TheNFTbay.org – The Billion Dollar Torrent (All NFT's from Ethereum and Solana)
thenftbay.org
thenftbay.org
How is "NFT" not a gigantic scam? I'm looking at this image right now: https://rarible.com/token/0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118a18...
There is nothing at all to keep me from screenshotting or otherwise downloading that image. I won't have to pay the author $213 for it, I just take the image because I can. Now I won't necessarily "be the original owner" of it or whatever but....I mean....I have the same image as the owner and I have $213 where the new "owner" simply has the image.....
Can someone, if such a person exists, that believes in NFT's as having actual value please explain it? It just seems to me like a few thousand people have realized "Hey people will literally give me $200 just because I told them to" and are doing it at scale....
And according to that website, so far the author of those "NFT"s has made 13 million dollars......Is that true? If this person has made 13 million dollars because they drew a few monkeys....I'm pretty sure they will be President of the US one day.
Owning an NFT of a digital image doesn't mean you own it anymore than owning a LeBron James card means you own LeBron James.
NFTs are no different than having a email from the Beanie Baby store saying that you bought the first beanie baby. If someone wants to buy that e-mail from you, then great, you made a profit.
I thought that was a fairly normal thing? That is, someone buys or owns a work of art but it's left in a museum in perpetuity.
But...I do not see the value in being able to "prove" that you own said artwork...because you can't do it...Globally, the number of people who know what Ethereum or any other block-chain technology means is probably what..many thousands? Maybe..maybe a few hundred thousand? And of those the subset of people who actually care...I'm sure is far fewer. So you can only verify yourself as the "owner" of said art to a very small subset of people...
I guess it's like a collector community? People are willing to spend literally millions of dollars to prove to other collectors that they are the owners of these digital assets?
This has been coming a long time. I have about 3000 hours in guild wars 2, when I log in I’m always so happy I have my legendary longbow. If they’d have been nfts that would be amazing. I’d love for that metadata to travel with me across other digital worlds.
And as for value goes, NFTs are far more liquid than physical art works because settlement is instant, provenance is simply a matter of inspecting transaction history (no need for counterparties such as Sotheby's), the market is worldwide, it's a composeable asset that can be used with other games, apps, etc., it can be used as an authentication token for exclusive access to software or physical events, etc. But never underestimate the value of liquidity.
Obviously not, because those are tangible things. That’s not a valid comparison.
The reason people pay millions for artworks is because of the intangible provenance. If the value was the tangible, then tangible digital replications would sell for the same value as the original.
In a pre-digital pre-social media world you’re right. But in the modern world where people spend more time socializing online than in meatspace, digital goods become easier to display than physical ones.
I think a lot of HN doesn’t get this because they don’t spend much time on social media. But for someone like Steph Curry, putting an ape in his profile pic gets a lot more exposure than a Van Gogh on his living room wall.
And I could in 30 seconds, find the most expensive nft, copy the image and use that as my profile picture...
Similarly if you "stole" the blockchain receipt of an actual NFT, therefore gaining "ownership" of it, the NFT community would simply pretend the person you stole it from was still the "real" owner, despite having zero "verifiable" status to it, beyond having possibly tweeted it before you did
I have to use a lot of quotes because even in a hypothetical there's so many variables that applying real world properties to just make my head hurt
Nobody would stop you from hanging it out up in your living room, or even announcing to everyone on social media that it's the original and you're the owner. Nobody would need to, because everyone in the art collecting community would recognize this as super cringe.
People purchase art for social status. What you're describing is the opposite of social status.
Why does a Chanel purse sell for substantially more than a similar quality leather bag from a generic manufacturer? Because of the intangible status market of the Chanel brand.
If the Chanel logo combined with artificial scarcity turns a $1000 bag into a $6000 purse, why would we not expect the Chanel logo with the same artificial scarcity to turn a $0 JPEG into a $1000 JPEG?
Yep exactly like that, except there's no luxury good, not even a receipt of a luxury good, just a ticket to the directions of an online store that's hosting the same bag of pixels that's given out to everyone who ever cared to come across the same public directions with their browser.
There's no respect to be earned from a public digital trail admitting you've traded real money for a link to a fake clout badge.
Except there clearly is. At the point where many of the world's most famous athletes, musicians and actors have prominently displayed NFTs that they purchased, then there clearly is real social status associated with them.
You can debate about whether that's unfair, or stupid, or just a fad. But it's pretty clearly undeniable that NFTs today are an indisputable social status market to a not insignificant fraction of the population. The fact that you find that you think it shouldn't be that way doesn't change the way things are.
