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> The venn diagram of NFT haters are almost exact matches of Crypto haters Nonsense. I'm pro-crypto but think NFTs are absolutely idiotic. Scarcity is fundame

> The venn diagram of NFT haters are almost exact matches of Crypto haters Nonsense. I'm pro-crypto but think NFTs are absolutely idiotic. Scarcity is fundamental to any store of value. There are an infinite number of potential NFTs.

omarfarooq 5y ago
> There are an infinite number of potential NFTs. That doesn't mean there is an infinite number of any given collection.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  Any given collection will have all the staying power of a beanie baby. Everyone moves on to the next non-fungible thing.
  - omarfarooq 5y ago
    > will have all the staying power of a beanie baby. You're making a future prediction about an entire category invoking a specific instance from physical collectibles. Have all physical collectibles been subject to the fate of beanie babies?
    - mrosett 5y ago
      Not all, but perhaps all those that appreciated in value so dramatically?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- smt88 5y ago
  > That doesn't mean there is an infinite number of any given collection. For digital collections, there are an infinite number. The only finite thing, in this case, is the NFT. NFTs are not digital representations of art. They don't create scarcity. They're digital trading cards: their scarcity is only relevant and verifiable in and of themselves.
- fortuna86 5y ago
  "Limited edition" Limited to how many we can sell.
spoonjim 5y ago
Interesting. I actually think that scarcity is the only thing that NFTs have. I almost think of them as the purest distillation of scarcity. Everyone knows you can get a perfect copy of a Vermeer done for $10k. Why is the real Vermeer worth more? Because the guy with the real Vermeer knows that while you can have the lighting and you can have the shadows, you can’t have the scarcity. And the concept of an NFT is just the end game of that line of thinking.
- Godel_unicode 5y ago
  Right, because the creator of the NFT totally can't just mint another token right after you buy the first one. Oh wait, just kidding they can. And there's absolutely nothing you can do, because you don't _actually_ own the thing, you just own a trivially replicated pointer to the thing. It's ok though, because at least the original will definitely be the one to be valuable, and not the 42nd, 69th, or 420th. Right? Right??
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    But that’s exactly what the scarcity value of a Vermeer is (which is 99% of the value). People can make infinite numbers of copies. NFTs just kind of lay that bare. It’s almost like the concept itself a performance art. “Can we cleave off the scarcity from the art/history/je ne sais quoi that fuels the hoarding of other scarce artifacts, and just sell that disembodied scarcity in a marketplace?”
    - Godel_unicode 5y ago
      You seem to have missed the fundamental truth that NFTs are not scarce. With the example of a Vermeer, you create one original thing, and then imitations of that thing. Minting multiple NFTs of the same thing is creating more originals, but of the same thing. One is not somehow "more original" than the others. This is a difficult concept for people to get their heads around because of the obvious but incorrect parallel between original art and reproductions. It would be slightly closer to say that an NFT is a photo of a Vermeer. Anyone can make more originals at any time and there's nothing you or anyone can do about it.
taylorfinley 5y ago
The venn diagram of crypto people who think NFTs are absolutely idiotic almost exactly matches the venn diagram of crypto people who haven't really dug in and tried to understand NFTS.
- ryan93 5y ago
  You don’t have to dig in to understand there is a distributed ledger saying you “own” a jpeg
  - taylorfinley 5y ago
    This is exactly the sort of shallow understanding I mean to point at. NFTs are so much more than "owning jpegs." This is the same mistake as saying "owning bitcoin is just owning a cell in a spreadsheet." Can I have the title to your car? After all, it's just a piece of paper. NFTs are access tokens to social communities, where owning a particular token grants you access to a community that shares ownership. Collab.Land is a tool communities use for NFT ownership based roles, revoked upon sale. NFTs are a distributed system of title. I'd be shocked if every concert ticket isn't a form of NFT in ten years--you can transfer them verifiably on the secondary market while giving a royalty to the issuer, use them to access a concert, and keep them as a souvenir like a traditional ticket stub. And yes, some people make profile pics, and generative art projects. You don't have to like or participate in those. But dismissing all NFTs as idiotic is not a position that is going to age well.
    - toomanydoubts 5y ago
      Why would you put a concert ticket on a distributed ledger if there's only a single party who can honor this ticket? There's a company who issued the ticket, and it's the same one that will either let you in or not at the date and time the concert is supposed to happen. Why would they put it in a distributed ledger instead of a database managed by themselves?
      - pinoli 5y ago
shp0ngle 5y ago
> Scarcity is fundamental to any store of value. There are an infinite number of potential altcoins.
- agravier 5y ago
  Same with paintings, etc. So yeah it's a wonky argument because it ignores subjective judgement
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    You can hang a painting on your wall and flaunt it. Nobody looks at the bits on your hard disk.
    - doublerebel 5y ago
      Many NFTs either come with or are designed for a physical representation. 100s or 1000s are already installed and viewable IRL. Being an NFT does not preclude the art from being traditionally enjoyed.
      - stickfigure 5y ago
        Being an NFT does not preclude anyone else from hanging the exact same physical representation on their wall. Exclusivity matters if you want to impress your rich friends.
        doublerebel 5y ago
