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I used to come onto HN and see crypto-coin news and I'd jump into the comments and ask something along the lines of "But isn't bitcoin and all the other things

I used to come onto HN and see crypto-coin news and I'd jump into the comments and ask something along the lines of "But isn't bitcoin and all the other things like it just a giant scam?" and someone who believed in Bitcoin to be a transformative technology would jump in and explain the real potential. I personally still think it's sort of a scam, but I'm happy for all of the people who used it to get rich....so, along those lines... How is "NFT" not a gigantic scam? I'm looking at this image right now: https://rarible.com/token/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118a18a936f13d:9187?tab=details https://rarible.com/token/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118a18... There is nothing at all to keep me from screenshotting or otherwise downloading that image. I won't have to pay the author $213 for it, I just take the image because I can. Now I won't necessarily "be the original owner" of it or whatever but....I mean....I have the same image as the owner and I have $213 where the new "owner" simply has the image..... Can someone, if such a person exists, that believes in NFT's as having actual value please explain it? It just seems to me like a few thousand people have realized "Hey people will literally give me $200 just because I told them to" and are doing it at scale.... And according to that website, so far the author of those "NFT"s has made 13 million dollars......Is that true? If this person has made 13 million dollars because they drew a few monkeys....I'm pretty sure they will be President of the US one day.

