Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k
bbc.com
bbc.com
It feels like NFTs are a mockery of the "market" for lack of a better word. When I think of what I would need to sell (items or time doing labor) to get these amounts and how incredibly useless NFTs actually are... It's frustrating.
I don't feel this way about inherited wealth, or people who got money through the lottery, or for being famous reality show people, but something about NFTs really rubs me the wrong way.
Look at blockchain today versus 4-5 years ago. There might actually be some legitimate uses for the technology, but that market has been soiled by the scammers and their ICOs.
At least that's where my frustration comes from.
It's almost as if transferring some of the (marginally useless) money from the 1% to the 99% might actually be a better investment in the future than some of these dubious "assets". But there's no NFT for that.
IE... somebody could sell the object and keep the NFT, or vice versa. There's no legal concept tying the NFT to ownership of the object, except perhaps indirectly via contract.
It's similar to what's been done in the high-end art world for years. People who buy a $50M painting don't usually hang it on their walls, they just leave it in a vault and get their name recorded on a public art registry saying they own it.
Seems like a similar legal framework granting NFT owners either copyright ownership or a usage license could be interesting.
What happens if someone buys my NFT but I refuse to deliver the physical item? It seems we need to pull in the legacy legal system to enforce the transfer, at which point I wonder what value the blockchain added in the first place.
Blockchains can be useful without totally replacing the legal system. Just making things a little better and more efficient is fine. In this case, it lets people easily trade collectibles without all the hassle of shipping physical items.
Isn't it more like "I own an NFT that refers to that thing"? There's nothing to stop the actual owner from 'printing' as many NFTs as they want, right?
Today when you buy a home you have someone go down to the local courthouse and check that there are no leans against the property and no one else is claiming ownership. In the future, you can imagine a world where that title would live on the blockchain and everyone could see the true owner based on their ability to sign a message with their wallet. You could transfer your title just as easily as any other blockchain transaction. While blockchain titles have obvious advantages, they are hard to pull off because you need 100% participation of everyone in the community for it to work.
The reason we're seeing art NFTs take off first, is that you only need the participation of the creator and a small group of collectors. The creator promises to sign all of their work with their digital wallet and as long as the buyer of the NFT trusts the creator, it works.
It’s funny to think back at how many people were horrified about that being considered “art” at the time.
Compared to {what I see as} the complete lack of *actual value* in some of these high profile NFTs, I’d say that bed now looks like the highest of high art.
I appreciate I might be missing something, but I do not understand one bit of the psychology behind NFT sales like this. I don’t understand where even the perceived value is.
Unless it was bought by that guy that refused to sit in the front of his Tesla, perhaps to watch on his headrest display while streaming the cops chasing him…
And that's what we have on record today.
I can imagine some hominid tribe prized the perfectly straight banana, or whatever, beyond belief.
NFTs aren't commodities or assets, they're just conspicuous consumption. Dramatically showing off how much money a person can waste on an illusion is cringe-worthy. It makes me annoyed in the same way pay-to-play games annoy me.
Investing the fruits of one's labor is widely considered a human right, and is even explicitly listed in the Declaration of Human Rights. And hedging ones investments with gold, silver, bonds or crypto is not an unreasonable thing to do.
They should.
I mean aren't they arguably also wealth redistribution from the stupid-enough-to-buy-an-nft to the insanely-lucky?
This is going to put Charlie through college no doubt.
You should be concerned about where society consumes resources. labor. concrete. gold. machine time. These things, in a given year, have limited supply.
You should not be very concerned about society consuming dollars - which is impossible to do (apart from burning it or fed decisions). Dollars are often a useful proxy for resources, but are not intrinsically linked. In the case of NFTs, the stock market, etc, they don’t consume as many resources as the large dollar figures would imply.
Yes there is some electricity use, I know. etc.
Point being, a wealth transfer does not consume resources. Carry on.
