9 ms·

NFTs are not like baseball cards. NFTs are a JSON string on a proprietary entity that point to the image of a baseball card. The image can be viewed by everyon

by WA 5y ago

NFTs are not like baseball cards. NFTs are a JSON string on a proprietary entity that point to the image of a baseball card. The image can be viewed by everyone. The bragging rights of owning a JSON string depend heavily on whether or not the proprietary entity will become the dominant player in the I own a JSON string-world. This also has zero to do with blockchains. The proprietary entity could've used any database they wanted. It's all a ridiculous scam, but have fun trading JSON strings.

eoo 5y ago
An NFT is a virtual title of ownership on a blockchain, that's it. You don't own neither a string or an image or a JSON. https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721 https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721
- techdragon 5y ago
  It’s a very expensive, publicly broadcasted and “socially agreed upon” (by everyone who thinks they are worth money) version of calling “dibs”.
- imtringued 5y ago
  It's actually simpler than that. It's just an entry in a database with your name attached to it. It's like an autograph. Why do database entries have value? Well, usually because there are processes attached to them. Often it is as simple as having a court enforce the process. I don't know why but the whole cryptocurrency space feels like a philosophical parody of the real world. Money without people. Contracts without enforcement. Ownership without property.
  - ThomPete 5y ago
    thats too simple, its more than that given some people attach varying value to it.
  - tnzm 5y ago
    >I don't know why but the whole cryptocurrency space feels like a philosophical parody of the real world. Money without people. Contracts without enforcement. Ownership without property. The common denominator between these being: process without purpose. And this is why the parody works so well. The world is already like you describe, though it's hard to notice if you view it through the rose-tinted glasses that the ever-shrinking in-group is more than happy to sell to you for good "old" fiat money. (If 50 years ago is old.) Neoliberal "infinite growth" capitalism is already an inter-generational MLM, sanctioned by a global monopoly on violent enforcement. All power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and we have all become so delightfully non-violent... The logical conclusion: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia locked in perpetual war upon the background of a collapsed ecosystem? Well, fuck that. Techno-capitalistic nation-states are an early-stage performance optimization. And since violent uprisings lead nowhere, we're doing the sane thing. We're refactoring 'em the fuck out of existence. If "having a court enforce [a] process" is "simple", how come so many people already have "avoid courts", "distrust lawyers" as rules of thumb, and "don't side with authority" as a general life principle? For the marginalized majority, every state is a failed state, and every system is hostile and oppressive. The thing everyone's getting out of crypto is the same thing they've been getting out of all the other silly pyramid schemes, from Tupperware to contraband. Which is to say, the same things they've been aggressively denied by the state-sanctioned economic mainstream. Hope. Opportunity. A voice. A functioning parody of existing economical processes gives people the hope that there's a better economic system right around the corner. Maybe we just have to collectively sort of stumble into it. Of course, it's only that simple if you have a simplified view of human creativity. But that's OK, too. Every invention that truly revolutionized our way of life was a somewhat accidental result of thousands upon thousands person-hours of organized research. And that's exactly what we're doing here - about as haphazardly as virtually any other kind of software development, but at the same time crowdfunded on a global scale. Today, we're offering people the same sort of economic "junk food" that the current system has gotten them addicted to for the better part of the 20th century. Tomorrow, someone finally sneaks distributed consensus technology into the mainstream, and makes the world a little less corrupt. It's beautiful.
