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I have to be honest. I view NFTs as one of the dumbest things to come out of the crypto space. I see the use cases, but frankly I don’t think it’s innovative no

I have to be honest. I view NFTs as one of the dumbest things to come out of the crypto space. I see the use cases, but frankly I don’t think it’s innovative nor does it solve something in a really unique way. Part of the point of digital assets are that they can be copied. If you don’t want to copy them, you can validate with the issuing authority (which is virtually all NFTs as it is).

me_me_mu_mu 5y ago
It makes for mega cringe lords like Gary Vee. Dude is like 60 and dresses like a Fortnite teenager so he can peddle NFTs to kids as an investment strategy. I always found him to be annoying and the NFT space basically confirmed it.
- Aloha 5y ago
  He's 46. I think NFT's are laughable, but if you're gonna play the agism card, at least get the details right.
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  - afterburner 5y ago
    Just Gen X being called boomers, once again
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  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    Don't know who this guy is but just looked him up online. As someone in their mid 40s, scares me if some people think this is what a 60 year old looks like...
- dqpb 5y ago
  Jeans and tshirt?
  - dorkwood 5y ago
    I'm worried about what I'll have to start wearing once I turn 46. Maybe a cardigan, or a vest?
- kilroy123 5y ago
  It's comments like this, which reaffirm my fears of staying in this industry for too long. I'm only in my mid-30s but I'm deathly afraid to stick around to see what the mid-40s or 50s will be like.
Alex3917 5y ago
> I view NFTs as one of the dumbest things to come out of the crypto space. To understand the space, you need to come to terms with the fact that asking "is this a legitimate human need" isn't a useful or relevant question. Instead, you need to ask, "for people who are already demonstrating that they have this human need, does this technology enable that need to be met more efficiently." You might think the human need isn't legitimate, and it might not be legitimate, but if you think that way you're going to miss what's happening. It's the same as the lesson from the Paul Graham and Fred Wilson AirBnB exchange, where just because you personally don't have the need doesn't mean that the need doesn't exist.
- YorickPeterse 5y ago
  Let's be realistic here: there's no need for NFTs other than fear of missing out, and money laundering.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
- Guest42 5y ago
  1. There isn’t a need and it can’t be demonstrated via handwaving. 2. Investing in the imaginary shouldn’t be peddled by charlatans. 3. Comparing to Airbnb is inaccurate and intentionally misleading. 4. Sentences 1-2 are circular.
- ozgune 5y ago
  > I view NFTs as one of the dumbest things to come out of the crypto space. I see the use cases, but frankly I don’t think it’s innovative nor does it solve something in a really unique way. I think the original comment isn’t arguing that “this isn’t a legitimate human need.” I think it’s arguing that neither the tech is innovative nor the offered solution is unique.
- yks 5y ago
  Need on the side of issuers obviously exists, they can make money. At the same time we see that most of the potential users, such as gamer community at large, are overwhelmingly against NFTs. So this need is clearly being manufactured, which can succeed or not, remains to be seen.
costcofries 5y ago
Not surprised that this is the top comment, it seems to be the overwhelming sentiment on HN, which is unfortunate. My perspective is that it's very early for NFTs and the large majority (you included) are fixating on what you're seeing in the space today, or put differently, you're being shortsighted. Mark your comment down and revisit it in a few years, having an opinion on the sidelines is just fine. Now let the downvotes commence.
- pyrale 5y ago
  I don't see how promoting artificial scarcity is going to become a good idea in a few years. Just because the implementation is shit nowadays doesn't mean we should be happy to see better implementations in the future.
  - costcofries 5y ago
    I'm a hobbyist photographer. I have been publishing my photographs to unsplash for the last 4 years. I have over 100 photos on Adobe contributor. The former has delivered me ZERO inbound or monetary value, just over 3 million downloads of my work. The latter has given me returns I could buy coffee with. NFTs open a new World of opportunity for me. Not only can other humans easily collect, and compensate me for my work, I also have a whole new stream for consuming royalties. Now think further about the ecosystem potential and all the third parties that consume my unsplash content for free today, NFTs can change that.
    - abduhl 5y ago
      Then put your hobby where your mouth is. Pull all of your photos from the past 4 years from unsplash and mint NFTs for them.
      - costcofries 5y ago
        That's exactly what I'm doing :)
boatsie 5y ago
I had this opinion too, but if you think about something like trading cards or any other “limited” collectibles that were mass produced, rather than one of a kind art, it’s sort of the same thing with regards to artificial scarcity.
- echelon 5y ago
