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The language people use around nfts is a big scam. Its not an NFT of this person, its not even an NFT of the picture. Its an NFT that points to an image. Hacke

The language people use around nfts is a big scam. Its not an NFT of this person, its not even an NFT of the picture. Its an NFT that points to an image. Hackernews loves to hate on crypto, if there is any part that should be hated on its nfts. Because they're a giant worthless scam.

smabie 5y ago
I mean they have value: otherwise you wouldn't be able to sell them? You can call them a scam but they're clearly not worthless. Flipping NFTs can be incredibly profitable.
- JoshuaDavid 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania Just because there are currently people willing to pay a lot of money for something, and there are currently people making money flipping that thing, doesn't mean that thing will be valuable in the future.
  - zokier 5y ago
    Just because something will not be valuable in the future doesn't mean its not valuable right now. Valuations change all the time.
    - JoshuaDavid 5y ago
      Agreed. For example, tulips were extremely valuable in the Dutch Republic in 1636.
  - causality0 5y ago
    Sure, but many things don't retain value. Your thousand dollar smartphone will be worthless in ten years. Your car will probably be worthless in twenty. People make the mistake of treating them like cryptocurrency which they aren't, but just because they're stupid and will be worthless doesn't make them worthless now.
    - smhenderson 5y ago
      Yes but a car and a smartphone provide so much more day to day value than the items being discussed so that's not really a good comparison. Tulips, while pretty and fragrant, won't help get work done, transport items and people to where they need to go or provide a valuable communication channel in an emergency. An, NFT, while potentially entertaining, is a lot more like a Tulip and has absolutely no similarity to a car or a smart phone in this context.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      It's not about retention of value, it's that there never was any real value. A smartphone or car is useful; if the buy/sell price of my phone or car was $0.01 I would still need them, if the buy/sell price of most (all?) NFTs was $0.01 nobody would care about them.
      - thrashh 5y ago
        It obviously has real value. People are spending a lot of money on them. Every time I see a discussion about NFTs, it seems people assume that other people value things the same way as them. It’s a major cognitive bias called naïve realism. People value things differently then you. I literally pay more money for things made by bands I like, for example.
        yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        No? It has perceived value, but unto itself its value is zero
        causality0 5y ago
        The value of a car to someone who never leaves a walkable city is less than zero. The only reason they'd even accept a free car is because someone else would buy it off them. There is no such thing as inherent value. Even something as basic as food is worthless to someone who has no use for it.
- garmaine 5y ago
  They have value because people think they will have a bigger future value. People think they will have more value in the future because there will be a bigger sucker willing to buy it from them. That's it. There's no step along the future ownership chain where it actually creates, yields, or transmutes into any sort of fundamental value. So assuming you've done your research, it is known up front to be worthless and yet you are buying it anyway with the intent to defraud someone else. Or you haven't done your research and you end up being the sucker in this setup. Either way, art NFTs are pretty definitionally a scam. The word "scam" is thrown around far too much by critics of cryptocurrencies. Think what you will of bitcoin or ethereum, but neither one is a scam. NFTs, on the other hand, unequivocally are scams.
  - fleddr 5y ago
    NFTs in itself are not a scam. When I genuinely mint a photo I own the copyright of and set a price, you can simply chose to buy it or not. In the case that you buy it, you're not scammed. The price was clear, and you got what you ordered. You can think of NFTs as being overvalued or worthless, but that doesn't make them a scam. Just don't buy them. Likewise, NFTs don't come with any promise that they gain in value, that too is on the buyer.
