Jack Dorsey is attempting to sell his first tweet as an NFT
theverge.com
theverge.com
So basically it's an odd form of a digital autograph associated with this tweet, that the owner presumably agrees not to autograph again and sell to other people.
I wouldn’t mind having $2M I didn’t need to bid on this level of abstraction.
Also, in the highly unlikely event of a hash collision, the Dorsey hash wins and the other hash has to go back to to /dev/null, metaphorical head held down in shame.
Duplicating the token means creating an exact bitwise duplicate of the NFT on the Matic sidechain, which the Ethereum Virtual Machine will not allow. There is no hash to send to someone else and unless there is an exploit in the EVM the NFT can only be owned by one person.
To be clear these NFTs only has the meaning of "signed tweet" because people decide it does. If you copied their smart contact and launched your own exact replica Jack could verify on your platform and a new and different NFT would be minted with the same "accepted representation".
I suppose the digital analogy would be for me to break into your stash and copy the files for the art or whatever and enjoy them on my own. Easier than learning how to forge a Rembrandt.
Just like the existing art world, except now you have more ways to prove provenance, and originality. the prior timestamp and your ownership and the price history being onchain.
At least an artist copying their own painting has to produce a new object.
The direct consequences for Jack are none, just as if a company that produced a limited edition stamped #001 of a product decided to manufacture and sell the same product with #001.
By using this platform he's indirectly given them his blessing and like the company example even though it would be physically difficult I doubt he'd do.
The tuple (contact id, token id, owner public key) will remain unique on the blockchain as enforced by the EVM.
Making a good copy of a Picasso is not that difficult. Go to any decent art school, and you will find artists who can competently forge a Picasso.
Many owners of Picasso artwork in fact display forgeries, which they call "replicas" in polite company, and keep the original works in secure storage, safe from any possible damage. Most people cannot distinguish between an original work and its forgery anyway.
In fact, even expert collectors are routinely fooled by forgeries![a] The authenticity of many works of art can be ascertained only by looking at provenance, documentary evidence, and historical context -- an imprecise process riddled with human bias and error.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are like authentic works of art, except that their authenticity, contents, ownership, and provenance (including date of origin) are protected by strong cryptography, making forgeries impossible for all practical purposes.
And society deems that an NFT representing the authentic first tweet by Jack Dorsey -- with its contents, ownership, and provenance protected by cryptography -- is more valuable than an indistinguishable copy of the tweet made by an unknown or lesser known person.
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[a] For example, see https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=fake%20picasso and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_forgery
People who collect Picasso’s want the piece the artists hands truly created, that’s why copies hold no real value. By copying digital art you _are_ getting the work the artists hands created, the identical hash can prove it.
Your copy of the associated file is just a copy of the file. You cannot associate another public key with the nft token.
As far as we know this is the only reasonable and foolproof way to define digital ownership, digitally.
Like any kind of asymmetric cryptography if you loose your private key that's game over.
And the whole fake/original breaks down in the physical world. How do you tie it to the physical goods in a way that can’t be fraudulent?
or by Twitter itself if Jack is at some point deemed problematic enough by modern puritans.
Would there not be some liability in doing so? Legally the buyer does own it (it seems) and Jack simply has control over it.
As for the hypothetical contract not to delete it yourself, you'd probably have a good argument that there was no clear meeting of the minds - without an explicit description of what the author intended to be bound to by selling a NFT you'll have a hard time getting the courts to enforce anything about it.
Ignoring NFTs you could define selling your tweet as:
* Selling the copyright to your tweet
* Selling the right to delete your tweet
Digital ownership is a new and nuanced concept that doesn't have good analogues. Ownership through public/private keys has no analogue and also feel absurd in any analogy using safes and keys.
Digitally, it is perfectly clear:
You own the NFT. Through what is written on a tweet and a website it can be interpreted as the representation of Jack's tweet. You don't have any further owenship or rights.
As I explain in this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26372130) there's a nuance between owning the NFT representation of the tweet and owning the ability to delete the tweet.
Taking a step back the value of the token comes from Jack using the platform to mint it (which is purely off chain and you have to trust the platform verifies against the twitter apis correctly) and tweeting about it (again, off chain and you have to assume his twitter wasn't hacked).
Jack can delete his tweet but he can't delete a token that represents the tweet he sold. I can appreciate if you don't think this nuance matters but obviously there are some who think it does.
The same applies to physical goods. There's nothing stopping the original from being destroyed, your item being a near exact replica but if the interpretation that ownership of NFT is psysical ownership is accepted then you can't steal it and claim you are the owner without my private key.
People would often approach him asking him to authenticate their artworks. One day this happened while an art dealer friend was present. "Fake!", says Picasso.