  They're limited in the sense that pogs were limited. When Kellog's is making NFTs, it devalues the entire platform. Trading cards aren't a fitting analogy, because only a few companies were/are in that business, and they each ran specific product lines. They're more similar to old lego sets in that sense. NFTs are pogs.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
    > Trading cards aren't a fitting analogy, because only a few companies were/are in that business The irony is that being digital, bits not atoms, make it easy to make copies. Oh you invented digital scarcity? Now you have 1000 copies of the "digital scarcity" business.
- allenu 5y ago
  I think this is where a lot of us don't see the similarity between artificial and real scarcity. The real scarcity of physical collectibles is not only due to their limited numbers, but also, I believe, due to the fact that they are physical objects that can degrade in quality or be lost entirely. That's a world of difference from digital bits that are just not allowed to be copied.
- falcolas 5y ago
  NFTs aren't trading cards. They're receipts showing that you "own" the card on display in the public square. And more than one receipt can be minted for that card. The most you can hope for is the earliest timestamp on the receipt.
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    I think NFTs are bullshit, but I don't think the "And more than one receipt can be minted for that card" is as much of a problem as people think it is. For example, it wouldn't be hard for an artist to publish a video saying "Hey folks, this is my public key, and these are the NFTs for these pieces of art", and then publish that video in multiple forums like Twitter, YouTube, etc. Then if someone tried to come up with different NFTs for the same pieces of art, the NFT holder could just point to the video (and, as you say, if the artist was malicious and tried to dupe his own NFTs, the earlier one would win). This kind of "identity validation" is all over the cryptography space already - that's basically how Keybase proofs work. Heck, lots of HN commenters put their proofs in their HN account signatures.
slg 5y ago
>I have to be honest. I view NFTs as one of the dumbest things to come out of the crypto space. This is so obvious to me that it is tough to stop myself from believing that everyone knows this and is just ignoring it in an attempt to make a quick buck. There are much better arguments for cryptocurrency. I happen to think they are generally overvalued and overhyped, but there is also real utility at the heart of it that people can believe in and project forward. NFTs seem to be stupid all the way down.
- basch 5y ago
  Philosophically, I think there is something there. How do you create scarcity in a digital infinitely copyable world, without an authority figure. With baseball cards and pokemon cards, you can create artificial scarcity by only printing so many in a run. NFT scarcity is really no sillier than baseball card scarcity. The original creator says "this collection has x amount." What makes that matter is that they said so, and the community believed them that their decision was important. Pokemon could print a "rare" card for every person on the planet, but that ruins game mechanics. In digital games, you can control scarcity with a central authority. EA or Ubisoft or Blizzard or Microsoft can only issue so much of an item, and they distribute them, and you cant copy it because the authority keeps track. In a decentralized world, a digital yet scarce item can be created, distributed, and reused. A game can go under, and a new game can pop up and respect the accumulated wealth of the community. A game can fork, where half of the community plays one teams version, and half plays a different one, with nobody losing their assets. A rogue developer can entice people to play by inviting people to reuse tools they acquired from a rivals game. A counterfeiting blacksmith can forge their own weapons, and a dark side community can vote to allow them in game, while a light side community can vote to only allow official weapons. What it will all come down to is consensus, the developers (and players voicing through where they spend their attention) of the game deciding which items should be allowed to be imported and which shouldnt. IMHO, there is something cool about the player stats of an RPG being isolated and separated from the game itself, and always owned by the player not the game company. From an investment perspective, I can see why it looks as dumb as anything in the physical speculative art world. But as a game mechanic, it does seem to offer a useful utility that previously depended on some server staying up forever or trust in a closed system. This is a brink or cusp, where theres a good idea out there somewhere, and maybe someone has or hasnt executed on it yet, but if it has been made into something truly useful, it still isnt popular enough to be well know by us plebs yet. They also, more simply, act as a membership card or vip pass. You can spend money to join a club, and then you get the corresponding experience that comes with it. Take for example the Matrix NFT. I fully expect there to be some somewhat cool experiences that real people get to really experience by consenting and paying to join that social experiment. Sure it could work roughly as well as a database entry at a central authority, but decentralization is one way to allow easy transfer of your membership to someone new when youre done, without the game developer having to care or keep track of who is who. It turns into Willy Wonka, whoever holds a golden ticket is allowed in, copying tickets isnt possible.