Your bank account is simply a row in a Cobol database managed by some archaic institution. Your stocks in your Robinhood app are the same. You seem to be demeaning the value of database records when so much of the world economy is merely that.
My bank is managing my real cash money account, which has real utility that can be used to purchase tangible assets like the property that houses my family.
Your NFT is a worthless forgotten entry buried in a DB of a URL pointing to a public image (everyone has access to, but no one else had to trade real money for) that will become a broken link when this pyramid scam collapses vaporizing every dollar that remained invested in it.
If I'm demeaning of anything, it's all the astroturfers, spam bots and scammers trying to hype up this fake FOMO market that is being marketed to greater fools (who aren't aware of what they're actually buying) as their next source of crypto wave riches they missed out by hearing about BTC too late.
I own my house because I have a piece of paper that says I own it, but really it's because my neighbors choose to acknowledge the "legitimacy" of that paper. If someone else moves into my house while I'm on vacation I can oust them (probably) simply because I have more people "on my side". If enough people choose to acknowledge the legitimacy of NFTs then the scheme will not collapse. You are just making a prediction that people wont choose this, but I think you might be surprised. People attribute value to all sorts of nonsense, especially once they've invested in it themselves.
One day all this will be dust, but today, for a brief moment, some guy can trade his collection of digital monkey pictures for a real life piece of paper saying he owns a house, or a whole bunch of database entries at a crusty old bank. Or, I guess, even "cold hard cash" if he prefers.
Nope, my NFT is a permanent record of account utilizing the ERC721 open standard for non-fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. The record of my purchase of the NFT will exist long after you or I are no longer around.
It is a transferrable asset tradeable 24/7 on the Ethereum blockchain, accessible as an open data standard on numerous marketplaces and applications. It is far more liquid and exchangeable than any physical asset I own.
Some of the NFTs I own exist as SVGs stored on Ethereum mainnet. Some exist on Filecoin or Arweave blockchains and have 200 years of prepaid storage to back them up. Some are backed by centralized photo servers and only merely exist as temporary novelties (which is totally ok, by the way).
It's not a pyramid scheme. It's deeper than you know and will evolve further than your bias will let you see. You don't have to like sports to understand why an athlete is paid $50 million a year to play with a ball. You would do well to understand it better before you demean it, even if you don't personally want to participate in it.
Your bank account is a set of contracts between you and your bank which say that when you want to withdraw funds or instruct the bank to send some of your money to someone else they are obligated to comply. The database is merely a summary of your interactions with the bank via those contracts, and their current obligations toward you. Delete the database and those contracts still exist, though the content may need to be reconstructed from other sources.
A similar argument can be made for stocks.
NFTs are just the database entries without the contracts. They have their uses, but it's not really the same thing at all.
It certainly would not be. It might look very very similar, but in no way indistinguishable to the degree that one digital file is literally the same as a copy of itself.
Are you seriously trying to claim that the reason the original Mona Lisa has value (vis-a-vis a high quality forgery) is because of the minute tangible composition of the paint?
I’m sorry, but no. It’s clearly the intangible provenance. Otherwise forgeries wouldn’t fall in value when detected, because after all nothing has changed about their tangible composition.
And even if it might be difficult to tell apart, it isn't literally the same thing.
>Are you seriously trying to claim that the reason the original Mona Lisa has value (vis-a-vis a high quality forgery) is because of the minute tangible composition of the paint?
I'm not sure how you concluded that is what I said. I never made any statement as to why it is valued the way that it is.
That's the problem NFT's seek to solve ;). You may not think it's a problem, but a lot of people on the production side of digital artwork do.
https://www.amazon.com/DECORARTS-Leonardo-Davinci-Classic-Re...
Obviously, the real mona lisa or the mickey mantle card has value because they were painted by famous artists, or signed by a famous baseball player... But at the end of the day they only have value because someone says they have value.
It actually doesn't make any logical sense that baseball cards have value. They are stock photos printed on card stock. They sold for pennies. I don't own the rights to the image. I can't even play any sort of interesting game with them in the same way I could with Magic the Gathering cards or Pokemon cards. I simply own the card and can resell it to other people and try to assemble interesting collections and discuss with other collectors. There really is no other utility other than that.
Bored Ape Yacht Club has memed itself into relevance, as indicated by your casual mention of their brand. They are digital collectibles but they also have become a true club in the sense that there are exclusive events both in real life and in the metaverse that BAYC holders get access to.
They also have gaming franchises in the works. And I imagine if U.S. securities laws weren't so draconian, they would probably arrange profit sharing among holders for proceeds from merchandising the franchise.