  - cle 5y ago
    They have value because people agree they have value. Trusted third parties (like courts) help people come to that agreement, by providing transparent, objective processes to settle legitimacy and ownership disputes (in the happy case, in the not-happy case they use physical force to reach agreement). Personally I don't understand the controversy, blockchains are a different kind of trusted third party that also help people come to agreements, by also providing "transparent, objective processes to settle legitimacy and ownership disputes". These third parties aren't mutually exclusive, and the role of blockchains/NFTs aren't fundamentally different, they just use novel means to help people come to agreements, within the same social constructs we've always had.
    - ARandumGuy 5y ago
      The problem with using NFTs to verify ownership is that they actually make it much harder to resolve any disputes. An NFT can't be transferred or modified without explicit permission from the owner of the NFT, which means that any dispute is impossible to resolve without bypassing the NFTs entirely. For example, let's say you have an NFT that represents something tangible (and not just some link to an image download). What happens if the owner of the NFT dies without setting up a way to transfer their NTSs? What if multiple, seemingly valid NFTs point to the same object? What if the NFT was never truly valid in the first place? What if an NFT is stolen? In all of these situations, a third party (like a court) would have no actual power to fix anything within the NFT space. A hard fork is theoretically possible, but that becomes impractical to do every time someone has an NFT dispute. The only option is to just declare an NFT invalid. But if you have some third party that controls the validity of NFTs, then you might as well cut out the NFTs and just rely on the third party.
      - cle 5y ago
        I think you're misunderstanding my stance here, I'm not arguing that NFTs are always better than other trusted third parties. I don't know enough about their details to make a claim like that. In the terms of what you're saying, I'm arguing that the space of scenarios in which people can't come to an agreement is different for NFTs vs. legal systems, because NFTs provide some self-service mechanisms for proving ownership and legitimacy. I'm sure those come with tradeoffs, as you've mentioned. I'm not in a position to weigh those tradeoffs yet, nor claim that one is always better than the other. I think it's too early for that. More concretely, courts, NFTs, et al are tools for reaching agreements. There's no reason to dogmatically cling to "on-chain" if it's not helping reach an agreement, and there's no inherent reason things can't be mixed between on-chain and off-chain, just as agreements can be made in court vs. out-of-court.
highfrequency 5y ago
Surely the baseball card’s value does not come from the fact that you can hold a piece of cardboard in your hand. Whether the data representation is a piece of cardboard or a JSON string replicated on 10,000 Ethereum nodes or a tulip or a Venmo balance is arbitrary; it just matters whether a lot of humans are looking at the same thing. And for the time being, a lot of humans are looking at crypto ledgers!
- rewma 5y ago
  > Whether the data representation is a piece of cardboard or a JSON string replicated on 10,000 Ethereum nodes or a tulip or a Venmo balance is arbitrary; it just matters whether a lot of humans are looking at the same thing. And for the time being, a lot of humans are looking at crypto ledgers! But are they really? I mean, are there that many humans waiting in line to have a JSON pointing to a tweet? There were a few reports of NFTs going on the market for thousands of dollars, but at least the ones I'm aware of sounded an awful lot like people buying their own NFTs and leaving that out from the report.
  - saurik 5y ago
    FWIW, I am personally shocked that anyone wants to buy small pieces of cardboard with photos of baseball players on them at all, much less for any appreciable amount of money just because one happens to be "rare" (whatever the hell that means, as clearly anyone with a printer and some cardboard can make their own)... that doesn't mean that someone else is valuing them for some reason, and they clearly do; that most small pieces of cardboard with pictures on them aren't valuable is kind of irrelevant to the idea that some are.
