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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

It means the same as any other valuable thing in our society caused by artificial scarcity - limited printings, trading cards, dollar bills, stamps, Bitcoin, software, music, books, etc.

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With most of these things, its all about using the item as a status symbol. Having a rare painting on your wall shows status. NFTs don't and likely never will have the same impact.

I'm not sure why people buy NFTs, but I suspect they think it somehow implements digital rights management of a bill of sale, and it doesn't.

The people who are buying them are absolutely buying them as a status symbol, so that appears to be working.

A great many people are starting to look down on NFT buyers and sellers. I'm not sure what status they provide since either someone has to maintain the chain somehow forever which is impossible, but also there isn't anything stopping someone from creating alternative timelines of sales.

Almost every status symbol is looked down upon by many people. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a group who admires it.

The same thing could be said about other collectibles. There isn’t anything stopping people from printing their own baseball cards, but that doesn’t change the market.

Yeah but at least you'd have a baseball card. This is a number? I definitely get your point though.

Except NFTs aren't artificially scarce, I'm not sure why people claim this. You can fork these chains just like how Bitcoin Cash was forked from Bitcoin.

But Bitcoin Cash has much lower unit value than Bitcoin, indicating people see them as different things. That seems to weigh heavily against your argument, rather than supporting it.

So if I sell an NFT how many third party sales forked off of how many subsequent sales should I consider official or not? Also, during the split, they were worth about the same, and you could sell one for the other on many exchanges. Is this what NFTs are supposed to be?

If you were asking me about details of NFTs, I have no idea, sorry. I was just disagreeing with the key point in your original argument

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