But for now, ownership of a BAYC grants you ownership of a meme. That's not an insult, by the way, quite the contrary. Human culture is memes all the way down.
Any object that is post-scarcity (like digital images) is incompatible with the business model of NFTs... except in its circle of believers.
Not really. In your Mona Lisa example, an NFT would be more like a blockchain based ticket to the Louvre that has a link to a Mona Lisa JPEG.
That’s the mismatch in NFT discussions: The believers have been convinced that the NFT is the artwork, but everyone else looks at the NFT and sees a link to a JPEG with no actual rights, possession, or ownership of the artwork.
NFTs aren’t the artwork. They’re a fancy crypto receipt that says “I paid X amount to someone and we agreed that transaction had a link to this specific JPEG”. You can technically go into the blockchain and confirm that your receipt was the first, but there’s nothing stopping anyone else from making another NFT of the Mona Lisa and selling it.
The blockchain itself can’t even verify that the Louvre sold you the original Mona Lisa NFT, you have to rely on 3rd-party news articles and such to confirm the address was truly associated with the Louvre. We’re already seeing scams where fraudulent NFTs are being produced that claim to be authorized by legal owners of the artwork but are actually just scammers selling NFTs of someone else’s artwork. But the funny part is that discovering these frauds has zero impact on the blockchain because the NFT was already minted and owned and you can’t undo that. We just have to look off-chain to websites to tell us what these tokens are supposed to be thought of, ignoring the actual blockchain NFT contents and trusting the non-blockchain NFT sources.
They might be valuable to other members of the NFT believers group in the same way that rare baseball cards are valuable to other baseball card collectors, but the rest of us just aren’t interested in trading digital baseball cards of JPEGs.
There’s also a huge problem with wash trading: Someone can make their NFT or NFT collection look arbitrarily valuable by trading it between multiple wallets they own. From the outside it looks like the NFT is “sold” for huge amounts of money, but really it’s just someone moving their own money and NFTs around on the blockchain. In the real art world this is much less practical because someone would be paying huge tax bills and auction fees on each sale. With blockchain, someone can simply wash trade with themselves across wallets and nobody would ever know. NFT values are definitely being pumped up by this scam because it’s too obvious and easy to ignore.
I disagree. When people are going around calling this a revolution that will change the fabric of society, they can’t just revert to “maybe it’s just not for you” when they have trouble explaining it or defending it. Either this is revolutionary or it’s a niche thing, but it can’t be both.
My reading of this is that it's describing something at a single point of time. So to use your example, the Tesla S was niche, _then_ the 3 evolved the idea to become revolutionary.
Some niches eventually become revolutionary, but they're not both niche and revolutionary at the same time.
And if someone was like “What’s the big deal with the Tesla Model S?” I could say things like “This car runs on electricity, so it will help reduce our carbon footprint. It’s also really fast, really quiet, has more storage space than other cars, has better software than other cars.” and the person asking the question would have an answer.
What I wouldn’t do is say “Whatever, when this is the only kind of car you can buy, you’ll understand.” Which is the answer I get a lot when I ask questions about crypto and NFTs.
So does every obvious scam.
Well that's the point isn't it?
It's valuable within the in-group that the person is part of. It increases their status within the crypto community and gives them access to exclusive networks/events.
Sure you can right-click save a crypto punk, but will that allow you into their community?
Much in the same way that I marvel at peoples ability to spend millions of dollars on Modern art (Basquiat's for example look like a 5 y/o drew them), NFT's to me serve a similar function.
Yet another way for humans to form tribes, create meaning and use conspicuous consumption to signal status.
But we’re starting to see situations where people lose their NFTs or the NFTs are stolen through hacks or phishing.
And then the community goes out of their way to pretend it never happened, that the NFT doesn’t matter, and that the silly Cryptopunk or goofy lion JPEG still belongs to the person even though the NFT doesn’t.
At what point do we acknowledge that the NFT doesn’t actually matter in these communities and that it’s all about throwing money around?
As for the exclusive communities: I’m still not convinced any of these are actually as interesting as the NFT sellers want you to believe. Maybe someone, somewhere has put together a banger Discord channel with some good conversations that requires the purchase of a $10,000 NFT to access, but it's still a Discord channel.
The "exclusive communities" thing is really just another abstract value proposition that the NFT sellers have come up with to try to inject some tangible value into an otherwise valueless token. It's also yet another example of NFT sellers taking something that costs $0 (or near $0) to create, applying some hype, adding the "NFT" buzzword, and then selling it to FOMO people who don't want to miss the next Bitcoin or TSLA wealth-generating meme asset.