nradov 5y ago
I agree NFTs are dumb, but some artists are getting paid huge amounts of real money for selling NFTs. If the artists can find suckers willing to pay then good for them. https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/11/22325054/beeple-christies-nft-sale-cost-everydays-69-million https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/11/22325054/beeple-christies...
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Sure, that's fine enough if they're ok with being the kind of person who'd do that sort of thing. I'm not even going to make a big stink about how they probably shouldn't do that. But when they come in here and try to tell us all how this incredible new technology is going to revolutionize the world, that's obvious bullshit.
joshmarlow 5y ago
I have pretty mixed feelings about NFTs in general. But I am intrigued by the use case of allowing a large number of individuals to patron a given artist (and give them recurring income on subsequent resale of their work). All else being equal, I would prefer to live in a society where artists and other makers have time to follow their passion and create instead of spending their time on some job just to pay the bills. So to the extent that NFTs can enable that, I'm tentatively onboard.
- anamexis 5y ago
  > So to the extent that NFTs can enable that, I'm tentatively onboard. And what extent is that? There are plenty of ways to send money to an artist, both with crypto and without. What value do NFTs add, as far as patronizing artists?
  - joshmarlow 5y ago
    It's possible - if not common - to setup the underlying smart contract to send some amount of funds back to the creator when an NFT changes hands. So that turns selling a piece of art once to pay the bills into selling it once and then subsequently collecting royalties (potentially indefinitely). As far as I know, that's a pretty novel offering. EDIT: for grammar
    - anamexis 5y ago
      But at the end of the day, you're not reselling the art, you're reselling the NFT. There's nothing that makes this capability unique to NFTs or crypto - you could sell a license to an artwork that has similar terms.
      - joshmarlow 5y ago
        > There's nothing that makes this capability unique to NFTs or crypto Yeah, you're probably right here. This is a slight pivot in discussion but - you're right, the proper license agreement (if enforced) would give a similar effect. And there's a strong argument that NFTs, DAOs for gathering capital, etc are just serving functions similar to Patreon or Kickstarter. But there are a lot of projects popping up and getting varying degrees of attraction in the crypto space. Maybe crypto isn't making many new things possible - but it might be making lots of things a little easier?
swalsh 5y ago
/* FYI, the down arrow is not an indication of agreement, it is an indication of quality. If you disagree with me, at least have the common courtesy to comment. */ It's a shame the acronym NFT has become synonymous with digital images. As a concept it's a huge idea with so much potential. The issue is people now hear NFT, and their mind shuts down thinking it's some stupid monkey picture thing. Everything you can do with an NFT, you COULD do with a centralized database. The problem is then you have to trust that database. You have to trust the person running it, you have to trust they will still be in business, you have to trust the person running it will allow other people to connect to it (or get stuck in their walled garden). We're pretty far into this Web 2.0 experiment with centralized services. The experiment is over, the results are in. We can't trust them. Does decentralization solve all problems? No absolutely not. Does it have a whole new set of problems? yes, but hopefully we can work through most of them. To me, the trade off of a more open ecosystem is worth it. If email was created in Web 2.0 it probably would have been stored in a database, and there would be little accessibility outside whoever created it. It would look like whatsapp. What NFT's give us, is the ability to own a unique digital assets in an open system and not have to rely on ad driven business models. It's a digital asset which can be ANYTHING.
- hatware 5y ago
  You get it. Everyone who says this is "dumb" said the internet, Facebook, Instagram, or Tik-tok was dumb too. Yet here they are. Kinks need to be worked out, sure, but in ten to fifteen years artists will not be beholden to corporations. That is something to work towards and be very proud of.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    There is a much much larger pile of garbage that was called dumb and just died off because it was.
- exdsq 5y ago
  NFTs in regards to digital licences and tickets to events are game-changers in my eyes. I wish the focus was on that instead of on jpegs. If anyone is working on these, or wants to work on these, I'd be keen to collaborate.
kranke155 5y ago
