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Comment by boltzmann_ | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand this. Who is buying art at this ridiculous prices? My only explanation is money laundering but if someone has another explanation please comment

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Do you understand art in general? It is valuable because there are people that believe it is valuable. The NFT advancement is that it proves some sort of proof of ownership. Yes, it can be copied, but someone can also take a picture of a famous painting, or buy a cheap print. But they can't claim ownership. Only one person can do that, and people attribute value to that.

Also there are a lot of crypto-millionaires that believe this is the future. So that's why they are going for large sums so soon. I am not one, but I do think they are right.

>The NFT advancement is that it proves some sort of proof of ownership.

It's not even ownership, at least in the classic art collector sense or in the sense of having a meaningful degree of control over the work. Torres retains ownership of the copyrighted work. What he's selling is a transferable limited license that doesn't even include any commercial use rights.

What's a little mind-blowing to me is that the terms of the site don't indicate that the license is an exclusive license. The buyer gets no legal guarantee that Torres won't sell another such license in the future.

Agreed, there are many issues, and I believe that many will be taking advantage of this system. But it will all be sorted in time, and I do think there is a huge future here.

You aren't the only one.

The nyan cat image is out there, copied all over the place. The buyer isn't getting a commercial license or anything like that.

I'm really not sure what the buyer is getting here.

A big dollar sale of an NFT like this makes headlines and is a shot in the arm to the whole concept of NFTs. I wonder if one or perhaps both parties to this sale somehow stand to gain much more than the final sale price if NFTs become seen as a hot commodity.

The idea in general is that you will own some digital asset and then use a smart-contract to license it out in a trustless manner. Reminds me of CryptoKitties where ETH whales were buying cats for huge sums.

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