I mean I guess if you look at show of brands like Luis Vuiton (sp?) There are plenty of people willing to pay for said bragging rights.
As someone who's always mocked those brands and the people who buy them, it seems so strange to me though.
NFTs and crypto are obviously realms for this to play out, but this same force is at work for speculative investing in startups as well. For every startup with a value prop, a market, and a revenue model, there are a dozen who are flush with cash solely for the purpose of attracting Greater Suckers, fueled by the same motive to park and/or gamble an asset portfolio.
[0] https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/karen-petrou-wealth-inequal...
People compare NFTs to trading cards. But if you already think those things are basically useless zero-sum speculative Greater Fool insert-other-overused-but-apt-buzzwords bullshit, your opinion of NFTs won't be improved much.
NFTs, in their current state and hype wave, are probably a little like the dotcom bubble. It definitely doesn't imply the internet and the world wide web are bubbles, but it implies a major disconnect of some kind. I'm more interested in the future of semi-fungible tokens and novel, creative uses of NFT/SFT smart contracts. Plus just smart contracts in general.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Rome_(podcast)
I'm not so sure. Owning $10-$50M homes in major world cities, flying in a private jet, summer homes, winter homes, no car cheaper than $200k, no car older then 5 years, private school for your kids, private tutors, etc. adds up fast. Not to mention the effort that goes into make sure you never have to fly business class again.
The obscenely wealthy seem to either be content (Buffet), focused on charity (Gates), or all over the place (Musk). Anything less than $100M is less interesting thank you'd think.
It’s literally that. Someone giving you a slip of paper ”You own Mona Lisa” and nothing more. The actual piece of art is elsewhere. Copyrights are not affected etc.
They absolutely don't. There's no art collectors or amateurs in this game, only speculators.
There is more to it than speculation. There is a con where something went on. Maybe the auction house commissioned the money to pay for it and had a 69.3 million fee.
It saddens me that journalists have chosen not to follow the money and ask the questions.
Did they? I thought it was his investor "Metakovan" who commissioned it. Following the money is rather hard in an all-pseudonym system.
But, NFT's are selling "participation". You are not John Cleese, and you're not even all that funny. But you're an enormous fan, and happen to control an adequately-large amount of cash.
In the same way that you can hire Elton John to pretend to be your friend for a few hours, and play at your wedding, etc, you can also "buy in" to a very public partcipation in some art, or joke, or both ... at no meaningful cost to you.
Surely the market is limited. But people have paid a lot of money for a piece of toast, too.
In this case, it's no weirder than Cleese selling his socks for charity. Or profit! Who cares? Eat the rich, it's all good.
Perhaps with people focusing on that, we can get more quality products IRL. I went to an eye exam where the optometrist was wearing arcteryx gear during my exam. Perhaps she was going to jet off to some location where that stuff was needed, or perhaps she just liked it for fashion. But nonetheless, when people start wearing things that need real quality for non-quality reasons eventually brands start wising up and selling at the same price but with worse quality.
Arcteryx pieces feel great on, the same way avocados taste great in your mouth. And just like you'd likely be misleading people by using an avocado as an example of the average fruit, you are misleading people by using Arcteryx to stand in for technical outdoorwear.
Hell, that holds even if your optometrist was wearing a fucking rain shell in the office. Compare:
1. jacket made of mostly straight, rectangular pieces of material sewn together, then taped at the seams (which can rub against your skin) in order to make it waterproof, probably with long arms so it doesn't ride up when you raise yours (e.g., you end up with wrinkly, noisy sleeves)
2. jacket with fused seams, made of pieces that are fabricated to fit together and follow the contour of the human body, with thicker material fused only in those areas that were measured to be high abrasion
Number 2 is obviously the wrong garment to wear inside a climate controlled building. But it feels so much better than your run-of-the-mill slicker that I could see someone in and out of a building deciding to simply leave it on for a bit.
In other words, the technical specs responsible for those differences match "real quality reasons" for someone to decide to wear it for longer periods, even in conditions for which the garment wasn't designed.
And if it wasn't a rain shell, it's likely the piece was comfortable, breathable, didn't look like the average piece of outdoorwear, and was perfectly fitting for the conditions of an optometry office. (I own probably four of their Delta LT fullzips which are so light I sometimes forget to stop wearing them in the early summer.)
The more optometrists who wear it because it feels good, the sooner it sucks being technical because optometrists don’t care if it fails because they aren’t 200 miles from another version.
Also, that is a model followed by every similar company-- a model started by Patagonia back in the day when a technical piece of clothing was literally a rugby shirt.
In short, if you woke up in a nightmare universe where all optometrists wear Arcteryx you'd probably end up with a few more pieces in their technical line.
> ownership of digital goods which can't be owned?
One interesting fact it is what the ownership means legally. If there was a successful image that an expensive NFT owner had, it wouldn't surprise me to see some legal shenanigans. This has not been tested yet. Capability does not give you the rights to make copies of digital art. "Can't be owed" is a rather brave claim I think.
> You can make unlimited indistinguishable copies
Interestingly it is not dissimilar to a lot of physical art. To the extent that some 'restorations' of damaged art contain a lot of paint of the restorer rather than the original artist. I believe there are many professionals who are capable of creating something visually indistinguishable from the Mona Lisa, say.