NFTs have been a revolution for digital artists. I can’t tire of saying this here. Look at Hic Et Nunc or even better FXhash on Tezos (a low carbon chain). FXhash has created a generative art market like it’s never existed before, it’s created an amazing art scene without precedent I’ve ever seen. It also allows for generative art to interact with the blockchain to make every art piece unique. IE if you mint on FXhash, each generative art piece is slightly different due to a randomising function in the art pieces. This means each and every NFT is unique since they all went through a slightly different values for some of their features. I highly recommend anyone criticising NFTs to think about this since it’s an absolutely groundbreaking achievement in digital art that just wasn’t possible before. The artists scene around FXhash is just incredible.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  So I looked up FXhash and from what I gathered, people write a function to generate an image, and then it gets run with some random inputs so you get a bunch of similar but slightly different images out. To call this an “absolutely groundbreaking achievement in digital art that just wasn’t possible before.” is comically absurd.
  - kranke155 5y ago
    Sure, then show me an open market where this was being done before at scale ?
    - Gigachad 5y ago
      Why does it have to be a market. Why does everything have to be about turning a profit. If you want computer generated art, I could show a billion examples. I could write my own function to generate a picture with no crypto technology. If your argument boils down to “show me how people made lots of money on it”, then that is just confirming what I already believe. No substance, just profiting on hype.
      - kranke155 5y ago
mc32 5y ago
To me NFTs are like selling “rights” to stars in galaxies far away. It’s nice that you can say you “own” your very own star as stipulated by the star rights granting corporation, but in reality it means nothing other than you can say so… but I can claim a million other stars without needing a corporation and no one can take them away from me but also anyone else can make a claim on the same stars.
- kranke155 5y ago
  True but what if in buying those stars you were supporting space research? That’s all NFTs are right now - a novel way to invest in artists. And that’s remarkable, and good enough for me.
  - mc32 5y ago
    That’s fine, but in many cases people believe these are investment instruments rather than seeing them as a donation. If these purveyors made it clear these were Donations, then yeah, that’s okay. Maybe Wikipedia can sell NFYs to “articles” and avoid the donation button?
    - kranke155 5y ago
      I think it’s pretty clear there’s a market for them, which attracted a bunch of knobs. But yes I see them as a direct way to fund artist’s work, particularly digital artists, who before this had to content with likes on Instagram! An NFT is a way to say “hey I like this so much I’ll pay you to keep doing it”
      - mc32 5y ago
        What makes it a better solution than a donation button?
        kranke155 5y ago
        People didn’t use the donation buttons. Now that you have a market for it, people use it. Something something human nature.
Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago
The emperor has no clothes when it comes to NFTs. Mass illusions of rareity of what is just simply a string of ones and zeros.
daenz 5y ago
I'm firmly of the same opinion, but the one thing I could see value for them would be in crowdfunding prizes, for example, as patreon rewards for the development of a video game. In that scenario, they have "real value" to the recipients, and money is exchanging hands for a very targeted purpose. Plus the NFTs are relatively low effort/cost. That seems like a win for everyone, but it is a very niche scenario.
timcott 5y ago
For a digitally savvy community, HN takes on NFTs are surprisingly backwards looking. NFTs most people have seen/heard of are just links to a JPEG with little to no utility. That has caused all the hype/OpenSea volume, but there are many interesting crypto projects that ascribe utility to NFTs (but are also much less accessible). Interesting NFTs are those that: prove identity, serve as a key to a private community, yield tokens with utility, prove ownership of an asset that generates royalties, augment a gaming experience, etc. What's unique about how NFTs solve existing problems is fundamental to crypto - the data layer is open source, so everything is composable. Maybe the folks here working for large cap tech firms in effort to monetize proprietary data are offended by that.
- malshe 5y ago
  What are some examples where NFTs have solved or are solving fundamental problems?
  - exdsq 5y ago
    NFTs help solve a few of the problems in reselling gig tickets 1. Royalties paid to the band 2. Allow you to check they're authentic tickets 3. Allow you to sell them online to people in a trusted away (atomic transactions for money, so no you send it then I pay/you pay then I sent it)
    - Gigachad 5y ago
      You can do all 3 much easier with a database.
- 58x14 5y ago
  I cite ENS (ens.domains) as one of the bedrock technologies in this next cycle. Identity is the biggest flaw in our current social media / search engine / information discovery paradigm. In the next two weeks, I'll have my PGP keys discoverable, on blockchain, two clicks away from anyone with (unrestricted) internet access. Just find me at joshjames.eth and boom, you can virtually guarantee a secure communication channel with me. Outside of a physical abduction or hardware compromise of my private keys, this pattern no longer requires a middleman to host my pubkey.