About inherited wealth: once you grok the ideological arguments for heavily taxing inheritances, and then also realize that above a certain threshold people can just spend a minute fraction of that wealth to ensure that those rules don't apply to them and their offspring, you might feel the same way depending on your idealogical outlook. The idea that taxation is unfair or even theft is very pervasive in society though, and it is such a sucesful memetic device that people who stand to lose the most by it are often staunch supporters of tax evasion. The idea being that just as with the lottery, one day they too might hit it big time, and then they too would benefit! Statistically, this is unlikely to the point of being negligible, but it is easier on the mind than understanding the situation for what it really is.
With the short squeeze speculation on stocks, the crypto run+crash and NFT's. The market is a very confusing place nowadays. You'd have to be bonkers to invest in these things on paper, but yet, lot's of people are making bank from it every day (and vice versa).
NFT is probably the most confusing of the bunch. I understand the technology and what it actually is, but I see little to no value in it. I strongly suspect that the vast majority of these NFT sales are just people buying from themselves to inflate perceived value or just money laundering. That said, it actually looks like this false hype has turned into real hype somehow and people are actually making money from this. NFT's are probably the closest thing we'll see to Tulip mania for long time, at least cryptocurrency has some (largely unrealized) utility and potential to become something widely used in the future.
In order to make lot's of money nowadays, you shouldn't ask yourself "What is actually going to make a profit and/or provide utility in the future?" but rather "What are all the stupid people going to pile in on next so i can get in and out before it crashes?".
Then, I needed a way to make sure people were actually sharing farts, and not other noises (like burps or dog barks).
So, ML to the rescue. Train on a corpus of real fart audio and other sounds.
But then, I needed to make sure the farts were not copies or derivative works.
So, audio fingerprinting.
Then, I figured why not throw in blockchain (does not need to be distributed to be able to use the buzzword), to ensure the verified, original farts could not be tampered with.
Now, I believe I have a way for anybody to create unique content that can be ‘converted’ into an NFT.
Investors?
Possibly you!
This could be a network for farters and poopers.
I think some people have just gotten very very crypto rich over the past year or two and this is just something they are spending their money on.
GME as an NFT?
Gamestop's whole business was used games. I mean they'd sell you a new copy happily, and you could sell it back at discount and spend the money on a different used game
Playstation / Xbox digital stores killed the market, now I pay $60 for the new assassin's creed and can never sell it, there's no such thing as a used game anymore
If Gamestop has streaming rights for certain games, then NFTs can represent who ones a copy of a game. If you're bored of a game, sell the license to play to someone else. (This is not even mentioning in-game items that could be traded on secondary markets)
Of course GameStop could conceivably build a tech stack that lets them manage 'who owns what license to what game' and a whole marketplace around that, but why build it yourself when people are already out there sending NFTs from one wallet to another.
- Games and consoles made years ago still generating revenue. - It would incentivise companies to support repair and continued use of old products.
I think it would be instant buy-in from those larger companies.
One key issue I see is that it's still quite centralised - you have to resell through their store and can't just exchange a game license for crypto at an arbitrary price. No surprise though that this is a necessary step on the way to getting publishers on board.
> What are all the stupid people going to pile in on next so i can get in and out before it crashes?
Haha that's awesome. I spent so many hours researching stuff to invest in so I could make a good decision or at least an educated one. Company stock, cryptocurrency projects, whitepapers... And then I watched people making ridiculous amounts of money off of DOGE of all things just because a billionaire tweeted funny dogecoin memes. Then people pumped the huge wave of animal shitcoin scams that came after to ridiculous prices as well. Now I'm watching people spend millions on non-fungible tokens that do nothing.
It's the kind of mind screw that makes you lose all sense of right and wrong. The world just stops making sense.
Presumably ritualized tribal combat has a long history.
As does religion.
Hence magnetism and homeopathy, still limping along to this day, came to have huge amounts of followers. "if you can turn on a powerful light at night, surely you can cure with magnetic fields coming out of your hands".
Here is the same, if you can store value simply by convincing each other without central authorities (bitcoin), surely you can explore it to its conclusion with NFTs. Ill remind you that before the 2017 crash, we were already seeing joke tokens, it just disappears once the hangover starts.
