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The thing about NFTs is that many people who buy them "don't get NFTs". All an NFT is is a token that represents ownership, like if the title to your car or ho

The thing about NFTs is that many people who buy them "don't get NFTs". All an NFT is is a token that represents ownership, like if the title to your car or house deed was on a blockchain. NFTs have some sane use causes like designating the owner of a valuable asset or creating electronic tickets that can be resold or transferred without some centralized entity like ticketmaster. Prior to NFTs existing, would you purchase the ownership rights to a gif or tweet? Probably not. And that is what is dumb about the excitement around NFTs, some people with more money than sense seem to think that now that you can represent ownership on a blockchain some things, like crappy jpegs, have suddenly become valuable assets.

lostcolony 5y ago
Yep. It's a completely made up problem. It's maybe useful in enforcing existing IP law (i.e., I can prove that that picture is mine), but even that is questionable (proof of ownership of digital IP has already been proven satisfactorily for courts of law to rule on it). The fact there is a new way of proving ownership doesn't make the thing owned valuable.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  As far as I'm aware, the NFT doesn't itself convey any transfer of copyrights (or any other form of IP). That has to be done by a separate document (and therefore it's that document that transfers the rights, not the NFT). So I don't see how the NFT is doing anything to help enforce existing IP laws?
- pornel 5y ago
  NFTs don't actually prove ownership of anything but themselves. Owning a hash of a URL has no connection to the real world, and can't prove that the NFT was created by the author of the artwork. It makes me doubly furious that NFT is advertised as caring for artists. In fact, NFT makes it easier than ever to sell stolen artwork. NFT itself doesn't contain any copyrighted material, and selling metadata/URLs is not illegal, so it's likely that fraud through NFT is de-facto legal if you just carefully word it as selling the NFT of the artwork, and not the artwork itself.
  - lostcolony 5y ago
    I'm not saying it does; I AM saying that it's an additional public record that can be used to bolster a case in the event of unclear ownership. And even that is "maybe" useful, hence my use of that phrase.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
anonporridge 5y ago
Here's an NFT which is the best description I've ever seen of what NFTs actually are, https://foundation.app/@visualizevalue/nfts-explained-12012 https://foundation.app/@visualizevalue/nfts-explained-12012 It sold for 74 ETH.
- somenewaccount1 5y ago
  Which is about approximately $240,000 USD. Hrm...I wonder if I should mint some nft's? And so it begins.
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    This is the equivalent of someone seeing how much a Picasso sells and wondering if they should become an artist. For every success, there are 10,000 failures.
    - somenewaccount1 5y ago
      That's true, but in the Picasso scenario I actually need to learn to do art. In the NFT case, apparently a 3rd grade level of photoshop skills would do.
      - anonporridge 5y ago
        You could also tape a banana to a wall and sell it for $120k in the traditional art world. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/maurizio-cattelan-banana-collector-1728009 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/maurizio-cattelan-banana-c... Don't mistake extreme technical skill as being the sole reason humans value things. Sometimes, it's just about being the first to effectively convey a new idea, and the crudeness of the execution doesn't matter. And there are plenty of extremely skilled artists that spend decades mastering their craft whose work is effectively worthless, because they're not actually breaking new ground.
        somenewaccount1 5y ago
TomGullen 5y ago
Can't understand "Ownership of a Tweet" as Twitter owns them - or at the very least they can destroy them whenever they want.
cperciva 5y ago
Thing is, NFTs don't represent ownership, absent some external legal documents which tie ownership to the NFT. (And even with such external documents p perhaps not; see e.g. the statute of frauds which restricts in what form land ownership can be transferred.) I can sell NFTs of bridges all day long; doesn't mean anyone is buying a bridge.
- Joeboy 5y ago
  An NFT is decent evidence in favour of the keyholder being the creator of a work, if there's no earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work. When people first started talking about them I thought that was the idea - a kind of people's copyright registry on the blockchain. Which seems like a fairly reasonable idea, as far as it goes. Edit: To be clear, I mean a copyright registry that is used for the sort of thing copyright registries are used for, ie. adjudicating copyright disputes. I am not saying an NFT of the Mona Lisa is good evidence you painted the Mona Lisa (unless you minted it in 1502), and I'm definitely not saying the current market in NFTs is sensible.
  - root_axis 5y ago
    > An NFT is decent evidence in favour of you being the creator of a work, if there's no earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work It's really not at all reliable. I could create an NFT for the "Joeboy" HN account right now, and ostensibly become the owner of your HN account since such an NFT does not already exist. Obviously, this makes no sense, the NFT is meaningless.
    - Joeboy 5y ago
      If there was no evidence of the account existing before you registered the NFT, I think that would be a reasonably credible bit of evidence in your favour.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      No, you could create an NFT that supposedly represents that but unless people buy into the idea, no is becoming the owner of anything. If instead Ycombinator would release each user as an NFT, and allow people to buy/sell then, then yes you could become the owner of an HN account via NFTs. But until then, the one who knows the password is the owner. People seems to have some sort of problem with trying to understand NFTs were all thoughts and logic go out the window as soon as NFTs are mentioned.
root_axis 5y ago
> All an NFT is is a token that represents ownership, like if the title to your car or house deed was on a blockchain. No. An NFT is just a few bytes of text pinned to a blockchain. They are essentially useless, and every useful property of an NFT can be achieved using asymmetric encryption or digital signatures, the blockchain component is just wasteful hype.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  If an external source - say the Twitter account of an artist - can authenticate that the holder of the NFT is who the creator of the art work wants to be recognized as the owner, then social consensus will lead to widespread value assignment to that NFT. The ability to hold and trade the NFT on the public blockchain makes that asset accessible to a large number of autonomous on-chain markets, like dApps which allow a person to take out self-executing loans that use the NFT as collateral.
  - acdha 5y ago
    > If an external source - say the Twitter account of an artist - can authenticate that the holder of the NFT is who the creator of the art work wants to be recognized as the owner, then social consensus will lead to widespread value assignment to that NFT. In other words, you don't need the blockchain because the actual value comes from a different system. The only thing it's adding is overhead and unreliability.
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      The second paragraph explains the utility of issuing it on the blockchain.
      - acdha 5y ago
        It fails to establish that this is unique to a blockchain: we do, after all, have decades of experience building distributed applications and it’s not like banks haven’t issued loans before and the hypothetical benefits have to be weighed against the added costs of relying a very slow, expensive database with no mechanism to correct bugs or fraud.
KorematsuFredt 5y ago
NFTs don't sell ownership rights. NFTs are equivalent of buying photographs of a celebrity. You may own NFT that represents Taylor Swift, but she aint going on a dinner date with you. Not to mention you are not the only one to hold it either as someone else can Taylor Swift NFT and sell it to. It is exactly same as buying and owning cards of your favourite celebrity. They are worthless even compared to cowdung and have absolutely not practical value. One has to be high on drugs to buy ugly gifs for thousands of dollars.
- Jxl180 5y ago
  The NFTs that people are making their profile pictures are drastically different from the celebrity and athlete NFTs put out by DraftKings or topshot. The NFTs in profile pics on Twitter (like crypto punks) have randomly generated features making each and every minted nft completely unique. I feel like there are two vastly different audiences with NFTs. The casual, celebrity/athlete NFTs that are selling multiple of some persons face for fiat currency, and parole who are actively participating in minting NFTs with web3 dApps made by developers with roadmaps and a strong community.