fooyc 5y ago
NFTs are a scam, but saying that it's because you can download them without paying is missing the point. You could say the same thing about movies, music, games, art. People in the cryptocurrency community believe that NFTs are used for money laundering. It's also believed that prices are inflated artificially to trick gullible or greedy people into buying them. But the download thing ? It's missing the point.
- serverholic 5y ago
  A scam implies someone is getting hurt. Yet I haven't seen anyone getting hurt. You might say that people will get hurt when the bubble pops but people have been saying the same thing about crypto for awhile.
  - Grustaf 5y ago
    No, that's not it. A scam implies that it's deliberate deception. People being hurt is neither here nor there. And obviously people ARE getting hurt, but that doesn't mean it's a scam. It's just a crazy bubble.
    - serverholic 5y ago
      I would say being deceived is also getting hurt…
      - Grustaf 5y ago
        Yes, a scam hurts people, but not everything that hurts people is a scam!
        serverholic 5y ago
        This is true. People gamble on the stock market all the time, yet nobody would call it a scam.
etothepii 5y ago
The tried and tested answer is to think about "buying" the Mona Lisa. If the Louvre offered the opportunity for someone to be called the owner of the Mona Lisa but they could never take it out of the Louvre or any way control it what would that sell for? I suspect many, many millions of dollars.
- smt88 5y ago
  NFTs don't confer ownership of anything except a string of letters. Unless there's a legal system backing them, they're just trading cars. Owning an NFT of a digital image doesn't mean you own it anymore than owning a LeBron James card means you own LeBron James.
- gaganyaan 5y ago
  Yes, but you could then have a legitimate court case over the ownership, and might even win the right to control it anyways. NFTs are a scam because they offer no legal rights whatsoever.
- ttyprintk 5y ago
  Brought to you by Hardee’s
- gitfan86 5y ago
  Similarly, you can give millions of dollars to a college and get a building or park named after you. You don't "own" it, you get social status out of it. NFTs are no different than having a email from the Beanie Baby store saying that you bought the first beanie baby. If someone wants to buy that e-mail from you, then great, you made a profit.
- cr1895 5y ago
  >If the Louvre offered the opportunity for someone to be called the owner of the Mona Lisa but they could never take it out of the Louvre or any way control it what would that sell for? I suspect many, many millions of dollars. I thought that was a fairly normal thing? That is, someone buys or owns a work of art but it's left in a museum in perpetuity.
bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago
If digital art is as valuable and worthy of recognition as physical art, then look at it through lens of the difference in price between the original Mona Lisa and replicas of it.
- theshadowknows 5y ago
  I absolutely think that digital art is as valuable and worthy of recognition as physical art. My wife is an artist (oils and water colors, not digital) and we've discussed it at length that the skill and talent required to create digital art imparts equal value. I'm not arguing against that (I'm not saying that's what you're saying either, but just to be clear for folks who read the comments). But...I do not see the value in being able to "prove" that you own said artwork...because you can't do it...Globally, the number of people who know what Ethereum or any other block-chain technology means is probably what..many thousands? Maybe..maybe a few hundred thousand? And of those the subset of people who actually care...I'm sure is far fewer. So you can only verify yourself as the "owner" of said art to a very small subset of people... I guess it's like a collector community? People are willing to spend literally millions of dollars to prove to other collectors that they are the owners of these digital assets?
  - clippablematt 5y ago
    Yes. People will spend millions of dollars on this because belonging to a community is about the most meaningful experience we can have. People will dedicate themselves to that sense of being. See football clubs, churches, political parties, chess clubs… We spend our lives on computers, digital artefacts and communities will come to be the most expensive items ever. This has been coming a long time. I have about 3000 hours in guild wars 2, when I log in I’m always so happy I have my legendary longbow. If they’d have been nfts that would be amazing. I’d love for that metadata to travel with me across other digital worlds.
- sgent 5y ago
  Digital art is and should be valuable, but how is owning an NFT proof of ownership if no one recognizes it as such? If I own a NFT I get no real world ownership benefits (like displaying it on my website, or in my metaverse). The NFT can be deleted by the host and I have no recourse.
chrisco255 5y ago
Yes, you can screenshot the Mona Lisa or print out a signed Mickey Mantle rookie card, but it's not the same thing is it? The verifiable timestamp and record of account associated with a wallet address (public key) that is known to be associated with the artist that produced the work is the same as establishing physical provenance for a unique item. And as for value goes, NFTs are far more liquid than physical art works because settlement is instant, provenance is simply a matter of inspecting transaction history (no need for counterparties such as Sotheby's), the market is worldwide, it's a composeable asset that can be used with other games, apps, etc., it can be used as an authentication token for exclusive access to software or physical events, etc. But never underestimate the value of liquidity.
- amcoastal 5y ago
  You wouldn't steal a car would you?
  - rudilee 5y ago
    Remind me of this skit https://youtu.be/Fb7N-JtQWGI https://youtu.be/Fb7N-JtQWGI
- goodoldneon 5y ago
  The painting example isn't valid. There's 1 original painting that only 1 person (or group) can own. Anyone who buys a print has something fundamentally different than I do; I have the painting hanging in my house. With a digital image, there isn't an original: all copies are equivalent (save for compression)
  - e_proxus 5y ago
    Actually, that would almost approach some "real" value for NFTs... Let's say you have digital artwork in a lossless format. You then take the world by storm with the compressed version. Everyone loves it. You sell an NFT with a hash/URI/encoding of the original uncompressed version encrypted so only the owner on the blockchain can decrypt it. Needlessly to say, this would only work for digital art that is compressible. The owner could perhaps prove that they really own the original by showing a differently compressed version of it.
cinntaile 5y ago
Anyone buying an NFT is getting an NFT. Nobody is getting tricked, a necessary condition for a scam. Therefore there is no scam.
- ttyprintk 5y ago
  When they discover that what they bought is an NFT, some people are so mad that they blame everyone else for right-clicking.
  - Steve0 5y ago
    Isn't this comparable to the guy in the Ferrari being mad at other drivers because he's in the same traffic jam as the rest or us? I get where he's coming from, but that doesn't make it reasonable. And certainly not a scam by Ferrari.
    - ttyprintk 5y ago
      I struggle with that comparison, but it sounds like the sports car guy feels that his conspicuous wealth should elevate him above the rules meant for everyone else. To the extent that he shouldn’t even have to ask for it out loud, because his car is art and yours is a commodity that makes no statement on the scarcity of beauty. If NFTs exist to make an artistic statement, then it’s not the same as a one-off art car. It’s a statement on conspicuously raising the ecological and conceptual cost for the same vulgar image that any scrolling rube can enjoy. An NFT really could represent season tickets for some assigned seats in a sports arena, or (unfortunately) the order on a list of organ transplant recipients. But instead of problems of scarcity, NFT represents FOMO. And the most-confident adherents are definitely speculating on riding the wave.
sparkling 5y ago
The way NFTs are being traded currently is a global game of musical chairs. You are basically paying for your name to be attached to a specific asset address on a distributed ledger. However, i do see some use cases. Imagine a decentralized NFT ledger where e.g one can buy the copyrights (and rights to royalties) for digital assets like music that would then be integrated into services like Apple Music or Spotify. That would create a neat marketplace for intellectual property.
rvz 5y ago
> How is "NFT" not a gigantic scam? Some types of NFTs are not scams, but the NFTs that are images, videos, audio are complete and utter scams. Simply slapping blockchain on them creates the false illusion that you somehow 'own' it when given that are not even stored on the blockchain in the first place, it tells you that you actually own an expensive certificate that could point to anything since they are really living on centralised servers. If that is not a scam, I don't know what is.
ahelwer 5y ago
I think I can explain. I understand why others value them, although I don't agree with the valuation (as a litmus test, I also think shelling out $30k for a genuine Rolex is very stupid). My lack of agreement also does not prevent me from participating and profiting off the people who think they do have value, although I have not done so. There are basically two theories of their value: the collectible theory and the ownership theory. These overlap but are best explained separately. In the collectible theory, NFTs are like an autograph you get on merch from a famous person. Think an autographed photo of Will Shatner you might get at a con. Usually the (cryptographic) autographer is the original artist of the work being autographed. Of course the autographer can release multiple autographed versions of the same work, but this decreases their value (and the value of any further work they might autograph). Collectibles have long had value to humans, but they also suffer from three annoying problems: storage, fakes, and transaction costs. NFTs solve all three - they never degrade on the blockchain, their authenticity is cryptographically verifiable (assuming one can associate the signing address with the famous person, which is comparatively simple), and they are easily transferred online. The second theory is the ownership theory. Here NFTs are used to track ownership of the underlying digital asset. In our current internet this is absurd, as the torrent is designed to demonstrate - everything is a copy, and even the NFT holder can never get access to the "original" bits. The ownership theory requires adoption of NFTs as an ownership mechanism in the metaverse, along with associated digital rights management technology. It's an early land-grab for the VR overworld. Now, personally I don't find either of these theories very compelling. But I also didn't find cryptocurrencies generally very compelling, so I don't have a great track record. Cryptocurrency really tends to turn us all into Frank Grimes -like characters who miss out. I believe the more widely-used term is "midwit".
- rory 5y ago
  > they never degrade on the blockchain I don't think this part is generally true, since the image itself isn't hosted on the blockchain. ...which brings me to: as someone who knows very little about this technology, why aren't the images themselves stored on the blockchain? Are they simply too big for that to be feasible?
  - 5y ago
mattdesl 5y ago
If you are actually curious, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29265373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29265373
Quarrelsome 5y ago