Cryptocurrency has actual value though. I don't think bitcoin has any inherent value, it's just famous because it came first. Technology like Ethereum and Monero are extremely valuable though. They aren't made up tokens that do nothing.
If they observe you are doing this and don’t play so loose against you, then I would take issue with the claim that they are not playing seriously.
Perhaps an excellent player might be able to crack the code (or at least be up over the course of enough games), but I'm not an excellent player.
The craziness i'm pointing out is the apparent sale/purchase of NFT tokens for lackluster pieces of digital art at insane amounts. You aren't really investing in the technology in this case, you're investing in that piece of art. It confers no proven legal privileges, meaningful ownership or protection from being copied. It just gives you the ability to prove to someone that at a specific point in time you made a token for that bitstring or bought it from someone who did. Would these pieces fetch the similar prices on the art market right now where you can actually buy real proven legal rights/ownership of the piece? I highly doubt it.
Me: “but this is a giant bubble! None of this is intrinsically valuable! You’re buying to sell! A huge crash will wipe you out!”
Them: “you must be new around here... there is always a bubble, the key is riding it as long as you can safely do so.”
I found this so enlightening. I wonder if economic cycles are a result of this thinking.
This has always been true [0]. Your comment had generated a thought for me: maybe as humanity has covered its essential needs, the idea of what has utility and value has progressively become less clear? Or is it just a side effect of QE and Central bank excess? Time will tell...
https://stockx.com/nike-dunk-sb-low-paris
That is an $80k shoe currently.
If you can get somebody to buy it, that is what it is worth.
Unless I really should read up on it because I'll be blown away, just seems like any uniqueness necessarily hinges entirely on hoe you choose to encode a thing, which is arbitrary, meaningless, and pointless?
But then, I haven't made any money from it, people have, what do I know.
Like, why is this worth $58 million? It's a 10-foot tall balloon animal.
https://www.doublestonesteel.com/blog/art-and-sculpture/koon...
Or why is this worth $200 million? It's something a 5-year-old would make if you gave them an unlimited amount of finger paint.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_17A
At least NFT creators tend to be honest about how ridiculous they are (see any interview with Beeple, for example), as opposed to conventional artists who like to pretend there's some sort of objective reason why their work is so highly valued.
An artist renouncing the copyright (as in putting it into the public domain) does not per se devalue the NFT. It is not strictly obvious if you legally need to own the copyright to sell an NFT of something in the first place (it is likely just fraud to misrepresent your authorship of the work).
The creator of a famous photograph which they have previously put into the public domain would likely find a buyer for its NFT, while you would not. NFT buyers are under no illusion about what they are buying here - it is the official sanction of the creator of a digital edition of the artwork.
Similarly, a creator could print billions of NFTs, but Damien Hirst could also sell 499 more further sharks in formaldehyde. NFTs cannot and do not set out to solve this problem.
And as for the lottery, the reason that states/countries have lotteries is because they make buckets of money off of them. Is the state at fault, then? While I personally think it's a waste of money to participate, people choose to give money to the lottery, and are told up front what the odds are of winning, which are very bad.
In the context that, otherwise, it would go to the state in taxation and everyone would benefit to a tiny extent.
> Is the state at fault [for running the lottery]
I'm not sure what you mean by 'at fault', exactly. As you say, people participate of their own accord. The only thing that you could take slight issue with is the "are told up front what the odds are of winning" because (many? most?) humans are notoriously bad at rationalising probabilities, especially astronomically low ones such as the chance of profiting from a lottery.
This paragraph interests me deeply. It is clearly a personal feeling and one that I have empathy for. However, a few things came to my mind when I read it.
1) You and I were born into a world where inheritance, lotteries, and celebrities existed, but NFTs were invented in our lifetime. Is it the newness/novelty of NFTs at issue?
