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Comment by 21eleven | Hacker News Reader

The thing about NFTs is that many people who buy them "don't get NFTs".

All an NFT is is a token that represents ownership, like if the title to your car or house deed was on a blockchain.

NFTs have some sane use causes like designating the owner of a valuable asset or creating electronic tickets that can be resold or transferred without some centralized entity like ticketmaster.

Prior to NFTs existing, would you purchase the ownership rights to a gif or tweet? Probably not. And that is what is dumb about the excitement around NFTs, some people with more money than sense seem to think that now that you can represent ownership on a blockchain some things, like crappy jpegs, have suddenly become valuable assets.

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Thing is, NFTs don't represent ownership, absent some external legal documents which tie ownership to the NFT. (And even with such external documents p perhaps not; see e.g. the statute of frauds which restricts in what form land ownership can be transferred.)

I can sell NFTs of bridges all day long; doesn't mean anyone is buying a bridge.

An NFT is decent evidence in favour of the keyholder being the creator of a work, if there's no earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work.

When people first started talking about them I thought that was the idea - a kind of people's copyright registry on the blockchain. Which seems like a fairly reasonable idea, as far as it goes.

Edit: To be clear, I mean a copyright registry that is used for the sort of thing copyright registries are used for, ie. adjudicating copyright disputes. I am not saying an NFT of the Mona Lisa is good evidence you painted the Mona Lisa (unless you minted it in 1502), and I'm definitely not saying the current market in NFTs is sensible.

> An NFT is decent evidence in favour of you being the creator of a work, if there's no earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work

It's really not at all reliable. I could create an NFT for the "Joeboy" HN account right now, and ostensibly become the owner of your HN account since such an NFT does not already exist. Obviously, this makes no sense, the NFT is meaningless.

If there was no evidence of the account existing before you registered the NFT, I think that would be a reasonably credible bit of evidence in your favour.

No, you could create an NFT that supposedly represents that but unless people buy into the idea, no is becoming the owner of anything.

If instead Ycombinator would release each user as an NFT, and allow people to buy/sell then, then yes you could become the owner of an HN account via NFTs. But until then, the one who knows the password is the owner.

People seems to have some sort of problem with trying to understand NFTs were all thoughts and logic go out the window as soon as NFTs are mentioned.

As I understood their comment, they were pointing out the absurdity of the idea you are also pointing out the absurdity of.

It's not at all there is rampant fraud in the NFT market. So much so Deviantart made some detection software to help alert artists their work is being stolen.

All that can be definitively proved outside of other methods is who created the token.

It sounds like you're talking about cases where, as I said, there's "earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work". In the absence of that, I think the token would be a decent piece of evidence in favour of the token owner.

So would posting it anywhere online essentially. Twitter would work for the same usecase. Or the old sending it to yourself through the mail thing.

NFTs also don’t put the image on chain usually instead just linking from the metadata so a fraudster could register a bunch of placeholder NFTs and then later put stolen art where the link points to. Hey Presto you can steal art and “prove” the actual creator is the fraud.

Well, posting the actual content publicly would obviously make it public, which registering a hash on the blockchain would not. "Sending it to yourself through the mail" would probably be the competition, and I would say a cryptographic hash is at least as good as a postmark, as well as cheaper.

Anyway. I wasn't talking about NFTs as they exist today. I'm just saying the original concept (as I understood it) seemed basically reasonable, before everybody went insane.

The useful part of what you describe is called timestamping and predated (and inspired) Bitcoin.

> An NFT is decent evidence in favour of the keyholder being the creator of a work, if there's no earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work.

The second clause shows why the first is not true: the other evidence is what gives you the information you need. In every context where it really matters it comes down to what a court would accept and … uh … I would not want to be the one having to tell a judge that something is proof of ownership when anyone on the internet could submit the same record.

I can't say for sure what a judge would make of a cryptographically secure hash of a piece of content that there's no record of prior to the hash's registration on a blockchain. I think if somebody tries to claim authorship of eg. a screenplay I've written, such a hash should be pretty good evidence in my favour.

Yeah, an NFT is more like a receipt. Except when you buy one, you only get the receipt. The actual item remains "out there".

> Thing is, NFTs don't represent ownership, absent some external legal documents which tie ownership to the NFT.

NFTs are the ownership-tying documents - specifically, asserting ownership over some property, just like any other deed/title to some property (be it tangible or abstract/intellectual). NFTs, like any other sort of deed/title, require recognition, validation, and enforcement by society at large to have any real value.

That is:

> I can sell NFTs of bridges all day long; doesn't mean anyone is buying a bridge.

I can sell deeds/titles to bridges all day long (complete with thick paper and fancy seals); doesn't mean anyone is buying a bridge.

> All an NFT is is a token that represents ownership, like if the title to your car or house deed was on a blockchain.

No. An NFT is just a few bytes of text pinned to a blockchain. They are essentially useless, and every useful property of an NFT can be achieved using asymmetric encryption or digital signatures, the blockchain component is just wasteful hype.

If an external source - say the Twitter account of an artist - can authenticate that the holder of the NFT is who the creator of the art work wants to be recognized as the owner, then social consensus will lead to widespread value assignment to that NFT.

The ability to hold and trade the NFT on the public blockchain makes that asset accessible to a large number of autonomous on-chain markets, like dApps which allow a person to take out self-executing loans that use the NFT as collateral.

