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Comment by librish | Hacker News Reader

I don't have any problems with people buying or selling art for large sums of money, nor do I have a problem with people classifying art as pretty much whatever they want.

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?

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> 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?

I imagine a lot of artists have benefited from this over the centuries.

Very, very interesting point.

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.

> The only thing I mind are the people pretending a real problem has been solved with NFTs.

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.

At the end of the day doesnt the trust still fall back to the author? If you are getting 1/1 of a digital autograph or something, you are trusting the author to later not make more autographs.

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?

Or really trusting anyone who downloaded it and reposted it, etc. This is not about scarcity but about a certificate of authenticity that you can show around. The actual good is worthless, the certificate is what is hard to forge.

Correct, downloading and reposting the photo isnt the same thing, and not really a part of the conversation. Youre buying the print number, not the work.

You are buying the print number in a specific blockchain, tomorrow anyone can create a few thousand blockchains from scratch where this print number doesn't exist; just like one has to believe a currency has value to assume any value on one of its coins/tokens.

There are some very interesting technical challenges that NFTs are being used for. Stuff like baskets of assets, appraising and taking out loans on assets, and certain distributed games like aavegotchi. At the end of the day, representing non-fungible assets is something useful. It's just that most people's exposure to it is seeing someone riding the hype to sell something that would probably have sold for a lot of money without being on the blockchain. Nothing wrong with that either if both sides are happy with the deal.

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

Why do you need the blockchain for any of the stuff you mentioned?

It's the fact that decentralization is now an option for those things when centralization used to be the only option

If you are someone that believes in blockchain being something as revolutionary as the internet, you might see oracles as a temporary solution. Currently, we need a bridge between the blockchain and the rest of the world since there is no other way to link information between the two.

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.

People keep measuring this stuff by things it doesn't want to be. It's a digital equivalent of a signed print. You have to trust the author not to print 100 copies more in the same way you trust an author selling physical prints. No one is claiming it is any more trust less than that.

Signed prints are usually worth little, so it doesn't seem that like its digital equivalent.

But not all. Most NFTs are worth nothing too.

NFTs exist that aren't pointers to artwork and are entities in games that can be traded or used outside of the game itself. Since the game state exists onchain, you don't have a dependency on oracles.

Think of it like perfect ownership instead of it being trustless. Providing proof of ownership is what makes the blockchain tick, in my opinion.

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