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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 paint

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.
hobs 5y ago
>Now imagine if an artist makes a digital painting. Is that work of art any less meaningful or valuable? Of course not. Of course yes it is - its less valuable after it is created because copying it costs nothing. Valuing a work above the creation cost of the work is what the art world certainly does, but replicas of the art are still valuable for being appealing and taking some work to create - a digital version is appealing but takes so little work to create and store that its hard to justify the rest of the collective delusion. Adding scarcity to non-scarce things is just stupid.
- iakh 5y ago
  You appear to be assuming that painting something with a brush is substantially more time consuming than painting something with a drawing tablet. Other than maybe mixing the paint and letting it dry, the effort seems to be able to same
  - hobs 5y ago
    My sentence might be a little confusing - I don't believe that - when I say create the digital version I mean the copy - the initial act of creation (imo) is still highly valued because it creates something from nothing digitally or not, pixels or not. A marble sculptor shouldn't be valued more than a digital sculptor, its really just about time and effort either way.
  - vitorbaptistaa 5y ago
    The difference is not in the original but in the copies. A copy of a painting can be a work of art, but it is different. It did not sit at the artists' atelier, it hasn't traveled through different places to finally hang at the buyer's living room. That is not the case for digital works. If we get strict about it, everything apart from the original file sitting in the artists' computer disks are copies. The file you downloaded after purchasing your "original" is a copy. But well, whatever makes people happy.
    - detaro 5y ago
      Is a bronze sculpture an "original"? (It's likely been done by a professional foundry, that created a mold from the artists template)
distrill 5y ago
> 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. It's different because the artist actually put their brush on the original canvas, but not the copies. I could buy that the emphasis we put on the original having more value is arbitrary, but there's nothing actually arbitrary about selecting which painting is _the original_. The problem I see with NFTs is that the arbitrariness is shifted from deciding which piece has value (original vs copy) to which one is _the original_ (copy A or copy B). They're both copies.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  > It's different because the artist actually put their brush on the original canvas, but not the copies. And, identically, the NFT of a digital work is different from copies of the digital work because the artist actually issued the NFT. > I could buy that the emphasis we put on the original having more value is arbitrary, but there's nothing actually arbitrary about selecting which painting is _the original_. And again, the situation with NFTs is identical. There's nothing arbitrary about determining the NFT issued by the artist and who controls that NFT (assuming the NFT blockchain technology works as intended), in fact it should be much easier than determining the originality of a famous painting.
defaultname 5y ago
NFTs have no mechanism to define originality, or even atomicity (an NFT might have a single owner, but it points to something external for which countless NFTs might point). It isn't a copyright grant, a contract, legal ownership, or even a binary container (beyond some token tiny amount). I don't think it's "hate" for people to marvel at the insanity that are NFTs. You have people literally posting and selling NFTs for other people's creations. And even if those people post NFTs, their NFTs have no additional claim to what they represent than the other people, beyond some social "oh that's the guy who made all of those crummy doodles". There is a notion of digital ownership, copyright assignment, etc. NFT is an extremely poor proxy for any of those. Owning a rare gun skin in CS:GO is much more "real" than an NFT is.
- tdy721 5y ago
  You have more interest in CS:go than Etherium then? But they remain equally real. Unless the rare gun skin is more real because there are many of it? Lol “Real”
- zacharytelschow 5y ago
  > It isn't a copyright grant, a contract, legal ownership Exactly the problem. If these were used to prove legal ownership of real assets, whether they be intellectual or physical, they would have value. Selling individually numbered digital pet rocks is not valuable.
  - benhurmarcel 5y ago
    They can’t be used to prove legal ownership of real assets, because you’d need a way for an authority to modify the data. Say I own an asset legally, and lose my private key. Or it gets stolen by a malware. I’m still the legal owner.
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    You've inspired me to add NFT DRM to my Pet Rock Remote Control, so you can cryptographically lock your remote control to the digital pet rocks you own, so that nobody else but you can send them commands to "sit", "stay", "play dead", "roll over", etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG0FAKkaisg&ab_channel=DonHopkins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG0FAKkaisg&ab_channel=DonHo...
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
> 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 point is that it remains to be seen if humans actually care if we declare "ownership" in this way, when as a non-owner I can see and get access to the exact same bits as the "owner". With physical goods, even though the value assigned to an "original" is arbitrary, it does seem that humans care more about "I know this collection of atoms is the original, and no one else can copy this same collection of atoms" that just the idea that there is a record of ownership on some blockchain.
- sleepybrett 5y ago
  It will be an interesting day when we can build objects from the molecules up (trekian replicator style)
- felipellrocha 5y ago
  Exactly this. Not only that, the original will have minor differences in implementation that are impossible to copy due to the physical limitation. To contrast, every digital good is exactly the same as the original. Heck, once the computer is turned off the first time, the original is technically gone, and a new copy was made when the computer turned back on. The concept of originality goes away on a digital world.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  You can also get a reproduction of a famous painting that is indistinguishable from the original to all but a small group of experts (and even experts might be fooled by very skilled forgeries). If you just like how a painting looks, you can absolutely get the vast majority (perhaps even the entirety) of the aesthetic value of it from a (relatively) inexpensive reproduction. Yet the vast majority of the immense value of very famous paintings comes from originality, as determined by a small group of experts which the rest of us trust. This is not so unlike how NFTs work.
