Grumpy Cat NFT sold for nearly $80K
foundation.app
foundation.app
> Proof of Authenticity
Authenticity how? That the user who created this has a nickname @grumpycat on foundation.app? What if I create a new such user on another platform, and sell that? Is it still authentic?
Is the domain actually-authentic-ntfs.com still available?
Edit: looks like it might be the same people that are running Twitter and Instagram accounts @RealGrumpyCat ... whether or not these are the original owners of the grumpy cat (according to Wikipedia), I've no idea.
The entire thing is a scam designed to get time in the news. Never forget what kind of folk you're dealing with in this space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneCoin
The genius scammers who managed to turn timestamp signing into an art form free from all responsibility for the "service" they monetize.
I know it's a typo but FWIW, I would buy NTFS for $80k :-)
It's not a coincidence that the most expensive NFTs are linked to a celebrity, meme or established artist.
But I suppose the platform leads people to believe that it's the original owners that created that signed hash (not that this means anything) and the illusion that this mattered is important for the auctioning behavior.
I wonder how regulators will react to this. Probably best to not regulate this at all, so that people realize that all NFTs are ultimately meaningless and the they die out quickly.
This can be plainly seen by looking at the flood of NFTs on opensea that have never been purchased.
If someone can't explain something simply, walk away and don't give them your money.
DHT and are new and NFTs are a completely different model of ownership, with it's own model of value.
If you really peice it out you'll find that it's the strongest (but not necessarily useful) form of "digital" ownership that we've got.
I'm not sure about direct profits, but I usually assume things like this are part of some convoluted money laundering scheme.
Remember back when GoldenPalace.com would do stuff like buy grilled cheeses shaped like Jesus and stuff for a million dollars? I thought that was so stupid, who cares? It’s just a cheap way to buy publicity and probably better than a million dollars in advertising.
I thought it was stupid, but people are busy and just getting a second of time for large numbers of people is possible to monetize.
So these stupid novelty things are likely guerrilla marketing at best, pump and dump fraud at worst. It’s like the olden days where you could start a social media storm with a few accounts and small amount of money.
"entitles the holder to the representation of the Brooklyn Bridge depicted herein"
Google holds the copyright for that map image.
Then I realized that no, the Mars example is outdated although the scam still exists. It’s more like an acre of land on Pluto because while still unlikely it’s possible that land rights on Mars could be meaningful in our lifetime, but those one acre on Mars certificates will definitely not be.
Someone created an NFT of the periodic table of elements where you can "collect" and "own" the elements.
I wouldn't be surprised if the people selling stars would move their business to NFTs.
The NFTs that you hear about that are being sold for high amounts are created by people that already have reputations. Unlike stars or plots on the moon every NFT has an artist that created it.
Artists and buyers share an implicit (by contact through the platform, in their promotion, etc) agreement.
The OP’s point can be said about pieces where the minter does not have the rights to sell the NFT. We have seen some examples of this in the NFT space (as we have with physical art/property/items).
However: in cases where the minter has the provenance, the analogy falls flat, and instead we can talk about NFTs as an upgrade to the art of previous generations.
But some include rights to the meme itself like this https://foundation.app/ryder_ripps/deal-with-it-2966
Different platforms have different requirements to be authenticated. Most tailored platforms will have specific agreements against creating the same artwork on a different platform.
As, of course, are any and all cryptocurrencies and blockchain-related get-rich-quick schemes. I can’t wait for this whole pyramid to collapse.
I hope you're not implying blockchain tech and all cryptocurrencies don't/can't provide real utility value, but if so I beg to differ substantially. I built a hook to the Stellar blockchain to store SHA256 hashes of audit evidence that can be validated against at a later time as tamper-proofing evidence. This is just one extremely simple use case, not to mention the entire Defi ecosystem that's being developed as we speak.
This is one of the reasons I don't like the blockchain hype -- people have real problems. Instead of choosing existing simple and reliable solutions -- TSA, CT-style logs[2], people go with the blockchain stuff which directly powers cryptolockers, ponzi schemes, and other crime.
Yes, I know cryptolockers don't use Stellar... but most people don't -- and they see posts like yours as a justification that to put their life savings into another scam.
[0] https://www.freetsa.org/index_en.php [1] https://gist.github.com/Manouchehri/fd754e402d98430243455713... [2] https://certificate.transparency.dev/howctworks/
Blockchains aren't going to dissappear so in my mind the only good solution is to educate instead of fear monger.