2) Suppose the answer to 1) is no i.e. I am not troubled by the newness of NFTs. Alright, instead let’s imagine the first incidence of inheritance, or lotteries, or celebrity status that yielded material/monetary reward. Did people feel similarly about these ways of acquiring money back when these ways were novel?
3) What about applying the general idea of finding/inventing/innovating to create new industries e.g. advertising technology? Some people have similar feelings about the nominal value being created versus the perceived value of a whole host of activities: venture capital, e-sports, advertising, sex work, content creation, financial services/instruments, the creative arts and their subfields, etc. You can search for posts and comments on this forum expressing exactly that on each of the examples I listed.
4) What do we call it? I would say the word jealousy captures one side of the dimension where perceived value doesn’t match up with actual value that was exchanged (perceived value is less than the value exchanged).
5) Why do we do it? Why do we judge the perceived fairness of transactions that we are not party to?
6) Now, back to the initial question: what makes some forms of wealth transfer fair and others not?
How could we not? Someone dropping millions of dollars on a useless token really puts into perspective the value of my actual work and contributions to society. If literally nothing is worth millions, I must be worth less than nothing because I'm certainly not getting paid millions.
Imagine buying a painting for a million dollars. Or a hand crafted watch. The markets for these talk a whole lot about the intrinsic value, the workmanship, the creativity. And people do love them for those things, but that's not why they pay so much for them.
Imagine being able to park a retirement fund into something that fits in your pocket. You can't even do that with gold bricks. But you can do that with watches.
It's just a way to store a very large amount of money in something you can take with you anywhere in the world without anyone noticing. NFTs are even smaller than a watch. They're just the new version of the art dealing hustle that has been going on for centuries.
for instance the beeple one that sold for a lot was purchased by a guy who runs and nft website as basically an advertisement for his site.
who knows if they even had a prior deal before the auction where the artist would return some of the money
If you start selling a proof of flat earth, 5G tower cause the COVID-19, a herb that cure cancer or similar nonsense, there are people willing to pay a huge money for. But would you?
NFT in its current implementation is totally bullshit. They relies on SaaS wallet service rather than running full Ethereum node, and instead of embed all data to Ethereum blockchain, they relies on traditional HTTP server hosted by... wallet service itself!
If you relies on a central authority, there are better and more efficient services to use. But oh the ignorance and speculation.
Definitely not as fun as making millions on meme’d speculation.
That will evolve into the patron system again, where the owner of early works becomes a hype machine to drum up their artists clout, and then offloads their early work.
If you only look at it from the perspective of the influencer, it doesn't seem like there's any harm. They managed to extract some wealth from crypto whales. -- where's the harm in that? But at the end of the day, they're selling a lie. The NFT-proponents want people to believe that NFTs are inherently valuable so that they can extract all of their money back, and then some. It's propaganda, and I can't get behind it, even if it means some artists are cashing out.
There is a lot of initial investment from top-tier people who convince others to invest (by showing eye-popping returns) and drive more investment. Soon the people on the top-tier gradually cash out and eventually it's the common people who lost their hard-earned money.
Your second paragraph could be applied to any non-crypto asset class. The only difference I can see is that crypto just made this scheme more obvious, unobfuscated then let's say the stock market with its different investor classes.
Why can't someone just buy all rights to this video the same way a company can buy the rights to a film? What does the blockchain do that a couple lawyers and some paperwork couldn't?
Why a blockchain-based digital "certificate" instead of just a certificate? Does my birth certificate or marriage certificate or college diploma need an upgrade to an NFT, too?
If so, what exactly would the buyer be buying? Just a virtual trading card and a promise that I won't sell my "birth-certificate NFT" trading card to anyone else?
Yes, and it's basically equivalent to writing the words "My Birth Certificate" on a piece of paper and selling that piece of paper. It holds no weight whatsoever.
> If so, what exactly would the buyer be buying?
Nothing.
> Just a promise that I won't sell my "birth-certificate NFT" to anyone else?
