Hacker News Reader

Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

NFTs are based around the idea that you create a new cryptocurrency for each object you want to sell on a chain, for example Ethereum. When you do this "creation of a non-fungible token", your token gets an address that is essentially an "ID" for the token you've created.

Every token you create gets a unique ID, that only that token has.

So with that in mind, a NFT is as unique as a painting in your example, as a NFT is always "one of a kind".

View on HN

But the actual image data isn't stored in the token, just its URL (usually). So what you own is not the image, but rather, whatever resource resides at a particular URL, with there being no guarantee that that resource doesn't also live at some other URL.

But everyone knows that. No one is claiming that an NFT literally is a digital image.

And what value does this unique NFT have if it has no enforceable or enforced relation to reality?

Not sure how this is relevant to the discussion at hand. Either you think it's valuable, or you don't. I happen to think NFTs are not as valuable as others seemingly think, but they do have some use cases (apparently).

What is reality anyway? We have a distributed, decentralized database (Ethereum) that people can set/get data in/from. Now we also have a abstraction on top of that that allows us to have unique data. What can we do with this? Fuck should I know, also I don't really care. Think of it what you want.

> What is reality anyway?

Have you not heard of this concept? Seems to be a bit of copout to explaining the value of an NFT given an NFT, by it's mere existence, has no bearing on anything outside of a blockchain. But if you are unclear on the concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality

We seem to differ on the definition as I'd call blockchains and cryptocurrencies real (part of reality), but you somehow don't.

I feel like you're trying to find a more concrete reason than is necessary - the fact that it is unique can be valuable on its own. I can go buy a reproduction Picasso that looks identical to the original and from an art standpoint it's effective equivalent, but it's still worth nothing compared to a "real" one. The fact that the original was painted by Picasso is what provides it so much value, even though who painted a particular piece of art is not a physical part of the art itself. A unique NFT effectively provides value in the same way, it is valuable as long as people care about who/what issued it and thus want to be able to say they own that unique one.

And while it's notable that digital art can be duplicated perfectly and physical art cannot, I don't personally think that matters all that much. People who are buying a Picasso aren't doing so just for the art, they're doing it so they can say they own a Picasso. In the same way you're not buying an NFT for the art itself, you're buying it because it's uniquely identifiable in a way you and others care about.

The value of being used in money laundering.

No, the ID is not unique. It might be unique in a particular database, where the software enforces such uniqueness, but that doesn't mean the ID unique. Anyone can make an exact copy of the ID, which will be undistinguishable from the original, or they can copy the entire database, any number of times, at a negligible cost. You can't do that with a physical object.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com