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NFT sales plummet nearly 90% from their peak as collectibles market cools

167 points by donohoe 5y ago

markhahn 5y ago
s/collectibles/asinine/
nness 5y ago
Has NFT's ever been more than another novel crypto bet? (I am super curious as to what percentage of NFT purchases were existing crypt-millionaires vs. collectors or even independent investors)
- fullshark 5y ago
  It's also possibly a cool new way to launder money.
- 52-6F-62 5y ago
  No less or more than baseball or hockey cards are? Which makes this no surprise https://toppsmlb.com/ https://toppsmlb.com/ Poor 8 year old me really thought that Brendan Shanahan rookie card would mean something someday.
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    My comic books I've been keeping around since the 90s are feeling insulted. At least with those I can still read them if I decide to break the seal. A NFT doesn't offer that.
    - 52-6F-62 5y ago
      I definitely think comic books fall into a higher order category.
    - furyofantares 5y ago
      > At least with those I can still read them if I decide to break the seal. Are there also digital versions available? I'd be surprised if a noticeable percentage of the value of your comic books is that you can read them. It seems like it's essentially 0% to me -- almost as baseless as an NFT, and makes me think some sort of functionality isn't actually needed for lots of people to agree that something is valuable for a long time.
      - ethagnawl 5y ago
        > I'd be surprised if a noticeable percentage of the value of your comic books is that you can read them. Value in whose eyes, though? The commenter seemed to be stating that the utility provided by being able to read the comics is valuable _to them_. There are also a number of other uses for a physical comic book that provide "value": you could frame individual pages, use the book as kindling, etc. You can't do any of those things with a NFT.
        furyofantares 5y ago
        > You can't do any of those things with a NFT. Some quick googling, apologies if I'm wrong, says this comic book is worth 3.2 million dollars: https://viewcomics.me/action-comics-1938/issue-1/full https://viewcomics.me/action-comics-1938/issue-1/full And yet it would seem I can read it right there on the internet for free, and can surely get framed prints of individual pages much cheaper than 3.2 million dollars, and I can get kindling much cheaper than 3.2 million dollars. You can point at those things as properties it has that an NFT doesn't. But those things aren't what's making it worth 3.2 million dollars It's worth 3.2 million dollars because someone trusts that it's worth 3.2 million dollars to other people. Value like this is an exercise in group trust that has had to build up over time. It's not actually a property of the functionality of the object
        SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
        The object and guarantee of uniqueness are one and the same, there's no required group trust. I have the comic, I own the comic. The comic is unique and the rareness and desirability of the comic assigns it value. The NFT is divorced from the thing it owns, but somehow the NFT is the thing that assigns ownership and value. A perfect copy of "Charlie bit my finger" can be replicated trivially nearly instantly. There is no value there. The NFT is the thing that carries the value in that situation because the video being collected isn't rare, unique, or special.
  - adventured 5y ago
    At least you can hold an autographed baseball or baseball card, for example, it's a tangible thing that a baseball player took the time to autograph. The NFT cards with fake / digital signatures are particularly pathetic. Or the way a physical card is designed, the way it looks in real lighting, the way its material properties exist and interact in physical space. There are qualities to that, and the manufacturing process involved, that you can never replicate with NFT collectibles. The same is true with physical vs digital art. Art hanging on the wall can have a majestic quality when it dances with lighting; digital art is flat garbage by comparison in that respect (even when it's really good digital art; it's bound to a screen in most cases). Manufacturing a nice physical collectible card to a high quality specification is dramatically more difficult than spitting out NFT cards by the zillions; quality control is a huge challenge in collectible cards. There's a scarcity effect generated in physical collectibles like cards, in regards to quality of manufacturing (damage, corners, centering, errors, etc), that doesn't exist in NFTs (unless you intentionally fake that, which would be something beyond stupid). There are many aspects of physical vs NFT collectibles, where the NFTs will never be able to compete, not under any circumstances. And there are almost no benefits that an NFT has over a physical collectible, with the supposed simplicity of digital storage & transacting being the primary (which also has an obvious, huge risk / downside associated with it simultaneously).
    - 52-6F-62 5y ago
      Oh I agree, but let’s not kid ourselves—the market around them is the same in abstract. For all the physical properties of a material thing we might admire, someone else might admire an NFT for the lack of those properties and inclusion of others. There might be no more further reconciling than that. People will like what they like, they’ll pursue what they pursue, and sometimes they will enjoy their share of delusions. At least it keeps life interesting.
- rixrax 5y ago
  At least some are people who want to make quick $$$ and have missed out getting in to the cryptos early on. My sample size is exactly three, but one friend and two co-workers have been putting their savings to NFTs and been rather vocal at that. Preaching the ingenuity of them. And how they are going to explode in value in few years time. As far as I can tell, profit is their only motive. Who knows. Maybe they will. Maybe not. But at least I’ve tried to remind my friend that it is a highly speculative asset. And that she should not put in more money than she is ready to lose. All or most of it.
- sleepybrett 5y ago
  In the art spaces am watching, they think/thought so. They are/were wrong, but they think/thought so.
api 5y ago
Obvious fad.
drcode 5y ago
Obviously the "first" NFT of any type is more collectible (i.e. first NYT column NFT, first major artist NFT, first Webster's dictionary NFT, etc.) It's only logical that the second NFT from the New York Times (or whomever) is going to be worth only 10% as much as the first one. BREAKING NEWS: Superman Comic #2 is worth only 10% as much as Superman Comic #1.
- robertkoss 5y ago
  Hindsight bias. If Superman Comic #1 would come out today, it would not be worth that much. So the reason that the second is less valuable is not because of "the nature of #2" but because NFT was a bubble and overhyped.
- incrudible 5y ago
  NFTs have been around for years, but the first ones are not really more valuable than the new ones caught up in the current hype phase. The market cap for Crypokitties peaked at 21 million in 2017, the recent peak was at only 3 million.
- krustyburger 5y ago
  But Action Comics number 2 is still tremendously valuable. In the Golden Age of comics, collecting comic books and preserving them was not the hobby it would become. So there are very few copies today, but not because anyone set out to make them scarce in any way. Quite the contrary, in fact. DC would surely have printed many more copies if they believed they would have sold. How is this at all like NFTs again?
  - EVdotIO 5y ago
    Yeah, it was kids that bought them at a nickel or whatever they were, and were treated as such for a very long time. Same thing can be said of stamps, hot wheels, barbis, baseball cards, pre war Native American handicrafts, CRT monitors, electric guitars... whatever. Even the super high end side of things of art, cars or numismatics had relatively humble origins. Money always cost what the money was worth. Cars were used and tossed; on the luxury end of Duesenbergs or Bugattis being discarded cheaply in their time. The concept of a starving artist has been around for hundreds of years, and the original patrons were picking up impressionist art for cheap. Collectibility needs a few things in the equation: rarity and here is the _big_ component, some shared nostalgia or cultural history. NFTs don't have that really any of these things.