    - rewma 5y ago
      > FWIW, I am personally shocked that anyone wants to buy small pieces of cardboard (...) I fail to see the relevance of your personal preferences to the discussion, as my point was that the cases I'm aware of sound an awful lot like shills trying to inflate the value of something with no market value whatsoever. As a concrete example, there was a HN discussion a couple of months ago on how a kid reported a couple thousands of dollars worth of sales from NFTs, but it all sounded like a mix of straight up fraud and money laundering. A few comments in the discussion point out that the kid's father works in finance and it sounds he is trying to case in on the NFT trend. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28326220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28326220
PeterisP 5y ago
" The bragging rights of owning a JSON string depend heavily on whether or not the proprietary entity will become the dominant player in the I own a JSON string-world." -> as the parent post explains, this particular aspect is exactly like baseball cards; where technically anyone could print other Barry Bonds cards but your bragging rights of owning a rare baseball card depend heavily on whether or not the proprietary entity printing those particular cards will be the dominant player in the baseball card world.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
nftcomplainer 5y ago
I’ll be honest. I’ve only ever dabbled in crypto to buy things off a certain infamous marketplace a few years ago and have avoided them since. Hearing NFTs described this way really just makes them sound like fairly transparent money laundering.
ThomPete 5y ago
No thats confusing one possible technical implementation with the concept, there are other ways to solve that. Thats like saying a Picasso painting is just a specific canvas with som paint on.
mcintyre1994 5y ago
Can you give an example of the proprietary entity you're referring to? I was curious so I took a short course that covered minting NFTs with Solidity, and the way it seemed to work is that the JSON strings (which contain the base64 encoded image) are stored (as an ERC-721 token) on the Ethereum blockchain. Eg. you can see a random such token here: https://rinkeby.etherscan.io/token/0x6b96751051cd25c29cdcea79c3625e749b0ed7f7 https://rinkeby.etherscan.io/token/0x6b96751051cd25c29cdcea7... The only proprietary entity involved in that process seems to be Alchemy. My understanding of them is a bit vague but they seem to just help with making miners aware of the new contract and getting it distributed. But that's just the contract, once it's deployed it's nothing to do with them and the NFTs AFAIK don't pass through them at all.
- dkersten 5y ago
  Maybe a stupid question, but where do I find the base64 encoded image in your linked token? The only thing I can see is a transaction moving it from one address to another, the contract bytecode (which I guess might encode an image but its definitely not obvious[1]) and the "extra data" hex in the transaction (that doesn't appear to be an encoded image either, from what I can tell). I'm probably missing something, so if you could let me know where to look, that'd be nice! [1] I decompiled it here: https://rinkeby.etherscan.io/bytecode-decompiler?a=0x6b96751051cd25c29cdcea79c3625e749b0ed7f7 https://rinkeby.etherscan.io/bytecode-decompiler?a=0x6b96751...
  - mcintyre1994 5y ago
    I'm not sure about that either TBH! If you copy the to address (0x22f542cd394fba213df8d1f6c46f454b74e05503) and paste it into testnets.opensea.io then you can see the collection here: https://testnets.opensea.io/0x22f542cd394fba213df8d1f6c46f454b74e05503 https://testnets.opensea.io/0x22f542cd394fba213df8d1f6c46f45... The contract has no mention of opensea, so they must be reading it from the blockchain somehow - but I guess etherscan doesn't display these tokens in a similar way for some reason. It's all pretty new to me and I definitely don't have a super joined up understanding of it all!
    - 5y ago
baby 5y ago
You are wrong. The JSON data is metadata and is optional. Also, you’re still not refuting GP’s explanation. If you can understand why people buy baseball cards, you can understand NFTs