Not even that, unless you also did that. You can make multiple NFTs from the same thing. Just like nothing would prevent you from writing "My Birth Certificate" on a second piece of paper and selling that too, unless there was some external agreement that you wouldn't.
> “DCF” means the Davies-Carr Family.
> You acknowledge and agree that the DCF (or, as applicable, its licensors) retains ownership of all legal right, title and interest in and to the Media and all intellectual property rights therein. The rights that you have in and to the NFT are as described in this License. The DCF reserves all rights in and to the Media not expressly granted to you in this License.
I guess it‘s some form of „trust“ between the issuer and the buyer.
Or the 2nd NFT wouldn‘t be as memey anymore and thus not worth as much.
(It would probably be worth more the first time in reality, since issuing an NFT twice is not „supposed to happen“, so there would be some novelty to it, and I guess novelty is part of what drives the prices. See also Banksy‘s image that actually increased in value after it got publicly shredded by a built-in mechanism after being auctioned off.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXBxVFsHBJQ
It touches upon "what is an NFT", but also the reasons why artists are interested in them, and where the (crypto) money is coming from.
His take (I don't mean to TLDW, the video is really worth watching) is that NFTs are loved by people from the crypto world because it "finally" gives a clear utility to crypto/the blockchain (aside from speculation/trading/gambling), and it's simultaneously beneficial to artists who can bypass the traditional art market with all of its gatekeepers and be on the receiving end of huge sums spent by crypto whales (who can't "do" much with their crypto savings anyway)
Worth the watch!
> its owner does not actually buy the copyright itself - meaning the artwork the NFT represents can still be shown wherever the original artist or creator chooses.
Genuinely curious. What does it mean to own a widely shared digital content, if you don't have the copyright to it? What's stopping the copyright-owner from continuing to license the copyright to others, or even enforcing their copyright against you in future? From a legal perspective, how would the NFT owner even enforce their ownership against anyone else?
Nothing.
> What's stopping the copyright-owner from continuing to license the copyright to others, or even enforcing their copyright against you in future?
Nothing.
> From a legal perspective, how would the NFT owner even enforce their ownership against anyone else?
They can't.
Or think somehow blockchain and AI can be used the amazing technoutopian future™ to combat piracy (including piracy of the image or video of the NFT they bought it)
Therein lies the question. It's basically selling a digital derivative of something that gives you no rights besides owning that derivative itself.
Is there anything saying that the copyright owner can't sell another NFT to a competing NFT blockchain? What if people start using different NFTs for the same digital good?
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=charlie+bit+my+...
The only thing I mind are the people pretending a real problem has been solved with NFTs. In any current (or conceived as far as I know) implementation of NFTs you have to trust so many people, technologies, and companies that the blockchain being technically "trustless" is not solving a real problem at all.
Overall I don't understand the point of a blockchain if you have to interact with anything off-chain at all. If I have to trust an oracle or similar why even bother with a blockchain in the first place?
Well how else do you generate hype with an aura of breaking edge tech to impress the clueless and give credibility to your scam?
Art has a couple of sticky points that allows it to be used as storage of value:
* It is impossible to copy and produce second original
* It is recognizable by trained and common people alike, it is useful a symbol of status
* New art inherits some of artist's prestige; say a newly discovered Picasso painting will be recognized as valuable just because it's a Picasso
* It is very difficult to produce enmasse - a computer-generated drawing in the style of Picasso will not be valued as an original Picasso
* Wealthy people agree it's a storage of value - when somebody needs liquidity they can be assured that somebody will buy their unique piece.
Do NFTs touch all of these points? 1, yes. 2. they're trying to build the fame of NFTs now. 3. they're trying to build it now, very unlikely it will succeed. 4. Are some NFTs esthetically pleasing ? I would guess this is why it's needed to be tied to an artwork. 5. Unlikely.
Even if the institutions that authenticate the autographs go away, their record of the work they did so far is printed into the permanent record, no?
But if you believe in this potential blockchain-everything future, all of this information will be on the blockchain as the single source of truth. At that point, oracles will not be needed and the information will be stored directly on the chain.