aqme28 5y ago
I have never understood the point or utility of NFTs, and I'm even one of those way-too-into-crypto guys.
- cobrabyte 5y ago
  Same. Give me the ability to hold fractional ownership of real-world assets (e.g., real estate, buildings, resources, etc.). I'm not interested in a 100% speculative concept without having real-world assets backing it up.
- dkjaudyeqooe 5y ago
  The utility of NFTs is to relieve the credulous of their money.
failwhaleshark 5y ago
Now I want to buy a $10 million NFT of a doodle of a bridge at a garage sale for 50 cents. The questions are: How were the the "dumb money" NFT buyers ever going to liquidate their "investments" on the other side? Did they ever intend to cash-out or just show-off how much money they can burn? Or is it 95% blackmarket money (i.e., drugs, sex slavery, worker slavery) that had nowhere to go except buried in the ground or in the walls of houses?
- redisman 5y ago
  I don’t understand the money laundering theory. There are a hundred liquid crypto assets to use for that. Big NFTs are high visibility and worthless so it’s the worst of all worlds
  - jonfromsf 5y ago
    It's because there's no price, so you can use it to justify money that came from elsewhere. Like if I made a million dollars selling drugs, I can put up an NFT, create a straw buyer (really me) who buys it from me for a million dollars, and now my black money has turned into white money.
    - lfmunoz4 5y ago
      Doesn't make sense to me. Say I have 1 million dollars of BTC that was stolen, what NFT would I buy so that I can later claim my 1 million is legal? In theory, you would say just create an NFT but in practice that wouldn't work or remotely be easy. I would have to create an NFT that is worth say 100 dollars and pretend it went to 1 million. There has to be a justification with previous sells of similar NFTs etc. This is a case where theory and practice doesn't match.
    - polynomial 5y ago
      Where does straw buyer convert the ill-gotten cash to nice clean electronic currency? That's what AML/KYC is intended to prevent.
  - adflux 5y ago
jcfrei 5y ago
previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27378011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27378011
askonomm 5y ago
As for most things blockchain and *coin, there is most likely fraud lingering around somewhere.
Animats 5y ago
The metric is the amount of transactions, because NFTs don't have a market price. Since each is unique (mostly), they have to be sold on something that works like eBay auctions. There's no liquid market where identical shares are traded and the bid and ask prices are reasonably close, like the NASDAQ. So NFT markets don't crash, they stall. As I mentioned previously, this works just like Beanie Babies on eBay. High asking prices, no bids.
fpgaminer 5y ago
I never got the hate for NFTs. It seemed like the logic translation of collectibles from the phyiscal world into the digital world. If an artist makes a painting, that original painting has collectible value. If the same artist makes copies of it, those copies have less value. That seems to make sense to most people. Now imagine if an artist makes a digital painting. Is that work of art any less meaningful or valuable? Of course not. But there's been no way to define an "original" in the digital art form, and so there's been no way to assign collectability to digital works of art. NFTs seem to provide a way for an artist and fans to collectively agree that some digital object is the original, and to treat it as such. The bonus is that it provides another avenue for digital artists to make money, which to my mind is always a good thing. I get that the concept is hard to wrap our brains around, because at the end of the day it's a collective delusion. Everyone just agrees to say that some arbitrary string of bytes is the "original" and anything that comes after it isn't. But ultimately how is that different from the arbitrary rules we use to define which physical object is the "original" and why those arbitrary rules define value. That said, I haven't looked too deeply into the technical side of NFTs, so this is more my take on the concept than the application. I'm sure there's slews of caveats, like how most NFTs only store a hash, the importance of exchanges, etc. And I totally agree that the market was in a huge bubble, so that's definitely worth criticizing (to an extent; I mean people can do whatever the hell they want with their money ultimately.) Is there a flaw in my take here? Are NFTs somehow more arbitrary and asinine than other collectible markets simply because they're digital? Or is everyone hating because hating new technology is as cool as it has ever been? I suppose Dropbox did turn out to just be git+rsync, so shrug /s
- kevingadd 5y ago
  One of the main complaints was that minting and selling NFTs was incredibly expensive - not just in terms of the USD cost of the fees, but the amount of proof-of-work compute involved. I think if they had launched on a proof of stake network people would have been way less negative on them.
  - danudey 5y ago
    This is my primary objection (and an objection to crypto in general as well). You have a meme, and someone sells you a little laminated card saying "I own the meme at this URL", and all it costs is $80,000 and you have to burn down an acre of rainforest. It's purely asinine in every respect, and, like a lot of crypto, is basically just a gold rush plus pyramid scheme.
angryasian 5y ago
Am I wrong in believing trying to force a sort of artificial scarcity on digital goods, is a flawed concept to begin with ? Maybe I don't understand NFTs
- dmarcos 5y ago
  Artificial scarcity works pretty well in the physical world. See limited edition products: cars, sneakers, books, collectable card games like Pokemon, Magic, Yugioh, limited print runs of art pieces… Value is the scarcity not the physical support. edit: pressed publish too quickly
  - polynomial 5y ago
    You wouldn't download a car, would you?
  - angryasian 5y ago
    I would argue that value is based on some sort of emotional measurement. The idea that a mass produced good, that is a physical item.. is only valuable because of the ability to hold it and the emotion behind it. whether or not digital good carry that same weight, is left to be seen.
- th0ma5 5y ago
  What's weirder is that this sort of implies DRM while not even providing it, even though we all know DRM doesn't work. The scarcity is having a spot in a ledger between other entries in one lineage by a (supposed, but rarely purely) distributed non-cooperative consensus of ledger entries. Anything other than that is imagined and probably done through other means just as well. I'm not sure why someone couldn't just periodically tweet pictures of note cards with a list of who owns what because that'd be just as effective.
- Noos 5y ago
  Not really, because the value of non-scare digital goods can be effectively zero. Look at public domain content for example; you can go to amazon and buy collections of 100 classic novels for two bucks, and that is just if you want the convenience of buying them at one stop as opposed from getting them for free from project gutenberg. Eventually we might see values trend so low that it may not make sense to make digital goods at all; i think video games in particular will be vulnerable to this soon.
chime 5y ago