me_me_mu_mu 5y ago

It makes for mega cringe lords like Gary Vee. Dude is like 60 and dresses like a Fortnite teenager so he can peddle NFTs to kids as an investment strategy. I always found him to be annoying and the NFT space basically confirmed it.

Aloha 5y ago
He's 46. I think NFT's are laughable, but if you're gonna play the agism card, at least get the details right.
- deleted 5y ago
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- afterburner 5y ago
  Just Gen X being called boomers, once again
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- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Don't know who this guy is but just looked him up online. As someone in their mid 40s, scares me if some people think this is what a 60 year old looks like...
dqpb 5y ago
Jeans and tshirt?
- dorkwood 5y ago
  I'm worried about what I'll have to start wearing once I turn 46. Maybe a cardigan, or a vest?
kilroy123 5y ago
It's comments like this, which reaffirm my fears of staying in this industry for too long. I'm only in my mid-30s but I'm deathly afraid to stick around to see what the mid-40s or 50s will be like.

Alex3917 5y ago

> I view NFTs as one of the dumbest things to come out of the crypto space. To understand the space, you need to come to terms with the fact that asking "is this a legitimate human need" isn't a useful or relevant question. Instead, you need to ask, "for people who are already demonstrating that they have this human need, does this technology enable that need to be met more efficiently." You might think the human need isn't legitimate, and it might not be legitimate, but if you think that way you're going to miss what's happening. It's the same as the lesson from the Paul Graham and Fred Wilson AirBnB exchange, where just because you personally don't have the need doesn't mean that the need doesn't exist.

YorickPeterse 5y ago
Let's be realistic here: there's no need for NFTs other than fear of missing out, and money laundering.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
Guest42 5y ago
1. There isn’t a need and it can’t be demonstrated via handwaving. 2. Investing in the imaginary shouldn’t be peddled by charlatans. 3. Comparing to Airbnb is inaccurate and intentionally misleading. 4. Sentences 1-2 are circular.
ozgune 5y ago
> I view NFTs as one of the dumbest things to come out of the crypto space. I see the use cases, but frankly I don’t think it’s innovative nor does it solve something in a really unique way. I think the original comment isn’t arguing that “this isn’t a legitimate human need.” I think it’s arguing that neither the tech is innovative nor the offered solution is unique.
yks 5y ago
Need on the side of issuers obviously exists, they can make money. At the same time we see that most of the potential users, such as gamer community at large, are overwhelmingly against NFTs. So this need is clearly being manufactured, which can succeed or not, remains to be seen.

costcofries 5y ago

Not surprised that this is the top comment, it seems to be the overwhelming sentiment on HN, which is unfortunate. My perspective is that it's very early for NFTs and the large majority (you included) are fixating on what you're seeing in the space today, or put differently, you're being shortsighted. Mark your comment down and revisit it in a few years, having an opinion on the sidelines is just fine. Now let the downvotes commence.

pyrale 5y ago
I don't see how promoting artificial scarcity is going to become a good idea in a few years. Just because the implementation is shit nowadays doesn't mean we should be happy to see better implementations in the future.
- costcofries 5y ago
  I'm a hobbyist photographer. I have been publishing my photographs to unsplash for the last 4 years. I have over 100 photos on Adobe contributor. The former has delivered me ZERO inbound or monetary value, just over 3 million downloads of my work. The latter has given me returns I could buy coffee with. NFTs open a new World of opportunity for me. Not only can other humans easily collect, and compensate me for my work, I also have a whole new stream for consuming royalties. Now think further about the ecosystem potential and all the third parties that consume my unsplash content for free today, NFTs can change that.
  - abduhl 5y ago
    Then put your hobby where your mouth is. Pull all of your photos from the past 4 years from unsplash and mint NFTs for them.
    - costcofries 5y ago
      That's exactly what I'm doing :)

boatsie 5y ago

I had this opinion too, but if you think about something like trading cards or any other “limited” collectibles that were mass produced, rather than one of a kind art, it’s sort of the same thing with regards to artificial scarcity.