I don't believe in NFTs but I can imagine that they represent a generational wealth in the same way that Elvis memorabilia has probably somewhat peaked in value as it closes its generational capture. My argument would be that when Pokemon cards came out I'd imagine most adults at the time would think them worthless, its just a card with a picture of a dinosaur on it. It was the children and young adults that attributed the value upon them and thus as those people are now 30/40/50 with large amounts of disposable income they can be worth a lot. The same could happen with NFTs. People buying into their value today might come good on their value in later decades. Maybe it doesn't have to make sense if enough people believe it.
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
Think you need to look into how the art market actually functions. The reality of preserving these artifacts goes way beyond just owning the painting, I mean even over time the paintings have to be re-painted over to restore them as they age anyway. Then you have things like videoart, digital art or just conceptual art. Maurizio Cattelan's "Comedian" piece, if you own it you don't just own the banana till it rots but the concept and the instructions on how to reproduce it for exhibition, it's not the same banana what you "own" isn't very tangible beyond the instructions on how to reproduce the work. The fact you can save an image of the Mona Lisa doesn't mean you own it, sure you probably agree because its a physical object but what about say video art like Bill Viola's works. They're digital but you copying the digital file doesn't mean you own it. Sure you can copy the ugly ape drawing, you could even try to resell it but buyers can tell it's not the real original ugly ape because of the blockchain. Not defending it either way, just spelling out the mindset that causes it to have value.
- jagger27 5y ago
  If in X years the domain in the link to the NFT stored in the blockchain expired and ends up pointing to a new image was it ever an ugly ape? Is there at least a hash of the image stored with the metadata and link?
ofou 5y ago
I think about NFTs as digital vinyls. The cool thing about them is that you can own it, even though you can stream it or download it via torrent.
jcpham2 5y ago
I try to conceptualize an NFT inside of a realm that validates it. If you do not operate in a realm that validates something about in the NFT, implying ownership. Then the NFT concept doesn't make sense. If we're operating in some type of meta-realm that can also perform validation of some sort, then the NFT concept at least begins to make sense.
chinathrow 5y ago
> ... this image ... https://img.rarible.com/prod/image/upload/t_big/prod-itemImages/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118a18a936f13d:9187/17def0ff https://img.rarible.com/prod/image/upload/t_big/prod-itemIma... Saved you a cookie banner dismissal.
intothev01d 5y ago
It's not about images. This is about digital authenticity and historical record that is easily verifiable in an open, global system. This is instantaneous transfer of those rights or assets to anyone else in the world. In-game purchases of items, tickets to an event, transfer any digital item and the verifiable rights/ownership of it. Mark Cuban has been a big proponent and has been implementing use cases and I think it's more eye opening once you begin to see more advanced usages. https://twitter.com/JrWhipstock/status/1460311826026147840 https://twitter.com/JrWhipstock/status/1460311826026147840
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- superbaconman 5y ago
  Bingo. Just because you download an nft doesn't mean you own it. Proof of ownership is achieved by signing a challenge with the wallet linked with the nft (as encoded on the Blockchain).
Tenoke 5y ago
Can you explain to me why people buy movies or software they can get identical versions of on the other bay? Or why they go to a live concert with the band playing instead of a venue with an identical recording of it? Or why they buy a baseball card instead of printing it? The reasons aren't singular nor quite the same but if you can answer those it might be easier to figure out why simplifications like 'i can have the same image' don't cover the whole value people derive from it.
- mam4 5y ago
  > people here buy movies Where on netflix ? People pay for easy access to a wide range of stuff which are in HD (personally i use primewire but eh... not HD). > Or software they can get identical versions of on the other bay. Maybe because they are in a compagny which doesn't wanna be liable for lawsuit. Once again personally as a individual i don't pay for software. > why they go to a live concert with the band playing instead of a venue with an identical recording of it Precisely because the energy of a real concert is better. Actually there's a bunch of bands which are supper popular not because they have better songs but because they give better show. None of these reasons are applicable to NFT.
  - Tenoke 5y ago
    Everything that's on Netflix is on torrents and even pirate streaming sites since it's the easiest content to pirate. Bands might have a different set live than studio versions but you can play that, and this counts 5 times more for DJs who also attract huge crowds. The extra energy and hype are more akin to the extra energy and hype and bragging rights you get from the NFT community when you have an actual NFT compared to lack of it when you just download the image.
TekMol 5y ago
Are you married? Say a new technology comes up that lets me clone your wife. Perfectly. Down to the last atom. Would you then be ok with your wife being destroyed and replaced by the copy? If you are not ok with that - aren't you just as irrational as the people who buy NFTs?
- cr1895 5y ago
  That's an absurd hypothetical. A human being isn't an object...do you also mirror their consciousness?
  - TekMol 5y ago
    An NFT is also not an object. Regarding consciousness - do you think consciousness is not made of atoms? What is it made of?
- npteljes 5y ago
  I don't see how this particular irrationality is comparable to the irrationality surrounding NFTs. To tweak the analogy to NFTs a bit better. Let's say that the fact of the marriage is recorded in a registry, and that the registry is trusted as canonical by the larger entity which people trust, like, the government. Now let's say that the registry is copied word to word, certified to be legal, and then the original destroyed. Surely that doesn't affect the marriage itself, the deep personal bond between the two people?
kashyapc 5y ago
I'll quote this response[1] from the other day's thread: "Imagine a world where all or most of our interactions are in the digital realm. When you wake up in this place you are naked, cannot show anyone anything about yourself, but you are very rich. Now how do you show others that you are rich? Simple, you buy Gucci NFT clothes that other naked peasants can see. That's what's happening." Someone in the thread elaborated: "Nah... it's much worse: you're buying a banner that hangs over your head saying 'I own Gucci clothes', but you're still naked." Elsewhere, a colleague of mine (also an artist) elaborated still further: "Even worse: the person you bought the banner from can set fire to it at any time and you'll be left with nothing." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29160040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29160040 ("NFT's aren't the answer to the problems of digital art")
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  You get a certificate of ownership for your clothes - but you don't actually hold that certificate, it's a digital record in some database. I mean, it's as valuable as what others believe it's worth, and like any common object with the word 'supreme' on it, there's people who consider these things valuable.
  - nefitty 5y ago
    The best analogy I've heard is, "Imagine you spent $1,000 for a painting. Now, instead, imagine you spent $1,000 to buy the receipt."
    - ASalazarMX 5y ago
      And any other person can have an identical painting, but without the receipt. NFTs are a scam to introduce artificial scarcity and make someone else pay for it. The "art" (speaking of the picture in the root comment) hardly has any value itself.
      - metters 5y ago
        I agree, but also have to add: Does any (normal, non digital) art (say picture or sculpture) have any value itself? Besides the value of the material of course.
jankins 5y ago
What you’re describing is the scam, and that’s become the definition, but “NFTs” in general do have more potential than that, even if it’s crowded out by bullshit. NFTs make more sense where a token’s utility is implemented in the same system as its ownership. For example, a domain name is an NFT, and there’s an ethereum name service: https://docs.ens.domains/ https://docs.ens.domains/ - ownership of a domain allows you to configure the domain. I’d wager most people purchasing art NFTs don’t really have a good understanding of what they’re buying. Some think the art lives on-chain, or that if the art lives on IPFS it is a blockchain-based permanent thing (it’s not, data only exists in IPFS as long as >0 people “pin” it, and artists engage in pin rings to pin each other’s art). So I see potential value of NFTs in general, though I don’t think the value is necessarily good. You could make the argument that art NFTs are like a MVP to see how ownership of different kinds of things in a distributed system works. I’m very skeptical because it’s attempting to create artificial scarcity of digital media, and if they figure it out for real, I can see that going wrong in more ways than I can see it going right.
conception 5y ago
NFTs are a great idea but what people are doing with them now is a scam. I’m not sure if it will ever come to pass but imagine what the rumors for GameStop’s nft could be - a decentralized steam. People can build whatever client they want and it uses the blockchain to determine if you own a particular digital game. Then when you want to see it you can just sell the nft. Obviously there are a lot of considerations to that but having a decentralized ownership of digital goods isn’t a terrible idea as compared to “renting” we do now for everything. That said paying 30k for a jpeg seems also a scam but Twitter is going to use them for avatars or something so now, potentially, we’re talking about buy unique digital “gear” for your online persona. Sounds less dumb and more like unique skins in a game or something. So yes most of it is a scam and tulip fever today but I could see the tech being used for interesting things. Probably won’t be but it could be.
- Macha 5y ago
  > I’m not sure if it will ever come to pass but imagine what the rumors for GameStop’s nft could be - a decentralized steam. Let's look at the issues of this one. Let's imagine you wanted to buy FIFA 2025 on this NFT steam. As a game purchaser, you want to play the game. It'd also be nice if you can resell it when you're done, but this is a secondary use case. As a game publisher, EA want only people who own the game to play it. They'd also rather they get that money directly, they've previously fought against resale and ownership rights, but let's assume they've given in on that in this example. So they can't put FIFA 2025 on the blockchain, because it's huge, and then anyone could read/play it. So they put a record that u/conception owns FIFA 2025. So then you need to use that token to sign something to prove to someone that you own the game such that they can provide you the binaries. What happens if this provider goes out of business? What even is their business model of this binary redemption provider, since there's no guarantee they recieved your money in this decentralised example. So they're hosting data and traffic for potentially zero income. These providers do allow developers to sell keys on their own website, but they enforce requirements on the developers if they're using Steam/Epic whatever to sell keys not to undercut the store that the keys are for. They do this because there's an interest in still obtaining these devs that won't go for steam exclusivity and yet getting their users into Steam for future sales. The decentralised blockchain means they can go somewhere else very easily next time too, and again, they're not being paid for their services in this example - charging a fee for downloads would be worse for the user and noncompetitive versus centralised services. Then you get the game. Is the game going to verify with some sort of blockchain transaction at launch? Online only DRM is quite unpopular for games with single player modes. Plus blockchain transactions are slow. Ok, let's assume it does like many games did in the SecuROM era and only checks periodically. What happens when someone comes along and cracks that DRM? Does it solve that problem for publishers? No. I just fail to see how this solves the problems that exist with game distribution, and there's clear areas where it's worse for every party involved.