Without specialised equipment you would have a very hard time telling reality from a good copy. So I am forced to conclude (what dealers will say quite explicitly) that most of the value is in the provenance not the physicality. "NFT is rubbish" becomes less obvious, to me.
Digital items have no original. The bytes are constantly copied, even in the creation itself. And every viewing creates another copy. And these copies have perfect fidelity. That's the difference.
In my understanding the NFT doesn't even cover the ownership of anything except the NFT itself. It's like owning a sheet of paper you write "certificate of authenticity" at the top on in sharpie, then sign yourself. You should probably write the bits in the middle in crayon.
> I mean I guess if you look at show of brands like Luis Vuiton (sp?) There are plenty of people willing to pay for said bragging rights.
Merch is at least an actual thing you can own and use, or get pleasure from by looking at (for works of arts e.g. prints & posters, limited run or not), sometimes tied to life events or memories (e.g. band, museum, or tourism spot merch).
For example if I sell you a song as an nft you could then license the song to Budweiser to use in a commercial and we both get paid. Think about how difficult this would be to arrange without the nft to handle the contract.
I've not seen a single NFT that comes with an associated copyright license to the underlying work.
Additionally, the artist only receives a royalty if the token is sold on these marketplaces that enforce the royalty. There's no such thing preventing a private sale that doesn't pay it.
This doesn't mean they couldn't exist, just that (in my current understanding) it's not part of the ERC-721 spec.
You can buy a replica of a piece of art to look at it. You buy the original to store value. You hope it may appreciate as well. It could end up worthless. But until someone says otherwise, it has the value stored in it.
It's just like baseball cards. You can make unlimited indistinguishable copies, but you don't. The date they are printed matters for some reason. Who owned it previously, its last sale price at auction is part of its history and thus its value.
Sorare/ubisoft also has a much better value proposition. Theyve combined draftkings and pokemon into a live betting market with collectable cards that you can use to play a game, to win more. The early generation may be simple digital art, mostly worthless, but there will be more innovation to come. Part of the reason I think NFTs are the real deal is because I think the value of art is often stupid, and yet it still has value. Even if 99% of NFTs turn into nothing, there will be some early art from people that arent famous yet, that is someday found. I have no doubt there is an immense amount of mystery being planted, waiting to be uncovered. Whatever stupidity and hype and storytelling and history around artwork, that I dont understand, will translate to this realm as well. The lack of decay, fire damage, traditional theft, and loss will be an interesting wrinkle.
Everyone understands that baseball cards are just like savings accounts!
I get that all “store of value” are arbitrary and that gold could be other things. But it seems funny to just pick random things and then try to convince others that it’s worthwhile. There are at least certain characteristics needed for a store of value and something completely arbitrary has a bootstrap problem.
I can at least look at art or play with a Black Lotus. Holding an NFT of a piece of art is stupid as a store of value because there are so many better stores (eg, an NFT that conveys ownership rights to a piece of art for example).
If anything this is a democratization of the wealthy auction scene. A new tier of field to play.
Alternative assets come in all shapes in sizes. I can store wealth in gold, comics, wine. Why not my name on a ledger listed as owner of nothing in particular other than the price I paid for it? The amount of hate they get on HN should be a clue that everyone is being over analytical and logical, and missing out on analyzing them through human behavior. They arent a robotic math problem, they are behavioral economics.
I can't wait to see an investable etf of sorts that lets people invest in a collection of NFTs like they would bonds. Youll have "curators"/"fund managers" assembling and storing a vast array of art, allowing people to diversify and own fractional shares of a bunch of art.
Does it sound stupid? Absolutely? Which is why it's just crazy enough to work.
"Investing" in a Picasso is an investment in a long-term store of cultural value that you speculate will appreciate more quickly than the S&P. Probably because you bet that the 1% will see outsized gains compared to the 99%. Maybe you also like the art and want to be the only person in the world who can display it. Also it can be very useful as a tax dodge.
"Investing" in a new and unknown artist is several things: a) speculation that they will become more famous and that you are tasteful enough to know it early (see: angel investing), b) patronage and participation (see: friends & family rounds), c) conspicuous consumption (see: conspicuous consumption), and finally d) purchase of an expression of art that you enjoy, which may or may not have resale value in the future if your priorities change.
NFTs are confusing because any persistent value is completely dependent on the continued agreement that exclusivity of relationship is valuable and transferable. What's it like to be the eleventh owner of an NFT? Presumably, it'd be pretty meh.
But to your point -- it's psychology not logic. Today's buyers are not looking for a store of value. It's just an exercise in one of two things: vanity or speculation. These are powerful things!
No, it is not. Picasso died dirt poor, he never beneficiated in large sums from his paintings. It just happen he was crazy enough to make a name and now people brag about him.
I meant it in the simplest way, which simply means "support".
Yes, physical art, baseball cards, gold and whatnot all have a long history and vast amount of people who participate in the trade.
NFTs in comparison are super new, and the only people who seem to chip in are those who either have some stake in there or bored.
NFTs might be a good store of value eventually. But right now dumping millions in there seems like a huge gamble.
Something like cards in Gods Unchained is a better NFT example than a picture.
Given every post on crypto / blockchain / NFT on HN is full of these exact same comments showing utter disbelief and bewilderment, for the past 10 years, the answer is “No, everyone here thinks like you.”
It has emotional value.