> If an external source - say the Twitter account of an artist - can authenticate that the holder of the NFT is who the creator of the art work wants to be recognized as the owner, then social consensus will lead to widespread value assignment to that NFT.

In other words, you don't need the blockchain because the actual value comes from a different system. The only thing it's adding is overhead and unreliability.

The second paragraph explains the utility of issuing it on the blockchain.

It fails to establish that this is unique to a blockchain: we do, after all, have decades of experience building distributed applications and it’s not like banks haven’t issued loans before and the hypothetical benefits have to be weighed against the added costs of relying a very slow, expensive database with no mechanism to correct bugs or fraud.

What I described IS unique to blockchains:

"makes that asset accessible to a large number of autonomous on-chain markets, like dApps which allow a person to take out self-executing loans that use the NFT as collateral"

What market undergridded by banks provides these features.

The blockchain provides extremely high assurances of up-time and immutability in its protocol rules - which assures accessibility and protection from third party interference. This is ideal as a digital asset registry.

NFTs don't sell ownership rights. NFTs are equivalent of buying photographs of a celebrity. You may own NFT that represents Taylor Swift, but she aint going on a dinner date with you.

Not to mention you are not the only one to hold it either as someone else can Taylor Swift NFT and sell it to.

It is exactly same as buying and owning cards of your favourite celebrity. They are worthless even compared to cowdung and have absolutely not practical value.

One has to be high on drugs to buy ugly gifs for thousands of dollars.

The NFTs that people are making their profile pictures are drastically different from the celebrity and athlete NFTs put out by DraftKings or topshot. The NFTs in profile pics on Twitter (like crypto punks) have randomly generated features making each and every minted nft completely unique.

I feel like there are two vastly different audiences with NFTs. The casual, celebrity/athlete NFTs that are selling multiple of some persons face for fiat currency, and parole who are actively participating in minting NFTs with web3 dApps made by developers with roadmaps and a strong community.

Can't understand "Ownership of a Tweet" as Twitter owns them - or at the very least they can destroy them whenever they want.

Yep. It's a completely made up problem. It's maybe useful in enforcing existing IP law (i.e., I can prove that that picture is mine), but even that is questionable (proof of ownership of digital IP has already been proven satisfactorily for courts of law to rule on it).

The fact there is a new way of proving ownership doesn't make the thing owned valuable.

As far as I'm aware, the NFT doesn't itself convey any transfer of copyrights (or any other form of IP). That has to be done by a separate document (and therefore it's that document that transfers the rights, not the NFT). So I don't see how the NFT is doing anything to help enforce existing IP laws?

NFTs don't actually prove ownership of anything but themselves. Owning a hash of a URL has no connection to the real world, and can't prove that the NFT was created by the author of the artwork.

It makes me doubly furious that NFT is advertised as caring for artists. In fact, NFT makes it easier than ever to sell stolen artwork. NFT itself doesn't contain any copyrighted material, and selling metadata/URLs is not illegal, so it's likely that fraud through NFT is de-facto legal if you just carefully word it as selling the NFT of the artwork, and not the artwork itself.

I'm not saying it does; I AM saying that it's an additional public record that can be used to bolster a case in the event of unclear ownership. And even that is "maybe" useful, hence my use of that phrase.

Here's an NFT which is the best description I've ever seen of what NFTs actually are, https://foundation.app/@visualizevalue/nfts-explained-12012

It sold for 74 ETH.

Which is about approximately $240,000 USD.

Hrm...I wonder if I should mint some nft's?

And so it begins.

This is the equivalent of someone seeing how much a Picasso sells and wondering if they should become an artist. For every success, there are 10,000 failures.

That's true, but in the Picasso scenario I actually need to learn to do art. In the NFT case, apparently a 3rd grade level of photoshop skills would do.

You could also tape a banana to a wall and sell it for $120k in the traditional art world. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/maurizio-cattelan-banana-c...

Don't mistake extreme technical skill as being the sole reason humans value things. Sometimes, it's just about being the first to effectively convey a new idea, and the crudeness of the execution doesn't matter. And there are plenty of extremely skilled artists that spend decades mastering their craft whose work is effectively worthless, because they're not actually breaking new ground.

In hindsight, I was making a joke that seeing the value of an NFT has convinced me to make NFT's - and that this is the very cycle which has made NFT's valuable.

I was not actually implying that I would literally start making NFT's right now.

I did however forget that jokes and humor were against Hackernews rules, and for that I thank you kind sir for the reminder.

3rd-grade photoshop and weapons-grade marketing

s/Picasso/Rothko/

To make that nft would take me - or my 8 year old niece - no more than 2-3 hours to craft.

Learning to mix paint like Rothko would take years.

I think it's more likely that the author of this NFT paid this much to himself. It's the pump phase of a pump and dump scam.

Except that, it's not even true.

NFTs are equivalent to a orange checkmark on the website twotter.com that I just set up.

I imagine it could actually develop into a similar situation for physical art. There is an original work that is worth a lot because humans are weird like that, and an entire industry of experts who try to sort out the actual original NFT that was minted by the artist over the duplicates and fakes.

For example, we know the original creator of Nyan Cat came out of the woodwork to retroactively mint an NFT for it, https://foundation.app/@NyanCat/nyan-cat-219, which sold for 300 ETH. Obviously, anyone can create an NFT with the same gif, but we are reasonably certain that the actual created this ONE and declared it be the original.

Obviously, this is a very odd thing to try to wrap your head around, but is it really that different from valuing original physical artwork?

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