cslarson 5y ago
FYI, $200 is the current bid on that nft and isn't accepted by the seller for obvious reasons. BoredApeYachtClub nfts have a floor price of 52.42 ETH on opensea so the 66 ETH price tag the seller has on it is likely more in ballpark. 52 ETH is about $217k.
moolcool 5y ago
The craziest thing about it to me is just how _absolutely hideous_ most of the profitable NFT art is. The BAYC apes are just some of the ugliest designs I've ever seen. Remarkably ugly stuff.
nathias 5y ago
So in this case a scam would be when you pay the price the author wants and not a scam is when you just take it? I get that the pirates would be against NTFs that are the tech of future DRM systems, but they could at least be honest about it. They aren't a scam, or killing the planet etc. they are bad because they are useful for copyright. I found this intro useful: https://nftschool.dev https://nftschool.dev
johnchristopher 5y ago
> I have the same image as the owner and I have $213 where the new "owner" simply has the image..... AFAIU the owner also has a sort of unique and unfalsifiable certificate that let him cash in on the picture later on if its price ever raise ? Like a certificate of authenticity for the Mona Lisa. You may have a very good copy (or even the original) but without the certificate your version sells for less ? Did I get that right ?
sebirocs 5y ago
NFT is just a token that represents the artwork. You can screenshot, delete the original file or whatever but the token still exists. Now the value of NFTs can be questioned, and the people who promotes them as well. We know for sure that some people will end up losing money when this fad ends so yeah giant scam indeed, but NFT as a thing still have use case, and you can say kinda the same about bitcoin.
delaaxe 5y ago
The NFT is not the picture, the NFT is the proof of ownership. That ownership is only as valuable as the NFT's creator makes them. Example: when Dolce Gabanna issues NFTs (they did), your wife and daughter immediately understand the value of having those displayed on a public social network profile, regardless of if tech engineers are still stuck over-intellectualizing them Of course this only works on digital goods. NFTs on physical objects are scams.
sharperguy 5y ago
It's like the difference between a genuine pokemon card and a print-off. The print-off looks just like the original, except for a missing security hologram. In theory, you could use the print-off in games of pokemon at home with friends with no problem. So why is the genuine one worth more? Because its the genuine card printed by The Pokemon Company, and you can prove it. So in a sense, NFTs distill the "genuine" part and separate it from the need for a physical token or card. That said, I am highly skeptical that any NFT will be worth the many thousands people are paying from them now in a few years time. Especially as the platforms they are based on fail to scale and transaction fees become ever more problematic.
snarf21 5y ago
They are just the new ponzi scheme, the new penny stocks, the new internet scam. I dare anyone who claims to believe in NFTs to put their entire net worth in NFTs and put that into escrow for 10 years. The crypto eco-system is mostly about scams. It was interesting tech but it should just be outlawed at this point.
- tata71 5y ago
  So....you don't want an NFT for the deed to your house, instead of having to pay gobs of money to do a "search" for other people that might hold a copy of the same paper and be making claims with it? Or an NFT of your shares of stock, so they can't be tampered with, or sold twice in short-sales, etc? Do you really think cryptocurrency/cryptography nerds are into this technology for the jpegs?! It's the underlying tech that's valuable — the jpeg art is just noise.
pavlov 5y ago
An NFT is a bit like going to a book signing. The author sits there, but instead of signing your book, he just hands you a piece of paper with a number printed on it and says "next". You also need to give him a pile of casino tokens in exchange. With luck, somebody else will appreciate your story of how the famous author touched this uniquely numbered piece of paper while thinking about his book, and will give you a larger pile of casino tokens for it. Whether anyone ever has a copy of the book doesn't really come into it.
- clippablematt 5y ago
  Youre almost there. But its more like tens of thousands of people putting hundreds of billions of dollars on the line to say that they witnessed the author sign your book, verifying your claims to whoever challenges them. Which turns out to be pretty useful and maybe have value.
  - pavlov 5y ago
    Well, they didn’t actually witness the author signing anything. They witnessed the numbered piece of paper on a table in a bookstore, and the author may or may not have been present. To know if this piece of paper was actually touched by the author, we still need verification outside of the blockchain. It’s not obvious to me that all this has any value. “The author probably blessed a number” certainly doesn’t have the emotional connection of an actual physical signature, for example. In a way NFTs seem to resemble the medieval church practice of selling indulgences. If you believe in the authority of those mass-produced blessed pieces of paper, they have value.
    - nyhc99 5y ago
      Anyone at any time can see the wallet address that created the NFT. It's trivial for any author or creator to publish their wallet address; it's simply a short hash value. That's the "verification outside of the blockchain" that you seem to think is such a stumbling point. I would suggest thinking more on the subject if it isn't obvious to you that this has value.
jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
> There is nothing at all to keep me from screenshotting or otherwise downloading that image. I won't have to pay the author $213 for it, I just take the image because I can. This is like saying: There's nothing stopping me from downloading the Bitcoin source and running my own network. Now I have bitcoins and I didn't have to pay someone $60k for each one. Yes, you have bitcoins but they're not the bitcoins anyone cares about. Likewise, you have a copy of the image of this NFT but you don't have the actual NFT that members of that community care about. NFTs are a club and if you want to join you have to buy one. Now, you can argue whether anyone should want to join such a club but that's a totally different issue from the right-click-save criticism.
lvass 5y ago
>Can someone, if such a person exists, that believes in NFT's as having actual value please explain it? The market for paintings and other artwork has existed for centuries or millennia. I've never obtained value from it but many people did. To me it sounds stupid to pay much more than you would for something practically identical, unless you're betting on selling it for more later. I can't see how NFTs are different at all. NFTs do have one considerable "advantage". It's trivial to have your money semi-anonymized in a blockchain, so it's even easier to launder money. It's also much easier to buy your own artwork for ludicrous amounts, so you can make money selling it after some newspapers pick up the story, and no one will suspect that you did it.
clippablematt 5y ago
People focus on the money, so walk away thinking “scam”. Legitimacy, reputation, community. These things are scarce and important. People like nfts. It’s pretty fun minting an nft on my own contract, then going to opensea and connecting my wallet and there it is. Then I go to Zora and connect, and there’s my files again. Then to showtime, still there. Open rainbow on my phone, everything goes with me. Add on top of that resales, a royalty system, access keys to discord channels and tv shows, programmability so I can plug together my files however I like. Maybe I add a rule that you have to share the file with other people or it self destructs. Or you have to pet it like a tamagotchi. All of the content is still freely accessible. NFT != DRM. So I can listen to all the music and see all the art. And I can have ownership of the things that are special to me. I spend 12hours a day on computers, why would we think digital artefact shouldn’t be valuable. Why would we think people wouldn’t want to belong to clubs and have a way of showing ownership of items relating to them. With a consistent way of referencing the data and signatures. All on the same api. Yeah you could use pgp and share torrents and pay artists over Patreon. But this is easier, faster, and more fun.
nscalf 5y ago
There are some really cool things that can be done with NFTs (concert tickets, in game items that can be cross-game, etc). The most popular use right now is art. The really interesting thing is that NFT art is really close to real world art: both are ridiculously overpriced for something not very unique that is heavily driven by rich characters trying to hide their money. All art is dumb, not just NFTs. NFTs are just more liquid.
Zababa 5y ago
The real scam is people wasting disk space to screenshot or download those horrors.
BTCOG 5y ago
Bitcoin is a real, hard money that you will clearly see take over as a reserve over the next decade, and it's secure. It solved problems. Everything else, especially including Ethereum are nothing more than psuedo-intellectual scams. Ethereum has already changed their monetary consensus six times within five years. Play fiat games, and win fiat prizes. You know you're only commenting this to get a rise, though.
freddref 5y ago
I just printed out that image and stuck it on my wall.. nice.
laughingbovine 5y ago
It's like a certificate of authenticity. If you buy a nice watch which comes with a piece of paper saying that Rolex made it, what's actually worth money here? The watch is worth the money, provided you can prove that it was made by Rolex and not a knockoff. Is the certificate of authenticity itself worth money? Ehh... sort of... but only if you have the watch its authenticating. Who would buy the piece of paper alone? What about if i can make infinite identical copies of the watch? Things stop making sense once there is no scarcity.
cuzBchain 5y ago
It’s akin to them holding www.google.com, which is a memory block in a distributed database in a machine network to other machines. I don’t need to use DNS to transmit/receive bits but only Google can transmit and receive from google.com using the DNS network There’s nothing stopping people from setting up their own tribal network now that high speed reliable physical networks exist and cloud is push button deploy for an expert. Like video subscriptions everyone is selling a platform to own memory addresses abstracted into a domain, and NFT. Our internet is a multiverse of the same old electron states printing differently depending on preferences I think humanity is starting to realize again the mainstream ephemeral value store (dollars) is not the only one. The network that generates these experiences is. Who cares how much we spend (money is just an emotional abstract) so long as the network lives? Long live the network
jeabays 5y ago
You're right, it's just nonsense based around artificial scarcity and commodification of something, in a way that is not grounded in material reality, it is the logical conclusion of financialization, the trading of assets on increasing levels of abstraction to the point where they quite literally have no material value.

