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Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

The original conceptual framework for NFT-like instruments is Nick Szabo's "Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority":

https://nakamotoinstitute.org/secure-property-titles/

At the very end he says:

> Largely unaddressed above is the problem of divergence between actual conditions and directory rights. [...] When divergence becomes too great, a solution to address the unreality of the title registry is needed.

Almost nobody selling NFTs today has even bothered to address Szabo's final "correspondence to ground" point, i.e., why anyone should think that the ownership of a particular NFT means anything!

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This NFT is not "The Brooklyn Bridge", this NFT is "Remember when John Cleese sold the Brooklyn Bridge NFT". Do you think nobody wants the bragging rights of owning that? I certainly do, but not for $50k, which it already has.

c.f.: http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

At least those who bought pixels on that page got something for it.

That's what I remember. At some point is all of this advertising? a well-known property that people are aware of?

> Do you think nobody wants the bragging rights of owning that?

It would be nice to believe that eventually we evolve beyond bragging about being an idiot.

> I certainly do

...

Exactly. There’s little I’d like less than bragging about having spent my life savings on a JPEG that everyone has but that I “own”...

I don't think the person spending $50k does it with his lifes saving.

You don't buy a jpeg, you buy the unique item that John Cleese sold.

Same for movie props. You can buy a nice lightsaber below $200. The ones that were used in the movies... a bit more.

"item"

> You don't buy a jpeg, you buy the unique item that John Cleese sold.

A NFT is not an item.

> Same for movie props. You can buy a nice lightsaber below $200. The ones that were used in the movies... a bit more.

Those are things. There is no correlation. NFT is selling you a pointer. It's a hash that on one software platform says "that thing over there". When Bob buys a NFT, he isn't buying a lightsaber that he can display, loan out, or hold . Bob is buying a number.

Right, but in this case, you're buying a number provably owned by John Cleese, as part of a performance piece where he sold a token representing the Brooklyn Bridge, as a commentary on the entire concept of selling numbers. It's meta, it's brilliant, it's popular, (it's absolutely going to devalue the other Brooklyn Bridge NFT I own because mine was minted first but this one's more popular), it's ART.

That's a good point, and I think you're right for this one instance. It's an exceptional case and the artistic statement literally can't be made without NFT. He's telling a joke and the fact that someone will buy the NFT is itself the punchline.

If Bob buys a movie prop lightsaber for $10,000 and a fully quality replica costs $200, then Bob has only bought $200 worth of something he can display, loan out, or hold. The remainder of the price is made up of the intangible connection to the film and artists.

I see what you're saying that the authenticity and the connection have some value. That value is intrinsic to the object itself though. NFT is asking us to pretend that that "intangible connection" can be parceled out for speculators as collectible magic numbers while the real lightsaber hopefully sits in Lucasfilm's warehouse.

NFTs imply there is a platform which supports the contract and blocks all non-ownership AND people will use no other platforms

Not necessarily.

It would be more impressive if Jack can sell his first tweet, once on each major platform. Now they are somewhat fungible, non fungible titles. If one is worth more than the other, why?

Sure, but this NFT was specifically valued for the interaction of the sale of this NFT. Just like buying Dorsey's Tweet is. It's just pure commoditized interaction without a base good under it.

I do agree that it's completely ridiculous, but I feel that way about the stock market.

The main (and dangerous) difference with the NFT stuff is that society doesn't agree any of this stuff is valuable. It's a bit like what happens when a conquering power comes in and existing land titles become meaningless. A good example of this was real estate moguls in prewar Japan, many of whom had spent centuries gradually accumulating land tenancy over tons of other people - but as soon as WW2 happened, one of the big changes that transformed that country was that all of those land titles were simply dissolved.

Just, -poof-. Gone.

Ownership of that land was simply taken from them, and evenly divided amongst their tenants.

There's a very similar danger with i.e. property rights inside of videogames and stuff - until and unless there's case law about it, I can go into my buddy's proverbial minecraft server, wreck all of his (potentially months of) work, and there's really nothing he can do about it. I might lose a friend over it, but I won't lose a lawsuit.

The illustrative bit about the minecraft server is I'm at the mercy of "the community of people who agrees that thing has value", and in this case, it's one person.

I'd assume part of the artistic statement being made here ties exactly to your point about land. It's ultimately just ALL certificates that are unconnected to possession of the physical space. The difference between owning the NFT and owning the bridge is a matter of scale; of how many people buy into the worth of your scrap of digital paper.

