5 ms·
This is how I understand it: Baseball cards sell for millions of dollars. Do those cards provide ownership to anything or anyone? No. Are they signed by the or
by koonsolo 5y ago
This is how I understand it: Baseball cards sell for millions of dollars.
Do those cards provide ownership to anything or anyone? No. Are they signed by the original players? No. Do they give you any other benefit? No.
It's just collector items that refers to something, and there is a limited amount of them. But that's basically it.
Now you could argue that you can hold a card in your hand, and an NFT not. But that is not where that crazy value is coming from.
I'm not claiming that NFT's value is justified, I have no idea about that. But to me it seems like a "collectors" thing.
Because let's be serious, nobody in their right mind would pay millions of dollars for a freaking card with some baseball player at the front. Same goes for NFT's.
- yokoprime 5y agoWith an NFT you own a token with a link to a resource, but the perception is that you own an actual artwork. Think is, the artwork (e.g. a jpg) can be copied an infinite amount of times. So the baseball card analogy falls short, at least as far as the posession of an actual item.
- koonsolo 5y agoThe baseball card also doesn't give you ownership of the baseball player, or over the photograph or stats of that player. You can copy the photograph and stats as much as you want (the player not so much ;)), but the card still stays the card. So conceptually: the NFT doesn't refer to the baseball card, it is the baseball card. Baseball card refers to something real, but doesn't take ownership of that thing. NFT refers to something real, but doesn't take ownership of that thing.
- newswasboring 5y agoI think I might be close to getting it. But with a baseball card, I control the baseball card. Right? With the NFT, I have no control over the resource linked to from the NFT. If that server goes away, doesn't the thing that provided NFTs its value also go away? Its like if someone scratched off the photo from my baseball card, doesn't that baseball card become valueless at that point?
- koonsolo 5y agoNFT and baseball cards are both pointers: they point to something you don't control. You control the pointer, not the thing they point to. So if we can agree that the card has value because "it's about Honus Wagner", and not really about the picture on the card, then NFT's and those cards are very similar. But on the other hand, you could indeed claim that the card has value because of the picture itself. But I still feel the picture on the card is really to act as a pointer, and not about providing value in itself. Because I would think that in that case, a real picture, or a bigger picture, or the original photographic film would be worth more. So in the end, the baseball card also doesn't become valueless when the player dies. That's just how I look at it.
- newswasboring 5y agoYes when the player dies I still have the card. If the hosting server dies I have nothing but the purchase receipt
- koonsolo 5y agoBlockchain is decentralized, so there is no "hosting server" of the NFT
- newswasboring 5y agoThere is, we are commenting on an article describing whats on the hosting server, namely the JSON for tokenURI field.
- koonsolo 5y agoThat is just a bad implementation of NFTs. Take a look at the Flow blockchain for example, which is probably the most famous NFT blockchain out there. They store all metadata in the token itself. It's not fair to discuss NFT's by only looking at a bad implementation. Metadata is stored on-chain.