Without commenting on the NFT aspect, a good community is worth its weight in gold, and so are community managers. Companies looking to open source pieces of code continually relearn that lession - open source communities don't "just happen", there's a ridiculous amount of work that goes into creating a viable one, even (or especially) if there's a closed source company backing it. That NFTs have chosen to have discussions in private is their prerogative (and I can't blame them either - NFTs still face questions of legitimacy like the above, and whether you believe in them or not, having to answer the same FUD again and again from users just trolling and calling you a scammer must be tiresome when trying to build things). What exclusive NFT communities are worth, I don't know, but charging a fee to join or a monthly fee for access to some group of people is worth it in many contexts. It's not remotely "near $0".
Money laundering?
A bill of sale to the rights to a musical recording is just a receipt and doesn't physically stop anyone from violating copyright, sure. This isn't new. People commission artwork and buy the rights to it all the time. What's new is simply the mechanism being put on a blockchain. I don't get what's so inherently crazy or a scam about that. Furry "adoptables" would map very easily onto NFTs.
NFTs for things you don't own are more silly novelties or scams, but we've always had bridge sellers.
How can I get a Mona Lisa copy that has the exact same physical makeup? Or a duplicate signed Mickey Mantle with the same ink strokes?
Digital assets can be easily duplicated identically. The only thing you're missing is some stamp on a chain that says you're the owner.
Let's say you have digital artwork in a lossless format. You then take the world by storm with the compressed version. Everyone loves it. You sell an NFT with a hash/URI/encoding of the original uncompressed version encrypted so only the owner on the blockchain can decrypt it.
Needlessly to say, this would only work for digital art that is compressible. The owner could perhaps prove that they really own the original by showing a differently compressed version of it.
Doesn't that defeat the point of only the NFT owner having control of it?
NFT's are mostly here to sell you avatar's of tech-minded people who create ( and even generate) as much as possible avatars.
An NFT is a basic, fundamental piece of technology that represents unique digital tokens (token A is distinct from and not exchangeable with token B, unlike money and stocks and most tokens before them that are interchangeable with others of the same kind), usually on a public blockchain (though that’s not technically required).
If the artist signs a contract assigning all rights to the artwork to whoever holds the NFT they minted (and some do), sure they own the artwork!
If a domain name system is programmed to let whoever owns an NFT device where it points to, then the NFT holder owns that domain as much as you own any domain you purchase in the traditional way (especially if that system itself is verifiably immutable).
On the other hand if all the NFT signals is that you bought a limited edition token linked to a piece of art from its creator and that you donated a lot of money to a certain charity, some people want to be known for that kind of thing and see value there too, that’s ok!
And yes, if you buy something with no rights, perhaps not even from the creator of the art because you didn’t check, because you think it might go up in value… maybe you got scammed.
Technology helps people do more, and that includes scammers. The presence of scammers is irrelevant and unrelated to the presence and possibility of interesting, useful, or fun use cases. The fact you don’t find them interesting, useful, or fun doesn’t make the technology itself a scam or everyone involved a scammer, it just means your preferences lie elsewhere.
I get where he's coming from, but that doesn't make it reasonable. And certainly not a scam by Ferrari.
If NFTs exist to make an artistic statement, then it’s not the same as a one-off art car. It’s a statement on conspicuously raising the ecological and conceptual cost for the same vulgar image that any scrolling rube can enjoy.
An NFT really could represent season tickets for some assigned seats in a sports arena, or (unfortunately) the order on a list of organ transplant recipients. But instead of problems of scarcity, NFT represents FOMO. And the most-confident adherents are definitely speculating on riding the wave.
However, i do see some use cases. Imagine a decentralized NFT ledger where e.g one can buy the copyrights (and rights to royalties) for digital assets like music that would then be integrated into services like Apple Music or Spotify. That would create a neat marketplace for intellectual property.
Some types of NFTs are not scams, but the NFTs that are images, videos, audio are complete and utter scams.
Simply slapping blockchain on them creates the false illusion that you somehow 'own' it when given that are not even stored on the blockchain in the first place, it tells you that you actually own an expensive certificate that could point to anything since they are really living on centralised servers.
If that is not a scam, I don't know what is.
There are basically two theories of their value: the collectible theory and the ownership theory. These overlap but are best explained separately.
In the collectible theory, NFTs are like an autograph you get on merch from a famous person. Think an autographed photo of Will Shatner you might get at a con. Usually the (cryptographic) autographer is the original artist of the work being autographed. Of course the autographer can release multiple autographed versions of the same work, but this decreases their value (and the value of any further work they might autograph).