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    While I agree with what you've written, this sentence, "This is not so unlike how NFTs work", is the critical point that remains to be seen. My opinion is that it's unlike NFTs enough in the average human mind that the analogy falls over. Yes, pretty much all of the value in expensive works of art is in the provenance of the artwork, not the actual image. But the fact that that provenance is embodied in a non-copyable physical piece of art, versus a ledger in the literal ether that is just a piece of text that says "Yep, this person bought it", is a critical difference that I think is unbridgeable.
jedberg 5y ago
An original painting has more value than a copy because it has the original brush strokes in it and was touched by the artist. For whatever reason humans value objects that they can touch and that have been touched by others that they find valuable. The NFT kind of loses that.
- nyhc99 5y ago
  An NFT of a piece of digital art that was minted by the artist themselves might psychologically approximate this.
gamache 5y ago
> Are NFTs somehow more arbitrary and asinine than other collectible markets simply because they're digital? They're precisely as asinine as a certificate of ownership, if a certificate of ownership used a household-month of electricity to produce. And the paper it was made out of attracted assholes.
freewilly1040 5y ago
There's a difference between "hate" and persistent disagreement. There was a breathless hype cycle around NFT's. This has become another instance of "crypto use case XYZ's moment is here!" turning into "XYZ hasn't taken off but remains very promising!" This all draws pretty reasonable critiques.
somebodythere 5y ago
NFTs I think haven't found product market fit yet. Imagine skins in a video game. People pay good money for those even though it's "just pixels", and I think there would be sustained interest to trade and own skins in a limited run, for example, autographed by an e-sports player. Or, in a digital trading card game, decks could be represented as a bundle of NFTs, and players could rent them to participate in a tournament without having to go buy all the carts themselves. I don't think the current model where everyone and their mom doodles something and mints an NFT is sustainable without external anchors of value.
pembrook 5y ago
> If an artist makes a painting, that original painting has collectible value. This misunderstands the ultimate reason why art becomes valuable. It has nothing to do with the scarcity itself. There's a billion works of art out there that are 1/1 originals and yet are worthless. So scarcity alone doesn't bring the value. What does? Mostly media and public relations originally, and if an artist gets attention for long enough, government, non-profit and educational institutions will legitimize that media coverage and write an artist into the mainstream "lexicon" for history going forward. You need both the scarcity combined with the mainstream knowledge of an artists name to create that value. The problem with NFTs is, now that the media channels that create "star" artists are getting more and more decentralized, the chances your friend will know the names of the same artists as you is diminished. Everybody's instagram feed is different, so there isn't the same shared language that existed in the past to attach value to these scarce objects. That, combined with the fact that you can't hang it on your wall as a signaling device to show off to your friends or prospective mating partners...is the reason why NFTs will never be as valuable as pre-internet art.
- lfmunoz4 5y ago
  NFTs are a better signaling device because although you cannot hang it on your wall, you change make it your avatar.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  > Mostly media and public relations originally, and if an artist gets attention for long enough, government, non-profit and educational institutions will legitimize that media coverage and write an artist into the mainstream "lexicon" for history going forward. I think a big part of it is that once an artist has this status, it becomes part of the industry that tracks provenance and detects forgeries. If your cousin's painting was valuable without being part of this system, you could crank out 100 of them and no one would know which one was the original, or whether your cousin actually painted the other 99. So in this way you're begging the question a little bit. If scarcity alone doesn't bring value, provable scarcity might.
zenron 5y ago
> 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. Sometimes ownership of a thing doesn't matter if there is a psychological barrier to the product itself and its relationship to the owner. If we are talking about the ownership of an item in the traditional sense a painting then NFT's need to fall into two categories: Vanity: Private ownership for personal enjoyment. Here I find NFT's silly. People will duplicate the work if they have access to a digital file and run wild with it for the sake of personal enjoyment. This is where I think most NFT hate comes from and its not without merit. Investment: NFTs could indeed be used for issuing ownership, or even fractional ownership, where a work is displayed at its maximum potential (resolution/medium) and access to the display is owned and profit is split among owners. This is really the remarkable aspect of NFTs and I am not even sure you have to limit digital goods either. If we are talking about ownership of an item in the commissioned sense then NFT's make copyright and trademark infringement easier to litigate ownership if the work is used by someone who isn't an owner. It is hasty to hate NFTs. But it is ok to question their relevance in certain regards.
tehwebguy 5y ago
Because it was always an obvious scam. A few early crypto adopters with zillions of coins passing them back and forth to create enough hype to convince a bunch of bandwagon jumpers to give away their money for nothing more than having their name carved into a tree.
Noos 5y ago
I'd be less skeptical if these werent introduced at the same time rampant speculation on valueless currencies or tokens became profitable. It's kind of obvious the real impetus is to capture the need of investors to get constantly increasing returns from speculation, and that new agreed upon stores of values of required to be created as old ones get too expensive to enter.
bccdee 5y ago
> It seemed like the logic translation of collectibles from the physical world into the digital world. Is it? I thought the value of a collectible was having it, not that other people don't have it. I don't think it's worth throwing away abundance for the sake of the satisfaction of having something scarce.