The art dealer was skeptical, so he gave one of his own Picassos to a third party and asked him to check.
"Fake!", says Picasso.
"But Pablo, I saw you draw that. You gave it to me with your own hands!"
"Bah. Anyone can do a fake Picasso. I often do them myself."
Was a great storyline on this in the recent half season of Billions!
The billionaire keeps the real ones at his house & the fakes in a freeport (probably happens in real life a lot of Billions story lines are based in real world gossip - e.g. BDSM Schneiderman)
In a funny scene prosecutor Chuck finds out and 'spills' wine on the real Van Gough and Bobby the billionaire has a epic grimace
the end solution was the billionaire brought in the works by stealth helicopter at night then opened a new non-profit museum for fake art in his apartment to get the tax deduction. totally unreasonable and pointless but an entertaining show.
An authentic painting is one the painter touched. An NFT? He never touched it. I just don't see the attraction.
It also doesn't really appeal to me personally, but I can see how the logic works.
Sorry, I just do not get it $2.5 million for someone else Tweet that will stay his. Seriously, WTF is wrong with this world!?
I think it's an especially crypto centric mindset to not see their value but if we take crypto aside do you appreciate works of art, collectable cards or limited edition runs as having value above their fungible copies (copy of art, copy of card, same product but regular edition)?
I love blockchain for transparency/authenticity aspects. I just struggle with the collector side of it not being physical things for me to hold. It just doesn't feel real to me in the digital world.
NFTs are good at laundering money not becuase they are NFTs but because they are ART, their cost intangible and non physical.
As an example if there was a limited run NFT that could be traded for 1 month of runescape membership ($10.99), it wouldn't be very easy to use it to launder money as you couldn't easily write off as an unrelated party purchasing it for $1099.
To oversimplify, an NFT shares the following properties to art:
* creator fame
* non-fungible (my copy of your Mona Lisa isn't a Mona Lisa)
You can argue about people doing better things with their time and money and I'd probably agree but I can see the value in owning a piece of history.
Art progresses human knowledge, spirit and soul it has embedded intrinsic attributes that makes us better people. NFTs do not have any of those. Jack's net worth according to google is 12.6 billion USD. (12600 million USD) so on top of that you say hey let me get even more ... in way that can be characterized as most idiotic thing I can imagine, why? because, you know we can.
All this in time of pandemic when millions lost job.
This is exactly type of thing why Nick Hanauer said "The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats".
Owning history? Seriously? In a 1000 years no one will care about Jack, Bill or Elon or about any other "look how rich and smart I am". What after 10000 years... or 100,000 years? For the universe that period is just a blink of an eye.
So, no mate, you do not own anything in this world, you are just here for a moment of time and then you die.
> NFTs are just like generating random numbers and then bidding who of the rich will give more money.
> Art progresses human knowledge, spirit and soul it has embedded intrinsic attributes that makes us better people. NFTs do not have any of those.
Like art this is really up to interpretation. As I mentioned in the previous comment NFTs have unique properties and as a result some intrinsic value. I'm not to argue the specific price of this tweet but that it shouldn't be dismissed outright.
For me an NFT of Jack's tweet embodies the time and effort spent building twitter the platform. Whether or nor Jack needs money is irrelevant in the same way that an artist's net worth isn't relevant to the value of their art, as is the time period their art was created.
Of course compared to the span of the universe ownership is meaningless, but that's irrelevant in this discussion. Twitter, like ethereum will likely remain in ~100 years, and if it doesn't exist be part of history books in ~1000.
This is also a unique property of NFTs, as ownership is via asymmetric cryptography until prime factorisation is broken or the blockchain is dead, ownership remains.
Once again, I'm not saying that this tweet is worth 2000 Eth, or that he should be selling it. All I'm trying to say is that NFTs have unique properties that don't exist in the digital world and shouldn't be entirely discounted because a millionaire is exchanging money with a billionaire.
i can’t put my finger on it
but feels like a strong bout of collective insanity
high on ideas
abusing language and metaphor and analogy to the point we no longer understand what is real and unreal
It may give you some theoretical infinitesimal ownership of the company.
But since Alphabet doesn't pay dividends, there is zero cash flow.
And it doesn't even give you the right to vote.
There's no scenario where you can convert your share into physical assets of the company, or claim any portion of the future cash flows of the company.
And unlike NFTs, a share of GOOG isn't even rare. There are 330 million others identical to yours.
A share of GOOG is just an entry in an electronic ledger, and literally the only thing you can do with it is sell it to someone else.
And yet people happily pay $2,100 for one, with no other objective than to resell it to someone else for more.