    - garmaine 5y ago
      NFTs aren't rights to photos, or any other kind of tangible or intangible property right. That would be an actual property. But that's not what NFTs are.
      - fleddr 5y ago
        Largely true, but rapidly changing. Some marketplaces do allow for copyright license statements to be included in the mint. The better marketplaces include verification of authorship. Adobe is including proof of authorship into its suite of tools. There's bots now crawling for knock-offs and cross chain mints. So in the best of cases...if a verified author mints a verified work, which includes a copyright/usage statement, and I buy it...what do I legally own? I think that's a question for the lawyers.
- kyruzic 5y ago
  They only have value if you can find a buyer. Most NFTs that are minted are never resold.
  - thrashh 5y ago
    …which applies to everything. Anything only has a market value when someone else wants it. Heck I have old things that I want to get rid of but because no one really wants it, I can’t sell it for any price that’s worth the effort, despite being a physical item having intrinsic value.
    - kyruzic 5y ago
      Those items do not have value to anyone except for you.
      - thrashh 5y ago
        That’s my point.
timdaub 5y ago
> Its not an NFT of this person, its not even an NFT of the picture. Its an NFT that points to an image. It can be "an NFT of that person". The NFT is the contract and the image, name and descriptions can be considered metadata. I think you're unnecessarily picky here: Strictly speaking, you're also not buying "a song of the Beatles", you're buying a copy/recording of an encoded piece of convoluted sinus waves or whatever. Relevant art work: "Ceci n’est pas une pipe.", La trahison des images from René Magritte.
- kyruzic 5y ago
  No the nft is not the image. That is precisely the point. If the NFT was the image how come I can download, distribute, and even sell (wether legal or not does not matter) the image?
  - timdaub 5y ago
    Yeah the NFT isn't the image. The image is metadata, read the ERC721 contract interface [1]. The NFT is the NFT. - 1: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721#specification https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721#specification
cwkoss 5y ago
I think NFTs could potentially be useful, but the current main use case is effectively a worthless scam. Use cases that intrigue me: - NFTs to manage licenses for digital works. Portable transferrable licenses would solve many of the evils of walled garden IP platforms (ex amazon video or itunes), especially if cross platform. I refuse to "purchase" digital content in a way that I'm subject to arbitrary platform rules and threat of my library disappearing: it's all effectively renting with fraudulent UI labels. - Media use licenses: I'd love to be able to buy an NFT for use of a song, 'point' the NFT at a youtube URL and that makes the video live and youtube would exempt me from their content ID system destroying my work with erroneous IP claims. If I get bored with my video, I could resell that license to someone else. Performance rights and public viewing rights for theaters could also use a similar system. It's currently very hard for a third party to independently validate a license, would be sweet if it was just an API call. - Cross platform game items: ex. someone could create a P2P MMO where people can host their own servers and items are durable. Would take some thinking to make 'drop' logic fair across servers (can't create a server that drops every item after killing any mob), but I think it's a tractable problem if smart people put enough work and thought into it. But yeah, buying a pointer to a URL which happens to currently serve a given image is a brittle ridiculous system that will likely come crashing down within a decade.
nhinck2 5y ago
If I sold a physical portrait that faded to nothingness in some random amount of time (but it was guaranteed) and left behind a description of what was previously on the photo... would you describe that as selling a portrait of someone?