There are a lot of interesting technologies being worked on in moving real world data on chain as well. I'd highly suggest you look into chainlink. They cover all sides of the vulnerabilities associated with getting accurate data when you could be trusting a potentially malicious data provider.
I wish hn would cover some of these more often
It's not a pretend problem at all.
The author could have used any existing auction platform too sell the rights to that video without involving NFT or crypto-currency. But they would never have gotten that much money for it. NFT solves that.
NFT is to auctions what adding "Blockchain" to your publicly-listed company-name was a few years ago, it increases valuation to ridiculous levels. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-27/what-s-in...
It's stupid, but it works.
Cause the NFT itself means nothing to courts or laws, does it?
If someone owns the copyright in that video, they can send YouTube takedown notices. But what, if anything, makes NFT proof of ownership of copyright? How do you even know the person that sold it to you had the copyright to transfer, and did they transfer it?
One of the things that seems irraitional about this NFT market.
We won't know till it's tried in court, but given that handshake agreements can carry weight in court if they can be proven, I'd suspect an NFT could be binding.
What if the seller says "Oh, you thought I was selling you the copyright in the thing the NFT represents? I don't know how you got that idea, I never said that! I just sold you the NFT, that's it." Do people buying NFT's actually get some kind of agreement that the seller owned the copyright in the thing represneted and sold it with the NFT purchase?
Real questions, I don't use these things!
> its owner does not actually buy the copyright itself
Maybe. If I do, I guess I can sell that event as an NFT. Or something.
Traditionally owning art is meaningful because you get to display it in your home/office etc. The artwork is intrinsically valuable as a unique material object. Digital art, on the other hand, can be duplicated easily so there is nothing you can point to and say "this is the original".
I don't see how that is synonymous with owning traditional art, you don't have anything unique since everyone can "own" Charlie bit my finger as much as the NFT owner owns it. We can watch the video whenever we want, even if it's taken down off of the official YT channel, there are thousands of copies everywhere. So unless you own the rights to the video and royalties or whatever then all you have is an NFT token that symbolizes something important to whoever thinks it's important (much like currency).
Seems to me that an NFT itself is more like a vanity plate on a car than anything else, basically bragging rights that you can sell on if anyone else sees value in bragging. I suppose the gamble is that NFTs will continue to mean something to someone but it does seem to me to be a long bet that people with piles of cash are hedging or simply don't mind paying $$$s for a fashion statement.
Expensive art is just as much a vanity plate as NFTs are.
> An NFT is a bit like a collectible certificate of authenticity, but its owner does not actually buy the copyright itself - meaning the artwork the NFT represents can still be shown wherever the original artist or creator chooses.
So the whole question is moot. All you own is the NFT and the NFT is associated with some cultural artifact but doesn't represent any legal rights. Like other cryptocurrencies it's a speculative asset whose value is based on the fact that people want to buy them and little else.
The article in the OP also seems to believe differently, which is what made me ask the question.
> But now the much-loved clip of baby Charlie gnawing on his brother Harry's finger will be taken off YouTube after it was sold for $760,999 (£538,000).
> The Davies-Carr family auctioned the clip as an NFT, a non-fungible token.
The quote says the video was sold, and that this will naturally result in it being removed from you tube, and then explains it was sold "as an NFT" which is "like a certificate to say that you own something digital".
I think you may be right, but the majority of people talking about NFT's don't seem to realize it. Including a bunch of people in this thread.
And by doing that, you will also piss off pretty much everyone on the planet, and no one will want that (digital) NFT. In fact, I wouldn't want to take that shameful NFT even if you paid me for it.
NFTs are for digital artworks, it is an artificial way to create scarcity. A physical painting is already scarce. Burning an actual Van Gogh would be like burning down a house and saying it's okay because the deeds to the house are fine.
It doesn't make sense to take down the video though, because it's the views that make it more valuable.
I dunno, so have I; and just - it was big, but there were so many of these kinda nonsense YouTube videos at the time this was trending it was kind of hard to catch them all.
