5 ms·

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

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
    - saurik 5y ago
      > But are they really? I mean, are there that many humans waiting in line to have a JSON pointing to a tweet? This is just your belief in what people would want to do, and is irrelevant to whether people out there exist, and I am claiming (seemingly successfully, as my comment is resonating with a number of people) the same thing would probably be said with just as much confusion by anyone who really considers how utterly pointless a baseball card is.
- lugorrr 5y ago
  "art blocks" had a trading volume of $100M last week [1]. And that's only one of the more notable nft projects. [1] https://nonfungible.com/market/history https://nonfungible.com/market/history
  - nradov 5y ago
    Were those real trades, or just the same few people trading back and forth between themselves as part of a pump-and-dump scam?
    - jsvaughan 5y ago
      Have a look at the sales (lower down the page) of say these: https://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks https://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks lowest price available $386k(!) or more detail on artblocks: https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/art-blocks https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/art-blocks average price $39k or these: https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/boredapeyachtclub https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/boredapeyachtclub 90th percentile = $168k
    - PeterisP 5y ago
      To me the more likely use seems not a pump-and-dump scam but rather money laundering - get a plausible and legitimate money trail as "capital gains from digital art investment" from some dirty bitcoins coming in from, for example, a ransomware payout.
- thebean11 5y ago
  > are there that many humans waiting in line to have a JSON pointing to a tweet There are a lot of humans waiting in line for other digital assets that don't do anything, like Fortite skins. That's also just a row in some database, what's the difference?
Grustaf 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. That is definitely part of it. We are physical beings, you can't pretend like physical existence is irrelevant.
michaelt 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. No, but if something physically exists then it's possible for there to be originals and first printings, which can be finite in supply despite the ease of reproduction. I can understand why some people might prize a 1987 Barry Bonds card over a modern reproduction, even if the reproduction is indistinguishable, because the 1987 version is older or more authentic. But there is no 'original' of this comment - moving it from my computer to yours (and from your RAM to your screen and so on) inherently makes it a reproduction. There's no authentic-vs-inauthentic distinction to be drawn.
jollybean 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" Yes, the value of the Baseball Card is derived from the fact that it actually exists. The fact that someone is arguing that 'The Baseball Card' is not materially different from 'a number' is really an interesting cultural phenom.
- highfrequency 5y ago
  It is a small leap. The balance in your bank account is also a number without a physical presence. It has value because you can convert it to physical goods. The same is true of a Bitcoin balance.
  - jollybean 5y ago
    Currency is a contract, it's inherently intangible. Bitcoin is not a currency, and it's not used for anything, so it's a really just a number, that someone may speculatively want to pay money for, due to the fact a small number of other people will pay for it, but unless there's a more broad acceptance of it, the implied value will also fade. If NFT's implied ownership of the Baseball card itself, I think this would be another thing altogether.
    - eric_cc 5y ago
      > Bitcoin is not a currency, and it's not used for anything Is that so? I just tipped bitcoin to a twitter account I enjoy (using lightning network). Keep lying to yourself..
jameshart 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. Oh but surely it does. Cardboard is fragile, and degrades if not looked after. Over time, the average condition of cardboard cards will deteriorate. So, if you own a baseball card in good condition, and can look after it better than the average, over time you will end up with one of an increasingly rare class of pieces of cardboard - an old baseball card that is in good condition. It’s not hard to imagine that in the distant future there will still be people who place value on the history of baseball who are interested in owning, for example, a collection of mint original baseball cards dating to the original era of each player, for every hall of famer who ever played for the Giants. So the speculative value of any baseball card includes some expected value estimate based on the possibility that it might, someday, be the last of its kind, and some millionaire needs to buy it to complete a collection. Can you really tell a similar story to yourself for why the expected future value of any NFT isn’t zero?
- tel 5y ago
  But then I come by and scan your card and print a fresh one. This is fairly cheap to do. Why is mine not valuable? Does this process devalue yours? NFTs posit that the answer is that yours isn’t authentic and the process won’t devalue mine because mine is. And they offer an algorithmic mechanism to enforce and verify authenticity. In the baseball card world, that ought to be true, but may not be. Maybe my fake is sufficiently good to fool the market. Then at that point we realize that what is really valuable is that authenticity. We can make cards themselves infinitely cheap to copy flawlessly and the proof of authenticity remains distinct and valuable.
  - jameshart 5y ago
    Your copy doesn't just lack 'authenticity', it also lacks something uncopyable, and which is only relvant to physical artifacts: 'age'. The fact that digital copies can be perfect, and never age or deteriorate due to the inevitable march of entropy, is a fundamental difference and yes that affects how valuable 'owning' a digital artifact is versus owning a physical one.