As someone who doesn't collect anything, NFT for collectibles doesn't interest me personally. But I still think NFTs have a future as digitally signed proof of ownership of media assets. Long ago, back in my web designer days, I bought a CD from CompUSA full of clip arts and stock photos and used them on my clients' websites. I moved on to web development and out of nowhere 5 years later I got a panicked call from an old client who said Getty is threatening to sue them for using copyrighted images on the website I made for them. Try as I might, I could not convince either my ex-client or Getty reps that I legally (and most likely naively) bought a stock photo CD but did not have that in my possession any longer. Cost me a month's rent out of pocket to get the matter resolved as I did not have the resources to fight either of them. I can imagine a (non-physical-media) future where all commercial stock media is signed upon download, with the NFT signature embedded in the file itself like EXIF data. Editors can be made to respect the source file NFTs and include them in the exported files. YouTube could easily identify the NFT for the audio track you used in your video and if you had licensed it legally, it would not even run the fingerprint algo on it. Now it doesn't matter if the original seller or vendor goes out of business. The history is in the blockchain forever (or as long as the license permits). I'm not saying I support going all NFT for ownership/copyright. I'm saying I can imagine it happening as a valid use-case for NFT/blockchain.
- sleepybrett 5y ago
  Let me show you my fine collection of prime numbers!
- danudey 5y ago
  For what it's worth, there's no way you can force every image manipulation tool and library to respect the NFTs, and the NFT can't necessarily point to a specific item itself (since the location it points to could move), so there's no permanent effective way to actually make those two connect. As far as I can tell, the only thing that NFTs might be useful for is uniquely identifiable assets whose unique identification can be embedded in the NFT itself; for example, a car's VIN number or a property's address or lot number. Unfortunately, we already have much more effective and well-regulated systems to handle both of those situations, and I'm at a loss for any circumstance in which an NFT would be better and also guaranteed effective.
arduinomancer 5y ago
I always thought this tweet summed up the ridiculousness of NFTs well. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1372739631846936581 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1372739631846936581 I think the reason they seem silly to a lot of people is because when you buy an NFT there's nothing extra you can do that other people can't when you hold the NFT. I can have the exact same experience as the NFT holder for free with no effort. Sure technically you can also make copies of physical collectibles but its not (trivial + free) like copying and pasting an image.
- Avtomatk 5y ago
  And, modifying 1 pixel from the image, results in a complete different NFT.
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    Not even that. You can upload the exact same image to a different URL and create a new NFT of that.
    - tshaddox 5y ago
      Sure, but that's like saying I can use my home printer to create a certificate of title for someone else's car. Obviously I can, but that doesn't mean that certificates of title for cars are pointless.
      - th0ma5 5y ago
        Titles are physical objects and backed by laws and the state and a centralized database available to all of government. Many of the NFTs are not distributed even though they claim to be, so while they have the same kind of centralization, they have no such authority. If we were to grant them such authority, we'd want it to be a normal centralized database and the benefits of decentralization would not be needed. There would be no need for non-cooperative consensus either.
        5y ago
HardwareLust 5y ago
Gee, almost like they were a pointless fad. Which they are.
variable11 5y ago
Nobody saw that coming.
msoad 5y ago
NFT for generative art where the essence of the art is the input to the algorithm makes sense. Check out Art Blocks https://artblocks.io https://artblocks.io
drcode 5y ago
Everyone posting anti-nft comments here: You do realize that the NFT markets are fuelled by controversy, right? Stop giving the NFT concept more attention if you truly want it to fail. Nobody is forcing you to buy an NFT, you have nothing to complain about.
- drdeca 5y ago
  > You do realize that the NFT markets are fuelled by controversy, right? Justification for this claim? This is not at all clear to me!
  - drcode 5y ago
    A Modigliani recently sold for $162 mil at auction, more than twice the beeple NFT price. Guess how many news stories there were for this sale, compared to the beeple. What else would you attribute this difference to, other than controversy? Do you think the beeple stories had no impact on the prices of follow-up nfts?
    - drdeca 5y ago
      I don't know what a beeple is. Or a modigliani for that matter. Ok, it sounds like you are saying that news coverage increases the price. That I can buy.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Yeah until the bottom falls out of the tulip market.
DonHopkins 5y ago
>"On May 24, Guggenheim cofounder Todd Morley told Bloomberg TV in New York that he is building a "blockchain tower" that will give anyone in the city access to wireless trading, provide a way to announce and showcase new technological advances, and house the world's largest collection of NFTs." How can hype like that not set off everyone's bullshit detections, I can not understand. Todd Morley sounds like a complete charlatan.
- PostThisTooFast 5y ago
  See: Trump
- Salgat 5y ago
  It's downright embarrassing how hard people are pushing blockchain technology onto every damn thing they can, even when it makes zero sense. NFTs? Just a massive unnecessary overhead to a concept of ownership well grounded in every country's laws. Cryptocurrency? Outside of very niche applications (including and mostly for the black market), it's dramatically slower, more expensive, and higher risk than a slew of existing payment options. Now this bullshit about a blockchain tower to provide free wireless access for blockchain networks? All marketing nonsense, since every company in these skyscrapers already has access to high speed internet, and every person in the area already has access to high speed mobile data. It's all bullshit.
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    It just sounds so childish. "Blockchain Tower". Woo! Woo! Pff... Just like a South Park or Rick and Morty parody of blockchain charlatan shills, but it's actually bona-fid blockchain charlatan shills performing a spot-on parody of themselves, without one iota of irony or self awareness. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Woo https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Woo >The term comes from "woo-woo", an epithet used in the 1990s by science and skeptical writers to ridicule people who believe or promote such things. This is in turn believed to have come from the onomatopoeia "woooooo!" as a reaction to dimmed lights or magic tricks. The term implies a lack of either intelligence or sincerity on the part of the person or concepts so described. >As a coincidence, the Chinese word 巫 (pronounced in the Mandarin dialect as Wū) means a shaman, usually with magic powers. Also coincidentally, the Chinese word 無/无 (pronounced Wú in Mandarin) means "nothing," "lacking," or "negation." Another Chinese word 误 (pronounced in the Mandarin dialect as Wù) means "mistake" or "incorrect". There is also the English verb "woo", which means to seek someone's love, especially with false promises; it can also be considered appropriate, because woo-meisters seek people's admiration, falsely promising them miraculous and easily understandable knowledge.
smazn 5y ago
Meanwhile hicetnunc.xyz is killing it. So maybe the big high profile transactions are down, but a more approachable and independent community is quietly flourishing and taking over the NFT world for artists and collectors.
intrasight 5y ago
I think of NFTs as analogous to signed copies of a limited run of prints of an original work. And they have some interesting financial characteristics. 1. Their value can be a proxy to the underlying art 2. The NFT contract can give the artist some of the appreciation upside of the NFT My opinion is that NFTs will come to be part of many artists toolkit.
echelon 5y ago
Still willing to longbets someone on this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212475 Any takers? NFTs are worthless trash.
twox2 5y ago
Just because people aren't buying cat memes for millions of dollars every single day doesn't mean NFT sales aren't going strong... they are. A sotheby's auction just went live today for a curated collection of NFTs. The auction closes in a week and some of the lots are already in the five figures.