While I agree with you on the surface, it not being able to be displayed is not really true. Bob may not hang it up on their wall or hold but they can put it on their website. Bob can make a dedicated personal museum showing their ownership live streamed in vrchat and altspacevr. Bob can constantly talk about it on their social media. Bob can be an equally big asshole about this as if they could hold it physically.

Thats not something that translates into digital content. That original lightsaber is valuable because it is unique, it can never be recreated, a jpeg is infinitely reproducible, thus less valuable

This is just giving regular ppl like you (or any meme culture creator) a similar sort of markup that was reserved for the Ralph Lauren's or any stupid designer item whose raw materials were mostly just vapor.

Luxury and self-image and [silent] bragging rights were always part of the economy, now it just also includes lulz, which happen to be much more accessible to create :)

> Maybe NFTs will not endure, which is a risk for anyone playing a pioneering role in a new genre. That is why the price was not $200 million or more. In any case, this is a world in which Marcel Duchamp’s urinal sculpture still is exhibited in major museums, regarded by many critics as a masterpiece of the 20th century, and it sold at auction for $1.6 million in 2002. Canvases painted a single color, and other forms of abstract and conceptual art, remain a major part of recent art history and can sell for tens of millions.

> The point is not to argue over what qualifies as “art.” It is simply that it is a mistake to assume that NFTs will fail in the art world.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-17/the-nf...

People doubting that a thing is actually art at all seems to be a fairly consistent marker of something being good art.

It's fresh, it's pushing boundaries, it's making people think and wonder, it's generating snark and discussion.

If readymades are art, if a blank canvas is art, then art is just a scam!

Not sure if it will stand the test of time though (I mean technically in terms of the artifacts persisting, and conceptually, aka whether it will still be interesting in 10 years or seen as a fad).

> People doubting that a thing is actually art at all seems to be a fairly consistent marker of something being good art.

Survivorship bias. The successes are highly visible, and we never hear of the failures.

> If readymades are art, if a blank canvas is art, then art is just a scam!

Ceci n'est pas une pipe. All art is a kind of deception.

The success is part of the art. A highschool kid scribbling "this is not a pipe" next to a pipe in his notebook is not the same as an accomplished artist convincing a gallery to feature it in an exhibition.

> The success is part of the art

Not necessarily. Creators who toil in obscurity during life but receive posthumous recognition do happen.

Sure, but is still their accomplishment. The scribbling in the notebook would never receive eventual recognition unless something remarkable happened.

I'd point out that one thing about "con job" art like that is that, compared to craftsmanship art, where there's a steady paycheck for skilled work, "con art" is, well, the lottery. Tons of people try, and the vast majority make absolutely nothing.

Meanwhile, in craftsman's art fields (all of the many ingredients that go into filmmaking, videogames, etc), if you're merely competent at what you do, it's like being a programmer - you learn the skills, and you get a job doing it, and my goodness - it pays a salary. There's no lottery involved. If you're a good matte painter, concept artist, 3d modeller, et cetera, illustrator, figure artist, etc, etc - people gladly pay money for it.

Anecdotally, as someone in the games industry (and knowing some folks in film), the difference between these two fields (con art and skilled art) is pretty stark. Every person I've know who's tried to do con art has failed to make a career out of it, and every person who's gotten a degree-equivalent level of skill/effort into skilled art has earned a living doing it (in much the same way they would in programming).

> every person who's gotten a degree-equivalent level of skill/effort into skilled art has earned a living doing it

Not for the folks I know. I know plenty of authors, painters, photographers, and ex-film-students who need day jobs. It's practically a trope. These are people with degrees in the subject who have already made professional money at it, but can't make enough steady money with it.

(guessing here) If you met these people on the job, you'd know a lot more gainfully employed folks simply by definition.

This is like saying, "denial means someone is probably lying"

This is a misdirection. No one upthread was saying anything is or isn't art. This isn't about art. This about NFT.

Technically it's an artwork that is a commentary om NFTs.

> Canvases painted a single color, and other forms of abstract and conceptual art, remain a major part of recent art history and can sell for tens of millions.

I don't think anyone's under the impression that people paying lots of money for extremely stupid things is a recent phenomenon. I deride those buying single-colour canvasses for 8 figure price tags just the same as I deride anyone buying into the litany of crypto pyramid schemes.