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.

hobs 5y ago

>Now imagine if an artist makes a digital painting. Is that work of art any less meaningful or valuable? Of course not. Of course yes it is - its less valuable after it is created because copying it costs nothing. Valuing a work above the creation cost of the work is what the art world certainly does, but replicas of the art are still valuable for being appealing and taking some work to create - a digital version is appealing but takes so little work to create and store that its hard to justify the rest of the collective delusion. Adding scarcity to non-scarce things is just stupid.

iakh 5y ago
You appear to be assuming that painting something with a brush is substantially more time consuming than painting something with a drawing tablet. Other than maybe mixing the paint and letting it dry, the effort seems to be able to same
- hobs 5y ago
  My sentence might be a little confusing - I don't believe that - when I say create the digital version I mean the copy - the initial act of creation (imo) is still highly valued because it creates something from nothing digitally or not, pixels or not. A marble sculptor shouldn't be valued more than a digital sculptor, its really just about time and effort either way.
- vitorbaptistaa 5y ago
  The difference is not in the original but in the copies. A copy of a painting can be a work of art, but it is different. It did not sit at the artists' atelier, it hasn't traveled through different places to finally hang at the buyer's living room. That is not the case for digital works. If we get strict about it, everything apart from the original file sitting in the artists' computer disks are copies. The file you downloaded after purchasing your "original" is a copy. But well, whatever makes people happy.
  - detaro 5y ago
    Is a bronze sculpture an "original"? (It's likely been done by a professional foundry, that created a mold from the artists template)

distrill 5y ago

> 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. It's different because the artist actually put their brush on the original canvas, but not the copies. I could buy that the emphasis we put on the original having more value is arbitrary, but there's nothing actually arbitrary about selecting which painting is _the original_. The problem I see with NFTs is that the arbitrariness is shifted from deciding which piece has value (original vs copy) to which one is _the original_ (copy A or copy B). They're both copies.