I suspect there is more to come, art that you have never heard of by an artist you are supposed to have heard of, now with NFT shiny and journalists that think they know the story.
This would not happen if linear broadcasters from yesteryear and their dead tree brethren didn't suck up the press releases to give them the oxygen of publicity.
What if Doge NFTs take off - could everything be sold a second time?
It would be like a print artist selling multiple editions of what they claim to be a limited 1/1 print run (nothing is stopping print artists from doing this now besides integrity & social contracts - it could devalue their work).
That sounds like it would be illegal.
You might buy a piece of artwork from famous artist X, but society and the market decide that art by Y is also valuable.
You might buy a painting because we all agree that paintings are valuable. But what's to stop framed original poetry, or sculptures, or photographs, becoming more valued and supplanting paintings as the preferred form of desirable art.
FTFY
And As seen here, even the "rich trolling" potential is practically impossible to enforce since we run into the idea of "piracy" (in the loosest form of quotes you can imagine). A problem even billion dollar media empires can't fully enforce. Is there something here I'm missing?
----
on a side note: while memes like nyan cat make sense, I find it very ethically dubious to "own" what's essentially a personal memory of a real family. But I guess if it's the family themselves that sold it, the consentual factors are already in place.
You'd have to own the SD card to own the 'original'. But who really cares? I don't understand NFTs, I just don't understand the value.
I could sell an NFT to your comment trivially because it doesn't mean anything. You can think of it as the digital equivalent of me taking a screenshot of your comment and selling that - sure it doesn't give the purchaser rights to your comment, but that isn't what was for sale anyway.
Many people immediately jump on the idea that NFTs cannot confer ownership, and thus are worthless as a concept, but they fail to recognize that it is only one half of ownership, just as a deed to a house is just a piece of paper (that anyone can photocopy) without an authority to recognize it.
if you have an authority to confer rights then the NFT itself was unnecessary to begin with.
anyway, the original point I was trying to make is that situation you described (selling a deed to a house you don't own) doesn't make sense since by definition the own who does not own the deed can not sell it. if, somehow the sale did go through, the original owner could easily get it back. this situation is not possible with NFTs without a central authority, but with a central authority NFTs would not be necessary to begin with.
The situation I described does make sense, because it's exactly what we are circling around here. Anyone can sell anything; it is merely a question of whether the sale will be recognized by the parties that matter. An NFT is necessary because it distributes the transfer and sale of things without a central intermediary. There is and always will be a required authority to recognize the value of a given NFT, however.
Note that these two ideas of central authority are not equivalent. In one hand, you have a centralized authority over trade; in the other, an authority over value. Note also that in the case of NFTs, there is no "one central authority who governs all value", but instead many authorities, i.e. the creators! The artist or creator of a given work is free to recognize the NFTs that grant ownership of their creations. It is they who have the power of authority.
What? A deed, per common law, is a legal instrument which affirms ownership of something. I'm not going to talk about value as that is independent of the purpose of a deed (you could have a deed to something that everyone agrees is worthless, but regardless you are the owner according to the government(s) in question)
Again, if you have a central authority an NFT is unnecessary and pointless to begin with. Nothing you've said really refutes that. All of the functionality of an NFT can be trivially replicated by a central authority, and indeed it already is.
> Anyone can sell anything
No, they can't. By your own logic, anyone can do anything. Surely you already see that is not true. We live in reality, and in reality others must recognize actions in order for them to be recognized as legitimate.
I’d guess it wouldn’t be a sale of rights to the comment (because you don’t own them).
If you advertised it as the sale of rights to the comment, then it would be a fraud? Or you could advertise it as “a collectible item representing one of endisneigh’s parent comments as issued by endisneigh, collect them all”?
I suppose I could sell a token for Hacker News, I just couldn't claim that the holder of the token gets any kind of special privilege here.
Is there a way to see the actual language of these NFTs that receive press attention? Do any of them actually claim anything one way or the other?
Sounds like an NFT alright.