by WA 5y ago

eoo 5y ago

An NFT is a virtual title of ownership on a blockchain, that's it. You don't own neither a string or an image or a JSON. https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721 https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721

techdragon 5y ago
It’s a very expensive, publicly broadcasted and “socially agreed upon” (by everyone who thinks they are worth money) version of calling “dibs”.
imtringued 5y ago
It's actually simpler than that. It's just an entry in a database with your name attached to it. It's like an autograph. Why do database entries have value? Well, usually because there are processes attached to them. Often it is as simple as having a court enforce the process. I don't know why but the whole cryptocurrency space feels like a philosophical parody of the real world. Money without people. Contracts without enforcement. Ownership without property.
- ThomPete 5y ago
  thats too simple, its more than that given some people attach varying value to it.
- tnzm 5y ago
  >I don't know why but the whole cryptocurrency space feels like a philosophical parody of the real world. Money without people. Contracts without enforcement. Ownership without property. The common denominator between these being: process without purpose. And this is why the parody works so well. The world is already like you describe, though it's hard to notice if you view it through the rose-tinted glasses that the ever-shrinking in-group is more than happy to sell to you for good "old" fiat money. (If 50 years ago is old.) Neoliberal "infinite growth" capitalism is already an inter-generational MLM, sanctioned by a global monopoly on violent enforcement. All power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and we have all become so delightfully non-violent... The logical conclusion: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia locked in perpetual war upon the background of a collapsed ecosystem? Well, fuck that. Techno-capitalistic nation-states are an early-stage performance optimization. And since violent uprisings lead nowhere, we're doing the sane thing. We're refactoring 'em the fuck out of existence. If "having a court enforce [a] process" is "simple", how come so many people already have "avoid courts", "distrust lawyers" as rules of thumb, and "don't side with authority" as a general life principle? For the marginalized majority, every state is a failed state, and every system is hostile and oppressive. The thing everyone's getting out of crypto is the same thing they've been getting out of all the other silly pyramid schemes, from Tupperware to contraband. Which is to say, the same things they've been aggressively denied by the state-sanctioned economic mainstream. Hope. Opportunity. A voice. A functioning parody of existing economical processes gives people the hope that there's a better economic system right around the corner. Maybe we just have to collectively sort of stumble into it. Of course, it's only that simple if you have a simplified view of human creativity. But that's OK, too. Every invention that truly revolutionized our way of life was a somewhat accidental result of thousands upon thousands person-hours of organized research. And that's exactly what we're doing here - about as haphazardly as virtually any other kind of software development, but at the same time crowdfunded on a global scale. Today, we're offering people the same sort of economic "junk food" that the current system has gotten them addicted to for the better part of the 20th century. Tomorrow, someone finally sneaks distributed consensus technology into the mainstream, and makes the world a little less corrupt. It's beautiful.
- cle 5y ago
  They have value because people agree they have value. Trusted third parties (like courts) help people come to that agreement, by providing transparent, objective processes to settle legitimacy and ownership disputes (in the happy case, in the not-happy case they use physical force to reach agreement). Personally I don't understand the controversy, blockchains are a different kind of trusted third party that also help people come to agreements, by also providing "transparent, objective processes to settle legitimacy and ownership disputes". These third parties aren't mutually exclusive, and the role of blockchains/NFTs aren't fundamentally different, they just use novel means to help people come to agreements, within the same social constructs we've always had.
  - ARandumGuy 5y ago
    The problem with using NFTs to verify ownership is that they actually make it much harder to resolve any disputes. An NFT can't be transferred or modified without explicit permission from the owner of the NFT, which means that any dispute is impossible to resolve without bypassing the NFTs entirely. For example, let's say you have an NFT that represents something tangible (and not just some link to an image download). What happens if the owner of the NFT dies without setting up a way to transfer their NTSs? What if multiple, seemingly valid NFTs point to the same object? What if the NFT was never truly valid in the first place? What if an NFT is stolen? In all of these situations, a third party (like a court) would have no actual power to fix anything within the NFT space. A hard fork is theoretically possible, but that becomes impractical to do every time someone has an NFT dispute. The only option is to just declare an NFT invalid. But if you have some third party that controls the validity of NFTs, then you might as well cut out the NFTs and just rely on the third party.
    - cle 5y ago
      I think you're misunderstanding my stance here, I'm not arguing that NFTs are always better than other trusted third parties. I don't know enough about their details to make a claim like that. In the terms of what you're saying, I'm arguing that the space of scenarios in which people can't come to an agreement is different for NFTs vs. legal systems, because NFTs provide some self-service mechanisms for proving ownership and legitimacy. I'm sure those come with tradeoffs, as you've mentioned. I'm not in a position to weigh those tradeoffs yet, nor claim that one is always better than the other. I think it's too early for that. More concretely, courts, NFTs, et al are tools for reaching agreements. There's no reason to dogmatically cling to "on-chain" if it's not helping reach an agreement, and there's no inherent reason things can't be mixed between on-chain and off-chain, just as agreements can be made in court vs. out-of-court.

highfrequency 5y ago

Surely the baseball card’s value does not come from the fact that you can hold a piece of cardboard in your hand. Whether the data representation is a piece of cardboard or a JSON string replicated on 10,000 Ethereum nodes or a tulip or a Venmo balance is arbitrary; it just matters whether a lot of humans are looking at the same thing. And for the time being, a lot of humans are looking at crypto ledgers!