tshaddox 5y ago
> It's different because the artist actually put their brush on the original canvas, but not the copies. And, identically, the NFT of a digital work is different from copies of the digital work because the artist actually issued the NFT. > I could buy that the emphasis we put on the original having more value is arbitrary, but there's nothing actually arbitrary about selecting which painting is _the original_. And again, the situation with NFTs is identical. There's nothing arbitrary about determining the NFT issued by the artist and who controls that NFT (assuming the NFT blockchain technology works as intended), in fact it should be much easier than determining the originality of a famous painting.

defaultname 5y ago

NFTs have no mechanism to define originality, or even atomicity (an NFT might have a single owner, but it points to something external for which countless NFTs might point). It isn't a copyright grant, a contract, legal ownership, or even a binary container (beyond some token tiny amount). I don't think it's "hate" for people to marvel at the insanity that are NFTs. You have people literally posting and selling NFTs for other people's creations. And even if those people post NFTs, their NFTs have no additional claim to what they represent than the other people, beyond some social "oh that's the guy who made all of those crummy doodles". There is a notion of digital ownership, copyright assignment, etc. NFT is an extremely poor proxy for any of those. Owning a rare gun skin in CS:GO is much more "real" than an NFT is.

tdy721 5y ago
You have more interest in CS:go than Etherium then? But they remain equally real. Unless the rare gun skin is more real because there are many of it? Lol “Real”
zacharytelschow 5y ago
> It isn't a copyright grant, a contract, legal ownership Exactly the problem. If these were used to prove legal ownership of real assets, whether they be intellectual or physical, they would have value. Selling individually numbered digital pet rocks is not valuable.
- benhurmarcel 5y ago
  They can’t be used to prove legal ownership of real assets, because you’d need a way for an authority to modify the data. Say I own an asset legally, and lose my private key. Or it gets stolen by a malware. I’m still the legal owner.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  You've inspired me to add NFT DRM to my Pet Rock Remote Control, so you can cryptographically lock your remote control to the digital pet rocks you own, so that nobody else but you can send them commands to "sit", "stay", "play dead", "roll over", etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG0FAKkaisg&ab_channel=DonHopkins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG0FAKkaisg&ab_channel=DonHo...

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

> 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 point is that it remains to be seen if humans actually care if we declare "ownership" in this way, when as a non-owner I can see and get access to the exact same bits as the "owner". With physical goods, even though the value assigned to an "original" is arbitrary, it does seem that humans care more about "I know this collection of atoms is the original, and no one else can copy this same collection of atoms" that just the idea that there is a record of ownership on some blockchain.

sleepybrett 5y ago
It will be an interesting day when we can build objects from the molecules up (trekian replicator style)
felipellrocha 5y ago
Exactly this. Not only that, the original will have minor differences in implementation that are impossible to copy due to the physical limitation. To contrast, every digital good is exactly the same as the original. Heck, once the computer is turned off the first time, the original is technically gone, and a new copy was made when the computer turned back on. The concept of originality goes away on a digital world.
tshaddox 5y ago
You can also get a reproduction of a famous painting that is indistinguishable from the original to all but a small group of experts (and even experts might be fooled by very skilled forgeries). If you just like how a painting looks, you can absolutely get the vast majority (perhaps even the entirety) of the aesthetic value of it from a (relatively) inexpensive reproduction. Yet the vast majority of the immense value of very famous paintings comes from originality, as determined by a small group of experts which the rest of us trust. This is not so unlike how NFTs work.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  While I agree with what you've written, this sentence, "This is not so unlike how NFTs work", is the critical point that remains to be seen. My opinion is that it's unlike NFTs enough in the average human mind that the analogy falls over. Yes, pretty much all of the value in expensive works of art is in the provenance of the artwork, not the actual image. But the fact that that provenance is embodied in a non-copyable physical piece of art, versus a ledger in the literal ether that is just a piece of text that says "Yep, this person bought it", is a critical difference that I think is unbridgeable.

jedberg 5y ago

An original painting has more value than a copy because it has the original brush strokes in it and was touched by the artist. For whatever reason humans value objects that they can touch and that have been touched by others that they find valuable. The NFT kind of loses that.

nyhc99 5y ago
An NFT of a piece of digital art that was minted by the artist themselves might psychologically approximate this.

gamache 5y ago

> Are NFTs somehow more arbitrary and asinine than other collectible markets simply because they're digital? They're precisely as asinine as a certificate of ownership, if a certificate of ownership used a household-month of electricity to produce. And the paper it was made out of attracted assholes.