lostcolony 5y ago

Yep. It's a completely made up problem. It's maybe useful in enforcing existing IP law (i.e., I can prove that that picture is mine), but even that is questionable (proof of ownership of digital IP has already been proven satisfactorily for courts of law to rule on it). The fact there is a new way of proving ownership doesn't make the thing owned valuable.

marcus_holmes 5y ago
As far as I'm aware, the NFT doesn't itself convey any transfer of copyrights (or any other form of IP). That has to be done by a separate document (and therefore it's that document that transfers the rights, not the NFT). So I don't see how the NFT is doing anything to help enforce existing IP laws?
pornel 5y ago
NFTs don't actually prove ownership of anything but themselves. Owning a hash of a URL has no connection to the real world, and can't prove that the NFT was created by the author of the artwork. It makes me doubly furious that NFT is advertised as caring for artists. In fact, NFT makes it easier than ever to sell stolen artwork. NFT itself doesn't contain any copyrighted material, and selling metadata/URLs is not illegal, so it's likely that fraud through NFT is de-facto legal if you just carefully word it as selling the NFT of the artwork, and not the artwork itself.
- lostcolony 5y ago
  I'm not saying it does; I AM saying that it's an additional public record that can be used to bolster a case in the event of unclear ownership. And even that is "maybe" useful, hence my use of that phrase.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

anonporridge 5y ago

Here's an NFT which is the best description I've ever seen of what NFTs actually are, https://foundation.app/@visualizevalue/nfts-explained-12012 https://foundation.app/@visualizevalue/nfts-explained-12012 It sold for 74 ETH.