So I see this claim made a lot, but I wonder if it isn't a spillover of the BTC inefficiencies into a domain that doesn't have this problem? I could be totally off here though.
NFTs are nothing but a transaction on a blockchain (which can be proof of work or proof of stake). There will be unique transaction id (which proves nothing). The image associated and the transaction id or any data with the transaction has no relation whatsoever. For example, you can get access to this cat image and replace it with a dogs image and nothing happens.
I think there is a few misunderstanding here that are worth clarifying. Proof-of-Work blockchains are actively harming the environment due to mining activities. How much energy miners spend on the network is mostly a function of the crypto currency price, not the number of transaction.
Secondly, NFTs can easily be minted on Proof-of-Stake blockchains that do not rely on miners and have little impact on the environment (and have very low gas fees, so that would also be beneficial for buyers and sellers).
My point is: Proof-of-Work is the actual environmental disaster, not NFTs.
(Note: I think that NFTs are an absurd and stupid concept that is completely overhyped)
This not only drives the solar industry, but takes proof-of-work’s foot off the gas, environmentally speaking.
It's like people collecting/trading/selling Funko Pop figures, or most other collectibles. NFTs are pretty much captialism working as intended. Is scam the right word?
Like art it's just a way for the rich to move numbers on a computer around.
I also hope blockchain related get rich quick schemes collapse, so we can finally look at areas where distributed hash technology can actually be benificial.
Also not hard to photocopy things. You can even make them better.
You have 4 copies of "The Scream" and then you have Andy Warhol.
This meme to me makes so little sense, I can only see it exists because people want to destroy new ideas. That seems to be peoples default state.
Think about the amazing Tulip industry, worth billions and billions and all the people 100s of years ago saying they are only stupid flowers. I'm not big on flowers but I do think they make the world a better place.
Except the average person can't tell the difference between a 'fake' Picasso and originals. Nor experts.
Once again this meme that because ~infinity can be produced the value of all of them goes to zero is somewhat insane. We can produce ~infinity real paintings as well.
I find it similar to the idea modern art is stupid and my child could do that, but I'm not earning millions with my kids because I'm too smart.
Fine, spin NFT's up and make money. Lets see how we go. If you jump in right now you might be the first to print a million soup cans for a $1.
> Once again this meme that because ~infinity can be produced the value of all of them goes to zero is somewhat insane. We can produce ~infinity real paintings as well.
The value of things is not dictated by how much of it we can produce. Value is not directly related to quantity but to the relationship between quantity, demand, and time.
> Fine, spin NFT's up and make money. Lets see how we go. If you jump in right now you might be the first to print a million soup cans for a $1.
Not interested.
Lastly, you use the word meme out of context a lot like someone who just learned it, and you keep calling other people stupid, people you do not know. That is no way to have a conversation.
Your point of supply, demand and time is a good one. The supply and costs to creating an NFT is low, but the demands for NFTs in general are also low.
Popular NFTs have low supply as they are created by popular individuals, of which there are few. The demand for these NFTs are high for a numerous reasons including but not limited to speculation and investors simply having excess capital.
From a technical perspective there is no limit to how many NFTs a popular artist could create but unless they are unique there isn't demand.
Like anything, making money by creating NFTs is non trivial whilst only the successful outlines are reported.
I don't think calling this "protected" is reasonable. You have some very weak guarantees that apply to one particular NFT platform, but this doesn't include being protected against fraud by the platform operators themselves, who can run a 51% attack whenever they want.
(And in case of Ethereum, have demonstrated their willingness of doing so whenever smart contract results prove to be inconvenient to investors.)
What do you gain over running a digital auction house on a RasPi? It'll be a lot cheaper to operate and is at no risk of having its underlying platform banned from multiple countries.
My question to him was, "Would you buy the ownership of Heroes by David Bowie (his favorite song of all time), for $2000 (a price he can afford)?"
He conceded the point before I finished the sentence. Now imagine if the NFT also came with the royalty rights of the song (not that this Grumpy cat came with that, but NFTs can be created where they carry rights with them), wouldn't he be willing to pay an even higher price?
Of course if you are selling to him something he already considers valuable at a very very low price he is gonna want to buy it. It has nothing to do with it being an NFT.
In short, he conceded no point but you did: the NFT in itself is not the valuable part, what's being sold is.