        That is a circular argument. That is the same argument as print vs original -- NFT owners are paying for the original to support the art regardless of how accurate a print may be. It's much more impressive to those people to have paid to support the original rather than having a knockoff... This has been true as long as goods have been produced.
        5y ago
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
> Scarcity is fundamental to any store of value. There are an infinite number of potential NFTs. I'm a pretty big crypto-skeptic, and I'm especially an NFT skeptic, but this is a weird argument. It's kind of like saying there could be an infinite number of paintings, so why should Picassos be worth very much? Even more, it's possible to create extremely high quality reproductions of famous Picasso paintings, but they would have just a teeny amount of value of the original. Reason being, with very expensive art, and other things like a signed book or baseball card, what you're really paying for is the provenance of the item, not so much the thing itself. While I'm skeptical that the NFT form of "digitally assigned provenance" will be valued similarly, I can understand the argument for why a piece of digital artwork with an associated NFT isn't that different from a piece of physical art with the artist's signature.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  Scarcity is necessary but not sufficient. What sets BTC apart from NTFs is its fungibility. In theory, there are an infinite number of potential cryptocurrencies, sure. But everyone has already embraced bitcoin (and a small handful of others), and replacing that userbase is an incredibly tall hurdle. On the other hand, minting a new beanie-baby-NFT takes less effort than making an actual beanie baby.
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    I think you're missing the purpose of NFTs. Again, I think the best analogy is really the art market. Most art in the art market is pretty worthless (at least monetarily) - just go to one of a bajillion garage sales to see why. But a few pieces of art will be worth a lot because something about them is desirable. It's the same with NFTs. There will be a bajillion "beanie-baby-NFTs" that will be close to worthless. And then there will be a few of the "Charlie Bit My Finger" variety that people actually have desire to uniquely "own".
    - stickfigure 5y ago
      The difference is that you can hang art on your wall and say "that's an original" when your other rich friends come to visit. "I control some arbitrary bits on an arbitrary blockchain" will never have the same cachet.
nootropicat 5y ago
Store of value requires being backed by something, scarcity alone is irrelevant. Nfts satisfy the same ponzi urge as memecoins (bitcoin, doge, etc) but also work as visible status symbols - expensive nft can be used as a profile picture, which is why they're taking over.
arthurcolle 5y ago
Yeah, agreed. Seems like someone is interested in painting a picture, despite any threats to their potentially incomplete image of reality
rattlesnakedave 5y ago
I’m also pro crypto, and this is a silly argument. Consider this statement: Scarcity is fundamental to any store of value. There are an infinite number of potential cryptocurrencies.
- fortuna86 5y ago
  > There are an infinite number of potential cryptocurrencies Which is why alt coins are our generation's version of penny stocks. But specific coins have scarcity built in.
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    And certain NFTs also have scarcity built in. Both NFTs and crypto coins can choose the level of scarcity they want, and all of the value for that scarcity is determined by whatever people believe it to be. NFTs are the exact same thing as crypto coins.
    - fortuna86 5y ago
      > And certain NFTs also have scarcity built in. Right, the "limited edition" sales ploy (limited to how many they can sell). Because they can also mint a "new collection".
- stickfigure 5y ago
  There are only a few cryptocurrencies that have any significant adoption, and fungibility is fundamental to that value. If I exchange a bitcoin for $N, that validates the value of all the other bitcoins. And folks exchange large numbers of bitcoins for $N every day. By definition, every non-fungible token is its own unique snowflake. There are new snowflakes made every day. Few ever trade, and the ones that do are probably wash trades.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Yeah come on it should be pretty simple to explain why Bitcoin has value. It's because there is demand for it, for whatever reason. A "scarcity theory of value" feels like someone hamfisted the labor theory of value into the cryptocurrency space. No, even if labor is scarce and precious then making beanie babies for which there is basically zero demand (I assume) is still producing no value. I'd say most of the value of Bitcoin comes from the ability to do payments that are not possible in the current legal system. Some of them may be illegal. Some of them might be genuinely useful like in El Salvador.
danShumway 5y ago
I think there's a big overlap -- if you're a crypto skeptic, you are almost certainly going to be an NFT skeptic as well. But the reverse is not necessarily true. NFTs are just fundamentally a lot worse than cryptocurrencies. They have every problem that cryptocurrencies have, except they're also not scarce, require centralized verification mechanisms, have bad incentive structures around hoarding, are prone to link rot, etc, etc, etc... NFTs are much harder to justify than cryptocurrencies are. They're all of the drawbacks with virtually none of the upsides. I don't know anyone who likes NFTs but dislikes cryptocurrency.
- baby 5y ago
  It doesn’t make sense to say that an NFT is not scarce. Every NFT is unique by design.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    Most NFTs are just links to a publicly hosted asset. They're not meaningfully unique in any of the ways that matter. Sure, technically you're making a new NFT when the same creator mints an NFT that points to the same work as before. But also technically you're making a new dollar with a new serial label when the government prints money, and we don't call paper money "non-fungible". It's not a kind of uniqueness that matters to anyone.
