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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

I'm skeptical, but I can think of few use cases:

1. you could actually want to support the artist. Right now I don't think the popular NFTs are real artists, but there's no reason real public artists can't jump on board. NFT could be a flex

2. Social networks could build in NFTs. Dorsey from Twitter mentioned he wants to add NFT verification into the app, so that could be a thing. And they could give you more prominent placement. It's basically like non-commercial advertising. Kind of like a star next to your name.

3. VR could try to enforce that some objects can only be controlled by the owner. It would be difficult, but possible

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1. You can already donate to an artist you like through a platform like Patreon

2. If it's a feature of a social network, don't you already need a central authority? What's the value of an NFT then rather than just an entry in a database?

3. Similar: whoever is implementing this theoretical VR environment could just be the authority of who owns what. I don't see what an NFT adds here

I think they mean that NFTs could be brought into the game or platform like Twitter. Buy a painting NFT, show it off in Second Life or the like. So the apps wouldn't control the assets, only verify them.

I'm not "for" NFTs but that seems like it could be used in cool ways.

That still requires a massive distributed investment in infrastructure to support this. Every game that you want to show off your painting in needs to a) support importing any of these "portable NFT-based items", b) actually implement the models (and any necessary supporting code) for them in their own format, whatever that happens to be, and c) implement restrictions based on checking the ownership of NFTs against some identifier for the actual items.

Again: Every game/environment that you want to bring your NFT-items to has to implement this. And they're not getting paid to do so, because your NFT money is going to whoever is brokering them. Where the hell is the incentive...?

One incentive might be that the game/environment wants to compete against other games/environments on being a platform which facilitates NFT trading. Taking their pound of flesh off the top of course.

I’m not a big crypto guy at all, but I do see the analogy with the very real digital economies you see on platforms like Steam.

But again, what's the incentive? For instance with something like CS: Go skins, the developers of the game are doing all the investment creating the asset, and they have zero incentive to make this available outside of their game?

Secondary markets increase demand for the primary market

How would that benefit them? The major game companies already have robust systems for making digital assets and selling them to people, does it really seem likely that they’d jump to give a large fraction of that revenue to someone else for the privilege of having a slow, cumbersome intermediary which would still require custom integration work for every game?

> 1. You can already donate to an artist you like through a platform like Patreon

You feel like you own something that the artist can only sell once (assuming they're honest). Also, I don't know if there is a credible receipt for a donation on Patreon that you can use to flex

> 2. If it's a feature of a social network, don't you already need a central authority? What's the value of an NFT then rather than just an entry in a database?

I guess a social network could leverage the hype behind existing NFTs rather than rolling their own. Sure there will be some that will try to have home-spun NFTs, but Twitter indicated for now they just want to use existing NFTS

> 3. Similar: whoever is implementing this theoretical VR environment could just be the authority of who owns what. I don't see what an NFT adds here

NFTs could also be transferable across platforms. Obviously platforms wouldn't like this, but as a user if I buy a virtual house, it would be better not to be tied to any one platform. So new or existing platforms could try to lure me over by saying I can bring my house with me

> You feel like you own something that the artist can only sell once (assuming they're honest). Also, I don't know if there is a credible receipt for a donation on Patreon that you can use to flex

Yeah I mean I understand the appeal of ownership, but it's just so abstract in this case. If you "own" a picasso, you have something nobody else has. If you "own" an NFT, anyone with a copy of the file has exactly what you have.

> I guess a social network could leverage the hype behind existing NFTs rather than rolling their own. Sure there will be some that will try to have home-spun NFTs, but Twitter indicated for now they just want to use existing NFTS

What would this feature/integration actually look like?

> NFTs could also be transferable across platforms. Obviously platforms wouldn't like this, but as a user if I buy a virtual house, it would be better not to be tied to any one platform. So new or existing platforms could try to lure me over by saying I can bring my house with me

Yeah but why would they? So what would my NFT "house" be? I guess this is a 3D asset, with a model, some textures, and a collision model that can be rendered inside this VR world. Basically every platform which wants to make this asset usable has to bear the costs of supporting and rendering this asset, while the NFT issuer reaps the profits. What is the incentive here?

> You feel like you own something that the artist can only sell once (assuming they're honest). Also, I don't know if there is a credible receipt for a donation on Patreon that you can use to flex

Couldn’t this be done better, at far lower cost simply by having the artist put your name on it or post a video saying “thanks @bko for supporting me!”? That’d have just as much weight, it’s more personal, and you wouldn’t be diverting a substantial amount of money away from the artists to the finance bros.

I agree. It's just that you would need a way to flex that on social media. I guess they can make a page or something on their site but honestly NFTs are super simple low tech cheap way to elicit donations with a receipt that can be easily acknowledged anywhere

NFTs are “low tech cheap”? That’s a lot of expensive infrastructure and client software to keep running just for receipts – a note on a web page or watermark on an image would be both easier and more robust since they don’t have any third-party dependencies.

I can upload a jpg, put in my wallet address and sell an NFT on opensea. I don't have to pay or maintain the infra. No charge backs, tax reporting, stripe integration, etc. I don't even need a website, just pimp it directly on my social

Your transaction fees pay for the infrastructure - and if you’re not paying taxes that’ll catch up with you if you make a habit of leaving signed public confessions around for the auditors. If you don’t generate enough fees, that grinds to a halt since unlike other applications there’s no other benefit to keeping it running.

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