I once wandered through a museum with a modern art collection. Several of the pieces looked like literal trash to me. I wasn't sure if the security guards were there to keep people from stealing the art or keep the janitors from taking the art out to the dumpster :-)

I get it that some people buy it as investments, hoping to find a sucker to sell it to at a higher price. But that just sounds like pump-and-dump to me. Or maybe it's rich people who have run out of fun things to do with their money.

Me, I'd rather do what Elon Musk does. I wanted to buy stock in SpaceX, but it is privately held, so I bought TSLA instead. Lucked out on that one.

I don't like NFTs but your comment triggered a counter argument in my head.

People buy and collect all kinds of worthless tuff. I know several people that spent between $3k and $10k on Magic the Gathering cards. From a non-player's perspective it's ridiculous. The cards are worthless and you could just print out images of the cards on a printer or copy machine if all you cared about was playing the game itself.

And yet people do it.

Is a NFT really any different? Is it wrong for people to spend their money on whatever they want?

Wizards of the Coast are making a game. I don’t doubt that the secondary market eventually changed how they operated but at base, they are a game company. That’s ethically different from someone that sets out to create a Ponzi scheme.

I don’t think anyone will disagree that money will be made by keen NFT creators and collectors, much like money is made by anyone peddling collectibles. The part of the argument where I depart is when proponents argue that this is somehow a transformative technology.

It’s digital baseball cards and pet rocks, “but crypto”.

I also remain convinced that NFTs are a fad in their current iteration. To use a rough analogy, NFTs are taking the record store into crypto when the future lies in building Spotify/Netflix in crypto.

Collecting is fine, buying is fine - as long as the goal is not bragging. The problem is bragging.

*Edit: Too late to delete, but my sarcastic comment is likely against site rules. Apologies

I suppose one can “brag” about most anything. Seems to me, though, that a brag about “owning” an arbitrary sequence of bytes is pretty damn empty.

Overcome a challenge that presses your personal limitations? Worthy of a brag: you took up the task, persevered, and conquered.

Open your wallet to purchase something? I just don’t see that there’s any legitimate boasting to be had there: any damn fool with the same money could do it. There is no challenge, there is no accomplishment, there is nothing to be proud of at all. It’s such empty bragging.

IMO people who brag about owning things have deep personal insecurities and would be better off putting the money spent towards therapy.

Having a unique and quirky item is worth a brag.

Bragging with an expensive Rolex is very different than bragging with the NFT of a terrible image of the Brooklyn Bridge by John Cleese who sold it as a joke.

Except there is nothing unique about it.

John Cleese has done how many pieces of architectural art now?

Nor anything unique about a Rolex. Can’t see how a purchased watch qualifies for bragging. It takes no skill, no dedication, no smarts, no gumption to open one’s wallet to purchase a watch.

The person who built the watch might have something to brag about.

A Rolex is an actual thing with a function and an intrinsic value. It can be copied, but only at a significant cost.

> Open your wallet to purchase something? I just don’t see that there’s any legitimate boasting to be had there: any damn fool with the same money could do it.

The item isn’t the brag. The purchase is. People don’t buy Rolxes because because it doesn’t anything radically different than a $50 watch. They buy it because it tells people they have money. That’s what art is. That’s what NFT is.

> That’s what NFT is.

Yeah, but who gives a shit whether it's centralized or not?

If some intrepid reporter figured out that NFT has a backdoor that means it is being controlled as a-- god forbid-- centralized service, what bad thing happens to the dipshit who paid a million dollars for Rick and Morty digital art?

I agree with you 100%.

I cant think of anything more depressing than saying art is showing off you have money.

Do you think the person that buys a Picasso is:

A) The world biggest fan of Cubism and a lifelong fan of Picasso.

B) A person with a shitload of money, that has nowhere else to put the money than in some famous artwork.

I am not saying that all art is like this. But I am saying that a large part of the fine arts world is like this.

I will remember this. I even bookmarked that tweet, and it cost me nothing.

I’ve created an NFT of a bookmark to the tweet. Starting bid is 1000 Doge.

to the moon!

Joke aside, what's to prevent anyone from selling an NFT for "the first NFT"? They've done it for tweets... And what would that make of their claim of "verifiable unique" ownership?

A claim of ownership requires one thing ... other people to believe it.

This isn't really convincing. If NFTs are only valuable when celebrities sell them as part of a fad, then they have absolutely failed to meet the "correspondence to ground" point.

How about if somebody sells NFTs and then becomes famous? Maybe they become famous for NFT art, maybe not.

Chances are most will expire worthless, but a select few may be early works from people who go down in history.

