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Comment by pxue | Hacker News Reader

Most ppl in this thread is still trapped by concept of ownership of something tangible.

Why not break out of that and think digitally.

Digital ownership is like putting your name on a building, like a museum. Completely meaningless to most but a few. And that is worth it enough for some folks to send millions to do it.

NFT ownership is exactly the same thing. The article says that creators just need a few thousand of devote followers to make a living. A NFT doesn't have to mean or worth anything to millions of people, just to a few thousand will do. It's enough to create a vibrant marketplace centered around some creator.

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I disagree with your analogy that "Digital ownership is like putting your name on a building, like a museum." The main value of putting your name on a building or museum is the branding value, and that's not the driving force behind the value of an NFT.

The analogy that DID make me understand NFTs is the traditional art market. When a painting sells for millions of dollars, basically all of that value comes from the provenance of the artwork, not the artwork itself. That is, with present technology it is possible to make an extremely detailed replica of, say, "The Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I", one that was indistinguishable to the human eye from a distance of a meter or so, that would sell for a few grand max, not the $135 million of the original.

Thus, if humans are capable of assigning a huge amount of value to provenance, why can't this be applied to digital artwork as well? IMO, though, since digital copies are exactly identical to the original (unlike physical objects), it remains to be seen whether humans will value this concept of provenance the same as they do in the physical world.

I agree with you that intellectual/digital property has value, but I think that it is impossible to establish authenticity in an entirely decentralized way.

If you are a notable artist wanting to sell NFT art, what makes your tokens valuable is that you have verified your identity with the service which deals the NFTs, and that the service is reputable. Otherwise, anyone may set up an account claiming to be you (on another service for instance) and sell the same JPGs attached to a new token.

In the absence of a centralized authority, the only sign of authenticity is chronology (who minted this jpg into a token first), which is very susceptible to chronological "squatting" e.g. an opportunist discovers an artist's works and mints them before the artist does.

The difficulty of replicating physical works of art has the happy side-effect of massively strengthening their authenticity.

Cool, cool, but there are _so_ many ways of providing the same user experience of digital ownership without involving a blockchain. So why not go with something simpler?

You own your token on a decentralized database (blockchain) that is immutable, vs access to an entry in a centralized database owned by someone else, that can be deleted.

a certificate of authenticity could be destroyed.

the money in the bank could disappear (physically they don't exist anymore)

a blockchain could become unaccessible

blockchain doesn't guarantee eternity (for example no electricity or no internet connection, no blockchain)

There's only value there for as long as that particular blockchain is still considered authoritative and interesting.

So it's a flex?

Weird, but ok.

there is only a limited number of buildings worth putting your name on.

NFT are virtually unlimited, hence worthless.

they need to keep it small, but if it doesn't work it would be like putting your name on a soda can ...

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