From what I can see, pretty much everything getting hyped with NFTs can already be achieved without them.
Blockchains can produce stronger guarentees than trusted timestamping. This is often used to prove digital existence and ownership.
Given the adoption of this interpretation in law disputes about digital ownership can amount to a digital signature with the private key.
It's a fancy website. But do you think the website would explain on their home page what "NFT" means, how it works, and what the goal of the website is? No, of course not. I guess that would be old-fashioned...
Edit: Thanks for the explanations about NFTs. I know that search engines exist. My point was that the website does not state what it's all about.
Think of it like a freshly printed 10 dollar bill - it's all unique because of the serial number, and there's no two bills with the identical serial number (in theory on bills... in practice on crypto it is truly unique)
Does the "proof of ownership" actually map onto anything in the real world? It sounds like people are paying out the nose for a notion of "this is mine" instead of "this is mine, and the courts will back me up." Who's actually respecting these ownership claims to justify the cost?
How is this any different from those "name a star after your sweetie" scams?
But for now, it's more profitable for people to keep them actually unique and ride the wave of ridiculous money.
And no, it's not really any different than selling naming rights to something that can't be owned, and selling it to multiple people. I'm sure those certificates have a number on them, too.
Like normal tokens that doesn't stop people from attributing goods (PRQ), value (BTC) or rights (Deal with it NFT).
Compared to selling physical named rights buyers can verify supply, see previous prices and sellers can optionally take commission on every sale.
Serious question as I'm confused by your confusion since HN is overrepresented by techies who know how to google <anything> ...
I also didn't know what "NFT" was last week and I simply googled it:
https://www.google.com/search?q=nft
It's the 1st result. Is that google result misleading and that Foundation.app website and everybody in this thread is talking about another "NFT" I'm unaware of?
My point was that this website does not explain at all what the website is about. Instead, it contains some mumbling about "bringing digital creators, crypto natives, and collectors together to move culture forward".
I understand that part. I don't know that the philosophy of that website is about either. However, I was replying specifically to your "don't know what it stands for":
>I've heard the term "NFT" a lot in the past days. However, I still don't know what it stands for.
If there's an unknown acryonym, it seems the common sense thing to do is google that acronym. That's what I was confused about in your comment. In fact, you've gotten several sub replies to your that restate what the topmost google result says the 'N', 'F', 'T' stands for. And those replies may themselves been informed by google several days earlier!
Whether NFTs make any economic or financial sense or what this thread's website is about ... is a different topic from what the acronym's letters expand out to be. So I guess my question can be put in a more general way: Is running across a random acronym on HN or discussion forums that I don't know and then Googling it a flawed approach?
(Because that's what I've been doing for decades and it seems to work.)
>I actually did duckduckgo it, that's not the problem.
And I just checked the DDG results and top result also says "non fungible token", so I'm still confused as what the purpose of the 1st paragraph in your comment "I still don't know what it stands for" is about. Why didn't the DDG result let you omit the 1st paragraph?
Crypto-currencies, for the most part, attempt to be fungible — all ethereum is the same and can be used for the same things. (There's a real argument to be made that BTC is not quite fungible). This is an important property for money to have. Shares in a company are fungible too, as are, say eggs (I can ask you for an egg today, I can give you another egg tomorrow, or I could give you the same one back if I haven't used it)
NFTs go in the exact opposite direction. Token are unique and not interchangeable. This models things like art, or real estate. If I lend you the Mona Lisa, you can't settle that loan by returning Guernica.
NFTs are really interesting in terms of the sort of applications you can build on top of them, but, as usual, the bro investor community around crypto is just milking the novelty factor for money.
There is absolutely no way ensure uniqueness. Any transaction on the blockchains can be called as a NFT if anyone says the transaction id makes the NFT unique. There is inherently no difference between any other token or coin or transaction and an NFT until unless there is an on chain mechanism to ensure uniqueness of the METADATA associated with the NFT. AFIK there are no such implementations of the NFT which ensures the uniqueness of the METADATA.
You're essentially paying for some unique random numbers that can change ownership.
A token contract (or any contract) is unique by address. To simplify the ethereum nft standard specifies that the token can only have one owner. This is what is called an NFT.
NFTs don't need smart contacts, they could be part of the protocol. As an example you can create a Cardano token with a maximum supply of 1.