- th0ma5 5y ago
  That auction is a bunch of people who could command those prices for the non-nft art as well, so not sure what that proves.
  - twox2 5y ago
    You're right about that for the most part, but my point is that NFTs are still being bought and sold on a daily basis. Just because there's not an over-hyped multi-million dollar sale every day, doesn't mean "the bubble has popped".
    - th0ma5 5y ago
      Under the context of a quantity of transactions and the normal person having access to art sales, I'd say that bubble has popped. That also may imply the total market size has popped. But you're right to say that the transaction size perhaps hasn't popped.
kadomony 5y ago
Oh no, it’s almost like people started to realize that the entire system was built from bullshit marketing and hype from stupidly executed multi-million dollar sales.
brutal_chaos_ 5y ago
No way! /s I mean, who didn't see that coming. NFTs, IMHO, have been money grabbing jokes, dumping on those naively looking for the next hot thing. Or rich people with money to blow...and since it's money to blow, who cares if it's now worthless?
- dang 5y ago
  Could you please stop posting comments that are on the snarky/flamey/unsubstantive/denunciatory side of the equation? You've done that quite a bit, and we're trying for a different spirit of conversation here: thoughtful and curious. Fortunately you've done that quite a bit as well, so this should be easy to fix. If you'd tend more in the intended direction, we'd appreciate it. The issue isn't your opinions, it's comment quality. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - brutal_chaos_ 5y ago
    Understood. I tend to think in Snark often...I'll refrain going forward.
    - dang 5y ago
      Appreciated!
taurath 5y ago
Now do housing please. Just because something does have intrinsic value doesn’t mean that value is exponential
jonahbenton 5y ago
Buy on the dip.
wildpeaks 5y ago
The real goal was to increase the number of people who have with crypto wallets and become crypto advocates to their circles, so there is less friction for the next crypto-based products.
toomuchredbull 5y ago
I like NFTs as tickets like with Veefriends. It makes scalping and whatnot transparent and allows you to easily have a great market in the second hand. Imagine season tickets as NFTs. Able to transfer them, hold them in the long term, and teams can earn on each transfer.
NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
NFTs are just things that people who missed the boat on crypto trying to get in on a new thing, while understanding neither.
KaiserPro 5y ago
If you think that NFTs have any future, I have a few things to sell you. The basic tennet of an NFT would have been fine, if the people selling them actually owned the thing that they were selling, and had contracts to prove it. Until then, they are just receipts for things you bought out the back of a van.
dbmikus 5y ago
Oh, boy! Time for everyone to bash on crypto. For me, the proof of NFT validity is the fact that for more than 10 years people have been pouring money into owning video game assets, when most of the time those assets are non-transferrable to other users let alone to other games. In a purely digital world (aka a video game), purely digital assets and purely digital ownership clearly make sense. One might say that a company could come along and provide the authority and trusted infrastructure to handle transferring digital assets across games and users, but let's draw a parallel to the real world. What if every time you wanted to sell something, you had to sell it on Amazon. You couldn't just give someone cash for it, or put it up on Craigslist. Blockchain tech lets people trustlessly transfer assets and have full digital ownership over a digital asset.
- redisman 5y ago
  Video games are video games. You get real actual value out of the items you buy because it’s a virtual world. If I buy a flaming sword. I can actually take it and go hit enemies with it for fire damage and show it off prominently on my person (in game). I can break it into component parts, I can trade it, I can enhance it. Other players can buy a similar one but they can’t just copy it. Basically none of this is true for non-game NFTs
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  The problem for digital items that can be transferred between games isn’t really tracking ownership but interoperability and licensing.
- Noos 5y ago
  The game assets only have value in the game world, which is run by a centralized authority though. There's really no point in transferring assets outside of the game at all, except to break the rules that authority has in place. Its much more efficient just to allow trading assets in the structure via an ingame auction house. The exception is account trading and resale, and that's a huge minefield no digital creator really wants to happen. Being able to sell your character or library often has significant issues with little upsides to the functioning of the environment.
dumbfounder 5y ago
The crypto market has a tendency to get way ahead of themselves. I am in the NFT space, and yes, we all realize this (well, most of us). What the haters don't realize is that a market can exist without them. The market doesn't need you to validate it. If people attribute value to something then that's the value. Period. Pokemon card collectors don't care that you think that Pokemon cards are stupid. That said, there will certainly be digital houses of cards built that do fall. There are many terrible problems with NFTs, and a lot of these problems are being worked on. The initial hype could not possibly last. It was fueled by crypto zealots and people that want to get rich. I also believe there is a lot of long term value to be had, but in order to realize that long term value the NFTs will need to deliver actual intrinsic value to the NFT owner. Some examples of this may be: an NFT that unlocks access to special content, and NFT that also serves as a DAO to determine future art created, an open world (metaverse) that tracks ownership of digital goods using NFTs. All of these things already exist, of course, but the decentralization part is what makes it new and different. The future we see is creators not relying on Apple, Amazon, or other massive corps to control their content, to put much more of that control into their hands. Same with the purchaser's of said content. Transparent, trusted, interoperable, verifiable transactions.
krrrh 5y ago
It's worth $5 to join Brad Troemel's Patreon so you can watch his 40 minute NFT Report[0]. Brad is part of the crop of "post-internet" artists that emerged 10 years ago and participated in the failed Silicon Valley Art Fair. He has a lot of insights about the art world and how it operates that are opaque to most tech world people as well as the general public. The video gives a really good explanation of the nexus between collectors and museums in establishing value, and also how NFTs aren't really a new concept in the art world but a spin on an old one, since so much traditional art has been stored in freeports in recent years and is already bought and sold on the basis of a jpg and without taking physical possession. [0] https://www.instagram.com/p/COStujxBFvB/ https://www.instagram.com/p/COStujxBFvB/
motohagiography 5y ago
While checking the hypothesis that NFTs are valuable because they are an accounting hack, I found a reference regarding how to account for "art" on a balance sheet, which might have implications for what makes an NFT valuable, or at least useful from an accounting perspective. https://www.cpdbox.com/artwork-ifrs/ https://www.cpdbox.com/artwork-ifrs/ and more generally, https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/lu/Documents/financial-services/artandfinance/lu-art-asset-class-122012.pdf https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/lu/Documents/...
root_axis 5y ago
The entire use case for NFTs could be accomplished with digital keysigning. The certificate issuer could just pad the asset with the issuee's public key and sign that with their private key. No blockchain necessary.