    - baby 5y ago
      > Most NFTs are just links to a publicly hosted asset That's metadata, to display or use it in dapps, this is not how you uniquely identify an NFT. The metadata is optional.
      - danShumway 5y ago
        > The metadata is optional For the vast majority of people hyping NFTs, the metadata is the only part they care about. The metadata is the part that links the NFT to an actual piece of artwork -- the issuer and the work that it's linked to are the only reasons why some tokens are worth more to collectors than others. Without the context of the person who issued it and the work that the token is being paired with, you're just trading numbers around and assigning completely arbitrary values to them. Which to be fair is a common criticism of NFTs. It's just weird to hear an advocate lean into that argument themselves, normally advocates are trying to convince me that NFTs mean something.
paxys 5y ago
As with any other kind of collectable, scarcity is created artificially. There is a potentially unlimited number of baseball cards. I can print one for myself today. Yet it is the authenticated 1933 Goudey #53 which is worth $4.2 million. NFTs provide this authenticity.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Except that they don't, and still rely on experts to give any kind of authenticity. NFTs are like the serial numbers on dollar bills - if the dollar is genuine, then that serial number is unique, but the serial number itself doesn't prove that the dollar is genuine.
neonbones 5y ago
I like to think about NFT as an easy method of buying art from artists. There are many platforms for this with classical purchase mechanics, but as an artist myself, I love the idea of an auction-based platform for this era of digital art. Right now, there are no mechanism for extraordinary digital artists to make their art expensive like IRL art. The best thing is you can do commissions for people, but it's hard for them to maintain their rights (both for artist and customer). Maybe NFT will be more prominent with some "data registry" between platforms to make it global to check your rights on items, and great artists can sell their art for a more reasonable price. For now, IRL art is like a "club for friends," and digital artists are not taken as seriously as they, even when digital one draw some almost masterpieces and spent 3-6 months on every item.
- kevingadd 5y ago
  It doesn't seem very easy right now, it's complex and expensive for the seller and/or buyer compared to existing services for commissioning art
- ryan_lane 5y ago
  But you don't own the art. You own the receipt for the purchase of a hash of the specific digital format the art is stored in. Note that there are definitely currently ways for digital artists to make expensive art, and that's in the form of commissions. If you really want to support an artist, find one you really like, and pay for a commission from them. You may also be able to pay more for forms of copyright (like reproduction). NFTs are the worst possible way for artists to make money from digital art.
  - miracle2k 5y ago
    Many artists do not want to do commissions. In fact, you could argue that people who want commissions are very selfish. Not only do they want to force artists to work on their thing, often driven by vanity, they even want to own the copyrights to the work! NFT buyers are clearly more respectful of an artists craft: They buy the work the artist really wanted to create, and they respect the fact that they cannot be the owner of the work in a moral sense.
jollybean 5y ago
"There are an infinite number of potential NFTs. " There are an infinite number of made up currencies as well. Because neither of them function as a currency then they are the same thing, the difference being, with NFT's you own some 'art' or something like that, with Crypto you own a 'number'. The 'potential usefulness' of Crypto makes it feel like it has more material merit, but in practice, they're not useful (not yet), so they might as well be NFTs. There are no Crypto models today that make sense in any real systematic way, other than some governments reasonable attempts to be more digital, which comes wit a bunch of scary caveats as well. Currency is a form of social credit that is fundamentally tied to the economy in which it is used as a means of transaction, there is no escaping that reality. We can't just magically make up some thing that is independent of that underlying reality. If we could merely overcome the kludigness of banks, and the transnational cost of VISA - and make something a little more easily internationalized ... those things would help, but those probably are going to have to be a function of 'good governance'. Maybe the experiments in New Zealand and Sweden etc. will pay off if they can find something that works, that can be expanded upon.
imgabe 5y ago
There’s an infinite number of potential paintings too. I don’t see what that has to do with the value of any one particular painting. There’s not an infinite number of the one original Mona Lisa.
- larsiusprime 5y ago
  If the original Mona Lisa had been done in photoshop there could be infinitely many indistinguishable copies of the “original” MonaLisa.psd
  - imgabe 5y ago
    The NFT solves exactly this. There cannot be infinitely many copies of an NFT. The fact that there can be infinitely many other, different NFTs is irrelevant.
deleted 5y ago
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nsonha 5y ago
there are also people who think the "art" is full of shit. So art + bs tech is doubly so.
GVRV 5y ago
I'm pro-crypto, pro-NFTs, just not pro the current popular use trend of NFTs. I'm sure we'll see much more interesting use cases for NFTs emerge over time, and I'm excited about that.
- dmarcos 5y ago
  There are some aspects of the pfp trend that I also don’t like. On the other hand, it’s helping to onboard (wallet, security, metamask…) more people into crypto than any other use case before. Many ready to go beyond collectables.
deleted 5y ago
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tapas73 5y ago
wow. only after reading 10s of comments did I understood that crypto-hater and pro crypto refer not to cryptography but to blockchain and friends.