Collectibles have long had value to humans, but they also suffer from three annoying problems: storage, fakes, and transaction costs. NFTs solve all three - they never degrade on the blockchain, their authenticity is cryptographically verifiable (assuming one can associate the signing address with the famous person, which is comparatively simple), and they are easily transferred online.
The second theory is the ownership theory. Here NFTs are used to track ownership of the underlying digital asset. In our current internet this is absurd, as the torrent is designed to demonstrate - everything is a copy, and even the NFT holder can never get access to the "original" bits. The ownership theory requires adoption of NFTs as an ownership mechanism in the metaverse, along with associated digital rights management technology. It's an early land-grab for the VR overworld.
Now, personally I don't find either of these theories very compelling. But I also didn't find cryptocurrencies generally very compelling, so I don't have a great track record. Cryptocurrency really tends to turn us all into Frank Grimes -like characters who miss out. I believe the more widely-used term is "midwit".
I don't think this part is generally true, since the image itself isn't hosted on the blockchain.
...which brings me to: as someone who knows very little about this technology, why aren't the images themselves stored on the blockchain? Are they simply too big for that to be feasible?
IPFS is ideal for this use case because the URL contains a hash of the content meaning that either the original asset is served or nothing (which you can fix if you have the asset).
There are projects trying to create permanent decentralised, content addressable storage (in some case as layers on top of IPFS), so maybe even that problem will go away.
That's entirely wrong. None of the NFTs are stored on the blockchain, merely a bit of JSON that contains a link to your image. If you're lucky, it's hosted on IPFS (and it'll disappear whenever everyone stops seeding it). Otherwise, it's just a link to your image host of choice, and the author is free to replace it with the image of a dick in three months, deleting all your resale value.
>their authenticity is cryptographically verifiable
No, it authenticates the seller. I can sell you an NFT of a Botticelli, that doesn't make me Botticelli or a member of his estate. Since every one on the market doesn't care for copyright, it doesn't matter.
>they are easily transferred online
So is the JPEG that I just right clicked
The collectible theory is a load of crap. NFTs are for laundering money and finding suckers.
Reminds me of that tweet about how programmers are like compilers that read things until they find the first concept they disagree with, then post it like an error message. Read the directly-following parenthetical.
NFTs solve none of these problems. The underlying asset is not stored on the blockchain and can be deleted at any time. Fakes are unaddressed since you can only validate you are the owner of a specific url and there's no guarantee that what you own is the original version (bytes are easy to copy). Any validation of authenticity must happen OFF of the blockchain in which case why are we doing this again? Transaction costs are a function of the market (even on the blockchain) and are not at all connected to NFTs.
Bubbles can eventually have value, weirdly - their irrational nature can sort of act as a forcing function taking us out of a local maxima, facilitating the creation of entirely new unforeseeable and previously-impossible things that actually have value of some sort. With cryptocurrencies you could argue they facilitated (through smart contracts and then distributed exchanges) the creation of massively-multiplayer online gambling games with no barriers to entry for publication & interface with the financial system where people win through patience and steely nerve. You may think more-advanced open-source casinos are not good for society, but they certainly hold economic value.
If I wanted I could write a smart contract for a MMO gambling game like POWH3D and publish it tomorrow. That isn't a capability I used to have - quite a few hoops to jump through to get a game onto a casino floor, or start up an online gambling website.
You seem defensive. Find a comment that requires the above defense.
The previous restrictions on starting your own online casino have never been technological. It's really not that hard to set up your own online casino using non-blockchain technology. The main hurdles are entirely legal. Gambling has a ton of regulations and restrictions in virtually every jurisdiction, and many governments are more then happy to aggressively punish those who break the rules. Regulators aren't going to look kindly on your MMO gambling game just because "it uses the blockchain."
And sure, maybe you can more easily evade regulators by making a blockchain casino, over a traditional online casino. But to me, "creating illegal casinos more easily then before" isn't a particularly compelling use case.
If the asset is stored on IPFS, as many are, this is simply not true. Even if the asset falls off the network (which the creator, owner, NFT holder, and anyone else can prevent by pinning it themselves) then as long as you have the file(a) and the IPFS software you can put it back at any time, and it’ll have the same URL thanks to content addressability.
I’d certainly agree that any NFT that links to a digital asset in a mutable / non-content addressable way is worthless.
The way to make a business model is to associate copyright ownership with the NFT ownership and then assert those rights by filing DMCA takedowns (and/or lawsuits) everyday to anyone who displays the "art" without paying for the privilege and using the NFT owners original work as the source file.