How will they know?
Not sure whether NFT situation got dumb enough for this to work.
It's not very different than selling overpriced and numbered collectibles.
I am not sure what you mean by this. Are you referring to art being duplicated, or a digital signature? You can verify that its a forgery, or from a different account than the first author. The digital signature isnt something you can replicate. You can print another one, but you cant duplicate the property of "first" itself.
I'm just as good as the most accomplished artist at reading numbers from /dev/random, that's why I don't see why one random-looking string would be more valuable than the other.
That depends on who thought of making the NFT first. Which isn't necessarily the artist.
> or its proven to have been generated by a person who exclusively had a certain private key
That has the same problem, it's generated by arbitrary pseudo-random numbers, rather than a real, living human hand. Look, I'm not disputing the underlying cryptographic principles. I'm happy they exist, because they are immensely useful for many purposes, like securing communication and financial transactions. I just struggle to see the artistic merit in someone having pulled some numbers out of /dev/random and having done some math on them.
The authenticity of this is easily verified by querying the transaction directly from the on-chain smart contract.
There are other blockchain/crypto art projects that use the chain itself to store data; such as Autoglyphs[2], which is essentially a first of its kind generative artwork on Ethereum coded entirely within the Solidity smart contract. In this case there is no question about the authenticity; you simply look at that contract address and the tokens it initiated.
[1] - https://hicetnunc.xyz/
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/20/22334527/nft-scams-artist...
Such products will never see the public domain, as they are owned forever. I wonder if the major publishing companies are eyeing these up
> An NFT is a bit like a collectible certificate of authenticity, but its owner does not actually buy the copyright itself - meaning the artwork the NFT represents can still be shown wherever the original artist or creator chooses.
What you "own" when you buy an NFT is bragging rights about owning the NFT.
Edit: It's like if you bought the gold masters for Abbey Road. You don't own the copyrights, just a one-of-a-kind representation of that album that you can tell your golf buddies about.
As the laws currently stand, at least.
I wonder if the NFT token itself loses copyright and becomes public domain at some point?
Unfortunately we are likely past peak stupid in the crypto-world but you'll have another chance ~3 years from now since that's the crypto dumb-money time-constant. But if you still think there's time, visit https://mintable.app/ follow the advice above and report back.
Is this a form of money laundering? I am so confused, no part of this makes any sense to me at all.
I guess Firefox and Chromium wouldn’t need to go along unless someone lobbied Congress to change the laws.
I don’t know how similar this would be to DRM, which seems to have failed to stop piracy.
An NFT affords no rights at all. It's equivelant to a piece of paper with a URL that points to a site that has a link the video on it. Except the link no longer works, since the video was taken down.
How pathetically desperate for validation you must be to pay this much for a unique thing, and to deprive others of access to it.
Its just capitalism, and capitalism is arbitrary and cruel.
When it's you making the money, it starts to make sense pretty quickly.
When it's not you making the money, it feels like egregious sin.
Its. Just. Capitalism.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/arts/design/nft-auction-c...
Maybe selling a banana taped to a wall could be a way for people to make money, considering one of those sold for ${OUTRAGE}.
Is Linus running out of money or something?
What is an NFT for a JPG file? I don't know, but we know it got sold for $69 million.
> Is Linus running out of money or something?
I have no idea, but since when does someone have to run out of money in order to want to make more?
Yes, it doesn't stop anyone from using Linux. So win-win for all.
Bragging rights. That's it.
One open question is whether it actually makes sense to have an ACL for an electronic asset, because once someone has access to it, they can easily make a perfect copy of the bits and give it to anyone they want. But I guess you could make the same argument about selling access to digital content that is available on a torrent somewhere.
are you aware that anyone may sell NFT for anything?
I could produce and sell NFT pointing to say Walmart website.
Or HN. Or Wikipedia.
Obviously you would need to actually own the asset to be able to hand over access control as part of the NFT sale. NFTs potentially have real use cases, but the technology and infrastructure isn't mature enough to support those use cases.