167 points by donohoe 5y ago

s/collectibles/asinine/

Has NFT's ever been more than another novel crypto bet? (I am super curious as to what percentage of NFT purchases were existing crypt-millionaires vs. collectors or even independent investors)

fullshark 5y ago
It's also possibly a cool new way to launder money.
52-6F-62 5y ago
No less or more than baseball or hockey cards are? Which makes this no surprise https://toppsmlb.com/ https://toppsmlb.com/ Poor 8 year old me really thought that Brendan Shanahan rookie card would mean something someday.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  My comic books I've been keeping around since the 90s are feeling insulted. At least with those I can still read them if I decide to break the seal. A NFT doesn't offer that.
  - 52-6F-62 5y ago
    I definitely think comic books fall into a higher order category.
  - furyofantares 5y ago
    > At least with those I can still read them if I decide to break the seal. Are there also digital versions available? I'd be surprised if a noticeable percentage of the value of your comic books is that you can read them. It seems like it's essentially 0% to me -- almost as baseless as an NFT, and makes me think some sort of functionality isn't actually needed for lots of people to agree that something is valuable for a long time.
    - ethagnawl 5y ago
      > I'd be surprised if a noticeable percentage of the value of your comic books is that you can read them. Value in whose eyes, though? The commenter seemed to be stating that the utility provided by being able to read the comics is valuable _to them_. There are also a number of other uses for a physical comic book that provide "value": you could frame individual pages, use the book as kindling, etc. You can't do any of those things with a NFT.
      - furyofantares 5y ago
        > You can't do any of those things with a NFT. Some quick googling, apologies if I'm wrong, says this comic book is worth 3.2 million dollars: https://viewcomics.me/action-comics-1938/issue-1/full https://viewcomics.me/action-comics-1938/issue-1/full And yet it would seem I can read it right there on the internet for free, and can surely get framed prints of individual pages much cheaper than 3.2 million dollars, and I can get kindling much cheaper than 3.2 million dollars. You can point at those things as properties it has that an NFT doesn't. But those things aren't what's making it worth 3.2 million dollars It's worth 3.2 million dollars because someone trusts that it's worth 3.2 million dollars to other people. Value like this is an exercise in group trust that has had to build up over time. It's not actually a property of the functionality of the object
        SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
        The object and guarantee of uniqueness are one and the same, there's no required group trust. I have the comic, I own the comic. The comic is unique and the rareness and desirability of the comic assigns it value. The NFT is divorced from the thing it owns, but somehow the NFT is the thing that assigns ownership and value. A perfect copy of "Charlie bit my finger" can be replicated trivially nearly instantly. There is no value there. The NFT is the thing that carries the value in that situation because the video being collected isn't rare, unique, or special.
- adventured 5y ago
  At least you can hold an autographed baseball or baseball card, for example, it's a tangible thing that a baseball player took the time to autograph. The NFT cards with fake / digital signatures are particularly pathetic. Or the way a physical card is designed, the way it looks in real lighting, the way its material properties exist and interact in physical space. There are qualities to that, and the manufacturing process involved, that you can never replicate with NFT collectibles. The same is true with physical vs digital art. Art hanging on the wall can have a majestic quality when it dances with lighting; digital art is flat garbage by comparison in that respect (even when it's really good digital art; it's bound to a screen in most cases). Manufacturing a nice physical collectible card to a high quality specification is dramatically more difficult than spitting out NFT cards by the zillions; quality control is a huge challenge in collectible cards. There's a scarcity effect generated in physical collectibles like cards, in regards to quality of manufacturing (damage, corners, centering, errors, etc), that doesn't exist in NFTs (unless you intentionally fake that, which would be something beyond stupid). There are many aspects of physical vs NFT collectibles, where the NFTs will never be able to compete, not under any circumstances. And there are almost no benefits that an NFT has over a physical collectible, with the supposed simplicity of digital storage & transacting being the primary (which also has an obvious, huge risk / downside associated with it simultaneously).
  - 52-6F-62 5y ago
    Oh I agree, but let’s not kid ourselves—the market around them is the same in abstract. For all the physical properties of a material thing we might admire, someone else might admire an NFT for the lack of those properties and inclusion of others. There might be no more further reconciling than that. People will like what they like, they’ll pursue what they pursue, and sometimes they will enjoy their share of delusions. At least it keeps life interesting.
rixrax 5y ago
At least some are people who want to make quick $$$ and have missed out getting in to the cryptos early on. My sample size is exactly three, but one friend and two co-workers have been putting their savings to NFTs and been rather vocal at that. Preaching the ingenuity of them. And how they are going to explode in value in few years time. As far as I can tell, profit is their only motive. Who knows. Maybe they will. Maybe not. But at least I’ve tried to remind my friend that it is a highly speculative asset. And that she should not put in more money than she is ready to lose. All or most of it.
sleepybrett 5y ago
In the art spaces am watching, they think/thought so. They are/were wrong, but they think/thought so.

api 5y ago

Obvious fad.

drcode 5y ago

Obviously the "first" NFT of any type is more collectible (i.e. first NYT column NFT, first major artist NFT, first Webster's dictionary NFT, etc.) It's only logical that the second NFT from the New York Times (or whomever) is going to be worth only 10% as much as the first one. BREAKING NEWS: Superman Comic #2 is worth only 10% as much as Superman Comic #1.

robertkoss 5y ago
Hindsight bias. If Superman Comic #1 would come out today, it would not be worth that much. So the reason that the second is less valuable is not because of "the nature of #2" but because NFT was a bubble and overhyped.
incrudible 5y ago
NFTs have been around for years, but the first ones are not really more valuable than the new ones caught up in the current hype phase. The market cap for Crypokitties peaked at 21 million in 2017, the recent peak was at only 3 million.
krustyburger 5y ago
But Action Comics number 2 is still tremendously valuable. In the Golden Age of comics, collecting comic books and preserving them was not the hobby it would become. So there are very few copies today, but not because anyone set out to make them scarce in any way. Quite the contrary, in fact. DC would surely have printed many more copies if they believed they would have sold. How is this at all like NFTs again?
- EVdotIO 5y ago
  Yeah, it was kids that bought them at a nickel or whatever they were, and were treated as such for a very long time. Same thing can be said of stamps, hot wheels, barbis, baseball cards, pre war Native American handicrafts, CRT monitors, electric guitars... whatever. Even the super high end side of things of art, cars or numismatics had relatively humble origins. Money always cost what the money was worth. Cars were used and tossed; on the luxury end of Duesenbergs or Bugattis being discarded cheaply in their time. The concept of a starving artist has been around for hundreds of years, and the original patrons were picking up impressionist art for cheap. Collectibility needs a few things in the equation: rarity and here is the _big_ component, some shared nostalgia or cultural history. NFTs don't have that really any of these things.

