Beeple JPG File Sells for $69M, Setting Crypto Art Record | Hacker News Reader

Beeple JPG File Sells for $69M, Setting Crypto Art Record

npr.org

I don't get it. It seems like selling virtual gold mined from Ultima Online macros circa 2001. Without anything of intrinsic worth, it doesn't seem like a durable investment. It does seem like a good way to dodge taxes and export drug money. I'd rather have a real van Gogh rolled-up somewhere in my FU money civilization-escape yacht.

Yeah I agree with this, something has to be going on. Every time the price makes the headline for something, be it art, real estate, etc I usually think laundering is the main driver of extraordinarily high price.

It was apparently purchased by the CEO of the largest NFT... marketplace (?)

So yeah it’s basically a marketing expense for NFTs broadly.

Its a scam. Like https://www.engadget.com/2019-02-15-super-mario-bros-cartrid...

"Super Mario Bros. is now jointly owned by three buyers: Jim Halperin, the founder and co-chairman of the collectibles auction company Heritage Auctions,"

classic fake pump of assets you already own a bunch and want to create illusion of value

or, in the time honored tradition of the ICO, it's one entity moving money from one obfuscated pocket to the other, under the pretext of a "sale," to inflate the value of an asset class they want to draw unsophisticated attention ($) to.

Pretending two wallet addresses are unaffiliated prior to a transaction is trivial to arrange and with some forethought would be invisible to blockchain analysis. But the superficial story is too juicy for the tech (and now, art) press to ignore, and the people savvy enough to expose the fraud also happen to be elbow deep in Eth/crypto HODLings and stand to benefit far too much by letting it proceed without criticism.

why is a Van Gough worth as much though? It's basically a little pigment on some linen, it's not inherently worth any more than the next piece of art that is "ownable".

Inherent worth only provides a price floor in a market. It only plays a partial role in determining the ceiling.

For that you need to incorporate a whole manner of values.

Cost, direct, indirect, amortised nor not.

Value proposition, both yang ble and intangible.

Scarcity, uniqueness and availability, time to produce, time to reproduce.

This is why it was so abhorrent when bankers and media brought up inherent value of GameStop, it's one small part of the equation and has very little to do with the situation.

I get your point, but I think it's worth considering the sheer beauty of a Van Gogh painting. Have you been to MoMA and spent 30+ minutes looking at The Starry Night. Compared to Beeple https://www.beeple-crap.com/archive who straight up says: "Most of my work is complete fucking garbage, but this old shit is reallllllly fucking bad. Seriously. I mean, you can look at this shit if you want to but just know that it is most likely making you dumber and a shittier human being. It’s that bad."

Van Gogh's work may be beautiful (I'm more of a Vermeer guy myself) but it's not 100,000x more beautiful than the work of a skilled artist who hasn't been pumped up by a tragic story and centuries of art snob hype.

The value of high art is purely socially constructed and is an aristocratic class signal.

Yup. It's pretty strong though compared to random nobody doodles. Picasso, Rembrandt, van Gogh aren't going to lose value anytime soon.

Respectfully, why would you take a water-vulnerable art piece onto a yacht, when: 1. Yachts are big targets 2. Art is a big target 3. Neither of these things will be post-civilization money, but will 4. Signal that you are a target full of assets that can be flipped for high value stuff

Which is all to say that these are information asymmetry problems, and everything frontier "isn't a durable investment" until it is. It's silly to dodge taxes on-chain when it's free and easy to pull a list of addresses that have the biggest on-chain value, look at how they're tagged on a block explorer, and figure out if they have a US entity that should have reporeted taxes on the transactional history

Uhh... Use common sense. You have them in special, sealed, floating containers. And I would have an automatic ejection system (salt plugs perhaps) for them should the craft sink.

The auction page: https://onlineonly.christies.com/s/beeple-first-5000-days/be...

Unlike the collectable NFT's of content that is available on youtube, it appears that this image is unique and you actually own the rights to it - so has some traditional intrinsic value - in the same sense that a painting has anyway.

Except its native format can be infinitely copied and enjoyed. And has started down this road, as the OP had a copy of it embedded, which we all saw without paying.

That's nothing like 'traditional intrinsic value', seems to me. Theres absolutely nothing different from my experience and the 'owners' experience.

You could say the same of a high quality replica of the Mona Lisa or a Picasso. It's all about the status of having the "real" thing. If you wanna argue it's vain, I agree, but many people find it impressive at the same time they look down at any copy as pathetic no matter how close to the original, even when to the point to being identical.

No, at the point of being identical, the distinction evaporates. That's my point I guess.

Imagine for instance that I register the image with a different blockchain. Do I now 'own it' too? Yes, I do, by this modern tortured logic.

There’s rights and licensing fees associated to it.

In a couple years this might be displayed in a museum somewhere.

Modern art like monochromes are still displayed to this day.

There's such fees on any copywrite material. This 'blockchain proves ownership' stuff doesn't add or subtract from that?

Making a high quality replica of the Mona Lisa requires work, and it still won't be identical—thus the term "replica".

Making a high quality copy of a digital work requires exactly no additional work. It actually takes more work to make a non-exact copy (say the CPU time of recompressing a JPEG with different compression settings). Because there's no work required to make an exact, indistinguishable copy, there is no scarcity.

If this was just about recording the rights to use/exploit a work, digitally and mathematically backing the concept of copyright, that would be one thing. That would help with, say licensing stock photos. But what does it mean to "own" Jack's first tweet? How does one exploit that exclusive ownership? Is it the words of the tweet? An image of it?

People seem cynic towards those NFTs - as well as the public reaction to the first stock papers or the first crypto currencies.

One important question is what will enable NFTs? Maybe it's virtual hang outs places with digital scarcity, then it makes sense.

Just like crypto or Hertz stock, people will buy NFTs because they expect tomorrow or in 10 years there'll be a bigger fool that will be willing to pay them even more money to own the thing. (This is the "greater fool theory").

At least classic cars or limited edition supercars actually have proper scarcity, and they are things that can actually be enjoyed and shown to people for bragging rights (i.e. to gain social value) or to attract a mate.

In my view NFTs is just yet another digital ponzi scheme, kudos to whoever came up with it, even Jack Dorsey saw the $$$ and got attracted to it.

So... if I was to own the rights to it I could DMCA all reproductions of it?

For that much, it should have been an HDR png or tiff. Unless the compression artifacts 'add to the charm.'

jpeg at high quality settings is fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com