An external representation or as you call it "metadata" only serves as a representation of the token contract address (and therefore creation address) and state of the contract which returns your public key as owner.
Unless the "metadata" is another NFT it cannot be unique by definition - digital uniqueness relies on ownership by asymmetric key cryptography.
Whereas, with the Grumpy Cat NFT, someone, somewhere, can exhibit some bits that shows they "own"(?) this particular image of Grumpy Cat, which is reproduced millions of times across the internet. Does the NFT even convey the legal rights to the image? Can you send DMCA takedowns based on owning the NFT for an image? What even makes the NFT non-fungible?
In fact, if anyone wants it, I'll happily sell you the NFT https://robinmessage.com/nft/GrumpyCat for $100,000 and I'll promise:
- to probably never issue that NFT to anyone else;
- and that, in some ineffable way, it represents the original Grumpy Cat.
I'm also curious about this. Does the buyer now legally own the image itself, as well as the NFT?
Ethereum is still a huge utterly insane risk because of Vitalik himself. I wouldn’t purchase anything of value as a store of value because of the creator.
Value seen or not.
Simplified you can think of an NFT being the following tuple: (NFT contract address, public address).
Uniqueness of this tuple is guarenteed by the EVM and liveness of this information is guaranteed by the Ethereum blockchain.
A lot of the NFTs value derives from the popularity of the individual that holds the private address corresponding to the public key that created the NFT contract.
This is the implicit way it represents the original Grumpy Cat and is not something you can duplicate seeing as you're not Tabatha Bundesen.
I doubt most people know what they're getting. I doubt they know what is actually stored on the blockchain (that the image itself isn't for instance) or how to find what is.
at the very least with a Rembrandt painting you can be reasonably sure that it's still worth something in a few years because 1. it actually constitutes a significant contribution to art and human culture, 2. it's been recognised as such for a few hundred years
What exactly is the chance that a digitally signed picture of a grumpy looking cat is something anyone cares about in another decade. A Pokemon trading card is high culture by comparison
* doesn't represent a significant contribution to internet culture
* will be still recognised as a meme in a few hundred years
I can't say which memes will survive but I wouldn't rule it out either.
Using this reasoning you can easily see why Jack Dorsey's NFT sold for so much more.
I learned somewhere that certain people that pass a certain "threshold" are not only fooled^H^H^H^H^H^Hconvinced by Nigerian prince scams, but utterly convinced that they are true.
I'm now wondering if there's a variant of this occurring on the other side of the equation, where people that fit within a certain threshold of "not being scammed" fit within this threshold so strongly it's impossible for them to break out of it and look at "how to actually scam ethically" from outside the box (where said box would say "hang on a minute, that sentence right there is an oxymoron")
Hey, I made $5 off the Mona Lisa, though!
The rights are quite limited:
> Use the Kitty art for your own personal, non-commercial use;
> Use the Kitty art to commercialize your own merchandise, provided that you aren’t earning more than $100,000 in revenue each year from doing so.
You can not:
> Modifying the art; > Using the art to market or sell third-party products; > Using the art in connection with images of hatred, violence, or other inappropriate behavior; or > Trying to trademark your art, or otherwise acquire intellectual property rights in it.
So basically you get to look at it mostly and resell it otherwise you need to reacquire another commercial license.
Buying an NFT for a tweet doesn't buy you the copyrights, neither does it buy you the ability to delete the tweet. [0] The true owner of the tweet isn't even obligated not to delete it. [0]
Either way, NFTs are just a novelty.
But without proof that the NFT seller actually had those rights to sell, it still doesn't mean anything.
This is just people laundering some money. Nothing more. It happens in the art world as well.
It's not random joe paying for a meme in hopes they can sell it for more (okay, maybe there is some tiny percentage of NFT's where this is true). But the majority is money laundering. Occam's razor.
I went over this idea in some detail in a previous comment but NFTs are no better at laundering money than mixers like tornado.cash.
In brief you still need an on ramp and off ramp. In this case the creator would have to be involved as since the auction there haven't been any offers or a listing.
I'm curious to know if they at least got the "rightful owner certification" part correct or not.
Https://jerseyfonseca.com/blogs/nft
There's nothing stopping people from doing this. V.cent.co does a decent job, though.
If you want to go further I'm sure you can find a link from the original reddit post.
The difficult part of laundering money on a blockchain is the on ramp/off ramp. Laundering is the easy part and doesn't need NFTs.