> This NFT is not "The Brooklyn Bridge", this NFT is "Remember when John Cleese sold the Brooklyn Bridge NFT".

You certainly seem to be right, but where's the authority for that observation coming from? Or what would the actual Brooklyn Bridge look like as an NFT?

It's like you get to pay to be part of a joke with John Cleese. I think it's worth something too.

I disagree, but this is a common objection which is worth addressing. Specifically I disagree that NFTs are grounded in that particular conceptual framework.

NFTs aren't attempting to be bearer instruments which convey ownership of some physical good, or even of a piece of intellectual property. Those require a corresponding Ricardian contract. This remains a good idea, but, to put it mildly, there are unsolved problems associated with it.

A NFT is just a baseball card, what you're proposing is more like a baseball player packaging up 10% of his lifetime earnings into 5000 instruments and selling those.

Baseball cards have provenance, scarcity, and IP protection of their appearance: that is, they're demonstrably produced by a company with a right to do it, there are only so many in existence, and it's illegal to make identical copies of the baseball card.

NFTs have two of these properties and an adequate substitute for the third. They're signed, giving provenance, and scarce, due to blockchain-verified artificial scarcity. It's not illegal to make copies of the referenced digital artifact, because what fun would that be? No one could load the image or whatever in a browser.

Nor is copyright currently assigned. I don't believe it's conventional to purchase copyright for an artwork along with the artwork itself, but I could be wrong about that, and it doesn't matter: this would be a cool thing to add to some NFTs, but we can just agree that it isn't a part of the package right now and move on.

But it is impossible to make an actual copy of the NFT itself, even with the private key used to sign the original. That makes IP protection an inferior good: it's fraud to make a forgery of a rare baseball card, but it's quite profitable fraud if one happens to get away with it.

Disclosure: I own no NFTs in the usual sense of the term, and don't intend to.

> A NFT is just a baseball card

It's more like a pointer to a JPEG of a baseball card.

This is like describing a baseball card as a low-quality reproduction on cheap cardstock of an original photo.

Personally, I don't care for baseball cards, I value them about as much as the paper they're printed on. But collectors like them, so if I found one (I dunno, dropped in its sleeve into a tip jar?), I'd check if someone else wanted to pay for it before I started using it as a bookmark.

Same deal with NFTs. The difference is they're brand-new and white-hot, and it remains to be seen if they have enduring value.

My guess: NFTs will continue to be valued, but the vast majority of those which exist right now (and of every NFT ever minted) will be worth so little that it isn't worth the transaction fee to transfer ownership.

The John Cleese Brooklyn Bridge though? It's a great joke! Might not be worth whatever it goes for down the road, but it will probably still be worth something.

Who can make a 50's era baseball card?

Who can make an NFT?

NFTs are Beanie Babies, but instead of a limited edition toy, you get a barcode. Anyone can make them for anything, so there's no scarcity. They're pogs you can't play with.

And just like pogs, when Pizza Hut and Lunchables started making pogs, it was over. Pizza Hut and Lunchables NFTs are coming.

I'm going to go sell an NFT of Jack Dorsey's fist Twitter post NFT.

> Who can make a 50's era baseball card?

Any decently print operation? The MLB would come after them if they tried to sell them, of course, but it's not like pictures on cardstock is a tougher technology to recreate than NFT.

Both are only worth something because of their provenance, ease of manufacturing is irrelevant.

You're not going to be able to sell a forged baseball card at Christie's. You can't prove its provenance, and it wouldn't hold up under scrutiny.

NFTs aren't scarce. Anyone can make them for anything. I can sell you the couch I'm sitting on as an NFT.

If I own a Picasso, I could burn it, have my tigers urinate on it, or make sure no other human ever sees it again. I can do whatever I want. What exactly can I do with Jack Dorsey's first tweet? Get him to delete it? Change it into an ad?

There's no legal framework behind NFTs. Ownership is meaningless. If you bought my couch as an NFT, good luck coming to get it.

Also, when the cryptography behind NFTs is broken (and it will be!), what happens to the ownership? If the chain switches algorithms, not everyone will update their keys. After breaking the old scheme, ownership will instantly be impossible to prove.

I really don't understand your point. I can print trading cards for my cat. You can make NFTs for your couch. No one wants to buy either. But if the MLB or John Cleese are selling, the equation changes.

We're in the "determined moms are buying all the Beanie Babies in stock" phase.

Next you have the copycats, people selling shovels, and uber drivers investing in it.

Then comes the eternal stagnation.