smabie 5y ago

I mean they have value: otherwise you wouldn't be able to sell them? You can call them a scam but they're clearly not worthless. Flipping NFTs can be incredibly profitable.

JoshuaDavid 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania Just because there are currently people willing to pay a lot of money for something, and there are currently people making money flipping that thing, doesn't mean that thing will be valuable in the future.
- zokier 5y ago
  Just because something will not be valuable in the future doesn't mean its not valuable right now. Valuations change all the time.
  - JoshuaDavid 5y ago
    Agreed. For example, tulips were extremely valuable in the Dutch Republic in 1636.
- causality0 5y ago
  Sure, but many things don't retain value. Your thousand dollar smartphone will be worthless in ten years. Your car will probably be worthless in twenty. People make the mistake of treating them like cryptocurrency which they aren't, but just because they're stupid and will be worthless doesn't make them worthless now.
  - smhenderson 5y ago
    Yes but a car and a smartphone provide so much more day to day value than the items being discussed so that's not really a good comparison. Tulips, while pretty and fragrant, won't help get work done, transport items and people to where they need to go or provide a valuable communication channel in an emergency. An, NFT, while potentially entertaining, is a lot more like a Tulip and has absolutely no similarity to a car or a smart phone in this context.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    It's not about retention of value, it's that there never was any real value. A smartphone or car is useful; if the buy/sell price of my phone or car was $0.01 I would still need them, if the buy/sell price of most (all?) NFTs was $0.01 nobody would care about them.
    - thrashh 5y ago
      It obviously has real value. People are spending a lot of money on them. Every time I see a discussion about NFTs, it seems people assume that other people value things the same way as them. It’s a major cognitive bias called naïve realism. People value things differently then you. I literally pay more money for things made by bands I like, for example.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        No? It has perceived value, but unto itself its value is zero
        causality0 5y ago
        The value of a car to someone who never leaves a walkable city is less than zero. The only reason they'd even accept a free car is because someone else would buy it off them. There is no such thing as inherent value. Even something as basic as food is worthless to someone who has no use for it.
garmaine 5y ago
They have value because people think they will have a bigger future value. People think they will have more value in the future because there will be a bigger sucker willing to buy it from them. That's it. There's no step along the future ownership chain where it actually creates, yields, or transmutes into any sort of fundamental value. So assuming you've done your research, it is known up front to be worthless and yet you are buying it anyway with the intent to defraud someone else. Or you haven't done your research and you end up being the sucker in this setup. Either way, art NFTs are pretty definitionally a scam. The word "scam" is thrown around far too much by critics of cryptocurrencies. Think what you will of bitcoin or ethereum, but neither one is a scam. NFTs, on the other hand, unequivocally are scams.
- fleddr 5y ago
  NFTs in itself are not a scam. When I genuinely mint a photo I own the copyright of and set a price, you can simply chose to buy it or not. In the case that you buy it, you're not scammed. The price was clear, and you got what you ordered. You can think of NFTs as being overvalued or worthless, but that doesn't make them a scam. Just don't buy them. Likewise, NFTs don't come with any promise that they gain in value, that too is on the buyer.
  - garmaine 5y ago
    NFTs aren't rights to photos, or any other kind of tangible or intangible property right. That would be an actual property. But that's not what NFTs are.
    - fleddr 5y ago
      Largely true, but rapidly changing. Some marketplaces do allow for copyright license statements to be included in the mint. The better marketplaces include verification of authorship. Adobe is including proof of authorship into its suite of tools. There's bots now crawling for knock-offs and cross chain mints. So in the best of cases...if a verified author mints a verified work, which includes a copyright/usage statement, and I buy it...what do I legally own? I think that's a question for the lawyers.
kyruzic 5y ago
They only have value if you can find a buyer. Most NFTs that are minted are never resold.
- thrashh 5y ago
  …which applies to everything. Anything only has a market value when someone else wants it. Heck I have old things that I want to get rid of but because no one really wants it, I can’t sell it for any price that’s worth the effort, despite being a physical item having intrinsic value.
  - kyruzic 5y ago
    Those items do not have value to anyone except for you.
    - thrashh 5y ago
      That’s my point.

timdaub 5y ago

> Its not an NFT of this person, its not even an NFT of the picture. Its an NFT that points to an image. It can be "an NFT of that person". The NFT is the contract and the image, name and descriptions can be considered metadata. I think you're unnecessarily picky here: Strictly speaking, you're also not buying "a song of the Beatles", you're buying a copy/recording of an encoded piece of convoluted sinus waves or whatever. Relevant art work: "Ceci n’est pas une pipe.", La trahison des images from René Magritte.

kyruzic 5y ago
No the nft is not the image. That is precisely the point. If the NFT was the image how come I can download, distribute, and even sell (wether legal or not does not matter) the image?
- timdaub 5y ago
  Yeah the NFT isn't the image. The image is metadata, read the ERC721 contract interface [1]. The NFT is the NFT. - 1: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721#specification https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721#specification

cwkoss 5y ago

I think NFTs could potentially be useful, but the current main use case is effectively a worthless scam. Use cases that intrigue me: - NFTs to manage licenses for digital works. Portable transferrable licenses would solve many of the evils of walled garden IP platforms (ex amazon video or itunes), especially if cross platform. I refuse to "purchase" digital content in a way that I'm subject to arbitrary platform rules and threat of my library disappearing: it's all effectively renting with fraudulent UI labels. - Media use licenses: I'd love to be able to buy an NFT for use of a song, 'point' the NFT at a youtube URL and that makes the video live and youtube would exempt me from their content ID system destroying my work with erroneous IP claims. If I get bored with my video, I could resell that license to someone else. Performance rights and public viewing rights for theaters could also use a similar system. It's currently very hard for a third party to independently validate a license, would be sweet if it was just an API call. - Cross platform game items: ex. someone could create a P2P MMO where people can host their own servers and items are durable. Would take some thinking to make 'drop' logic fair across servers (can't create a server that drops every item after killing any mob), but I think it's a tractable problem if smart people put enough work and thought into it. But yeah, buying a pointer to a URL which happens to currently serve a given image is a brittle ridiculous system that will likely come crashing down within a decade.

nhinck2 5y ago

If I sold a physical portrait that faded to nothingness in some random amount of time (but it was guaranteed) and left behind a description of what was previously on the photo... would you describe that as selling a portrait of someone?