fooyc 5y ago

NFTs are a scam, but saying that it's because you can download them without paying is missing the point. You could say the same thing about movies, music, games, art. People in the cryptocurrency community believe that NFTs are used for money laundering. It's also believed that prices are inflated artificially to trick gullible or greedy people into buying them. But the download thing ? It's missing the point.

serverholic 5y ago
A scam implies someone is getting hurt. Yet I haven't seen anyone getting hurt. You might say that people will get hurt when the bubble pops but people have been saying the same thing about crypto for awhile.
- Grustaf 5y ago
  No, that's not it. A scam implies that it's deliberate deception. People being hurt is neither here nor there. And obviously people ARE getting hurt, but that doesn't mean it's a scam. It's just a crazy bubble.
  - serverholic 5y ago
    I would say being deceived is also getting hurt…
    - Grustaf 5y ago
      Yes, a scam hurts people, but not everything that hurts people is a scam!
      - serverholic 5y ago
        This is true. People gamble on the stock market all the time, yet nobody would call it a scam.

etothepii 5y ago

The tried and tested answer is to think about "buying" the Mona Lisa. If the Louvre offered the opportunity for someone to be called the owner of the Mona Lisa but they could never take it out of the Louvre or any way control it what would that sell for? I suspect many, many millions of dollars.

smt88 5y ago
NFTs don't confer ownership of anything except a string of letters. Unless there's a legal system backing them, they're just trading cars. Owning an NFT of a digital image doesn't mean you own it anymore than owning a LeBron James card means you own LeBron James.
gaganyaan 5y ago
Yes, but you could then have a legitimate court case over the ownership, and might even win the right to control it anyways. NFTs are a scam because they offer no legal rights whatsoever.
ttyprintk 5y ago
Brought to you by Hardee’s
gitfan86 5y ago
Similarly, you can give millions of dollars to a college and get a building or park named after you. You don't "own" it, you get social status out of it. NFTs are no different than having a email from the Beanie Baby store saying that you bought the first beanie baby. If someone wants to buy that e-mail from you, then great, you made a profit.
cr1895 5y ago
>If the Louvre offered the opportunity for someone to be called the owner of the Mona Lisa but they could never take it out of the Louvre or any way control it what would that sell for? I suspect many, many millions of dollars. I thought that was a fairly normal thing? That is, someone buys or owns a work of art but it's left in a museum in perpetuity.

bitxbitxbitcoin 5y ago

If digital art is as valuable and worthy of recognition as physical art, then look at it through lens of the difference in price between the original Mona Lisa and replicas of it.

theshadowknows 5y ago
I absolutely think that digital art is as valuable and worthy of recognition as physical art. My wife is an artist (oils and water colors, not digital) and we've discussed it at length that the skill and talent required to create digital art imparts equal value. I'm not arguing against that (I'm not saying that's what you're saying either, but just to be clear for folks who read the comments). But...I do not see the value in being able to "prove" that you own said artwork...because you can't do it...Globally, the number of people who know what Ethereum or any other block-chain technology means is probably what..many thousands? Maybe..maybe a few hundred thousand? And of those the subset of people who actually care...I'm sure is far fewer. So you can only verify yourself as the "owner" of said art to a very small subset of people... I guess it's like a collector community? People are willing to spend literally millions of dollars to prove to other collectors that they are the owners of these digital assets?
- clippablematt 5y ago
  Yes. People will spend millions of dollars on this because belonging to a community is about the most meaningful experience we can have. People will dedicate themselves to that sense of being. See football clubs, churches, political parties, chess clubs… We spend our lives on computers, digital artefacts and communities will come to be the most expensive items ever. This has been coming a long time. I have about 3000 hours in guild wars 2, when I log in I’m always so happy I have my legendary longbow. If they’d have been nfts that would be amazing. I’d love for that metadata to travel with me across other digital worlds.
sgent 5y ago
Digital art is and should be valuable, but how is owning an NFT proof of ownership if no one recognizes it as such? If I own a NFT I get no real world ownership benefits (like displaying it on my website, or in my metaverse). The NFT can be deleted by the host and I have no recourse.

chrisco255 5y ago

Yes, you can screenshot the Mona Lisa or print out a signed Mickey Mantle rookie card, but it's not the same thing is it? The verifiable timestamp and record of account associated with a wallet address (public key) that is known to be associated with the artist that produced the work is the same as establishing physical provenance for a unique item. And as for value goes, NFTs are far more liquid than physical art works because settlement is instant, provenance is simply a matter of inspecting transaction history (no need for counterparties such as Sotheby's), the market is worldwide, it's a composeable asset that can be used with other games, apps, etc., it can be used as an authentication token for exclusive access to software or physical events, etc. But never underestimate the value of liquidity.

amcoastal 5y ago
You wouldn't steal a car would you?
- rudilee 5y ago
  Remind me of this skit https://youtu.be/Fb7N-JtQWGI https://youtu.be/Fb7N-JtQWGI
goodoldneon 5y ago
The painting example isn't valid. There's 1 original painting that only 1 person (or group) can own. Anyone who buys a print has something fundamentally different than I do; I have the painting hanging in my house. With a digital image, there isn't an original: all copies are equivalent (save for compression)
- e_proxus 5y ago
  Actually, that would almost approach some "real" value for NFTs... Let's say you have digital artwork in a lossless format. You then take the world by storm with the compressed version. Everyone loves it. You sell an NFT with a hash/URI/encoding of the original uncompressed version encrypted so only the owner on the blockchain can decrypt it. Needlessly to say, this would only work for digital art that is compressible. The owner could perhaps prove that they really own the original by showing a differently compressed version of it.

cinntaile 5y ago

Anyone buying an NFT is getting an NFT. Nobody is getting tricked, a necessary condition for a scam. Therefore there is no scam.

ttyprintk 5y ago
When they discover that what they bought is an NFT, some people are so mad that they blame everyone else for right-clicking.
- Steve0 5y ago
  Isn't this comparable to the guy in the Ferrari being mad at other drivers because he's in the same traffic jam as the rest or us? I get where he's coming from, but that doesn't make it reasonable. And certainly not a scam by Ferrari.
  - ttyprintk 5y ago
    I struggle with that comparison, but it sounds like the sports car guy feels that his conspicuous wealth should elevate him above the rules meant for everyone else. To the extent that he shouldn’t even have to ask for it out loud, because his car is art and yours is a commodity that makes no statement on the scarcity of beauty. If NFTs exist to make an artistic statement, then it’s not the same as a one-off art car. It’s a statement on conspicuously raising the ecological and conceptual cost for the same vulgar image that any scrolling rube can enjoy. An NFT really could represent season tickets for some assigned seats in a sports arena, or (unfortunately) the order on a list of organ transplant recipients. But instead of problems of scarcity, NFT represents FOMO. And the most-confident adherents are definitely speculating on riding the wave.