aqme28 5y ago

I have never understood the point or utility of NFTs, and I'm even one of those way-too-into-crypto guys.

cobrabyte 5y ago
Same. Give me the ability to hold fractional ownership of real-world assets (e.g., real estate, buildings, resources, etc.). I'm not interested in a 100% speculative concept without having real-world assets backing it up.
dkjaudyeqooe 5y ago
The utility of NFTs is to relieve the credulous of their money.

failwhaleshark 5y ago

Now I want to buy a $10 million NFT of a doodle of a bridge at a garage sale for 50 cents. The questions are: How were the the "dumb money" NFT buyers ever going to liquidate their "investments" on the other side? Did they ever intend to cash-out or just show-off how much money they can burn? Or is it 95% blackmarket money (i.e., drugs, sex slavery, worker slavery) that had nowhere to go except buried in the ground or in the walls of houses?

redisman 5y ago
I don’t understand the money laundering theory. There are a hundred liquid crypto assets to use for that. Big NFTs are high visibility and worthless so it’s the worst of all worlds
- jonfromsf 5y ago
  It's because there's no price, so you can use it to justify money that came from elsewhere. Like if I made a million dollars selling drugs, I can put up an NFT, create a straw buyer (really me) who buys it from me for a million dollars, and now my black money has turned into white money.
  - lfmunoz4 5y ago
    Doesn't make sense to me. Say I have 1 million dollars of BTC that was stolen, what NFT would I buy so that I can later claim my 1 million is legal? In theory, you would say just create an NFT but in practice that wouldn't work or remotely be easy. I would have to create an NFT that is worth say 100 dollars and pretend it went to 1 million. There has to be a justification with previous sells of similar NFTs etc. This is a case where theory and practice doesn't match.
  - polynomial 5y ago
    Where does straw buyer convert the ill-gotten cash to nice clean electronic currency? That's what AML/KYC is intended to prevent.
- adflux 5y ago

jcfrei 5y ago

previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27378011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27378011

askonomm 5y ago

As for most things blockchain and *coin, there is most likely fraud lingering around somewhere.

Animats 5y ago

The metric is the amount of transactions, because NFTs don't have a market price. Since each is unique (mostly), they have to be sold on something that works like eBay auctions. There's no liquid market where identical shares are traded and the bid and ask prices are reasonably close, like the NASDAQ. So NFT markets don't crash, they stall. As I mentioned previously, this works just like Beanie Babies on eBay. High asking prices, no bids.

fpgaminer 5y ago

I never got the hate for NFTs. It seemed like the logic translation of collectibles from the phyiscal world into the digital world. If an artist makes a painting, that original painting has collectible value. If the same artist makes copies of it, those copies have less value. That seems to make sense to most people. Now imagine if an artist makes a digital painting. Is that work of art any less meaningful or valuable? Of course not. But there's been no way to define an "original" in the digital art form, and so there's been no way to assign collectability to digital works of art. NFTs seem to provide a way for an artist and fans to collectively agree that some digital object is the original, and to treat it as such. The bonus is that it provides another avenue for digital artists to make money, which to my mind is always a good thing. I get that the concept is hard to wrap our brains around, because at the end of the day it's a collective delusion. Everyone just agrees to say that some arbitrary string of bytes is the "original" and anything that comes after it isn't. But ultimately how is that different from the arbitrary rules we use to define which physical object is the "original" and why those arbitrary rules define value. That said, I haven't looked too deeply into the technical side of NFTs, so this is more my take on the concept than the application. I'm sure there's slews of caveats, like how most NFTs only store a hash, the importance of exchanges, etc. And I totally agree that the market was in a huge bubble, so that's definitely worth criticizing (to an extent; I mean people can do whatever the hell they want with their money ultimately.) Is there a flaw in my take here? Are NFTs somehow more arbitrary and asinine than other collectible markets simply because they're digital? Or is everyone hating because hating new technology is as cool as it has ever been? I suppose Dropbox did turn out to just be git+rsync, so shrug /s

kevingadd 5y ago
One of the main complaints was that minting and selling NFTs was incredibly expensive - not just in terms of the USD cost of the fees, but the amount of proof-of-work compute involved. I think if they had launched on a proof of stake network people would have been way less negative on them.
- danudey 5y ago
  This is my primary objection (and an objection to crypto in general as well). You have a meme, and someone sells you a little laminated card saying "I own the meme at this URL", and all it costs is $80,000 and you have to burn down an acre of rainforest. It's purely asinine in every respect, and, like a lot of crypto, is basically just a gold rush plus pyramid scheme.

angryasian 5y ago

Am I wrong in believing trying to force a sort of artificial scarcity on digital goods, is a flawed concept to begin with ? Maybe I don't understand NFTs

dmarcos 5y ago
Artificial scarcity works pretty well in the physical world. See limited edition products: cars, sneakers, books, collectable card games like Pokemon, Magic, Yugioh, limited print runs of art pieces… Value is the scarcity not the physical support. edit: pressed publish too quickly
- polynomial 5y ago
  You wouldn't download a car, would you?
- angryasian 5y ago
  I would argue that value is based on some sort of emotional measurement. The idea that a mass produced good, that is a physical item.. is only valuable because of the ability to hold it and the emotion behind it. whether or not digital good carry that same weight, is left to be seen.
th0ma5 5y ago
What's weirder is that this sort of implies DRM while not even providing it, even though we all know DRM doesn't work. The scarcity is having a spot in a ledger between other entries in one lineage by a (supposed, but rarely purely) distributed non-cooperative consensus of ledger entries. Anything other than that is imagined and probably done through other means just as well. I'm not sure why someone couldn't just periodically tweet pictures of note cards with a list of who owns what because that'd be just as effective.
Noos 5y ago
Not really, because the value of non-scare digital goods can be effectively zero. Look at public domain content for example; you can go to amazon and buy collections of 100 classic novels for two bucks, and that is just if you want the convenience of buying them at one stop as opposed from getting them for free from project gutenberg. Eventually we might see values trend so low that it may not make sense to make digital goods at all; i think video games in particular will be vulnerable to this soon.