rewma 5y ago
> Whether the data representation is a piece of cardboard or a JSON string replicated on 10,000 Ethereum nodes or a tulip or a Venmo balance is arbitrary; it just matters whether a lot of humans are looking at the same thing. And for the time being, a lot of humans are looking at crypto ledgers! But are they really? I mean, are there that many humans waiting in line to have a JSON pointing to a tweet? There were a few reports of NFTs going on the market for thousands of dollars, but at least the ones I'm aware of sounded an awful lot like people buying their own NFTs and leaving that out from the report.
- saurik 5y ago
  FWIW, I am personally shocked that anyone wants to buy small pieces of cardboard with photos of baseball players on them at all, much less for any appreciable amount of money just because one happens to be "rare" (whatever the hell that means, as clearly anyone with a printer and some cardboard can make their own)... that doesn't mean that someone else is valuing them for some reason, and they clearly do; that most small pieces of cardboard with pictures on them aren't valuable is kind of irrelevant to the idea that some are.
  - rewma 5y ago
    > FWIW, I am personally shocked that anyone wants to buy small pieces of cardboard (...) I fail to see the relevance of your personal preferences to the discussion, as my point was that the cases I'm aware of sound an awful lot like shills trying to inflate the value of something with no market value whatsoever. As a concrete example, there was a HN discussion a couple of months ago on how a kid reported a couple thousands of dollars worth of sales from NFTs, but it all sounded like a mix of straight up fraud and money laundering. A few comments in the discussion point out that the kid's father works in finance and it sounds he is trying to case in on the NFT trend. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28326220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28326220

PeterisP 5y ago

" The bragging rights of owning a JSON string depend heavily on whether or not the proprietary entity will become the dominant player in the I own a JSON string-world." -> as the parent post explains, this particular aspect is exactly like baseball cards; where technically anyone could print other Barry Bonds cards but your bragging rights of owning a rare baseball card depend heavily on whether or not the proprietary entity printing those particular cards will be the dominant player in the baseball card world.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

nftcomplainer 5y ago

I’ll be honest. I’ve only ever dabbled in crypto to buy things off a certain infamous marketplace a few years ago and have avoided them since. Hearing NFTs described this way really just makes them sound like fairly transparent money laundering.

ThomPete 5y ago

No thats confusing one possible technical implementation with the concept, there are other ways to solve that. Thats like saying a Picasso painting is just a specific canvas with som paint on.

mcintyre1994 5y ago

Can you give an example of the proprietary entity you're referring to? I was curious so I took a short course that covered minting NFTs with Solidity, and the way it seemed to work is that the JSON strings (which contain the base64 encoded image) are stored (as an ERC-721 token) on the Ethereum blockchain. Eg. you can see a random such token here: https://rinkeby.etherscan.io/token/0x6b96751051cd25c29cdcea79c3625e749b0ed7f7 https://rinkeby.etherscan.io/token/0x6b96751051cd25c29cdcea7... The only proprietary entity involved in that process seems to be Alchemy. My understanding of them is a bit vague but they seem to just help with making miners aware of the new contract and getting it distributed. But that's just the contract, once it's deployed it's nothing to do with them and the NFTs AFAIK don't pass through them at all.

dkersten 5y ago
Maybe a stupid question, but where do I find the base64 encoded image in your linked token? The only thing I can see is a transaction moving it from one address to another, the contract bytecode (which I guess might encode an image but its definitely not obvious[1]) and the "extra data" hex in the transaction (that doesn't appear to be an encoded image either, from what I can tell). I'm probably missing something, so if you could let me know where to look, that'd be nice! [1] I decompiled it here: https://rinkeby.etherscan.io/bytecode-decompiler?a=0x6b96751051cd25c29cdcea79c3625e749b0ed7f7 https://rinkeby.etherscan.io/bytecode-decompiler?a=0x6b96751...
- mcintyre1994 5y ago
  I'm not sure about that either TBH! If you copy the to address (0x22f542cd394fba213df8d1f6c46f454b74e05503) and paste it into testnets.opensea.io then you can see the collection here: https://testnets.opensea.io/0x22f542cd394fba213df8d1f6c46f454b74e05503 https://testnets.opensea.io/0x22f542cd394fba213df8d1f6c46f45... The contract has no mention of opensea, so they must be reading it from the blockchain somehow - but I guess etherscan doesn't display these tokens in a similar way for some reason. It's all pretty new to me and I definitely don't have a super joined up understanding of it all!
  - 5y ago

baby 5y ago

You are wrong. The JSON data is metadata and is optional. Also, you’re still not refuting GP’s explanation. If you can understand why people buy baseball cards, you can understand NFTs