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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

NFTs just happen to be the token du jour, and it's a bit sad that a16z is peddling them. There's nothing of value here, and no one will care in 4 years. Remember Crypto Kitties[1]? Don't worry, no one else does either. The idea of "proof of ownership" makes no sense in a digital context, anyway, and the best way forward (if actually trying to solve this problem) isn't with some pump-and-dump token, but rather with DRM-style certificates.

But no one's really trying to solve the problem of digital ownership, provenance, chain of custody, or original verifiability, they're just trying to get rich.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoKitties/

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VCs are geared to take big swings and bets. Makes total sense that they would buy into anything that has the potential to be a billion dollar idea, even if the likelihood of success is 1-5%.

What's interesting about NFTs to me is that an org like the NBA is one of the most successful - but I guess that makes sense because, as others have posted, they generate all the NFTs and can validate them. So it seems to me that it can be successful in the case where you have a single, centralized owner. Where it breaks down for me is when that ownership is some random person on the interwebs.

NBA Top Shot is also interesting because the number of buyers/sellers seems fair stable/flat - that would indicate to me that it is a relatively small number of people trading with each other because I think the number of buyers/sellers would increase if the overall market was growing - but I could be wrong about that.

https://www.cryptoslam.io/nba-top-shot

> So it seems to me that it can be successful in the case where you have a single, centralized owner.

Postgres also works great when you have a single, centralized owner

Yea but then it's not "crypto" duh. /s

Don't confuse VC's position to have more capital, closer to action, so even if their bet is shit, they'll be able to exit with profit because they entered on lows and pumped it to everyone else.

Oh I don't think they'll necessarily profit - I'm saying that they are incentivized to take a lot of risk. But I don't think that makes them either any smarter or that they'll have a guarantee of being able to get out before the walls collapse.

I don't think NFTs are a good fit even for something like NBA Top Shot. You can already buy custom emotes or skins or whatever in video games. No NFTs necessary, just use the game's database for record keeping, not an NFT.

Well, they are pushing them because in general traditional VC's completely missed out on the initial crypto boom.

NFT's are their manufactured attempt to build a Crypto V2 market they think they can control. 90% of the stories you read about in the press about NFT's are placed there by these same VC investors. They are desperately trying to viral market fomo response for their useless tokens....sorry their authentic original JPG's....

Its really quite sad.

CryptoKitties are a quite bad reference example to argue against NFTs - because they have been and still are highly successful and valuable, trading for thousands (some tens of tbousands) of dollars. Similar to the CryptoPunks.

> CryptoKitties are a quite bad reference example to argue against NFTs - because they have been and still are highly successful and valuable

Their volume for the past 24 hours has consisted of 73 trades[1]. In what world is that successful?

> [...] trading for thousands (some tens of tbousands) of dollars.

This is extremely misleading, no one's putting in 10 grand from their paycheck to buy a kitty; it's all in-ecosystem crypto "money" that's being sloshed around.

[1] https://nonfungible.com/market/history/cryptokitties?filter=...

You're misunderstanding how kitties work. They are bred, they were created as a game, not as a limited run collection, and so there's an infinite supply of Kitties. Although some, like early generation Kitties from December 2017 can go for high amounts, even today, they aren't expected to accrue value.

Some trading cards are extremely rare and valuable. Most are not. Vast majority of kitties fit in this category.

Unlike NFTs, money is fungible. If they weren't "sloshing around" that crypto money they could easily sell it on Coinbase, withdraw the $10K, and buy something else.

True, but if I've got a lot of ETH, is there anything stopping me from buying/minting a cheap NFT and then wash trading it between wallets I own for seemingly large sums of money -- all of which is actually staying within my possession, minus gas fees?

Unless there is some strong KYC on opensea that prevents this (I honestly don't know, having never used the platform), it seems almost inevitable. There's not really an objective way to value most of this stuff, so buyers are going to look at the price history to guesstimate what they might be able to resell an NFT for. But how much of that price history is bogus wash trades?

Of course we remember CryptoKitties. The makers of CryptoKitties went on to build NBA Top Shots, which is selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of merchandise:

https://nbatopshot.com/

And even CryptoKitties is still around. Early generation CryptoKitties are still considered collectibles, but of course there's an infinite supply of Kitties, so the rarity is less than say, CryptoPunks (which pre-date Kitties) of which only 10K were minted:

https://opensea.io/assets/cryptopunks?search[sortAscending]=...

There's actually an entire ecosystem of hundreds of thousands of creators, fans, developers, etc working on everything you dismiss. A16Z is investing in many of those projects. Some are happening organically. NFTs will change more than you know.

Same was true for Beanie Babies. eBay grew huge because of them.

Today, eBay is around, but not Beanie Babies, at least not in any significant sense.

I think NFT will be the same. Eventually we might put real estate on it and do something useful, just as eBay has become much more than a place to trade Beanie Babies.