somenewaccount1 5y ago
Which is about approximately $240,000 USD. Hrm...I wonder if I should mint some nft's? And so it begins.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  This is the equivalent of someone seeing how much a Picasso sells and wondering if they should become an artist. For every success, there are 10,000 failures.
  - somenewaccount1 5y ago
    That's true, but in the Picasso scenario I actually need to learn to do art. In the NFT case, apparently a 3rd grade level of photoshop skills would do.
    - anonporridge 5y ago
      You could also tape a banana to a wall and sell it for $120k in the traditional art world. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/maurizio-cattelan-banana-collector-1728009 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/maurizio-cattelan-banana-c... Don't mistake extreme technical skill as being the sole reason humans value things. Sometimes, it's just about being the first to effectively convey a new idea, and the crudeness of the execution doesn't matter. And there are plenty of extremely skilled artists that spend decades mastering their craft whose work is effectively worthless, because they're not actually breaking new ground.
      - somenewaccount1 5y ago

TomGullen 5y ago

Can't understand "Ownership of a Tweet" as Twitter owns them - or at the very least they can destroy them whenever they want.

cperciva 5y ago

Thing is, NFTs don't represent ownership, absent some external legal documents which tie ownership to the NFT. (And even with such external documents p perhaps not; see e.g. the statute of frauds which restricts in what form land ownership can be transferred.) I can sell NFTs of bridges all day long; doesn't mean anyone is buying a bridge.

Joeboy 5y ago
An NFT is decent evidence in favour of the keyholder being the creator of a work, if there's no earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work. When people first started talking about them I thought that was the idea - a kind of people's copyright registry on the blockchain. Which seems like a fairly reasonable idea, as far as it goes. Edit: To be clear, I mean a copyright registry that is used for the sort of thing copyright registries are used for, ie. adjudicating copyright disputes. I am not saying an NFT of the Mona Lisa is good evidence you painted the Mona Lisa (unless you minted it in 1502), and I'm definitely not saying the current market in NFTs is sensible.
- root_axis 5y ago
  > An NFT is decent evidence in favour of you being the creator of a work, if there's no earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work It's really not at all reliable. I could create an NFT for the "Joeboy" HN account right now, and ostensibly become the owner of your HN account since such an NFT does not already exist. Obviously, this makes no sense, the NFT is meaningless.
  - Joeboy 5y ago
    If there was no evidence of the account existing before you registered the NFT, I think that would be a reasonably credible bit of evidence in your favour.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    No, you could create an NFT that supposedly represents that but unless people buy into the idea, no is becoming the owner of anything. If instead Ycombinator would release each user as an NFT, and allow people to buy/sell then, then yes you could become the owner of an HN account via NFTs. But until then, the one who knows the password is the owner. People seems to have some sort of problem with trying to understand NFTs were all thoughts and logic go out the window as soon as NFTs are mentioned.

root_axis 5y ago

> All an NFT is is a token that represents ownership, like if the title to your car or house deed was on a blockchain. No. An NFT is just a few bytes of text pinned to a blockchain. They are essentially useless, and every useful property of an NFT can be achieved using asymmetric encryption or digital signatures, the blockchain component is just wasteful hype.

CryptoPunk 5y ago
If an external source - say the Twitter account of an artist - can authenticate that the holder of the NFT is who the creator of the art work wants to be recognized as the owner, then social consensus will lead to widespread value assignment to that NFT. The ability to hold and trade the NFT on the public blockchain makes that asset accessible to a large number of autonomous on-chain markets, like dApps which allow a person to take out self-executing loans that use the NFT as collateral.
- acdha 5y ago
  > If an external source - say the Twitter account of an artist - can authenticate that the holder of the NFT is who the creator of the art work wants to be recognized as the owner, then social consensus will lead to widespread value assignment to that NFT. In other words, you don't need the blockchain because the actual value comes from a different system. The only thing it's adding is overhead and unreliability.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    The second paragraph explains the utility of issuing it on the blockchain.
    - acdha 5y ago
      It fails to establish that this is unique to a blockchain: we do, after all, have decades of experience building distributed applications and it’s not like banks haven’t issued loans before and the hypothetical benefits have to be weighed against the added costs of relying a very slow, expensive database with no mechanism to correct bugs or fraud.

KorematsuFredt 5y ago

NFTs don't sell ownership rights. NFTs are equivalent of buying photographs of a celebrity. You may own NFT that represents Taylor Swift, but she aint going on a dinner date with you. Not to mention you are not the only one to hold it either as someone else can Taylor Swift NFT and sell it to. It is exactly same as buying and owning cards of your favourite celebrity. They are worthless even compared to cowdung and have absolutely not practical value. One has to be high on drugs to buy ugly gifs for thousands of dollars.

Jxl180 5y ago
The NFTs that people are making their profile pictures are drastically different from the celebrity and athlete NFTs put out by DraftKings or topshot. The NFTs in profile pics on Twitter (like crypto punks) have randomly generated features making each and every minted nft completely unique. I feel like there are two vastly different audiences with NFTs. The casual, celebrity/athlete NFTs that are selling multiple of some persons face for fiat currency, and parole who are actively participating in minting NFTs with web3 dApps made by developers with roadmaps and a strong community.