These are worth jack shit except to the temporary evangelicals buying the craze. They aren't rare, you have to explain it ("I wonder if anyone knows I own the NFT of this song"), and the crypto will be broken before the holders update their wallets to safer algorithms.

Nobody will ever honor your CryptoKitties. You can't use them in Nintendogs or Neopets. The creators won't build a compelling platform for them and they'll simply die from waning interest.

These are moon certificates, except with crypto.

The fact that you have insisted (twice!) that the secp256k1 curve will be broken makes it impossible to take anything you have to say on this subject seriously.

Longbets 20 years $5000?

I expect quantum to pick up major steam, especially if major state actors want to screw over the Bitcoin network.

Minor note, NFTs are on Ethereum and not Bitcoin. Ethereum is already quantum resistant and has slot in solutions to make it quantum secure when needed (they aren't in use right now as they are less efficient). Quantum computing is not an existential threat to NFTs or blockchains.

Okay, but moon certificates seem even MORE equivalent to baseball cards. I don't think you understand my objection, I completely agree that NFTS are inherently worthless: I just don't think that's an exceedingly unique property. They're baseball cards or beanie babies with a smaller storage footprint.

Charmin

https://rarible.com/charmin

That's the rub for me.

If I buy the baseball card, I get whatever (limited) utility it offers. I can put it in an album, frame it and hang it on the wall, stick it in the spokes of a bicycle wheel, use it as a very small shim or insulator.

If I buy the rights to the card, I get the utility that offers. I can contract out and offer reprints of the 1990 Topps Juan Agosto card for the millions of people who want one.

If I buy a NFT corresponding to the photo on the card, what utility have I bought? What new capabilities or rights do I possess? As best I can tell, nothing.

NFTs are the MMO version of the "I am Rich" app with factions and customizable skins. You can demonstrate your economic might by exchanging large quantities of money for something with negligible if any actual utility. But you at least get to pick which particular piece of uselessness you're associating yourself with, so you can use it as a more precise social signaling thing.

Yes, but a baseball card is just a piece of paper with some ink on it. It's only trivially harder[1] to replicate than a pointer to a JPEG. We have already established that sentimental value + proof of provenance suffices to yield basically any market price. Take this concept to its logical conclusion, and you get NFTs.

[1] At the price levels we're discussing.

> We have already established that sentimental value + proof of provenance suffices to yield basically any market price.

Those are some of the means by which we arrive at price.

> Take this concept to its logical conclusion, and you get NFTs

Mistake this concept for an end by itself and you get NFT.

IMO NFT are a path to the commoditisation of belief and the communities which spring up around shared beliefs. Imagine if QAnon were to launch their own, with the proof of patriotism baked in to your online in or if some religion reinvented the indulgence. These would probably be done on their own coinbase.

Don’t give them ideas!

I haven't even mentioned intangible secessionist states setting up auto-resolving contracts systems and laws, taxation, etc.

In the case of real property the clearinghouse for this is the local courthouse. Deeds, liens, etc... all flow through the local (city/county) clerk. If you can create NFT's such that transfer requires two signatures (one of those being the jurisdiction of the real property) then it would function little different than how property transfers happen today. Furthermore NFT transfers signed by the court could reduce or eliminate the costly need for title searches and title insurance. If real property moves to the block chain in this manner all you need is one final title search, then signed by the court, from then on out title can be ensured by the blockchain. If you can do fractional ownership of an NFT then it greatly simplifies land development, mineral rights, and other more complex transfers such as sub-division of a tract.

Having knowledge of this business for some time now I believe it's an issue of when, not if, real property will move to a blockchain of some sort.

In the case of hacks (someone gets the court's private key and signs fraudulent transfers), mistakes (bugs, human error, etc), and other such scenarios, there would still need to be some kind of title insurance and human oversight.

Right, even if you come up with a clean, secure way to publish attestations onto a blockchain, you've got a problem when they are transferred to an invalid or inaccessible destination.

That a title can be contested is actually a feature of the existing system, not simply a problem.

> If real property moves to the block chain in this manner all you need is one final title search, then signed by the court, from then on out title can be ensured by the blockchain.

Just because your "final" title search doesn't produce anything doesn't mean a future one won't, so I don't see how the blockchain solves anything here.

What does would this improve and/or simplify compared to publishing the existing database online? (which can be published as a list of changes rather than a snapshot)

What are the obvious solutions for stolen keys or people dying with access lost? (which don't translate to the blockchain not mattering at all)

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