sparkling 5y ago

The way NFTs are being traded currently is a global game of musical chairs. You are basically paying for your name to be attached to a specific asset address on a distributed ledger. However, i do see some use cases. Imagine a decentralized NFT ledger where e.g one can buy the copyrights (and rights to royalties) for digital assets like music that would then be integrated into services like Apple Music or Spotify. That would create a neat marketplace for intellectual property.

rvz 5y ago

> How is "NFT" not a gigantic scam? Some types of NFTs are not scams, but the NFTs that are images, videos, audio are complete and utter scams. Simply slapping blockchain on them creates the false illusion that you somehow 'own' it when given that are not even stored on the blockchain in the first place, it tells you that you actually own an expensive certificate that could point to anything since they are really living on centralised servers. If that is not a scam, I don't know what is.

ahelwer 5y ago

I think I can explain. I understand why others value them, although I don't agree with the valuation (as a litmus test, I also think shelling out $30k for a genuine Rolex is very stupid). My lack of agreement also does not prevent me from participating and profiting off the people who think they do have value, although I have not done so. There are basically two theories of their value: the collectible theory and the ownership theory. These overlap but are best explained separately. In the collectible theory, NFTs are like an autograph you get on merch from a famous person. Think an autographed photo of Will Shatner you might get at a con. Usually the (cryptographic) autographer is the original artist of the work being autographed. Of course the autographer can release multiple autographed versions of the same work, but this decreases their value (and the value of any further work they might autograph). Collectibles have long had value to humans, but they also suffer from three annoying problems: storage, fakes, and transaction costs. NFTs solve all three - they never degrade on the blockchain, their authenticity is cryptographically verifiable (assuming one can associate the signing address with the famous person, which is comparatively simple), and they are easily transferred online. The second theory is the ownership theory. Here NFTs are used to track ownership of the underlying digital asset. In our current internet this is absurd, as the torrent is designed to demonstrate - everything is a copy, and even the NFT holder can never get access to the "original" bits. The ownership theory requires adoption of NFTs as an ownership mechanism in the metaverse, along with associated digital rights management technology. It's an early land-grab for the VR overworld. Now, personally I don't find either of these theories very compelling. But I also didn't find cryptocurrencies generally very compelling, so I don't have a great track record. Cryptocurrency really tends to turn us all into Frank Grimes -like characters who miss out. I believe the more widely-used term is "midwit".

rory 5y ago
> they never degrade on the blockchain I don't think this part is generally true, since the image itself isn't hosted on the blockchain. ...which brings me to: as someone who knows very little about this technology, why aren't the images themselves stored on the blockchain? Are they simply too big for that to be feasible?
- 5y ago

mattdesl 5y ago

If you are actually curious, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29265373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29265373

Quarrelsome 5y ago

I don't believe in NFTs but I can imagine that they represent a generational wealth in the same way that Elvis memorabilia has probably somewhat peaked in value as it closes its generational capture. My argument would be that when Pokemon cards came out I'd imagine most adults at the time would think them worthless, its just a card with a picture of a dinosaur on it. It was the children and young adults that attributed the value upon them and thus as those people are now 30/40/50 with large amounts of disposable income they can be worth a lot. The same could happen with NFTs. People buying into their value today might come good on their value in later decades. Maybe it doesn't have to make sense if enough people believe it.

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

Think you need to look into how the art market actually functions. The reality of preserving these artifacts goes way beyond just owning the painting, I mean even over time the paintings have to be re-painted over to restore them as they age anyway. Then you have things like videoart, digital art or just conceptual art. Maurizio Cattelan's "Comedian" piece, if you own it you don't just own the banana till it rots but the concept and the instructions on how to reproduce it for exhibition, it's not the same banana what you "own" isn't very tangible beyond the instructions on how to reproduce the work. The fact you can save an image of the Mona Lisa doesn't mean you own it, sure you probably agree because its a physical object but what about say video art like Bill Viola's works. They're digital but you copying the digital file doesn't mean you own it. Sure you can copy the ugly ape drawing, you could even try to resell it but buyers can tell it's not the real original ugly ape because of the blockchain. Not defending it either way, just spelling out the mindset that causes it to have value.

jagger27 5y ago
If in X years the domain in the link to the NFT stored in the blockchain expired and ends up pointing to a new image was it ever an ugly ape? Is there at least a hash of the image stored with the metadata and link?

ofou 5y ago

I think about NFTs as digital vinyls. The cool thing about them is that you can own it, even though you can stream it or download it via torrent.

jcpham2 5y ago

I try to conceptualize an NFT inside of a realm that validates it. If you do not operate in a realm that validates something about in the NFT, implying ownership. Then the NFT concept doesn't make sense. If we're operating in some type of meta-realm that can also perform validation of some sort, then the NFT concept at least begins to make sense.

chinathrow 5y ago

> ... this image ... https://img.rarible.com/prod/image/upload/t_big/prod-itemImages/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118a18a936f13d:9187/17def0ff https://img.rarible.com/prod/image/upload/t_big/prod-itemIma... Saved you a cookie banner dismissal.

intothev01d 5y ago

It's not about images. This is about digital authenticity and historical record that is easily verifiable in an open, global system. This is instantaneous transfer of those rights or assets to anyone else in the world. In-game purchases of items, tickets to an event, transfer any digital item and the verifiable rights/ownership of it. Mark Cuban has been a big proponent and has been implementing use cases and I think it's more eye opening once you begin to see more advanced usages. https://twitter.com/JrWhipstock/status/1460311826026147840 https://twitter.com/JrWhipstock/status/1460311826026147840

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
superbaconman 5y ago
Bingo. Just because you download an nft doesn't mean you own it. Proof of ownership is achieved by signing a challenge with the wallet linked with the nft (as encoded on the Blockchain).

Tenoke 5y ago

Can you explain to me why people buy movies or software they can get identical versions of on the other bay? Or why they go to a live concert with the band playing instead of a venue with an identical recording of it? Or why they buy a baseball card instead of printing it? The reasons aren't singular nor quite the same but if you can answer those it might be easier to figure out why simplifications like 'i can have the same image' don't cover the whole value people derive from it.

mam4 5y ago
> people here buy movies Where on netflix ? People pay for easy access to a wide range of stuff which are in HD (personally i use primewire but eh... not HD). > Or software they can get identical versions of on the other bay. Maybe because they are in a compagny which doesn't wanna be liable for lawsuit. Once again personally as a individual i don't pay for software. > why they go to a live concert with the band playing instead of a venue with an identical recording of it Precisely because the energy of a real concert is better. Actually there's a bunch of bands which are supper popular not because they have better songs but because they give better show. None of these reasons are applicable to NFT.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  Everything that's on Netflix is on torrents and even pirate streaming sites since it's the easiest content to pirate. Bands might have a different set live than studio versions but you can play that, and this counts 5 times more for DJs who also attract huge crowds. The extra energy and hype are more akin to the extra energy and hype and bragging rights you get from the NFT community when you have an actual NFT compared to lack of it when you just download the image.