omarfarooq 5y ago

> There are an infinite number of potential NFTs. That doesn't mean there is an infinite number of any given collection.

stickfigure 5y ago
Any given collection will have all the staying power of a beanie baby. Everyone moves on to the next non-fungible thing.
- omarfarooq 5y ago
  > will have all the staying power of a beanie baby. You're making a future prediction about an entire category invoking a specific instance from physical collectibles. Have all physical collectibles been subject to the fate of beanie babies?
  - mrosett 5y ago
    Not all, but perhaps all those that appreciated in value so dramatically?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
smt88 5y ago
> That doesn't mean there is an infinite number of any given collection. For digital collections, there are an infinite number. The only finite thing, in this case, is the NFT. NFTs are not digital representations of art. They don't create scarcity. They're digital trading cards: their scarcity is only relevant and verifiable in and of themselves.
fortuna86 5y ago
"Limited edition" Limited to how many we can sell.

spoonjim 5y ago

Interesting. I actually think that scarcity is the only thing that NFTs have. I almost think of them as the purest distillation of scarcity. Everyone knows you can get a perfect copy of a Vermeer done for $10k. Why is the real Vermeer worth more? Because the guy with the real Vermeer knows that while you can have the lighting and you can have the shadows, you can’t have the scarcity. And the concept of an NFT is just the end game of that line of thinking.