echelon 5y ago
They're limited in the sense that pogs were limited. When Kellog's is making NFTs, it devalues the entire platform. Trading cards aren't a fitting analogy, because only a few companies were/are in that business, and they each ran specific product lines. They're more similar to old lego sets in that sense. NFTs are pogs.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  > Trading cards aren't a fitting analogy, because only a few companies were/are in that business The irony is that being digital, bits not atoms, make it easy to make copies. Oh you invented digital scarcity? Now you have 1000 copies of the "digital scarcity" business.
allenu 5y ago
I think this is where a lot of us don't see the similarity between artificial and real scarcity. The real scarcity of physical collectibles is not only due to their limited numbers, but also, I believe, due to the fact that they are physical objects that can degrade in quality or be lost entirely. That's a world of difference from digital bits that are just not allowed to be copied.
falcolas 5y ago
NFTs aren't trading cards. They're receipts showing that you "own" the card on display in the public square. And more than one receipt can be minted for that card. The most you can hope for is the earliest timestamp on the receipt.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  I think NFTs are bullshit, but I don't think the "And more than one receipt can be minted for that card" is as much of a problem as people think it is. For example, it wouldn't be hard for an artist to publish a video saying "Hey folks, this is my public key, and these are the NFTs for these pieces of art", and then publish that video in multiple forums like Twitter, YouTube, etc. Then if someone tried to come up with different NFTs for the same pieces of art, the NFT holder could just point to the video (and, as you say, if the artist was malicious and tried to dupe his own NFTs, the earlier one would win). This kind of "identity validation" is all over the cryptography space already - that's basically how Keybase proofs work. Heck, lots of HN commenters put their proofs in their HN account signatures.

slg 5y ago

>I have to be honest. I view NFTs as one of the dumbest things to come out of the crypto space. This is so obvious to me that it is tough to stop myself from believing that everyone knows this and is just ignoring it in an attempt to make a quick buck. There are much better arguments for cryptocurrency. I happen to think they are generally overvalued and overhyped, but there is also real utility at the heart of it that people can believe in and project forward. NFTs seem to be stupid all the way down.

basch 5y ago
Philosophically, I think there is something there. How do you create scarcity in a digital infinitely copyable world, without an authority figure. With baseball cards and pokemon cards, you can create artificial scarcity by only printing so many in a run. NFT scarcity is really no sillier than baseball card scarcity. The original creator says "this collection has x amount." What makes that matter is that they said so, and the community believed them that their decision was important. Pokemon could print a "rare" card for every person on the planet, but that ruins game mechanics. In digital games, you can control scarcity with a central authority. EA or Ubisoft or Blizzard or Microsoft can only issue so much of an item, and they distribute them, and you cant copy it because the authority keeps track. In a decentralized world, a digital yet scarce item can be created, distributed, and reused. A game can go under, and a new game can pop up and respect the accumulated wealth of the community. A game can fork, where half of the community plays one teams version, and half plays a different one, with nobody losing their assets. A rogue developer can entice people to play by inviting people to reuse tools they acquired from a rivals game. A counterfeiting blacksmith can forge their own weapons, and a dark side community can vote to allow them in game, while a light side community can vote to only allow official weapons. What it will all come down to is consensus, the developers (and players voicing through where they spend their attention) of the game deciding which items should be allowed to be imported and which shouldnt. IMHO, there is something cool about the player stats of an RPG being isolated and separated from the game itself, and always owned by the player not the game company. From an investment perspective, I can see why it looks as dumb as anything in the physical speculative art world. But as a game mechanic, it does seem to offer a useful utility that previously depended on some server staying up forever or trust in a closed system. This is a brink or cusp, where theres a good idea out there somewhere, and maybe someone has or hasnt executed on it yet, but if it has been made into something truly useful, it still isnt popular enough to be well know by us plebs yet. They also, more simply, act as a membership card or vip pass. You can spend money to join a club, and then you get the corresponding experience that comes with it. Take for example the Matrix NFT. I fully expect there to be some somewhat cool experiences that real people get to really experience by consenting and paying to join that social experiment. Sure it could work roughly as well as a database entry at a central authority, but decentralization is one way to allow easy transfer of your membership to someone new when youre done, without the game developer having to care or keep track of who is who. It turns into Willy Wonka, whoever holds a golden ticket is allowed in, copying tickets isnt possible.

nradov 5y ago

I agree NFTs are dumb, but some artists are getting paid huge amounts of real money for selling NFTs. If the artists can find suckers willing to pay then good for them. https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/11/22325054/beeple-christies-nft-sale-cost-everydays-69-million https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/11/22325054/beeple-christies...