TekMol 5y ago

Are you married? Say a new technology comes up that lets me clone your wife. Perfectly. Down to the last atom. Would you then be ok with your wife being destroyed and replaced by the copy? If you are not ok with that - aren't you just as irrational as the people who buy NFTs?

cr1895 5y ago
That's an absurd hypothetical. A human being isn't an object...do you also mirror their consciousness?
- TekMol 5y ago
  An NFT is also not an object. Regarding consciousness - do you think consciousness is not made of atoms? What is it made of?
npteljes 5y ago
I don't see how this particular irrationality is comparable to the irrationality surrounding NFTs. To tweak the analogy to NFTs a bit better. Let's say that the fact of the marriage is recorded in a registry, and that the registry is trusted as canonical by the larger entity which people trust, like, the government. Now let's say that the registry is copied word to word, certified to be legal, and then the original destroyed. Surely that doesn't affect the marriage itself, the deep personal bond between the two people?

kashyapc 5y ago

I'll quote this response[1] from the other day's thread: "Imagine a world where all or most of our interactions are in the digital realm. When you wake up in this place you are naked, cannot show anyone anything about yourself, but you are very rich. Now how do you show others that you are rich? Simple, you buy Gucci NFT clothes that other naked peasants can see. That's what's happening." Someone in the thread elaborated: "Nah... it's much worse: you're buying a banner that hangs over your head saying 'I own Gucci clothes', but you're still naked." Elsewhere, a colleague of mine (also an artist) elaborated still further: "Even worse: the person you bought the banner from can set fire to it at any time and you'll be left with nothing." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29160040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29160040 ("NFT's aren't the answer to the problems of digital art")

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
You get a certificate of ownership for your clothes - but you don't actually hold that certificate, it's a digital record in some database. I mean, it's as valuable as what others believe it's worth, and like any common object with the word 'supreme' on it, there's people who consider these things valuable.
- nefitty 5y ago
  The best analogy I've heard is, "Imagine you spent $1,000 for a painting. Now, instead, imagine you spent $1,000 to buy the receipt."
  - ASalazarMX 5y ago
    And any other person can have an identical painting, but without the receipt. NFTs are a scam to introduce artificial scarcity and make someone else pay for it. The "art" (speaking of the picture in the root comment) hardly has any value itself.
    - metters 5y ago
      I agree, but also have to add: Does any (normal, non digital) art (say picture or sculpture) have any value itself? Besides the value of the material of course.

jankins 5y ago

What you’re describing is the scam, and that’s become the definition, but “NFTs” in general do have more potential than that, even if it’s crowded out by bullshit. NFTs make more sense where a token’s utility is implemented in the same system as its ownership. For example, a domain name is an NFT, and there’s an ethereum name service: https://docs.ens.domains/ https://docs.ens.domains/ - ownership of a domain allows you to configure the domain. I’d wager most people purchasing art NFTs don’t really have a good understanding of what they’re buying. Some think the art lives on-chain, or that if the art lives on IPFS it is a blockchain-based permanent thing (it’s not, data only exists in IPFS as long as >0 people “pin” it, and artists engage in pin rings to pin each other’s art). So I see potential value of NFTs in general, though I don’t think the value is necessarily good. You could make the argument that art NFTs are like a MVP to see how ownership of different kinds of things in a distributed system works. I’m very skeptical because it’s attempting to create artificial scarcity of digital media, and if they figure it out for real, I can see that going wrong in more ways than I can see it going right.

conception 5y ago

NFTs are a great idea but what people are doing with them now is a scam. I’m not sure if it will ever come to pass but imagine what the rumors for GameStop’s nft could be - a decentralized steam. People can build whatever client they want and it uses the blockchain to determine if you own a particular digital game. Then when you want to see it you can just sell the nft. Obviously there are a lot of considerations to that but having a decentralized ownership of digital goods isn’t a terrible idea as compared to “renting” we do now for everything. That said paying 30k for a jpeg seems also a scam but Twitter is going to use them for avatars or something so now, potentially, we’re talking about buy unique digital “gear” for your online persona. Sounds less dumb and more like unique skins in a game or something. So yes most of it is a scam and tulip fever today but I could see the tech being used for interesting things. Probably won’t be but it could be.

Macha 5y ago
> I’m not sure if it will ever come to pass but imagine what the rumors for GameStop’s nft could be - a decentralized steam. Let's look at the issues of this one. Let's imagine you wanted to buy FIFA 2025 on this NFT steam. As a game purchaser, you want to play the game. It'd also be nice if you can resell it when you're done, but this is a secondary use case. As a game publisher, EA want only people who own the game to play it. They'd also rather they get that money directly, they've previously fought against resale and ownership rights, but let's assume they've given in on that in this example. So they can't put FIFA 2025 on the blockchain, because it's huge, and then anyone could read/play it. So they put a record that u/conception owns FIFA 2025. So then you need to use that token to sign something to prove to someone that you own the game such that they can provide you the binaries. What happens if this provider goes out of business? What even is their business model of this binary redemption provider, since there's no guarantee they recieved your money in this decentralised example. So they're hosting data and traffic for potentially zero income. These providers do allow developers to sell keys on their own website, but they enforce requirements on the developers if they're using Steam/Epic whatever to sell keys not to undercut the store that the keys are for. They do this because there's an interest in still obtaining these devs that won't go for steam exclusivity and yet getting their users into Steam for future sales. The decentralised blockchain means they can go somewhere else very easily next time too, and again, they're not being paid for their services in this example - charging a fee for downloads would be worse for the user and noncompetitive versus centralised services. Then you get the game. Is the game going to verify with some sort of blockchain transaction at launch? Online only DRM is quite unpopular for games with single player modes. Plus blockchain transactions are slow. Ok, let's assume it does like many games did in the SecuROM era and only checks periodically. What happens when someone comes along and cracks that DRM? Does it solve that problem for publishers? No. I just fail to see how this solves the problems that exist with game distribution, and there's clear areas where it's worse for every party involved.

cslarson 5y ago

FYI, $200 is the current bid on that nft and isn't accepted by the seller for obvious reasons. BoredApeYachtClub nfts have a floor price of 52.42 ETH on opensea so the 66 ETH price tag the seller has on it is likely more in ballpark. 52 ETH is about $217k.

moolcool 5y ago

The craziest thing about it to me is just how _absolutely hideous_ most of the profitable NFT art is. The BAYC apes are just some of the ugliest designs I've ever seen. Remarkably ugly stuff.

nathias 5y ago

So in this case a scam would be when you pay the price the author wants and not a scam is when you just take it? I get that the pirates would be against NTFs that are the tech of future DRM systems, but they could at least be honest about it. They aren't a scam, or killing the planet etc. they are bad because they are useful for copyright. I found this intro useful: https://nftschool.dev https://nftschool.dev

johnchristopher 5y ago

> I have the same image as the owner and I have $213 where the new "owner" simply has the image..... AFAIU the owner also has a sort of unique and unfalsifiable certificate that let him cash in on the picture later on if its price ever raise ? Like a certificate of authenticity for the Mona Lisa. You may have a very good copy (or even the original) but without the certificate your version sells for less ? Did I get that right ?

sebirocs 5y ago

NFT is just a token that represents the artwork. You can screenshot, delete the original file or whatever but the token still exists. Now the value of NFTs can be questioned, and the people who promotes them as well. We know for sure that some people will end up losing money when this fad ends so yeah giant scam indeed, but NFT as a thing still have use case, and you can say kinda the same about bitcoin.

delaaxe 5y ago

The NFT is not the picture, the NFT is the proof of ownership. That ownership is only as valuable as the NFT's creator makes them. Example: when Dolce Gabanna issues NFTs (they did), your wife and daughter immediately understand the value of having those displayed on a public social network profile, regardless of if tech engineers are still stuck over-intellectualizing them Of course this only works on digital goods. NFTs on physical objects are scams.

