Hacker News Reader

Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

> My understanding is that the NFT also contains a hash of the work that it represents, so there really is only one of a given digital work

I've never heard that before. Can someone confirm this is true? Is it solving for a hash of the original digitization of the work or something?

View on HN

My understanding is that John can take a picture/jpg of the Mona Lisa, mint an ERC-20 token and sell his picture/jpg on a NFT marketplace. Jane can also take a picture/jpg of the Mona Lisa, mint an ERC-20 token and sell her picture/jpg on a NFT marketplace. I think the difference shows up when Jack Dorsey mints a screenshot of his first tweet and sells it, it's worth $2m because it's sold by Jack. Whereas I could screenshot Jack's first tweet, mint it and sell it for $0.01 because it's sold by me.

Very happy to be corrected if this is incorrect.

This is also my understanding, and my point was (in this example) Jack Dorsey can just do it a second time, and a third time, and so on.

And it's not like Monet making more paintings, because each painting is unique. This is an identical digital copy from the same person, with no guarantee of its longevity.

Both of these statements are true:

- An NFT can (should) include a hash of the work

- Multiple NFTs can exist pointing to the same hash.

However:

> And it's not like Monet making more paintings, because each painting is unique.

Each NFT is also unique in the sense that each NFT itself has an address and its own history. They are distinguishable. They are orderable.

> This is an identical digital copy from the same person, with no guarantee of its longevity.

The record has a guaranteed longevity - the longevity of the underlying blockchain. The object it points to obviously does not.

However that's not really important. Building records in the city clerk office have a guaranteed longevity that is far greater than the buildings themselves.

So for example, if Jack minted multiple NFTs for the same tweet it would be clear to everyone which one was first. Only the first one would presumably be considered valuable.

If Jack attached IP rights to those NFTs, courts would presumably only consider the first valid.

I personally find NFTs that lack actual legal property rights to be silly and valueless, but I wanted to address confusion about how they actually work.

> So for example, if Jack minted multiple NFTs for the same tweet it would be clear to everyone which one was first. Only the first one would presumably be considered valuable.

That's not how I see it at all. Once Jack has been shown to be willing to oversell himself just to make a quick buck, it will immediately devalue everything associated with him, including the original NFT. You're buying into the quality/credibility/longevity of the creator here, and once it's shown he's a shill there's not much reason to value any of his original "work" highly.

I am open to being wrong, but it still boggles my mind anybody could think NFTs are anything other than a scam. At least bitcoin had lots of legitimate theory to be used as an alternative to currency, even if it only ended up being an investment alternative for gold. An NFT is like trying to sell art without actually having to create art.

> Once Jack has been shown to be willing to oversell himself just to make a quick buck, it will immediately devalue everything associated with him, including the original NFT. You're buying into the quality/credibility/longevity of the creator here, and once it's shown he's a shill there's not much reason to value any of his original "work" highly.

To be clear I don't personally see any value at all in an NFT that doesn't have legal IP rights attached. I think we agree that far.

However:

> it will immediately devalue everything associated with him, including the original NFT

It might. Kind of hard to theorize as to what the result would be. The reason I'm hesitant to jump to that conclusion is because of the timestampy nature of blockchains. It's not as if the market is suddenly flooded with forgeries and nobody can tell what's real. It's baked into the blockchain which one was first. In fact you might argue it would not be possible (economically) for Jack to do this in the first place since nobody would buy the second instance.

Another comparison here to make is like signed copies / limited editions. People buy signed copies of albums, artworks, etc., even though forgeries are rampant. Are NFTs like signed copies?

If the value of a signed copy is mostly performative, then NFTs alone maybe should not have value (because nobody can really see that you own one). If the value of a signed copy is personal, then maybe it does.

I don't personally see any value in owning an NFT, but it's not cut and dry to me that nobody else will or should.

The analogy I use with NFT art is not with physical items but with banking. The token is just another form of credit issued by the artist. The relationship to the specific work is knowingly tenuous and entails intermediaries - and in this respect, it's still a tech demo - but the financial asset itself has meaning relative to the credit of the artist, given that the wallet that minted will itself have a persistent identity.

Recognition for previous work creates expectations for new work, even if the work itself is lost. Art has always operated that way.

But there are details that need sorting out. A proprietary URL link - or an IPFS link only hosted by one node - is too flimsy for long-term collectables. Use value is sorely needed to really flesh out the function of the tokens. Again, as it is, we have tech demos with some eyewatering valuations.

> An NFT is like trying to sell art without actually having to create art.

An NFT of a tweet maybe. But actually artists do create art and sell it as NFTs.

Sure, but there's no guarantee there won't be duplicates of that work later. Unless the author has a legal contract guaranteeing never to make another NFT of that work again, there's no reason to believe in its authenticity.

And call me crazy, but the kind of people selling NFTs don't strike me as trustworthy.

But in the non-NFT world, artists are selling prints of their work, and have been doing so for decades - hardly a fad! Those can be fairly expensive for the top tier, and they work the same way: You trust the artist will not inflate the supply of the same work with additional prints later on.

yes, but you can't just recreate a print at high quality unless there happens to be a digital image of it floating around.

Here's Beeple's $69 million artwork in full resolution (warning: 300 megs!):

https://ipfsgateway.makersplace.com/ipfs/QmXkxpwAHCtDXbbZHUw...

The metadata for the IPFS: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmPAg1mjxcEQPPtqsLoEcauVedaeMH81WXDPvPx...

Because a token is public we can all see the contents. Now, you could theoretically just put the hash in there without the content existing on the IPFS (or elsewhere), and then give the owner the content after the sale via a separate channel. But now you've got the problem of how to verify what you're buying is the real deal. Furthermore, it complicates resale (not that IPFS will save you there, IIRC if you're the one storing content on IPFS and the only one, then it's possible you just stop hosting it and the data vanishes).

I might be able to recreate it well enough. I might be able to pay a cheap poster in a museum shop! I can probably recreate a Wall Drawing by Sol LeWitt (since they being frequently recreated anyway), and I can certainly glue a banana to a wall.

It all leads back to the question of why we value the original in the first place. People have all kinds of answers to this - why it's different for "real" art - but those points usually don't hold up to scrutiny.

There is something about physical things that a digital image is lacking, for sure. But most of the value we ascribe to things, even to the Mona Lisa, is totally arbitrary, a collective illusion.

It's not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com