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Comment by defaultname | Hacker News Reader

NFTs have no mechanism to define originality, or even atomicity (an NFT might have a single owner, but it points to something external for which countless NFTs might point). It isn't a copyright grant, a contract, legal ownership, or even a binary container (beyond some token tiny amount).

I don't think it's "hate" for people to marvel at the insanity that are NFTs. You have people literally posting and selling NFTs for other people's creations. And even if those people post NFTs, their NFTs have no additional claim to what they represent than the other people, beyond some social "oh that's the guy who made all of those crummy doodles".

There is a notion of digital ownership, copyright assignment, etc. NFT is an extremely poor proxy for any of those.

Owning a rare gun skin in CS:GO is much more "real" than an NFT is.

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> It isn't a copyright grant, a contract, legal ownership

Exactly the problem. If these were used to prove legal ownership of real assets, whether they be intellectual or physical, they would have value. Selling individually numbered digital pet rocks is not valuable.

They can’t be used to prove legal ownership of real assets, because you’d need a way for an authority to modify the data.

Say I own an asset legally, and lose my private key. Or it gets stolen by a malware. I’m still the legal owner.

You've inspired me to add NFT DRM to my Pet Rock Remote Control, so you can cryptographically lock your remote control to the digital pet rocks you own, so that nobody else but you can send them commands to "sit", "stay", "play dead", "roll over", etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SG0FAKkaisg&ab_channel=DonHo...

>NFTs have no mechanism to define originality, or even atomicity.

It always links to a wallet and thus proves originality. You're right, anyone can mint a mona lisa and claim it's a van gogh, but if it wasn't minted using van goghs wallet, it's not van gogh.

>It isn't a copyright grant, a contract, legal ownership, or even a binary container

Say i have an octopus NFT. I am the only person who can transfer ownership of my octopus. you don't need 'Legal' ownership, this is real 'ownership' of my keys. You can show that this EXACT Octopus sold for $50m and was previously held by a wallet associated with mark cuban. Yes, some random can make a duplicate octopus but it won't be created by my wallet, mark cuban wouldn't have previously owned it and it wouldn't have previously sold for $50m in the metadata.

>Owning a rare gun skin in CS:GO is much more "real" than an NFT is.

How many people own the 'Rare gun skin in CS:GO? would you trust the company if they said only 5 people owned that rare gun skin? What's stopping them from infinitely minting the rare gun skin and saying there's only 100 of them. Would you be willing to pay more for the CS Skin if only 100 people could have it, than if it was inifinite? If CS:GO was to adopt a standard blockchain for the sale of their NFT's, you could see exactly who had what skins and what the bidding price is for them. Complete transparency in scarcity.

>It always links to a wallet

I am Leonardo da Vinci. My wallet is ABC. Would you like to buy the Mona Lisa?

I am NYC. My wallet is CBA. Would you like to buy the Brooklyn Bridge?

The notion that a wallet is authoritative is not grounded in reality. There is no central authority. There is no registry. There is no legal correlation.

And your Octopus NFT isn't an Octopus NFT, it's an NFT with a pointer to a reference that points to an octopus. Great, now I just minted an Octopus NFT with a pointer to a reference that points to the same octopus. Now what?

But you're claiming that we need to backtrace each NFT to some wallet which somehow (even though there is no authority, by design) I guess we'll find a MySpace posting by Mark Cuban saying it was his NFT. It borders on parody.

Could Valve "mint" guns through a blockchain? Sure, they could. There is another game (an F1 game) where they do something similar for tradeables. But that is neither here nor there with the reality that NFTs as currently implemented are effectively equivalent to selling certificates offering people a plot of land on Jupiter.

You're right, the crux of the argument is whether you believe wallets have authority. I regularly interact with crypto, have participated in ICO's and have bought and sold NFT's. People who are into NFT's do believe in the authority of wallets. Granted, they are about authoritative as a hacker news display name. I can ping the wallet and see if this wallets monikor has a large amount of crypto, see their past transactions, decentralized social media's, etc. A wallet only gains authority slowly as someone uses it. Say a particular NFT was sold by _X_, which is a big name who has sold alot of cool digital art in the past. If I duplicate the Art, or use a pointer to the same reference it was never generated, nor sold by _X_. The art is only half the story and within NFT's the other half is the transaction history and how you got it. It's cool to look at different transactions, how much it was sold for, etc. Also, dismissing NFT's because art is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There are alot more uses for them, it just seems like people like to talk trash on things other people just generally think are cool and quirky.

> marvel at the insanity

In the 1970s, people would buy rocks as pets. Yes really. Manias are real things.

You have more interest in CS:go than Etherium then? But they remain equally real. Unless the rare gun skin is more real because there are many of it?

Lol “Real”

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