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Sure, that's fine enough if they're ok with being the kind of person who'd do that sort of thing. I'm not even going to make a big stink about how they probably shouldn't do that. But when they come in here and try to tell us all how this incredible new technology is going to revolutionize the world, that's obvious bullshit.

joshmarlow 5y ago

I have pretty mixed feelings about NFTs in general. But I am intrigued by the use case of allowing a large number of individuals to patron a given artist (and give them recurring income on subsequent resale of their work). All else being equal, I would prefer to live in a society where artists and other makers have time to follow their passion and create instead of spending their time on some job just to pay the bills. So to the extent that NFTs can enable that, I'm tentatively onboard.

anamexis 5y ago
> So to the extent that NFTs can enable that, I'm tentatively onboard. And what extent is that? There are plenty of ways to send money to an artist, both with crypto and without. What value do NFTs add, as far as patronizing artists?
- joshmarlow 5y ago
  It's possible - if not common - to setup the underlying smart contract to send some amount of funds back to the creator when an NFT changes hands. So that turns selling a piece of art once to pay the bills into selling it once and then subsequently collecting royalties (potentially indefinitely). As far as I know, that's a pretty novel offering. EDIT: for grammar
  - anamexis 5y ago
    But at the end of the day, you're not reselling the art, you're reselling the NFT. There's nothing that makes this capability unique to NFTs or crypto - you could sell a license to an artwork that has similar terms.
    - joshmarlow 5y ago
      > There's nothing that makes this capability unique to NFTs or crypto Yeah, you're probably right here. This is a slight pivot in discussion but - you're right, the proper license agreement (if enforced) would give a similar effect. And there's a strong argument that NFTs, DAOs for gathering capital, etc are just serving functions similar to Patreon or Kickstarter. But there are a lot of projects popping up and getting varying degrees of attraction in the crypto space. Maybe crypto isn't making many new things possible - but it might be making lots of things a little easier?

swalsh 5y ago

/* FYI, the down arrow is not an indication of agreement, it is an indication of quality. If you disagree with me, at least have the common courtesy to comment. */ It's a shame the acronym NFT has become synonymous with digital images. As a concept it's a huge idea with so much potential. The issue is people now hear NFT, and their mind shuts down thinking it's some stupid monkey picture thing. Everything you can do with an NFT, you COULD do with a centralized database. The problem is then you have to trust that database. You have to trust the person running it, you have to trust they will still be in business, you have to trust the person running it will allow other people to connect to it (or get stuck in their walled garden). We're pretty far into this Web 2.0 experiment with centralized services. The experiment is over, the results are in. We can't trust them. Does decentralization solve all problems? No absolutely not. Does it have a whole new set of problems? yes, but hopefully we can work through most of them. To me, the trade off of a more open ecosystem is worth it. If email was created in Web 2.0 it probably would have been stored in a database, and there would be little accessibility outside whoever created it. It would look like whatsapp. What NFT's give us, is the ability to own a unique digital assets in an open system and not have to rely on ad driven business models. It's a digital asset which can be ANYTHING.

hatware 5y ago
You get it. Everyone who says this is "dumb" said the internet, Facebook, Instagram, or Tik-tok was dumb too. Yet here they are. Kinks need to be worked out, sure, but in ten to fifteen years artists will not be beholden to corporations. That is something to work towards and be very proud of.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  There is a much much larger pile of garbage that was called dumb and just died off because it was.
exdsq 5y ago
NFTs in regards to digital licences and tickets to events are game-changers in my eyes. I wish the focus was on that instead of on jpegs. If anyone is working on these, or wants to work on these, I'd be keen to collaborate.

kranke155 5y ago

NFTs have been a revolution for digital artists. I can’t tire of saying this here. Look at Hic Et Nunc or even better FXhash on Tezos (a low carbon chain). FXhash has created a generative art market like it’s never existed before, it’s created an amazing art scene without precedent I’ve ever seen. It also allows for generative art to interact with the blockchain to make every art piece unique. IE if you mint on FXhash, each generative art piece is slightly different due to a randomising function in the art pieces. This means each and every NFT is unique since they all went through a slightly different values for some of their features. I highly recommend anyone criticising NFTs to think about this since it’s an absolutely groundbreaking achievement in digital art that just wasn’t possible before. The artists scene around FXhash is just incredible.

