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> You're not 'buying' anything. You're just making a non-deductible donation. You are buying something in that you will be able to sell it later, which I think
by Zababa 5y ago
> You're not 'buying' anything. You're just making a non-deductible donation.
You are buying something in that you will be able to sell it later, which I think is the main point.
- dagmx 5y agoYes, but what that something is is not what people think they own. They own a unique reference to an item, not the item itself.
- Ekaros 5y agoHmm, analogy I just came up. This would be same as buying piece of paper with name of the art work and then signature by artist(possibly fake). So some value, but on average not really. Unless artist was very popular and those signatures were exceedingly rare...
- kgc 5y agoI'd argue it's more similar to buying a signed copy of a book by an author. It doesn't prevent them from printing more copies, but it is also worth more than an unsigned copy.
- Yizahi 5y agoMore like a torn out page with signature, without the book. The book itself is nearby, but another person holds it in his hands and can open it for you when requested.
- Mystlix 5y agothe author's signature has value because the author has a very limited amount of time in his life to give out signatures. moreover not only it takes time to sign stuff but it also takes effort. these two combined, plus some subjective personal feelings about the author and their importance, give value to a physical signature. digital signatures on the other hand are effortless and automatic, the author doesn't have to do anything beyond generating a public key pair once
- soylentbeige 5y agoAnother analogy: you own the pointer not the value stored in memory.
- formerly_proven 5y agoYou're buying a receipt.
- senectus1 5y agocorrect me if I'm wrong, but a receipt dressed up in a brochure that in most cases is being marketed as "art". The address to this brochure doesn't change but the "art" at the end of it can change without your notice?
- Zababa 5y agoThose are fair points, but my understanding is that it's not specific to NFTs iteself: - buyers not knowing exactly what they buy is something that happens all the time in the real world. That doesn't make it right, of course, but that doesn't make all those sales "non-deductible donations". - artists already use a lot the same kind of mechanism used for NFTs. For example, limited editions of a reproduction of a piece of art. You won't own the original piece, but you will have a copy, with a certificate that proves its authenticity. Part of the price is usually a high quality reproduction, but an often significant part is the certificate and the scarcity of the item. I think my point is that "limited" NFTs as in "multiple NFTs for one piece of art" are something already natural and established in the art world. I agree with you that "unique" NFTs as in "one NFT for one piece of art" are more confusing and already somewhat existed before in the form of copyright holding. One difference that I can think of is that with NFTs artists can keep the copyright and thus control over how their art is used, while still allowing people to "own" and speculate on the art itself. All of that is just about the NFT concept by itself. There is also the implementation part (crypto), how it's used, and arguments like "is it even a good idea to do artificial scarcity in the first place?". I don't know enough about those subjects to have an opinion on them.