In such markets, pieces are status, which has nothing really to do with matter (in a physical sense). Specifically:
- status is sold; Jack Dorsey is famous, and his first tweet is strongly symbolic;
- status is acquired/purchased; the buyer has the money for the purchase, and he'll fits the item likely in a sort of private collection.
The status interpretation can make more intuitive the nature of the transaction/item, dispelling the insanity interpretation.
It needs to be considered also that this can be very conventional speculation; in this sense, it would appear intuitively "not insane", like financial instruments (of course, in another sense, they are fundamentally insane :)).
¹=https://www.amazon.com/Million-Stuffed-Shark-Economics-Conte...
Maybe he's doing a proof-of-concept for something else Twitter is developing (almost infinitely more likely than Jack doing money laundering), but this stuff just seems weird for rich tech people to do. This is like certificates of authenticity for random infomercial products, just on the blockchain.
NFTs are the new shitcoins, without even a pretense of being generally useful. Digital Beanie Babies will surely be worth something long term, but nowhere near the bubble we're about to see.
Then again, Bitcoin itself is the original non-fungible token, lacking the critical ecash proprietary of untraceability. So what do I know.
https://newrepublic.com/article/147192/modern-art-serves-ric...
What's more useless:
a) $2.5m sitting in a bank account, vulnerable to taxation, confiscation, legal judgment, gradual inflation, rapid devaluation and bank insolvency, unlikely to increase much in value, where the only thing you can do with it is trade it for something useful.
b) $2.5m invested in something rare, that could increase in value, where you can both trade it for something else you want, or appreciate the object itself and enjoy owning it.
Something rare is just that, something rare. It produces nothing.
And neither is fractional reserve banking.
Yeah, it is.
> What's more useless:
> a) $2.5m sitting in a bank account, vulnerable to taxation, confiscation, legal judgment, gradual inflation, rapid devaluation and bank insolvency, unlikely to increase much in value, where the only thing you can do with it is trade it for something useful.
> b) $2.5m invested in something rare, that could increase in value, where you can both trade it for something else you want, or appreciate the object itself and enjoy owning it.
Holding an NFT should be benchmarked against holding BTC. The way you've presented it — as being either USD or NFT — is clearly a false dichotomy.
Still, at least with physical things, we know there is limited quantity of quality. Same can't be said about digital products...
To put it simply to the point of absurdity, if we were a "magical" (in Arthur C. Clarke's word) civilization without any outstanding needs, we could still play some for-profit economic game and spend quadrillions buying autographs, because it wouldn't lessen anything of importance. Conversely, if you're barely eating enough, you won't spend resources on anything else than getting more food, because that would lessen your chances of survival.
The degree of perceived insanity, I think, thus entirely depends on who you are as a beholder of value, where you fit in the material ⇾ idealistic spectrum. Pretty sure Africans with $1/day feel this is perfectly stupid, but your average billionaire might find it a funny hobby, like collecting some cards of the digital era. There will be a market for that, I think crypto-manias proved as much.
It's all relative to an observer, IMHO.
Yeah tell that to the cypher-punks who have been preaching 'speak math to power' for eternity. This is just crypto-porn evangelized by OG users of Twitter like @jack, nothing more.
I can see a situation where every real life high-end product has an ID associated with it too. Leading to less fraud. There's also a definite future in first sales and all the following resales as a way to preserve value for collectibles.
They don't dominate the news cycle becuase famous people aren't cashing in to produce digital art for essentially free money.
"The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it."
If Dorsey agrees that the "owner" has the prereogative to destroy (delete) it, they plausibly "own" it insofar as they control its existance.
For example, the Dallas Mavericks are exploring issuing their season tickets as NFTs and charging a fee everytime a ticket is resold to disincentivize scalpers.
This is seen by some as a way to put some teeth into the "licensed merchandise" business. Mark Cuban, who owns some sports team, is into that.
Non-fungible tokens are not regulated investments. Fungible tokens are either a security or a commodity, and the SEC and the CFTC don't like pump and dump promotions of them. But you can pump and dump Beanie Babies or sneakers or Authorized NBA Merchandise all you want, constrained only by weak false advertising laws.
The first NFT crash has already happened.[3] Enthusiasts are now talking about "taking advantage of the volatility of the market".
Unlike fungible items, there won't be one price and a liquid market. Reselling will look more like early eBay, with people trying to unload their "antiques". You can still trade Beanie Babies on eBay.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Animats&next=2628880...
- Baseball/pokemon card auctions
- Bitcoin and crypto in general
- Meme stocks
- and now this NFT stuff
It is all exploding. Usually, this was limited to much smaller stage and scale, besides may be the art world. Ofcourse auctions are older than the dust, I am just noticing increasing pyramid-schemes/tokens/scarcity-driven-value-stores and personalities such as deepfuckingvalue/elon/chamath/etc.