Godel_unicode 5y ago
Right, because the creator of the NFT totally can't just mint another token right after you buy the first one. Oh wait, just kidding they can. And there's absolutely nothing you can do, because you don't _actually_ own the thing, you just own a trivially replicated pointer to the thing. It's ok though, because at least the original will definitely be the one to be valuable, and not the 42nd, 69th, or 420th. Right? Right??
- spoonjim 5y ago
  But that’s exactly what the scarcity value of a Vermeer is (which is 99% of the value). People can make infinite numbers of copies. NFTs just kind of lay that bare. It’s almost like the concept itself a performance art. “Can we cleave off the scarcity from the art/history/je ne sais quoi that fuels the hoarding of other scarce artifacts, and just sell that disembodied scarcity in a marketplace?”
  - Godel_unicode 5y ago
    You seem to have missed the fundamental truth that NFTs are not scarce. With the example of a Vermeer, you create one original thing, and then imitations of that thing. Minting multiple NFTs of the same thing is creating more originals, but of the same thing. One is not somehow "more original" than the others. This is a difficult concept for people to get their heads around because of the obvious but incorrect parallel between original art and reproductions. It would be slightly closer to say that an NFT is a photo of a Vermeer. Anyone can make more originals at any time and there's nothing you or anyone can do about it.

taylorfinley 5y ago

The venn diagram of crypto people who think NFTs are absolutely idiotic almost exactly matches the venn diagram of crypto people who haven't really dug in and tried to understand NFTS.

ryan93 5y ago
You don’t have to dig in to understand there is a distributed ledger saying you “own” a jpeg
- taylorfinley 5y ago
  This is exactly the sort of shallow understanding I mean to point at. NFTs are so much more than "owning jpegs." This is the same mistake as saying "owning bitcoin is just owning a cell in a spreadsheet." Can I have the title to your car? After all, it's just a piece of paper. NFTs are access tokens to social communities, where owning a particular token grants you access to a community that shares ownership. Collab.Land is a tool communities use for NFT ownership based roles, revoked upon sale. NFTs are a distributed system of title. I'd be shocked if every concert ticket isn't a form of NFT in ten years--you can transfer them verifiably on the secondary market while giving a royalty to the issuer, use them to access a concert, and keep them as a souvenir like a traditional ticket stub. And yes, some people make profile pics, and generative art projects. You don't have to like or participate in those. But dismissing all NFTs as idiotic is not a position that is going to age well.
  - toomanydoubts 5y ago
    Why would you put a concert ticket on a distributed ledger if there's only a single party who can honor this ticket? There's a company who issued the ticket, and it's the same one that will either let you in or not at the date and time the concert is supposed to happen. Why would they put it in a distributed ledger instead of a database managed by themselves?
    - pinoli 5y ago

shp0ngle 5y ago

> Scarcity is fundamental to any store of value. There are an infinite number of potential altcoins.

agravier 5y ago
Same with paintings, etc. So yeah it's a wonky argument because it ignores subjective judgement
- stickfigure 5y ago
  You can hang a painting on your wall and flaunt it. Nobody looks at the bits on your hard disk.
  - doublerebel 5y ago
    Many NFTs either come with or are designed for a physical representation. 100s or 1000s are already installed and viewable IRL. Being an NFT does not preclude the art from being traditionally enjoyed.
    - stickfigure 5y ago
      Being an NFT does not preclude anyone else from hanging the exact same physical representation on their wall. Exclusivity matters if you want to impress your rich friends.
      - doublerebel 5y ago
        That is a circular argument. That is the same argument as print vs original -- NFT owners are paying for the original to support the art regardless of how accurate a print may be. It's much more impressive to those people to have paid to support the original rather than having a knockoff... This has been true as long as goods have been produced.
        5y ago

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

> Scarcity is fundamental to any store of value. There are an infinite number of potential NFTs. I'm a pretty big crypto-skeptic, and I'm especially an NFT skeptic, but this is a weird argument. It's kind of like saying there could be an infinite number of paintings, so why should Picassos be worth very much? Even more, it's possible to create extremely high quality reproductions of famous Picasso paintings, but they would have just a teeny amount of value of the original. Reason being, with very expensive art, and other things like a signed book or baseball card, what you're really paying for is the provenance of the item, not so much the thing itself. While I'm skeptical that the NFT form of "digitally assigned provenance" will be valued similarly, I can understand the argument for why a piece of digital artwork with an associated NFT isn't that different from a piece of physical art with the artist's signature.

