
- adflux 5y ago
  For most NFTs you are essentially buying a record which links to an url on a platform. The video is not encoded in the nft
  - oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
    Exactly, and the URL could 404 tomorrow or redirect to goatse or download malware ...
  - atleta 5y ago
    Well, I guess you could include some kind of hash/checksum too. That could prove your 'ownership' without any platform whatsoever. (It doesn't make it more meaningful, but at least decreases the dependency on whoever owns the platform hosting the link.)

oneeyedpigeon 5y ago

I think the difference is that, with NFTs, you know someone else is losing out BIG time and, being a compassionate human being, you feel sad that they're being taken advantage of. In the cases of inherited wealth and the lottery, huge numbers of people are losing out to an infinitesimal degree, so it doesn't seem as bad.

mionhe 5y ago
How are huge amount of people losing out if someone passes money to their children, exactly? Was the money supposed to be given to the government and redistributed? And as for the lottery, the reason that states/countries have lotteries is because they make buckets of money off of them. Is the state at fault, then? While I personally think it's a waste of money to participate, people choose to give money to the lottery, and are told up front what the odds are of winning, which are very bad.
- oneeyedpigeon 5y ago
  > How are huge amount of people losing out if someone passes money to their children, exactly? In the context that, otherwise, it would go to the state in taxation and everyone would benefit to a tiny extent. > Is the state at fault [for running the lottery] I'm not sure what you mean by 'at fault', exactly. As you say, people participate of their own accord. The only thing that you could take slight issue with is the "are told up front what the odds are of winning" because (many? most?) humans are notoriously bad at rationalising probabilities, especially astronomically low ones such as the chance of profiting from a lottery.

tareqak 5y ago

> I don't feel this way about inherited wealth, or people who got money through the lottery, or for being famous reality show people, but something about NFTs really rubs me the wrong way. This paragraph interests me deeply. It is clearly a personal feeling and one that I have empathy for. However, a few things came to my mind when I read it. 1) You and I were born into a world where inheritance, lotteries, and celebrities existed, but NFTs were invented in our lifetime. Is it the newness/novelty of NFTs at issue? 2) Suppose the answer to 1) is no i.e. I am not troubled by the newness of NFTs. Alright, instead let’s imagine the first incidence of inheritance, or lotteries, or celebrity status that yielded material/monetary reward. Did people feel similarly about these ways of acquiring money back when these ways were novel? 3) What about applying the general idea of finding/inventing/innovating to create new industries e.g. advertising technology? Some people have similar feelings about the nominal value being created versus the perceived value of a whole host of activities: venture capital, e-sports, advertising, sex work, content creation, financial services/instruments, the creative arts and their subfields, etc. You can search for posts and comments on this forum expressing exactly that on each of the examples I listed. 4) What do we call it? I would say the word jealousy captures one side of the dimension where perceived value doesn’t match up with actual value that was exchanged (perceived value is less than the value exchanged). 5) Why do we do it? Why do we judge the perceived fairness of transactions that we are not party to? 6) Now, back to the initial question: what makes some forms of wealth transfer fair and others not?

matheusmoreira 5y ago
> Why do we do it? Why do we judge the perceived fairness of transactions that we are not party to? How could we not? Someone dropping millions of dollars on a useless token really puts into perspective the value of my actual work and contributions to society. If literally nothing is worth millions, I must be worth less than nothing because I'm certainly not getting paid millions.

betwixthewires 5y ago

That's because you're not seeing what they are. Imagine buying a painting for a million dollars. Or a hand crafted watch. The markets for these talk a whole lot about the intrinsic value, the workmanship, the creativity. And people do love them for those things, but that's not why they pay so much for them. Imagine being able to park a retirement fund into something that fits in your pocket. You can't even do that with gold bricks. But you can do that with watches. It's just a way to store a very large amount of money in something you can take with you anywhere in the world without anyone noticing. NFTs are even smaller than a watch. They're just the new version of the art dealing hustle that has been going on for centuries.

shostack 5y ago
I thought you were about to say they are fantastic money laundering vehicles.

ffggvv 5y ago

not sure about this one but if it makes you feel better most of those high profile ones are either blatant money laundering or advertisements in disguise. for instance the beeple one that sold for a lot was purchased by a guy who runs and nft website as basically an advertisement for his site. who knows if they even had a prior deal before the auction where the artist would return some of the money

ezoe 5y ago

I think it's more of a moral problem. Would you commit a fraud to earn money? If you start selling a proof of flat earth, 5G tower cause the COVID-19, a herb that cure cancer or similar nonsense, there are people willing to pay a huge money for. But would you? NFT in its current implementation is totally bullshit. They relies on SaaS wallet service rather than running full Ethereum node, and instead of embed all data to Ethereum blockchain, they relies on traditional HTTP server hosted by... wallet service itself! If you relies on a central authority, there are better and more efficient services to use. But oh the ignorance and speculation.

vwcx 5y ago

The flip side to this jealousy, like many things in life, is the unsexy realities: even an investment in an index fund this past year would’ve outperformed the average year’s ROI several times over. The upside is right there, available just by following the same common sense, safe investing advice being preached for decades. Definitely not as fun as making millions on meme’d speculation.