chime 5y ago

As someone who doesn't collect anything, NFT for collectibles doesn't interest me personally. But I still think NFTs have a future as digitally signed proof of ownership of media assets. Long ago, back in my web designer days, I bought a CD from CompUSA full of clip arts and stock photos and used them on my clients' websites. I moved on to web development and out of nowhere 5 years later I got a panicked call from an old client who said Getty is threatening to sue them for using copyrighted images on the website I made for them. Try as I might, I could not convince either my ex-client or Getty reps that I legally (and most likely naively) bought a stock photo CD but did not have that in my possession any longer. Cost me a month's rent out of pocket to get the matter resolved as I did not have the resources to fight either of them. I can imagine a (non-physical-media) future where all commercial stock media is signed upon download, with the NFT signature embedded in the file itself like EXIF data. Editors can be made to respect the source file NFTs and include them in the exported files. YouTube could easily identify the NFT for the audio track you used in your video and if you had licensed it legally, it would not even run the fingerprint algo on it. Now it doesn't matter if the original seller or vendor goes out of business. The history is in the blockchain forever (or as long as the license permits). I'm not saying I support going all NFT for ownership/copyright. I'm saying I can imagine it happening as a valid use-case for NFT/blockchain.

sleepybrett 5y ago
Let me show you my fine collection of prime numbers!
danudey 5y ago
For what it's worth, there's no way you can force every image manipulation tool and library to respect the NFTs, and the NFT can't necessarily point to a specific item itself (since the location it points to could move), so there's no permanent effective way to actually make those two connect. As far as I can tell, the only thing that NFTs might be useful for is uniquely identifiable assets whose unique identification can be embedded in the NFT itself; for example, a car's VIN number or a property's address or lot number. Unfortunately, we already have much more effective and well-regulated systems to handle both of those situations, and I'm at a loss for any circumstance in which an NFT would be better and also guaranteed effective.

arduinomancer 5y ago

I always thought this tweet summed up the ridiculousness of NFTs well. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1372739631846936581 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1372739631846936581 I think the reason they seem silly to a lot of people is because when you buy an NFT there's nothing extra you can do that other people can't when you hold the NFT. I can have the exact same experience as the NFT holder for free with no effort. Sure technically you can also make copies of physical collectibles but its not (trivial + free) like copying and pasting an image.

Avtomatk 5y ago
And, modifying 1 pixel from the image, results in a complete different NFT.
- duskwuff 5y ago
  Not even that. You can upload the exact same image to a different URL and create a new NFT of that.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    Sure, but that's like saying I can use my home printer to create a certificate of title for someone else's car. Obviously I can, but that doesn't mean that certificates of title for cars are pointless.
    - th0ma5 5y ago
      Titles are physical objects and backed by laws and the state and a centralized database available to all of government. Many of the NFTs are not distributed even though they claim to be, so while they have the same kind of centralization, they have no such authority. If we were to grant them such authority, we'd want it to be a normal centralized database and the benefits of decentralization would not be needed. There would be no need for non-cooperative consensus either.
      - 5y ago

HardwareLust 5y ago

Gee, almost like they were a pointless fad. Which they are.

variable11 5y ago

Nobody saw that coming.

msoad 5y ago

NFT for generative art where the essence of the art is the input to the algorithm makes sense. Check out Art Blocks https://artblocks.io https://artblocks.io

drcode 5y ago

Everyone posting anti-nft comments here: You do realize that the NFT markets are fuelled by controversy, right? Stop giving the NFT concept more attention if you truly want it to fail. Nobody is forcing you to buy an NFT, you have nothing to complain about.

drdeca 5y ago
> You do realize that the NFT markets are fuelled by controversy, right? Justification for this claim? This is not at all clear to me!
- drcode 5y ago
  A Modigliani recently sold for $162 mil at auction, more than twice the beeple NFT price. Guess how many news stories there were for this sale, compared to the beeple. What else would you attribute this difference to, other than controversy? Do you think the beeple stories had no impact on the prices of follow-up nfts?
  - drdeca 5y ago
    I don't know what a beeple is. Or a modigliani for that matter. Ok, it sounds like you are saying that news coverage increases the price. That I can buy.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Yeah until the bottom falls out of the tulip market.

DonHopkins 5y ago

>"On May 24, Guggenheim cofounder Todd Morley told Bloomberg TV in New York that he is building a "blockchain tower" that will give anyone in the city access to wireless trading, provide a way to announce and showcase new technological advances, and house the world's largest collection of NFTs." How can hype like that not set off everyone's bullshit detections, I can not understand. Todd Morley sounds like a complete charlatan.

PostThisTooFast 5y ago
See: Trump
Salgat 5y ago
It's downright embarrassing how hard people are pushing blockchain technology onto every damn thing they can, even when it makes zero sense. NFTs? Just a massive unnecessary overhead to a concept of ownership well grounded in every country's laws. Cryptocurrency? Outside of very niche applications (including and mostly for the black market), it's dramatically slower, more expensive, and higher risk than a slew of existing payment options. Now this bullshit about a blockchain tower to provide free wireless access for blockchain networks? All marketing nonsense, since every company in these skyscrapers already has access to high speed internet, and every person in the area already has access to high speed mobile data. It's all bullshit.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  It just sounds so childish. "Blockchain Tower". Woo! Woo! Pff... Just like a South Park or Rick and Morty parody of blockchain charlatan shills, but it's actually bona-fid blockchain charlatan shills performing a spot-on parody of themselves, without one iota of irony or self awareness. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Woo https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Woo >The term comes from "woo-woo", an epithet used in the 1990s by science and skeptical writers to ridicule people who believe or promote such things. This is in turn believed to have come from the onomatopoeia "woooooo!" as a reaction to dimmed lights or magic tricks. The term implies a lack of either intelligence or sincerity on the part of the person or concepts so described. >As a coincidence, the Chinese word 巫 (pronounced in the Mandarin dialect as Wū) means a shaman, usually with magic powers. Also coincidentally, the Chinese word 無/无 (pronounced Wú in Mandarin) means "nothing," "lacking," or "negation." Another Chinese word 误 (pronounced in the Mandarin dialect as Wù) means "mistake" or "incorrect". There is also the English verb "woo", which means to seek someone's love, especially with false promises; it can also be considered appropriate, because woo-meisters seek people's admiration, falsely promising them miraculous and easily understandable knowledge.

smazn 5y ago

Meanwhile hicetnunc.xyz is killing it. So maybe the big high profile transactions are down, but a more approachable and independent community is quietly flourishing and taking over the NFT world for artists and collectors.

intrasight 5y ago

I think of NFTs as analogous to signed copies of a limited run of prints of an original work. And they have some interesting financial characteristics. 1. Their value can be a proxy to the underlying art 2. The NFT contract can give the artist some of the appreciation upside of the NFT My opinion is that NFTs will come to be part of many artists toolkit.

echelon 5y ago

Still willing to longbets someone on this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212475 Any takers? NFTs are worthless trash.