stickfigure 5y ago
Scarcity is necessary but not sufficient. What sets BTC apart from NTFs is its fungibility. In theory, there are an infinite number of potential cryptocurrencies, sure. But everyone has already embraced bitcoin (and a small handful of others), and replacing that userbase is an incredibly tall hurdle. On the other hand, minting a new beanie-baby-NFT takes less effort than making an actual beanie baby.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  I think you're missing the purpose of NFTs. Again, I think the best analogy is really the art market. Most art in the art market is pretty worthless (at least monetarily) - just go to one of a bajillion garage sales to see why. But a few pieces of art will be worth a lot because something about them is desirable. It's the same with NFTs. There will be a bajillion "beanie-baby-NFTs" that will be close to worthless. And then there will be a few of the "Charlie Bit My Finger" variety that people actually have desire to uniquely "own".
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    The difference is that you can hang art on your wall and say "that's an original" when your other rich friends come to visit. "I control some arbitrary bits on an arbitrary blockchain" will never have the same cachet.

nootropicat 5y ago

Store of value requires being backed by something, scarcity alone is irrelevant. Nfts satisfy the same ponzi urge as memecoins (bitcoin, doge, etc) but also work as visible status symbols - expensive nft can be used as a profile picture, which is why they're taking over.

arthurcolle 5y ago

Yeah, agreed. Seems like someone is interested in painting a picture, despite any threats to their potentially incomplete image of reality

rattlesnakedave 5y ago

I’m also pro crypto, and this is a silly argument. Consider this statement: Scarcity is fundamental to any store of value. There are an infinite number of potential cryptocurrencies.

fortuna86 5y ago
> There are an infinite number of potential cryptocurrencies Which is why alt coins are our generation's version of penny stocks. But specific coins have scarcity built in.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  And certain NFTs also have scarcity built in. Both NFTs and crypto coins can choose the level of scarcity they want, and all of the value for that scarcity is determined by whatever people believe it to be. NFTs are the exact same thing as crypto coins.
  - fortuna86 5y ago
    > And certain NFTs also have scarcity built in. Right, the "limited edition" sales ploy (limited to how many they can sell). Because they can also mint a "new collection".
stickfigure 5y ago
There are only a few cryptocurrencies that have any significant adoption, and fungibility is fundamental to that value. If I exchange a bitcoin for $N, that validates the value of all the other bitcoins. And folks exchange large numbers of bitcoins for $N every day. By definition, every non-fungible token is its own unique snowflake. There are new snowflakes made every day. Few ever trade, and the ones that do are probably wash trades.
imtringued 5y ago
Yeah come on it should be pretty simple to explain why Bitcoin has value. It's because there is demand for it, for whatever reason. A "scarcity theory of value" feels like someone hamfisted the labor theory of value into the cryptocurrency space. No, even if labor is scarce and precious then making beanie babies for which there is basically zero demand (I assume) is still producing no value. I'd say most of the value of Bitcoin comes from the ability to do payments that are not possible in the current legal system. Some of them may be illegal. Some of them might be genuinely useful like in El Salvador.

danShumway 5y ago

I think there's a big overlap -- if you're a crypto skeptic, you are almost certainly going to be an NFT skeptic as well. But the reverse is not necessarily true. NFTs are just fundamentally a lot worse than cryptocurrencies. They have every problem that cryptocurrencies have, except they're also not scarce, require centralized verification mechanisms, have bad incentive structures around hoarding, are prone to link rot, etc, etc, etc... NFTs are much harder to justify than cryptocurrencies are. They're all of the drawbacks with virtually none of the upsides. I don't know anyone who likes NFTs but dislikes cryptocurrency.

baby 5y ago
It doesn’t make sense to say that an NFT is not scarce. Every NFT is unique by design.
- danShumway 5y ago
  Most NFTs are just links to a publicly hosted asset. They're not meaningfully unique in any of the ways that matter. Sure, technically you're making a new NFT when the same creator mints an NFT that points to the same work as before. But also technically you're making a new dollar with a new serial label when the government prints money, and we don't call paper money "non-fungible". It's not a kind of uniqueness that matters to anyone.
  - baby 5y ago
    > Most NFTs are just links to a publicly hosted asset That's metadata, to display or use it in dapps, this is not how you uniquely identify an NFT. The metadata is optional.
    - danShumway 5y ago
      > The metadata is optional For the vast majority of people hyping NFTs, the metadata is the only part they care about. The metadata is the part that links the NFT to an actual piece of artwork -- the issuer and the work that it's linked to are the only reasons why some tokens are worth more to collectors than others. Without the context of the person who issued it and the work that the token is being paired with, you're just trading numbers around and assigning completely arbitrary values to them. Which to be fair is a common criticism of NFTs. It's just weird to hear an advocate lean into that argument themselves, normally advocates are trying to convince me that NFTs mean something.

