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Comment by iAm25626 | Hacker News Reader

Car/bag/cloth/jewelry/art - these type of things are sometime considered status symbol. It help people convey certain “message” to other. NFT might could be the same in the ever more virtual world. I might not be be the target audience; but it does not meant that it hold no value to other.

People spent lots of money on game skins, rare weapon. So there is a market.

When one goes to a physical conference: flair/badges serves similar purpose. NFT could be that in zoom/team/slack.

My naive way of looking at NFT: Maybe it can be used to help fund open source free software. Instead piece of art; a flair/pin/badge for showing your support for your favor projects.

do not underestimate people's vanity.

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The term for this is "Veblen good" [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

When it comes to luxury cars and clothes, you force others to see that you’ve spent for status. That doesn’t exist for NFTs. There’s no public forum I can go to where others are forced to observe my status signals.

High end art is more about investing, money laundering, and tax havens then status.

Well, it doesn't exist...yet. NFTs could serve as badges, why not?

Except twitter profile pictures now right? Verified NFTs are in the pipeline.

https://twitter.com/af_mada/status/1443243702156206089?s=20

How? Your Twitter profile picture is an image. What stops me from saving your profile and setting mine to the same thing?

Are you suggesting Twitter validates that a Twitter account owns an NFT and shows a check/badge/whatever? I also don't think that works. Whatever rare NFT you have I can go make a visually identical NFT for <minimum cost of an NFT> and confirm that I own that NFT.

I often think that I must be missing something about NFTs because they seem breathtakingly stupid. But, I've yet to find out what I don't understand about them.

> Whatever rare NFT you have I can go make a visually identical NFT for <minimum cost of an NFT> and confirm that I own that NFT.

Yes but your NFT would be deployed on a copycat (ie. replica, inauthentic) smart contract.

Would this matter? Would still have "legit" logo like the authentic one.

It wouldn't matter if you're intention is to fool the gullible or uninformed.

The Twitter verification is for status, if the status also requires the person seeing the profile has to find the contract existing with the profile NFT and then exhaustively find out if there is an “original” then the whole verification process isn’t fit for purpose.

Basically everyone ends up ill informed.

Twitter is building exactly that apparently, you would get an ethereum checkmark next to your profile pic if that image is verified.

There is definitely discussion happening on exactly your point, but i imagine there are options to combat the fake NFTs given that you can't fake a signature from a known public key.

Given that there are so many NFT projects I speculate that the twitter verification will only happen for a small subset though.

So we’re trusting a centralized service, cool.

I mean everyone can verify the ownership too since it's on the public blockchain?

Right but who verifies that the particular NFT is the original one that has all the feel good magic and not a copy someone else minted?

It's almost like Twitter is doing a great public service by building exactly what's needed to show that this is, in fact, bullshit.

Similarly all the crypto metaverse projects although they're not as mainstream suffer this problem. There's a reason Will Wright's new "NFT" game runs its own chain.

You can see which collection an NFT belongs to, their contract addresses, and transaction history. This is a non-problem. I'm sure it will be visible in Twitter's implementation too

Not just that but anyone can mint a copy of the picture the NFT points to and have their own verified version.

They could easily show provenance info (author or collection name) in addition to the badge. Your fake image will be spot quickly.

> Whatever rare NFT you have I can go make a visually identical NFT for <minimum cost of an NFT> and confirm that I own that NFT

Can you sign that NFT with the creator's private key?

Yes, you can sign it with your own private key because you are now the "creator".

That's the point of digital assets, they are fungible by definition because it's a bunch of 1s and 0s, doesn't matter which system you run it on you will get an indistinguishable output.

Yet two fully bit-by-bit identical digital assets can have very different social and monetary value based on who stamped their name on it.

Of course for that to work you need an easy way to check who owns a particular wallet so you can verify they did actually stamp their name on it. And quite a lot of NFTs exist without this level of proof hence rampant fraud.

Except the world knows who the creator is and your 1s and 0s aint it

> I often think that I must be missing something about NFTs because they seem breathtakingly stupid.

That's exactly how you know you've got it. The difference is that you didn't feel the heat of FOMO convincing you to dive in without an understanding.

Huh? You would have to authenticate with Twitter using your crypto wallet to prove you own the wallet associated with the NFT. Twitter would know the contract addresses of the original NFT so even if you created your own smart contract with identical images it wouldn't be the original...

I just don't see a single positive side of this. Cool, now more people can flaunt their wealth in a brand new way. It's like Fortnite skins, but more extreme and for adults. Just one more way to rope people into wasting money on mostly useless shit.

The author of PPSSPP also sells a "gold" version. The only difference is the icon.

https://central.ppsspp.org/whygold

If someone comes to me and they said they paid 50 k for an NFT. And try to brag...

I will literally crawl on the floor to laugh at that stupidity.

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