Is there an underlying pattern here?
I suggest there's a time for both, but the time as long since passed for a minimum wage hike or other, better demand-side initiatives instead of the supply side economics that have dominated for the last 40 years.
I'm note speaking politically or ideologically, just pragmatically.
That we have people holding 3 jobs with no healthcare in an economy where people are paying $500 for shoes and 'digital art' and other speculative things is just not healthy.
> $500 for shoes
Why are they mutually exclusive? Should people give up luxuries?
That there are huge markets for useless things at the same time people are struggling without healthcare is not a positive sign.
It's not that simple. If people wouldn't use it for store of value, seignorage wouldn't be so profitable for banks.
Gold backing was also very profitable for banks, as they could sell the gold and lie to people about the gold still existing. It wasn't like people wanted it: gold was taken away by force and by shaming people who hoarded it.
Fiat money printing.
It causes speculative bubbles.
I understand unique value in a Black Lotus Magic the Gathering card, which will easily outlast any digital storage media you can buy today.
Aren't we getting a little ahead of ourselves by unique digital things when there isn't even a way to store it without a global network, slurping silly amounts of energy, and of what's hardware requirements is crippling the semiconductor availability?
Most Art NFTs that enter the news cycle runs on ethereum. Ethereum not only processes NFTs but a multitude of other transactions for other projects and is a order of magnitude more energy efficient and already moving to become more energy efficient. This specific platform in on the Matic L2 sidechain which is again an order more efficient. There's even a specific blockchain called Flow by the creator of the first NFTs that are designed for NFTs.
It is not like you can frame this in your living room - what is the appeal?
And I'd be shocked if this NFT actually included that sort of ownership as part of the deal.
It's more like a collectors card of some thing. Purely abstract.
That's the madness behind the current trends: I genuinely fail to see value. Unique is not a guarantee for valuable.
> Unique is not a guarantee for valuable...That's the madness behind the current trends...
Not sufficient, but maybe necessary, as the mathematicians would put it.
Why would anyone pay nearly $9.5 million for this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Guiana_1c_magenta
It's certainly not great artwork (it's a crude hack job cranked out by a local printer when the shipment of real stamps didn't arrive on time). It's never been owned by anyone particularly famous (edit: well, the DuPont guy is somewhat (in)famous, but the stamp was extremely valuable even before he owned it). None of the people associated with its production are particularly famous. It doesn't play any kind of pivotal role in world history, or even the history of the former British Guiana.
The only reason it's worth $9.48 million is that there is only one of them.
Also: energy, or anything else, is not infinite. It HAS TO BE RESTRAINED.
"Value" is a human construct that requires interpretation of information to form a narrative and meaning.
In contrast vanity tor addresses are valuable.
I'm already exhausted by NFT. There's going to be decades & decades of people insisting this petty silly act is meaningful, has value. They'll be right, but only because they recruit others to their small world thinking, to their narrowed horizons, focused on property & proprietary. Decades of endlessly hearing excitement about capturing the great & vast digital, about using society to make real, enforce their fabricated & fictitious sense of scarcity & limits & constraints.
Decades & decades of listening to zero-sum mentality, watching just enough people get roped in, suckered into this concocted belief system. These jokers are going to make L. Ron Hubbard look both moral & amateur. This new religion gives me the creeps, this anti-use of freedom. This is such the opposite of hope, & capability, & democratic power that the internet represented, a closing of access, a system of restricting, not the opening of frontiers, the ever-expanding availability that shaped all my decades under Moore's law. This saga is such a sad one. And it's only just beginning, opening salvos like this: telling us that only the wealthy will own the digital.
Here is the documentation on ERC-721 (NFTs): https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc...
Edit: their website doesn't go into detail much at all, so I don't have high hopes for this
1630 Ethereum isn't that unlikely, Ethereum was worth ~$120 last March so that's only ~$200k. That's probably nothing for the CEO of a cryptocurrency company (https://nitter.dark.fail/sinaEstavi)
That would open up so many interesting avenues - new owner could delete, modify, hide it?
Take the recent grumpy cat NFT as an example, what's being sold is just an the original grumpy cat image except the NFT creator is verified to be the cat's owner.
It doesn't give the purchaser any rights but it still sold for a decent amount. What's valuable is that it was created by the owner, not any rights or control.
Jack Dorsey isn't attempting to sell anything here. The site allows anybody to make an offer, unsolicited, on a tweet of their choosing. Jack can choose to accept the offer if he wishes, but he's not the one who initiated this.
It's all in their FAQ.