paxys 5y ago

As with any other kind of collectable, scarcity is created artificially. There is a potentially unlimited number of baseball cards. I can print one for myself today. Yet it is the authenticated 1933 Goudey #53 which is worth $4.2 million. NFTs provide this authenticity.

tsimionescu 5y ago
Except that they don't, and still rely on experts to give any kind of authenticity. NFTs are like the serial numbers on dollar bills - if the dollar is genuine, then that serial number is unique, but the serial number itself doesn't prove that the dollar is genuine.

neonbones 5y ago

I like to think about NFT as an easy method of buying art from artists. There are many platforms for this with classical purchase mechanics, but as an artist myself, I love the idea of an auction-based platform for this era of digital art. Right now, there are no mechanism for extraordinary digital artists to make their art expensive like IRL art. The best thing is you can do commissions for people, but it's hard for them to maintain their rights (both for artist and customer). Maybe NFT will be more prominent with some "data registry" between platforms to make it global to check your rights on items, and great artists can sell their art for a more reasonable price. For now, IRL art is like a "club for friends," and digital artists are not taken as seriously as they, even when digital one draw some almost masterpieces and spent 3-6 months on every item.

kevingadd 5y ago
It doesn't seem very easy right now, it's complex and expensive for the seller and/or buyer compared to existing services for commissioning art
ryan_lane 5y ago
But you don't own the art. You own the receipt for the purchase of a hash of the specific digital format the art is stored in. Note that there are definitely currently ways for digital artists to make expensive art, and that's in the form of commissions. If you really want to support an artist, find one you really like, and pay for a commission from them. You may also be able to pay more for forms of copyright (like reproduction). NFTs are the worst possible way for artists to make money from digital art.
- miracle2k 5y ago
  Many artists do not want to do commissions. In fact, you could argue that people who want commissions are very selfish. Not only do they want to force artists to work on their thing, often driven by vanity, they even want to own the copyrights to the work! NFT buyers are clearly more respectful of an artists craft: They buy the work the artist really wanted to create, and they respect the fact that they cannot be the owner of the work in a moral sense.

jollybean 5y ago

"There are an infinite number of potential NFTs. " There are an infinite number of made up currencies as well. Because neither of them function as a currency then they are the same thing, the difference being, with NFT's you own some 'art' or something like that, with Crypto you own a 'number'. The 'potential usefulness' of Crypto makes it feel like it has more material merit, but in practice, they're not useful (not yet), so they might as well be NFTs. There are no Crypto models today that make sense in any real systematic way, other than some governments reasonable attempts to be more digital, which comes wit a bunch of scary caveats as well. Currency is a form of social credit that is fundamentally tied to the economy in which it is used as a means of transaction, there is no escaping that reality. We can't just magically make up some thing that is independent of that underlying reality. If we could merely overcome the kludigness of banks, and the transnational cost of VISA - and make something a little more easily internationalized ... those things would help, but those probably are going to have to be a function of 'good governance'. Maybe the experiments in New Zealand and Sweden etc. will pay off if they can find something that works, that can be expanded upon.

imgabe 5y ago

There’s an infinite number of potential paintings too. I don’t see what that has to do with the value of any one particular painting. There’s not an infinite number of the one original Mona Lisa.

larsiusprime 5y ago
If the original Mona Lisa had been done in photoshop there could be infinitely many indistinguishable copies of the “original” MonaLisa.psd
- imgabe 5y ago
  The NFT solves exactly this. There cannot be infinitely many copies of an NFT. The fact that there can be infinitely many other, different NFTs is irrelevant.

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nsonha 5y ago

there are also people who think the "art" is full of shit. So art + bs tech is doubly so.

GVRV 5y ago

I'm pro-crypto, pro-NFTs, just not pro the current popular use trend of NFTs. I'm sure we'll see much more interesting use cases for NFTs emerge over time, and I'm excited about that.

dmarcos 5y ago
There are some aspects of the pfp trend that I also don’t like. On the other hand, it’s helping to onboard (wallet, security, metamask…) more people into crypto than any other use case before. Many ready to go beyond collectables.

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tapas73 5y ago

wow. only after reading 10s of comments did I understood that crypto-hater and pro crypto refer not to cryptography but to blockchain and friends.