This would create digital scarcity because copies couldn't be used without legal exposure, so any real business or serious person who wanted to use it would pay for the rights to. It's like the Getty Images business model scaled way way up. I don't necessarily think this business model is good for society or will actually happen but it's the way to monetize NFTs.
The issue is you need the legal process to tie ownership of the NFT to ownership/transferrable license/whatever of the work. And once you're setting up that legal process, what then do you need the NFT for?
In reality the only digital scarcity that NFTs directly create is the scaricty of the token itself. Which is fine, and could potentially be used for interesting purposes. One problem is that they pretty much always require off-blockchain knowledge of which contract is the correct one for the purpose.
The other problem is that most plausible useful purposes I've seen discussed (like tracking "ownership" of digital items in a video game) could work just fine as a centralized database.
I've yet to see a proposed practical use (not "art") of NFTs where all participants are sufficently mutually distrustful that a central database cannot be used. There may well exist such uses, and those might be worth getting excited about.
As for the "art", well digital money laundering schemes just don't cut it for me. Like literally: selling some shitty tokens and buying it using other accounts you own, is a great way to provide an explanation for crypto you acquired from some illegal trade or whatever. If anybody asks where you got the crypto from, you can point to your NFTs, and explain that you are just as shocked as everybody else at how much people are willing to buy this stuff for.
What happens in that initial sale? The owner declares that whoever possesses the NFT owns the good? Under laws like the first sale doctrine, they can't prevent the subsequent owner passing the legal ownership seperate to the NFT so ownership of the NFT still means nothing legally.
Well how about they take a leaf out of the software industry book, and instead of selling you ownership of the thing the NFT represents, they sell you a transferrable non-revocable exclusive license that requires in its terms that transfers of the license and transfers of the NFT happen in tandem. Well now the future buyers _are_ dealing with contracts.
A problem NFT appears to be an attempt to solve is all the parasitic people, organizations and rules that govern the transfer of assets. These lawyers, title clerks, law firms, title companies, auction houses and governments extract significant rent from asset transfer marketplaces. This rent is a cost to market participants but the larger cost is limiting the liquidity and size of the overall market.
Like imagine if the title to a car was an NFT instead of a piece of paper. I think NFT might just be a complete scam but it might have utility in disintermediating markets.
Except I believe most NFT contracts don't actually grant copyright ownership, only the kind of standard copyright license-to-use grant you see in most terms of service.
My argument would be that when Pokemon cards came out I'd imagine most adults at the time would think them worthless, its just a card with a picture of a dinosaur on it. It was the children and young adults that attributed the value upon them and thus as those people are now 30/40/50 with large amounts of disposable income they can be worth a lot.
The same could happen with NFTs. People buying into their value today might come good on their value in later decades. Maybe it doesn't have to make sense if enough people believe it.
Maurizio Cattelan's "Comedian" piece, if you own it you don't just own the banana till it rots but the concept and the instructions on how to reproduce it for exhibition, it's not the same banana what you "own" isn't very tangible beyond the instructions on how to reproduce the work.
The fact you can save an image of the Mona Lisa doesn't mean you own it, sure you probably agree because its a physical object but what about say video art like Bill Viola's works. They're digital but you copying the digital file doesn't mean you own it.
Sure you can copy the ugly ape drawing, you could even try to resell it but buyers can tell it's not the real original ugly ape because of the blockchain.
Not defending it either way, just spelling out the mindset that causes it to have value.
Is there at least a hash of the image stored with the metadata and link?
https://img.rarible.com/prod/image/upload/t_big/prod-itemIma...
Saved you a cookie banner dismissal.
People in the cryptocurrency community believe that NFTs are used for money laundering. It's also believed that prices are inflated artificially to trick gullible or greedy people into buying them. But the download thing ? It's missing the point.
And obviously people ARE getting hurt, but that doesn't mean it's a scam. It's just a crazy bubble.
The reasons aren't singular nor quite the same but if you can answer those it might be easier to figure out why simplifications like 'i can have the same image' don't cover the whole value people derive from it.
Where on netflix ? People pay for easy access to a wide range of stuff which are in HD (personally i use primewire but eh... not HD).
> Or software they can get identical versions of on the other bay.
Maybe because they are in a compagny which doesn't wanna be liable for lawsuit. Once again personally as a individual i don't pay for software.
> why they go to a live concert with the band playing instead of a venue with an identical recording of it
Precisely because the energy of a real concert is better. Actually there's a bunch of bands which are supper popular not because they have better songs but because they give better show.
None of these reasons are applicable to NFT.
