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Comment by wickoff | Hacker News Reader

I became convinced that NFTs are worth something after understanding that there is little difference between an outrageously expensive watch and a rare NFT.

One shows off your wealth in person, the other will let you show it off online.

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How? You can't see if I own any NFTs right now. You can't see it in gmail. You can't see it on facebook. You don't get ads saying "rich NFT holders in your area!". No one knows or cares if you own an NFT.

That’s only because the infrastructure for it isn’t there yet. Doesn’t mean it won’t eventually happen

Twitter is adding ownership verification for NFT profile pictures.

> Twitter is adding ownership verification for NFT profile pictures.

Then what if someone mints new NFTs based on (say) the same images used for the cryptopunks cartoons?

You could get your extremely online bragging rights for an affordable price.

Except you can't, practically speaking--as the price is baked into the "brand".

But you’d get twitter verification. Or will twitter only recognize one chain for NFTs?

How do you handle someone minting multiple nfts of the same image on different chains?

Twitter, if they build their verification correctly, should determine NFT's sovereignty via the smart contracts, not the chains. Thus, CryptoPunks will only exist on one chain & one smart contract.

But what stops someone from minting the same jpegs elsewhere? Possible there is some mechanism I’m unaware of

My thesis on this revolves around the idea of "brands." I wrote about it more in depth here: https://www.robertchung.me/people-dont-understand-nfts

> Twitter is adding ownership verification for NFT profile pictures.

Twitter seems to have too many engineers.

You can see what people own by their wallet address.

The watch example is apt, similar to a Richard Mille being a flex that 99% of people won’t ever notice or understand it conveys status.

"Trust me this watch makes me very cool!"

People are going to flash their wallet addresses at bars or at business meetings?

We already have strong social taboos about flashing bank accounts. The whole point of status good is they convey wealth rather than tactlessly showing a total.

You've never seen where these brags occur?

See if this feels familiar:

Paris Hilton buys NFT of Hello Kitty! creator's DNA, says "crypto is the future"

Paris Hilton is possibly the world's richest and best known idiot. The flex here is having a news article written about you. Paris Hilton bought an NFT to stay relevant. Not to become relevant.

The fancy watch market is much much broader than celebrities

> I became convinced that NFTs are worth something after understanding that there is little difference between an outrageously expensive watch and a rare NFT.

> One shows off your wealth in person, the other will let you show it off online.

That's some pretty faulty logic, there. You're looking at it from the wrong end: it doesn't matter if you can imagine an object could be used as a wealth-status symbol, what actually matters is if it's actually recognized as one by a community with enough power for their recognition to matter.

Also, expensive status-bauble watches are stupid, too.

They are stupid, but rich people sometimes wear them for a reason, if they ever get stranded in a messy situation and their wealth is confiscated, they can still sell their watches and other miscellaneous items to bootstrap themselves outta poverty zone.

> They are stupid, but rich people sometimes wear them for a reason, if they ever get stranded in a messy situation and their wealth is confiscated, they can still sell their watches and other miscellaneous items to bootstrap themselves outta poverty zone.

Huh? That doesn't make any sense.

1. "if they ever get stranded in a messy situation": I'm interpreting that as a situation where they need to barter the watch or use it as a bribe. However there's hard limits on how much they could realistically get for a watch due to the seller's desperation and the buyer's risk (I'm guessing a few thousand dollars), even if they paid tens of thousands or more for it. The cheapest gold Rolex you can find (or maybe even a knock off) makes far more sense for this use case than some elite status watch.

2. "if ... their wealth is confiscated": anyone confiscating their "wealth" to the point where they're in the "poverty zone" more than likely will confiscate valuables like $100k watches, jewelry, art, etc. Planning for that to be your "back up wealth" is about as dumb as planning on living in your garage if you ever lose your home.

Expensive watches are supply limited (both by the brand’s intention and the availability of watchmakers).

Besides, expensive watches look really pretty and shiny. NFT is not.

> Expensive watches are supply limited

Exactly like NFTs. Not defending NTFt's just pointing out your argument isn't making much sense as presented.

Can't you sign a lot of time the same hash? Just use another initialization vector, salt, hashing algorithm, and you get a new nft.

One of the key aspect of blockchains is the fact that they're - by construction - timestamped.

But who cares? I mean outside of crypto enthousiast folks.

The thing that is attached to NFTs is generally not supply limited though (in the sense that is much easier to create a digital thing, whether that is game item, art or some kind of record than a watch).

I can create some trillions digital bits, then mint trillions NFTs for each of them.

This would make sense if collectors weren't hiding behind pseudonyms such as "@crypto888crypto" and "@7Surfer7Silver7".

Hint: it's not about status. It's about pumping the price of eth.

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