twox2 5y ago

Just because people aren't buying cat memes for millions of dollars every single day doesn't mean NFT sales aren't going strong... they are. A sotheby's auction just went live today for a curated collection of NFTs. The auction closes in a week and some of the lots are already in the five figures.

th0ma5 5y ago
That auction is a bunch of people who could command those prices for the non-nft art as well, so not sure what that proves.
- twox2 5y ago
  You're right about that for the most part, but my point is that NFTs are still being bought and sold on a daily basis. Just because there's not an over-hyped multi-million dollar sale every day, doesn't mean "the bubble has popped".
  - th0ma5 5y ago
    Under the context of a quantity of transactions and the normal person having access to art sales, I'd say that bubble has popped. That also may imply the total market size has popped. But you're right to say that the transaction size perhaps hasn't popped.

kadomony 5y ago

Oh no, it’s almost like people started to realize that the entire system was built from bullshit marketing and hype from stupidly executed multi-million dollar sales.

brutal_chaos_ 5y ago

No way! /s I mean, who didn't see that coming. NFTs, IMHO, have been money grabbing jokes, dumping on those naively looking for the next hot thing. Or rich people with money to blow...and since it's money to blow, who cares if it's now worthless?

dang 5y ago
Could you please stop posting comments that are on the snarky/flamey/unsubstantive/denunciatory side of the equation? You've done that quite a bit, and we're trying for a different spirit of conversation here: thoughtful and curious. Fortunately you've done that quite a bit as well, so this should be easy to fix. If you'd tend more in the intended direction, we'd appreciate it. The issue isn't your opinions, it's comment quality. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- brutal_chaos_ 5y ago
  Understood. I tend to think in Snark often...I'll refrain going forward.
  - dang 5y ago
    Appreciated!

taurath 5y ago

Now do housing please. Just because something does have intrinsic value doesn’t mean that value is exponential

jonahbenton 5y ago

Buy on the dip.

wildpeaks 5y ago

The real goal was to increase the number of people who have with crypto wallets and become crypto advocates to their circles, so there is less friction for the next crypto-based products.

toomuchredbull 5y ago

I like NFTs as tickets like with Veefriends. It makes scalping and whatnot transparent and allows you to easily have a great market in the second hand. Imagine season tickets as NFTs. Able to transfer them, hold them in the long term, and teams can earn on each transfer.

NaturalPhallacy 5y ago

NFTs are just things that people who missed the boat on crypto trying to get in on a new thing, while understanding neither.

KaiserPro 5y ago

If you think that NFTs have any future, I have a few things to sell you. The basic tennet of an NFT would have been fine, if the people selling them actually owned the thing that they were selling, and had contracts to prove it. Until then, they are just receipts for things you bought out the back of a van.

dbmikus 5y ago

Oh, boy! Time for everyone to bash on crypto. For me, the proof of NFT validity is the fact that for more than 10 years people have been pouring money into owning video game assets, when most of the time those assets are non-transferrable to other users let alone to other games. In a purely digital world (aka a video game), purely digital assets and purely digital ownership clearly make sense. One might say that a company could come along and provide the authority and trusted infrastructure to handle transferring digital assets across games and users, but let's draw a parallel to the real world. What if every time you wanted to sell something, you had to sell it on Amazon. You couldn't just give someone cash for it, or put it up on Craigslist. Blockchain tech lets people trustlessly transfer assets and have full digital ownership over a digital asset.

redisman 5y ago
Video games are video games. You get real actual value out of the items you buy because it’s a virtual world. If I buy a flaming sword. I can actually take it and go hit enemies with it for fire damage and show it off prominently on my person (in game). I can break it into component parts, I can trade it, I can enhance it. Other players can buy a similar one but they can’t just copy it. Basically none of this is true for non-game NFTs
meheleventyone 5y ago
The problem for digital items that can be transferred between games isn’t really tracking ownership but interoperability and licensing.
Noos 5y ago
The game assets only have value in the game world, which is run by a centralized authority though. There's really no point in transferring assets outside of the game at all, except to break the rules that authority has in place. Its much more efficient just to allow trading assets in the structure via an ingame auction house. The exception is account trading and resale, and that's a huge minefield no digital creator really wants to happen. Being able to sell your character or library often has significant issues with little upsides to the functioning of the environment.

dumbfounder 5y ago

The crypto market has a tendency to get way ahead of themselves. I am in the NFT space, and yes, we all realize this (well, most of us). What the haters don't realize is that a market can exist without them. The market doesn't need you to validate it. If people attribute value to something then that's the value. Period. Pokemon card collectors don't care that you think that Pokemon cards are stupid. That said, there will certainly be digital houses of cards built that do fall. There are many terrible problems with NFTs, and a lot of these problems are being worked on. The initial hype could not possibly last. It was fueled by crypto zealots and people that want to get rich. I also believe there is a lot of long term value to be had, but in order to realize that long term value the NFTs will need to deliver actual intrinsic value to the NFT owner. Some examples of this may be: an NFT that unlocks access to special content, and NFT that also serves as a DAO to determine future art created, an open world (metaverse) that tracks ownership of digital goods using NFTs. All of these things already exist, of course, but the decentralization part is what makes it new and different. The future we see is creators not relying on Apple, Amazon, or other massive corps to control their content, to put much more of that control into their hands. Same with the purchaser's of said content. Transparent, trusted, interoperable, verifiable transactions.

krrrh 5y ago

It's worth $5 to join Brad Troemel's Patreon so you can watch his 40 minute NFT Report[0]. Brad is part of the crop of "post-internet" artists that emerged 10 years ago and participated in the failed Silicon Valley Art Fair. He has a lot of insights about the art world and how it operates that are opaque to most tech world people as well as the general public. The video gives a really good explanation of the nexus between collectors and museums in establishing value, and also how NFTs aren't really a new concept in the art world but a spin on an old one, since so much traditional art has been stored in freeports in recent years and is already bought and sold on the basis of a jpg and without taking physical possession. [0] https://www.instagram.com/p/COStujxBFvB/ https://www.instagram.com/p/COStujxBFvB/

motohagiography 5y ago

While checking the hypothesis that NFTs are valuable because they are an accounting hack, I found a reference regarding how to account for "art" on a balance sheet, which might have implications for what makes an NFT valuable, or at least useful from an accounting perspective. https://www.cpdbox.com/artwork-ifrs/ https://www.cpdbox.com/artwork-ifrs/ and more generally, https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/lu/Documents/financial-services/artandfinance/lu-art-asset-class-122012.pdf https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/lu/Documents/...

root_axis 5y ago

The entire use case for NFTs could be accomplished with digital keysigning. The certificate issuer could just pad the asset with the issuee's public key and sign that with their private key. No blockchain necessary.