Or copyrights! https://news.bitcoin.com/italian-copyright-agency-selects-al...

Right, but while you can knock on Beanie Babies, how long have other collectibles held up over decades or centuries? Art works from the 15th century are extremely valuable today. If the blockchain is still around in 500 years, is it conceivable that an early gen Crypto Kitty could have a lot of value by then? Of course it is. Video games were looked at as toys for kids, but now have evolved until a multi hundred billion dollar industry, and an early generation video game cartridge or console in good condition is quite valuable (depending on rarity).

Anyways, there will be hits and misses with regards to digital collectibles on the blockchain, but the value of the space as a whole will grow tremendously (multiple hundreds of billions).

> Video games...

But that copy of Pac-Man that I have on my raspberry pi is worth exactly nothing.

And an NFT of it should be worth the same unless it gives me other rights (like copyrights, or something else of value).

> _proof of ownership makes no sense in digital context?_

Why?

> _There's nothing of value here_

Objectively there is, as people are spending money on it.

But I understand your meaning, which is to say "there will be no value to these given time". I'm interested to hear what you would consider to be failure conditions (and thus for this not to appear on r/agedlikemilk). Despite what you say Cryptokitties are still being actively traded despite the fact "no one remembers them" and they had recognition that was orders of magnitude less than NFTs now, but yet you consider it a failure.

Except folks that are interested in NFTs DO remember cryptokitties as one of the earliest NFTs.

They change hands constantly:

https://opensea.io/assets/cryptokitties?search[sortAscending...

Mattereum is doing something interesting. Each NFT references a physical item they keep in a vault, and if you want you can redeem it and take delivery. They have professional curators and legal contracts.

It's not all that different from what rich people do with vaulted art and registries. Just more available to regular people.

So, how do you know when the NFT is invalid? Can Mattereum just freeze any token at any time? If I transfer my token back to them and they don’t give me my thing, how do we all know? What if the thing is damaged? What if my country holds it up at customs?

I don't know but since they spent a lot of time developing real-world legal contracts, I suspect there are decent answers.

Art vaults/registries have similar issues and work fine for much more valuable items, so Mattereum isn't breaking completely new ground here. They just have a more convenient way to transfer ownership.

Why not use a database? If I hold an Matterum NFT, I'm trusting Matterum to make good on the deal, so it's not like the trustlessness of the blockchain actually comes into play. It seems like using a blockchain in this case just adds transaction costs.

I just glanced at their white paper and it refers to multiple registrars, so stuff might not be just at Mattereum.[1]

Besides that, I think an immutable public record of ownership is worthwhile. It's something you can use as evidence in court. If it were just their database and they changed it, what recourse would you have?

[1] https://mattereum.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/mattereum-s...

The same one you'd have with any proof of ownership in a society with laws.

Meaning on good ole' paper, or in a government database somewhere that you have no visibility or access to. Is this preferable to an ownership record that you, the gov, or anyone else can verify from your phone?

Things like deeds and titles aren't necessarily locked away without visibility but are necessary to prove ownership in a court of law, the venue where doing that is most consequential. Technologically, it's redundant and unecessary to maintain shared ownership records of everyone else's assets. Practically, if you don't trust the state / your representative government to maintain & adjudicate property ownership rights or contract law disputes, it's a little silly to think conveniences like checking ubiquitous apps on mobiles or the internet itself will still work and that we won't be experiencing the complete breakdown of society by that point.

We're not talking about replacing the register of deeds here, and the government isn't going to maintain ownership records of random collectibles.

We trust online brokerages to maintain our ownership on securities with databases alone, but those are heavily regulated. The government isn't likely to enact regulation on baseball cards and action figures either.

So for safety we're pretty much down to paper documentation and a cumbersome sale process. That's slow and expensive, which is why rich people do it and regular people don't. Until now.

I don't see why people think blockchains have to exclusively do new and unprecedented things. It's productive to do old things more efficiently.

It's not really physical collectibles that need this, it's digital ones. (Physical collectibles have popularly accepted professional grading services that authenticate and certify) So then I guess the question is why isn't a central database maintained by a trusted authority (ies) just as good as a blockchain maintained by everyone?

Whatever you think about NFTs, there are plenty of earnest people in the space; they have been trading, building and podcasting for years without any mainstream attention, or in fact, without making money. And yes, people are still trading Cryptokitties.

People are still working on Commodore 64, but that doesn't make it a logical next step for our industry or the internet.

| there are plenty of earnest people in the space

Of course there are. Scams wouldn't work if everyone involved was in on it.

Actually, we are trying to solve digital ownership, provenance, chain of custody, and verifiability. https://pruf.io

NFTs are pretty useful for money laundering.

> they're just trying to get rich.

Aren't you too rich or too poor... Developing really something for getting rich is a reason worth enough. The real problem is long-term courage.

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