Ask HN: Are NFTs a Circlejerk of the Rich? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are NFTs a Circlejerk of the Rich?

16 pointshubraumhugo16 comments

NFTs are, depending on if you are talking to a zealot or a skeptic, either the second coming of TechnoChrist or the biggest scam to be invented in Crypto since the scam of Crypto was invented.[0] What do you think?

[0] https://every.to/napkin-math/nft-projects-are-just-mlms-for-tech-elites

View on HN

yes

They know it is a scam. That's why they want to find other richer friends (and fools) to buy into the scam before either the hype dies or the market crashes.

Which ever outcome comes first, either way the ones who minted and sold their NFTs to the richer fools that bought into it have already won (they get royalties from future sales) and guess who those folks are...

  the (rich) influencers and celebrities.

People have literally run out of things to spend money on. What a time to be alive.

People have run out of things to spend money on where the person you are paying gets to keep some of it.

At present it certainly appears that way. However consider something like the deed to a house which could be digitally signed by a keypair that you control. When you want to resell it you could demonstrate ownership of the underlying asset and transfer it without even needing to be in the same country. This has lots of utility for scammers (selling a bridge that isn't yours) but if you could reliably link physical artifacts with a database of digital entities (representing the ownership) this could have a lot of interesting applications.

Another example - Urbit address space. I own two stars, ~sicbus and ~tipbus. Each of these can spawn 2^16 - 1 planets, which can be used by individuals to build software that is usable within Urbit.

Other than the NFT model, I don't know of a good way to resell these assets to others.

It is early stages and the current applications are certainly fairly gimmicky, but the idea of using cryptography to assert ownership and hold "real copies" is probably very valuable.

Nobody is going to trust the deeds to their house to a blockchain with a BDFL who has demonstrated the ability to rollback/fork their blockchain at will. Or worse yet, some insecure side-chain. I think the post title is a valid remark on the current state of Ethereum NFTs, which I believe are the most popular.

yes

Agreed.

I don't understand why a) this isn't the most upvoted answer in this thread, and b) this isn't the only answer in this thread.

Cause there are a lot of rich people on HN

Is anyone buying NFTs with actual real (legitimate) cash?

I assume it's mostly just diversifying existing bitcoin/ether holdings into something slightly more tangible, and with an additional speculative element.

This is the question no one is asking. As far as I see: People are buying imaginary tokens to "art" they don't own using pretend money that lives in their computer, sorry, blockchain.

Count the layers of ephermerality. how many disks and how much network does it take to serve a "blockchain?" How many social structures and infrastucture have to be in place for an NFT "asset" to be extant? link rot is a deflationary economic pressure here?

People "paid money" for "premium" domain names by moving sums back and forth between shell companies. how much of the NFT market is the same thing with slightly different details?

That's like asking if buying art is a "circlejerk of the rich".

It is

https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/banksy-sothebys-shredd...

just another status symbol. it is worth noting that the overwhelming majority of NFTs do not sell, or sell for little.

It may not be just another status symbol though. It is likely also a pump-and-dump or tax evasion.

For example, let's say I buy 10 NFTs from the same set, each for $50k. I then sell one of them to another wallet that I secretly own, but I sell it for $5M.

Suddenly the "value" of those NFTs has gone up 100x! I can then sell the other 9, or I can even donate them to charity to reduce my taxes by $45M.

This is not dissimilar from physical fine art. It's just a lot easier.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com