Bands might have a different set live than studio versions but you can play that, and this counts 5 times more for DJs who also attract huge crowds. The extra energy and hype are more akin to the extra energy and hype and bragging rights you get from the NFT community when you have an actual NFT compared to lack of it when you just download the image.
Say a new technology comes up that lets me clone your wife. Perfectly. Down to the last atom.
Would you then be ok with your wife being destroyed and replaced by the copy?
If you are not ok with that - aren't you just as irrational as the people who buy NFTs?
Regarding consciousness - do you think consciousness is not made of atoms? What is it made of?
To tweak the analogy to NFTs a bit better. Let's say that the fact of the marriage is recorded in a registry, and that the registry is trusted as canonical by the larger entity which people trust, like, the government. Now let's say that the registry is copied word to word, certified to be legal, and then the original destroyed. Surely that doesn't affect the marriage itself, the deep personal bond between the two people?
"Imagine a world where all or most of our interactions are in the digital realm. When you wake up in this place you are naked, cannot show anyone anything about yourself, but you are very rich. Now how do you show others that you are rich? Simple, you buy Gucci NFT clothes that other naked peasants can see. That's what's happening."
Someone in the thread elaborated:
"Nah... it's much worse: you're buying a banner that hangs over your head saying 'I own Gucci clothes', but you're still naked."
Elsewhere, a colleague of mine (also an artist) elaborated still further:
"Even worse: the person you bought the banner from can set fire to it at any time and you'll be left with nothing."
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29160040 ("NFT's aren't the answer to the problems of digital art")
I mean, it's as valuable as what others believe it's worth, and like any common object with the word 'supreme' on it, there's people who consider these things valuable.
NFTs are a scam to introduce artificial scarcity and make someone else pay for it. The "art" (speaking of the picture in the root comment) hardly has any value itself.
I mostly agree regarding the limited practical value of most art NFTs, but then you could say the same about signed & numbered physical prints which are otherwise indistinguishable from their unsigned/unnumbered (but cheaper) equivalents—yet people pay a premium for those too.
NFTs are pretty general, so one could associate them with licensing or something like a VIP / backstage pass or rewards club membership. In the absence of these things, however, what you're mostly buying is the digital equivalent of the artist's autograph. Which isn't exactly nothing, but I still have a hard time justifying the prices many of these NFTs trade at.
I’d wager most people purchasing art NFTs don’t really have a good understanding of what they’re buying. Some think the art lives on-chain, or that if the art lives on IPFS it is a blockchain-based permanent thing (it’s not, data only exists in IPFS as long as >0 people “pin” it, and artists engage in pin rings to pin each other’s art).
So I see potential value of NFTs in general, though I don’t think the value is necessarily good. You could make the argument that art NFTs are like a MVP to see how ownership of different kinds of things in a distributed system works. I’m very skeptical because it’s attempting to create artificial scarcity of digital media, and if they figure it out for real, I can see that going wrong in more ways than I can see it going right.
I’m not sure if it will ever come to pass but imagine what the rumors for GameStop’s nft could be - a decentralized steam.
People can build whatever client they want and it uses the blockchain to determine if you own a particular digital game. Then when you want to see it you can just sell the nft. Obviously there are a lot of considerations to that but having a decentralized ownership of digital goods isn’t a terrible idea as compared to “renting” we do now for everything.
That said paying 30k for a jpeg seems also a scam but Twitter is going to use them for avatars or something so now, potentially, we’re talking about buy unique digital “gear” for your online persona. Sounds less dumb and more like unique skins in a game or something.
So yes most of it is a scam and tulip fever today but I could see the tech being used for interesting things.
Probably won’t be but it could be.
Let's look at the issues of this one. Let's imagine you wanted to buy FIFA 2025 on this NFT steam.
As a game purchaser, you want to play the game. It'd also be nice if you can resell it when you're done, but this is a secondary use case.
As a game publisher, EA want only people who own the game to play it. They'd also rather they get that money directly, they've previously fought against resale and ownership rights, but let's assume they've given in on that in this example.
So they can't put FIFA 2025 on the blockchain, because it's huge, and then anyone could read/play it. So they put a record that u/conception owns FIFA 2025.
So then you need to use that token to sign something to prove to someone that you own the game such that they can provide you the binaries. What happens if this provider goes out of business? What even is their business model of this binary redemption provider, since there's no guarantee they recieved your money in this decentralised example. So they're hosting data and traffic for potentially zero income.
These providers do allow developers to sell keys on their own website, but they enforce requirements on the developers if they're using Steam/Epic whatever to sell keys not to undercut the store that the keys are for. They do this because there's an interest in still obtaining these devs that won't go for steam exclusivity and yet getting their users into Steam for future sales. The decentralised blockchain means they can go somewhere else very easily next time too, and again, they're not being paid for their services in this example - charging a fee for downloads would be worse for the user and noncompetitive versus centralised services.