sharperguy 5y ago

It's like the difference between a genuine pokemon card and a print-off. The print-off looks just like the original, except for a missing security hologram. In theory, you could use the print-off in games of pokemon at home with friends with no problem. So why is the genuine one worth more? Because its the genuine card printed by The Pokemon Company, and you can prove it. So in a sense, NFTs distill the "genuine" part and separate it from the need for a physical token or card. That said, I am highly skeptical that any NFT will be worth the many thousands people are paying from them now in a few years time. Especially as the platforms they are based on fail to scale and transaction fees become ever more problematic.

snarf21 5y ago

They are just the new ponzi scheme, the new penny stocks, the new internet scam. I dare anyone who claims to believe in NFTs to put their entire net worth in NFTs and put that into escrow for 10 years. The crypto eco-system is mostly about scams. It was interesting tech but it should just be outlawed at this point.

tata71 5y ago
So....you don't want an NFT for the deed to your house, instead of having to pay gobs of money to do a "search" for other people that might hold a copy of the same paper and be making claims with it? Or an NFT of your shares of stock, so they can't be tampered with, or sold twice in short-sales, etc? Do you really think cryptocurrency/cryptography nerds are into this technology for the jpegs?! It's the underlying tech that's valuable — the jpeg art is just noise.

pavlov 5y ago

An NFT is a bit like going to a book signing. The author sits there, but instead of signing your book, he just hands you a piece of paper with a number printed on it and says "next". You also need to give him a pile of casino tokens in exchange. With luck, somebody else will appreciate your story of how the famous author touched this uniquely numbered piece of paper while thinking about his book, and will give you a larger pile of casino tokens for it. Whether anyone ever has a copy of the book doesn't really come into it.

clippablematt 5y ago
Youre almost there. But its more like tens of thousands of people putting hundreds of billions of dollars on the line to say that they witnessed the author sign your book, verifying your claims to whoever challenges them. Which turns out to be pretty useful and maybe have value.
- pavlov 5y ago
  Well, they didn’t actually witness the author signing anything. They witnessed the numbered piece of paper on a table in a bookstore, and the author may or may not have been present. To know if this piece of paper was actually touched by the author, we still need verification outside of the blockchain. It’s not obvious to me that all this has any value. “The author probably blessed a number” certainly doesn’t have the emotional connection of an actual physical signature, for example. In a way NFTs seem to resemble the medieval church practice of selling indulgences. If you believe in the authority of those mass-produced blessed pieces of paper, they have value.
  - nyhc99 5y ago
    Anyone at any time can see the wallet address that created the NFT. It's trivial for any author or creator to publish their wallet address; it's simply a short hash value. That's the "verification outside of the blockchain" that you seem to think is such a stumbling point. I would suggest thinking more on the subject if it isn't obvious to you that this has value.

jallen_dot_dev 5y ago

> There is nothing at all to keep me from screenshotting or otherwise downloading that image. I won't have to pay the author $213 for it, I just take the image because I can. This is like saying: There's nothing stopping me from downloading the Bitcoin source and running my own network. Now I have bitcoins and I didn't have to pay someone $60k for each one. Yes, you have bitcoins but they're not the bitcoins anyone cares about. Likewise, you have a copy of the image of this NFT but you don't have the actual NFT that members of that community care about. NFTs are a club and if you want to join you have to buy one. Now, you can argue whether anyone should want to join such a club but that's a totally different issue from the right-click-save criticism.

lvass 5y ago

>Can someone, if such a person exists, that believes in NFT's as having actual value please explain it? The market for paintings and other artwork has existed for centuries or millennia. I've never obtained value from it but many people did. To me it sounds stupid to pay much more than you would for something practically identical, unless you're betting on selling it for more later. I can't see how NFTs are different at all. NFTs do have one considerable "advantage". It's trivial to have your money semi-anonymized in a blockchain, so it's even easier to launder money. It's also much easier to buy your own artwork for ludicrous amounts, so you can make money selling it after some newspapers pick up the story, and no one will suspect that you did it.

clippablematt 5y ago

People focus on the money, so walk away thinking “scam”. Legitimacy, reputation, community. These things are scarce and important. People like nfts. It’s pretty fun minting an nft on my own contract, then going to opensea and connecting my wallet and there it is. Then I go to Zora and connect, and there’s my files again. Then to showtime, still there. Open rainbow on my phone, everything goes with me. Add on top of that resales, a royalty system, access keys to discord channels and tv shows, programmability so I can plug together my files however I like. Maybe I add a rule that you have to share the file with other people or it self destructs. Or you have to pet it like a tamagotchi. All of the content is still freely accessible. NFT != DRM. So I can listen to all the music and see all the art. And I can have ownership of the things that are special to me. I spend 12hours a day on computers, why would we think digital artefact shouldn’t be valuable. Why would we think people wouldn’t want to belong to clubs and have a way of showing ownership of items relating to them. With a consistent way of referencing the data and signatures. All on the same api. Yeah you could use pgp and share torrents and pay artists over Patreon. But this is easier, faster, and more fun.

nscalf 5y ago

There are some really cool things that can be done with NFTs (concert tickets, in game items that can be cross-game, etc). The most popular use right now is art. The really interesting thing is that NFT art is really close to real world art: both are ridiculously overpriced for something not very unique that is heavily driven by rich characters trying to hide their money. All art is dumb, not just NFTs. NFTs are just more liquid.

Zababa 5y ago

The real scam is people wasting disk space to screenshot or download those horrors.

BTCOG 5y ago

Bitcoin is a real, hard money that you will clearly see take over as a reserve over the next decade, and it's secure. It solved problems. Everything else, especially including Ethereum are nothing more than psuedo-intellectual scams. Ethereum has already changed their monetary consensus six times within five years. Play fiat games, and win fiat prizes. You know you're only commenting this to get a rise, though.

freddref 5y ago

I just printed out that image and stuck it on my wall.. nice.

laughingbovine 5y ago

It's like a certificate of authenticity. If you buy a nice watch which comes with a piece of paper saying that Rolex made it, what's actually worth money here? The watch is worth the money, provided you can prove that it was made by Rolex and not a knockoff. Is the certificate of authenticity itself worth money? Ehh... sort of... but only if you have the watch its authenticating. Who would buy the piece of paper alone? What about if i can make infinite identical copies of the watch? Things stop making sense once there is no scarcity.

cuzBchain 5y ago

It’s akin to them holding www.google.com, which is a memory block in a distributed database in a machine network to other machines. I don’t need to use DNS to transmit/receive bits but only Google can transmit and receive from google.com using the DNS network There’s nothing stopping people from setting up their own tribal network now that high speed reliable physical networks exist and cloud is push button deploy for an expert. Like video subscriptions everyone is selling a platform to own memory addresses abstracted into a domain, and NFT. Our internet is a multiverse of the same old electron states printing differently depending on preferences I think humanity is starting to realize again the mainstream ephemeral value store (dollars) is not the only one. The network that generates these experiences is. Who cares how much we spend (money is just an emotional abstract) so long as the network lives? Long live the network

jeabays 5y ago

You're right, it's just nonsense based around artificial scarcity and commodification of something, in a way that is not grounded in material reality, it is the logical conclusion of financialization, the trading of assets on increasing levels of abstraction to the point where they quite literally have no material value.