Gigachad 5y ago
So I looked up FXhash and from what I gathered, people write a function to generate an image, and then it gets run with some random inputs so you get a bunch of similar but slightly different images out. To call this an “absolutely groundbreaking achievement in digital art that just wasn’t possible before.” is comically absurd.
- kranke155 5y ago
  Sure, then show me an open market where this was being done before at scale ?
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    Why does it have to be a market. Why does everything have to be about turning a profit. If you want computer generated art, I could show a billion examples. I could write my own function to generate a picture with no crypto technology. If your argument boils down to “show me how people made lots of money on it”, then that is just confirming what I already believe. No substance, just profiting on hype.
    - kranke155 5y ago

mc32 5y ago

To me NFTs are like selling “rights” to stars in galaxies far away. It’s nice that you can say you “own” your very own star as stipulated by the star rights granting corporation, but in reality it means nothing other than you can say so… but I can claim a million other stars without needing a corporation and no one can take them away from me but also anyone else can make a claim on the same stars.

kranke155 5y ago
True but what if in buying those stars you were supporting space research? That’s all NFTs are right now - a novel way to invest in artists. And that’s remarkable, and good enough for me.
- mc32 5y ago
  That’s fine, but in many cases people believe these are investment instruments rather than seeing them as a donation. If these purveyors made it clear these were Donations, then yeah, that’s okay. Maybe Wikipedia can sell NFYs to “articles” and avoid the donation button?
  - kranke155 5y ago
    I think it’s pretty clear there’s a market for them, which attracted a bunch of knobs. But yes I see them as a direct way to fund artist’s work, particularly digital artists, who before this had to content with likes on Instagram! An NFT is a way to say “hey I like this so much I’ll pay you to keep doing it”
    - mc32 5y ago
      What makes it a better solution than a donation button?
      - kranke155 5y ago
        People didn’t use the donation buttons. Now that you have a market for it, people use it. Something something human nature.

Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago

The emperor has no clothes when it comes to NFTs. Mass illusions of rareity of what is just simply a string of ones and zeros.

daenz 5y ago

I'm firmly of the same opinion, but the one thing I could see value for them would be in crowdfunding prizes, for example, as patreon rewards for the development of a video game. In that scenario, they have "real value" to the recipients, and money is exchanging hands for a very targeted purpose. Plus the NFTs are relatively low effort/cost. That seems like a win for everyone, but it is a very niche scenario.

timcott 5y ago

For a digitally savvy community, HN takes on NFTs are surprisingly backwards looking. NFTs most people have seen/heard of are just links to a JPEG with little to no utility. That has caused all the hype/OpenSea volume, but there are many interesting crypto projects that ascribe utility to NFTs (but are also much less accessible). Interesting NFTs are those that: prove identity, serve as a key to a private community, yield tokens with utility, prove ownership of an asset that generates royalties, augment a gaming experience, etc. What's unique about how NFTs solve existing problems is fundamental to crypto - the data layer is open source, so everything is composable. Maybe the folks here working for large cap tech firms in effort to monetize proprietary data are offended by that.

malshe 5y ago
What are some examples where NFTs have solved or are solving fundamental problems?
- exdsq 5y ago
  NFTs help solve a few of the problems in reselling gig tickets 1. Royalties paid to the band 2. Allow you to check they're authentic tickets 3. Allow you to sell them online to people in a trusted away (atomic transactions for money, so no you send it then I pay/you pay then I sent it)
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    You can do all 3 much easier with a database.
58x14 5y ago
I cite ENS (ens.domains) as one of the bedrock technologies in this next cycle. Identity is the biggest flaw in our current social media / search engine / information discovery paradigm. In the next two weeks, I'll have my PGP keys discoverable, on blockchain, two clicks away from anyone with (unrestricted) internet access. Just find me at joshjames.eth and boom, you can virtually guarantee a secure communication channel with me. Outside of a physical abduction or hardware compromise of my private keys, this pattern no longer requires a middleman to host my pubkey.