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Comment by wrs | Hacker News Reader

Given there’s a $50k bid for this, I can’t decide if the joke backfired, or succeeded brilliantly. It’s a no-lose proposition for Cleese, I guess!

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Normally, when these kind of things happen, the receipient of that money tends to do something cool with it like dontating it to causes. However, I think it would be very apropos for Cleese to just keep any earnings.

(Cleese collects fifty million dollars, goes to the bank and takes the entire amount out in cash.)

"I won, I won, I finally came out ahead!"

Prunella Scales appears.

"Thank you, Basil!"

Yoink.

This is already a famous NFT.

"Remember when John Cleese sold the Brooklyn Bridge? Look, I have that NFT that he sold!".

Heck, I would even pay money for that. First of all for the bragging rights, and second of all because I'm sure plenty of people would pay for it.

But $50k is a bit over my budget ;). But in no way am I surprised that there is somebody out there that wants to pay this amount.

If anyone is surprised by this, you probably also don't understand any other collectibles.

So the idea is to pay money to claim involvement in a cultural moment in which you played no role? Sounds sad and hollow to me.

Why do people buy movie props, collect stamps, let authors sign their books? Maybe all very "sad and hollow", but a lot of people seem to enjoy it.

You judging those people says more about you than them.

> movie props, collect stamps, let authors sign their books

All those things have intrisinc values. If tomorrow the market for movie props, stamps and signed book went straight to 0, the owners would keep those objects for themselves, they have sentimental values, not just financial.

If the market for NFTs goes to 0, you have a worthless GUID, cool.

> You judging those people says more about you than them.

Ouch, reading into it, much? I don't begrudge collectors their collections. I understand those because they own an object that holds value, either to them or to others.

The way you put it in the parent comment is "I'm spending money so that I have a story that I can use to flex on people later," which I just can't grok as a motive for spending tens of thousands of dollars.

But the very value of that specific NFT is to have been there when it happened. Buying this NFT 10 years from now will be useless, you were not part of the movement.

... Meaning a logical next step arises: you should create and sell a "I, koonsolo, was there when this NFT was a thing" NFT, which will perpetually be associated to you whoever buys it.

So basically “greater fool”

Just tell people you own it. Venmo me $5 and I’ll put your name down on the blockchain (a public Google sheet). It’ll have the same effect.

But it won't.

This is the key conceptual leap you have to make to understand NFTs, or cryptocurrency for that matter.

The blockchain is a consensus mechanism, with the emphasis on consensus.

A lot of people agreeing on something having value means that it has value to those people. They can then exchange that thing among themselves and thus transfer the value.

One person saying something has value means it has value to them. If no one else accepts it has value, it can't be used to transfer value.

And a standard database transaction that can be done with pre-existing technology already can do this too? Like seriously, NFTs are not breaking new ground. This is just an excuse to piss away something that could be converted to objectively far more useful fiat.

The fed needs to raise interest rates and get the free dumb money out of the system as soon as possible so we can suck these schemes dry.

Frankly, I think John Cleese is trolling all of the NFT fans.

Clearly not.

It hasn’t hit the reserve price, so I imagine that was set to something ludicrous and he never intends for this performance to actually be sold.

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