NFTs are the new Beanie Babies | Hacker News Reader

NFTs are the new Beanie Babies

riknieu.com

26 pointsRikNieu37 comments

NFTs are speculative mania in its purest form.

An NFT confers zero legal ownership over the underlying JPEG - without an intellectual property contract attached, you have no claim. You own the pointer to the image, and that's it.

Moreover, it's fairly clear that the NFT isn't about the art, either - the most popular NFTs are just series of procedurally generated crap, from 400pixel avatars to literal rocks.

You own the pointer to the image but the pointer can never be dereferenced.

Looking to educate myself here...

I know the pointer cannot be removed from the blockchain but does it contain a hash of the contents? Couldn't someone change what is at the URL.

What is at the URL could disappear altogether.

Like this?

https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1448066579611234305

This. I know an intellectual property lawyer and was told without a legal contract in place there is no way to assert your property rights in a court of law. Legally speaking, you own nothing.

That seems like a specific problem of how copyrights are assigned than the legal/NFT system itself. Bearer bonds are a thing. Are bearer assignments a thing? ie. "I assign the copyright of this work to whoever bears a certificate, or whoever bears a NFT?"

What's to stop someone from minting another NFT pointing at the same piece of data?

The same thing that prevents you from minting another deed that says you own the same piece of land as someone else.

A centralized authority and hundreds of years of legal tradition to resolve property disputes?

I was thinking of more "the courts". That's not in line with the crypto-anarchist narrative people like to think must be associated with NFTs, but I think having NFTs replace the complicated system we use to assign ownership today (eg. title searches/insurance) is a pretty attainable goal that doesn't require replacing the entire government with blockchain.

Not true. Someone could take an image that I've created, stick it on a server, create an NFT with a URL pointing at it, then sell it. Likewise, others, including me, could then create an NFT with a URL that points at that piece of data. The original creator (me in this situation) wouldn't have created the 'original' NFT.

NFTs don't solve counterfeiting when anybody can create a 'counterfeit' at any time.

> Not true. Someone could take an image that I've created, stick it on a server, create an NFT with a URL pointing at it, then sell it. Likewise, others, including me, could then create an NFT with a URL that points at that piece of data. The original creator (me in this situation) wouldn't have created the 'original' NFT.

Right, just like how you can make a deed that says you own 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

>NFTs don't solve counterfeiting when anybody can create a 'counterfeit' at any time.

never claimed it did, only that NFTs can potentially provide a better way to assign/transfer copyrights than the current system of paper contracts.

Maybe, but the closest I've heard of is contracts explicitly stating that the NFT doesn't assign any legal rights to the work. I'm not sure if the opposite exists / makes legal sense.

Right, my point isn't that most NFTs today grants you rights/ownership, just that it's not unfeasible for that to be a thing.

Is it, though? I mean if somebody steals your private key, does it make sense that that would give them legal rights / ownership to your NFT'd artworks? I'm honestly not sure if this is a thing, or a legally sensible idea.

> You own the pointer to the image

You own a pointer.

How is it different from the Buy A Square Foot On The Moon products?

C2PA is an actual serious attempt to figure out the problem of cryptographic claims over media, but doesn't attract the same type of attention because it isn't associated with blockchain boosters. That's a shame.

https://c2pa.org/public-draft/

Yes there's a very interesting problem tucked in there, especially around authenticity and traceability in the age of deepfakes. But NFTs, being just another unregulated pump-n-dump scheme like the rest of the crypto ecosystem, ain't it.

From what I can tell Beanie Babies were not a pump and dump scheme.

There's a high likelihood that a lot of NFTs are getting bid up by the sellers.

Beanie Baby mania was rational as there was a seemingly irreperable supply chain problem.

The floor prices dropped when the founder shocked the market by fixing the problem with a new vendor and flooding the market.

Like any good trade, there were many people hoarding beanie babies after the fundamental circumstance had changed hoping the prices “bounced back”, but that doesnt mean there wasnt a rational trade at some point.

Honestly most comparisons to speculative bubbles are wrong, whether it is about Tulips or Beanie Babies. It seems all the commodity and commodity derivatives bubbles have an economic component, and the equities bubbles are the more dubious ones, such as the South Sea Bubble or the 90s tech bubble. It makes more sense to use equities bubbles as better examples of irrational exuberance.

I agree, but Beanie Babies and the tulip mania are more well known in pop culture.

Aside from quickly sharing an understanding that people are being dismissive of whatever is being compared to beanies/tulips, it doesn’t convey to me that their opinion is based on knowing what they’re talking about regarding the thing being compared or the ancient bubble.

The thing I found intriguing about this is it implies some sort of vague stigma to using NFT'd images, eg. setting them as your profile picture on twitter, unless you paid for them. Are there really people who would think ill of you for doing that?

Yes, some NFT pumpers on twitter get very mad if you copypaste their avatar as your avatar.

The NFT crowd has come up with the term "right-clicker" to describe someone dastardly enough to download an NFT's content without being the anointed owner.

https://twitter.com/KirinDave/status/1443331312195018759

This kind of makes me want to replace all my profile pics with NFT'd images. I suppose that would be petty.

That was great rabbit hole.

Someone is selling NFT pic of twit complaining about 'right-clicers' - gold

Beanie Babies were actually cute, and well made toys. They still have that intrinsic value even when dug out of Grandma's closet today.

NFT's haven't got even that much going for them, so far as I can tell. History may recall we used this digital wailing wall for a while; but who will care enough to dig that deep into the minutiae of the silly season when the larger questions are so much more interesting, like "why didn't they see what was happening to their society?"

In the less distant future, our grandchildren will read the wikipedia on the NFT mania of 2021 and exclaim "I can't believe you guys were that dumb" At that moment I'll point to the framed screenshot of my reply to your comment and say "There's evidence I stayed out of it kiddo"

> At that moment I'll point to the framed screenshot of my reply to your comment and say "There's evidence I stayed out of it kiddo"

Why not mint the reply as an NFT and frame the blockchain transaction hash? ;)

You'd only think this if you had no idea how the art world works. It's more just what's always been happening forever but now you know about it and its easier for anyone to get involved.

100%, I think that's mostly batshit too. But it's not taking over my Twitter feed, so I have no reason to address it directly.

I suggest following better people ;)

Muting words on Twitter gives you a much better experience. I muted a lot of conspiranoid words in the last 18 months.

The problem with that article is it confuses NFTs with NFTs being used as collectibles.

It’s like criticising the JPG file format because a lot of people use it to just store pictures of cats.

The practical use-cases for NFTs, tokenisation of real world items, identities, proofs, certificates etc., goes far beyond the collectibles market.

NFTs are going to play a massive role in our lives in the future. Criticising them because of one trivial (albeit lucrative) aspect is missing the forest for the trees.

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