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
  - saurik 5y ago
    > But are they really? I mean, are there that many humans waiting in line to have a JSON pointing to a tweet? This is just your belief in what people would want to do, and is irrelevant to whether people out there exist, and I am claiming (seemingly successfully, as my comment is resonating with a number of people) the same thing would probably be said with just as much confusion by anyone who really considers how utterly pointless a baseball card is.
lugorrr 5y ago
"art blocks" had a trading volume of $100M last week [1]. And that's only one of the more notable nft projects. [1] https://nonfungible.com/market/history https://nonfungible.com/market/history
- nradov 5y ago
  Were those real trades, or just the same few people trading back and forth between themselves as part of a pump-and-dump scam?
  - jsvaughan 5y ago
    Have a look at the sales (lower down the page) of say these: https://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks https://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks lowest price available $386k(!) or more detail on artblocks: https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/art-blocks https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/art-blocks average price $39k or these: https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/boredapeyachtclub https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/boredapeyachtclub 90th percentile = $168k
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    To me the more likely use seems not a pump-and-dump scam but rather money laundering - get a plausible and legitimate money trail as "capital gains from digital art investment" from some dirty bitcoins coming in from, for example, a ransomware payout.
thebean11 5y ago
> are there that many humans waiting in line to have a JSON pointing to a tweet There are a lot of humans waiting in line for other digital assets that don't do anything, like Fortite skins. That's also just a row in some database, what's the difference?

Grustaf 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. That is definitely part of it. We are physical beings, you can't pretend like physical existence is irrelevant.

michaelt 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. No, but if something physically exists then it's possible for there to be originals and first printings, which can be finite in supply despite the ease of reproduction. I can understand why some people might prize a 1987 Barry Bonds card over a modern reproduction, even if the reproduction is indistinguishable, because the 1987 version is older or more authentic. But there is no 'original' of this comment - moving it from my computer to yours (and from your RAM to your screen and so on) inherently makes it a reproduction. There's no authentic-vs-inauthentic distinction to be drawn.

jollybean 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" Yes, the value of the Baseball Card is derived from the fact that it actually exists. The fact that someone is arguing that 'The Baseball Card' is not materially different from 'a number' is really an interesting cultural phenom.

highfrequency 5y ago
It is a small leap. The balance in your bank account is also a number without a physical presence. It has value because you can convert it to physical goods. The same is true of a Bitcoin balance.
- jollybean 5y ago
  Currency is a contract, it's inherently intangible. Bitcoin is not a currency, and it's not used for anything, so it's a really just a number, that someone may speculatively want to pay money for, due to the fact a small number of other people will pay for it, but unless there's a more broad acceptance of it, the implied value will also fade. If NFT's implied ownership of the Baseball card itself, I think this would be another thing altogether.
  - eric_cc 5y ago
    > Bitcoin is not a currency, and it's not used for anything Is that so? I just tipped bitcoin to a twitter account I enjoy (using lightning network). Keep lying to yourself..

jameshart 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. Oh but surely it does. Cardboard is fragile, and degrades if not looked after. Over time, the average condition of cardboard cards will deteriorate. So, if you own a baseball card in good condition, and can look after it better than the average, over time you will end up with one of an increasingly rare class of pieces of cardboard - an old baseball card that is in good condition. It’s not hard to imagine that in the distant future there will still be people who place value on the history of baseball who are interested in owning, for example, a collection of mint original baseball cards dating to the original era of each player, for every hall of famer who ever played for the Giants. So the speculative value of any baseball card includes some expected value estimate based on the possibility that it might, someday, be the last of its kind, and some millionaire needs to buy it to complete a collection. Can you really tell a similar story to yourself for why the expected future value of any NFT isn’t zero?

tel 5y ago
But then I come by and scan your card and print a fresh one. This is fairly cheap to do. Why is mine not valuable? Does this process devalue yours? NFTs posit that the answer is that yours isn’t authentic and the process won’t devalue mine because mine is. And they offer an algorithmic mechanism to enforce and verify authenticity. In the baseball card world, that ought to be true, but may not be. Maybe my fake is sufficiently good to fool the market. Then at that point we realize that what is really valuable is that authenticity. We can make cards themselves infinitely cheap to copy flawlessly and the proof of authenticity remains distinct and valuable.
- jameshart 5y ago
  Your copy doesn't just lack 'authenticity', it also lacks something uncopyable, and which is only relvant to physical artifacts: 'age'. The fact that digital copies can be perfect, and never age or deteriorate due to the inevitable march of entropy, is a fundamental difference and yes that affects how valuable 'owning' a digital artifact is versus owning a physical one.