freewilly1040 5y ago

There's a difference between "hate" and persistent disagreement. There was a breathless hype cycle around NFT's. This has become another instance of "crypto use case XYZ's moment is here!" turning into "XYZ hasn't taken off but remains very promising!" This all draws pretty reasonable critiques.

somebodythere 5y ago

NFTs I think haven't found product market fit yet. Imagine skins in a video game. People pay good money for those even though it's "just pixels", and I think there would be sustained interest to trade and own skins in a limited run, for example, autographed by an e-sports player. Or, in a digital trading card game, decks could be represented as a bundle of NFTs, and players could rent them to participate in a tournament without having to go buy all the carts themselves. I don't think the current model where everyone and their mom doodles something and mints an NFT is sustainable without external anchors of value.

pembrook 5y ago

> If an artist makes a painting, that original painting has collectible value. This misunderstands the ultimate reason why art becomes valuable. It has nothing to do with the scarcity itself. There's a billion works of art out there that are 1/1 originals and yet are worthless. So scarcity alone doesn't bring the value. What does? Mostly media and public relations originally, and if an artist gets attention for long enough, government, non-profit and educational institutions will legitimize that media coverage and write an artist into the mainstream "lexicon" for history going forward. You need both the scarcity combined with the mainstream knowledge of an artists name to create that value. The problem with NFTs is, now that the media channels that create "star" artists are getting more and more decentralized, the chances your friend will know the names of the same artists as you is diminished. Everybody's instagram feed is different, so there isn't the same shared language that existed in the past to attach value to these scarce objects. That, combined with the fact that you can't hang it on your wall as a signaling device to show off to your friends or prospective mating partners...is the reason why NFTs will never be as valuable as pre-internet art.

lfmunoz4 5y ago
NFTs are a better signaling device because although you cannot hang it on your wall, you change make it your avatar.
pessimizer 5y ago
> Mostly media and public relations originally, and if an artist gets attention for long enough, government, non-profit and educational institutions will legitimize that media coverage and write an artist into the mainstream "lexicon" for history going forward. I think a big part of it is that once an artist has this status, it becomes part of the industry that tracks provenance and detects forgeries. If your cousin's painting was valuable without being part of this system, you could crank out 100 of them and no one would know which one was the original, or whether your cousin actually painted the other 99. So in this way you're begging the question a little bit. If scarcity alone doesn't bring value, provable scarcity might.

zenron 5y ago

> 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. Sometimes ownership of a thing doesn't matter if there is a psychological barrier to the product itself and its relationship to the owner. If we are talking about the ownership of an item in the traditional sense a painting then NFT's need to fall into two categories: Vanity: Private ownership for personal enjoyment. Here I find NFT's silly. People will duplicate the work if they have access to a digital file and run wild with it for the sake of personal enjoyment. This is where I think most NFT hate comes from and its not without merit. Investment: NFTs could indeed be used for issuing ownership, or even fractional ownership, where a work is displayed at its maximum potential (resolution/medium) and access to the display is owned and profit is split among owners. This is really the remarkable aspect of NFTs and I am not even sure you have to limit digital goods either. If we are talking about ownership of an item in the commissioned sense then NFT's make copyright and trademark infringement easier to litigate ownership if the work is used by someone who isn't an owner. It is hasty to hate NFTs. But it is ok to question their relevance in certain regards.

tehwebguy 5y ago

Because it was always an obvious scam. A few early crypto adopters with zillions of coins passing them back and forth to create enough hype to convince a bunch of bandwagon jumpers to give away their money for nothing more than having their name carved into a tree.

Noos 5y ago

I'd be less skeptical if these werent introduced at the same time rampant speculation on valueless currencies or tokens became profitable. It's kind of obvious the real impetus is to capture the need of investors to get constantly increasing returns from speculation, and that new agreed upon stores of values of required to be created as old ones get too expensive to enter.

bccdee 5y ago

> It seemed like the logic translation of collectibles from the physical world into the digital world. Is it? I thought the value of a collectible was having it, not that other people don't have it. I don't think it's worth throwing away abundance for the sake of the satisfaction of having something scarce.