Then you get the game. Is the game going to verify with some sort of blockchain transaction at launch? Online only DRM is quite unpopular for games with single player modes. Plus blockchain transactions are slow.
Ok, let's assume it does like many games did in the SecuROM era and only checks periodically.
What happens when someone comes along and cracks that DRM? Does it solve that problem for publishers? No.
I just fail to see how this solves the problems that exist with game distribution, and there's clear areas where it's worse for every party involved.
For a smaller dev, does saving some percentages of profits to distribution make sense?
As for DRM, I don’t think an nft solves that or piracy in general but neither does the current system.
I guess the question of nfts is “Is it possible for ownership of unique digital goods to exist without a central authority controlling it?”
Doesn’t seem like a bad question to ask, and I don’t think the tech is there, but the idea of an nft could answer it.
No, because NFTs don't cover distribution because even a 2d indie game can be multiple gb so won't be on the blockchain.
It also ignores that a big feature these distribution platforms offer to developers is discovery too, whether by recommendations, charts, or just seeing what your friends are playing
I get that the pirates would be against NTFs that are the tech of future DRM systems, but they could at least be honest about it. They aren't a scam, or killing the planet etc. they are bad because they are useful for copyright.
I found this intro useful: https://nftschool.dev
AFAIU the owner also has a sort of unique and unfalsifiable certificate that let him cash in on the picture later on if its price ever raise ?
Like a certificate of authenticity for the Mona Lisa. You may have a very good copy (or even the original) but without the certificate your version sells for less ?
Did I get that right ?
That ownership is only as valuable as the NFT's creator makes them.
Example: when Dolce Gabanna issues NFTs (they did), your wife and daughter immediately understand the value of having those displayed on a public social network profile, regardless of if tech engineers are still stuck over-intellectualizing them
Of course this only works on digital goods. NFTs on physical objects are scams.
In theory, you could use the print-off in games of pokemon at home with friends with no problem.
So why is the genuine one worth more? Because its the genuine card printed by The Pokemon Company, and you can prove it.
So in a sense, NFTs distill the "genuine" part and separate it from the need for a physical token or card.
That said, I am highly skeptical that any NFT will be worth the many thousands people are paying from them now in a few years time. Especially as the platforms they are based on fail to scale and transaction fees become ever more problematic.
Or an NFT of your shares of stock, so they can't be tampered with, or sold twice in short-sales, etc?
Do you really think cryptocurrency/cryptography nerds are into this technology for the jpegs?!
It's the underlying tech that's valuable — the jpeg art is just noise.
With luck, somebody else will appreciate your story of how the famous author touched this uniquely numbered piece of paper while thinking about his book, and will give you a larger pile of casino tokens for it.
Whether anyone ever has a copy of the book doesn't really come into it.
Which turns out to be pretty useful and maybe have value.
To know if this piece of paper was actually touched by the author, we still need verification outside of the blockchain.
It’s not obvious to me that all this has any value. “The author probably blessed a number” certainly doesn’t have the emotional connection of an actual physical signature, for example.
In a way NFTs seem to resemble the medieval church practice of selling indulgences. If you believe in the authority of those mass-produced blessed pieces of paper, they have value.
It's also trivial for any author to change that message to a new hash so they can sell their NFT's again. Or the service where that message was posted might disappear, so you can no longer view the message and therefore nobody knows that the NFT is "authentic". So you basically get the same problem as any central authority of trust. In this case you trust the message board the author posts on, and you trust the author, and you have to also trust the service hosting whatever art the NFT points to. If you trust those then why not just trust a regular exchange instead?
This is like saying: There's nothing stopping me from downloading the Bitcoin source and running my own network. Now I have bitcoins and I didn't have to pay someone $60k for each one.
Yes, you have bitcoins but they're not the bitcoins anyone cares about. Likewise, you have a copy of the image of this NFT but you don't have the actual NFT that members of that community care about. NFTs are a club and if you want to join you have to buy one.
Now, you can argue whether anyone should want to join such a club but that's a totally different issue from the right-click-save criticism.
The market for paintings and other artwork has existed for centuries or millennia. I've never obtained value from it but many people did. To me it sounds stupid to pay much more than you would for something practically identical, unless you're betting on selling it for more later. I can't see how NFTs are different at all.
NFTs do have one considerable "advantage". It's trivial to have your money semi-anonymized in a blockchain, so it's even easier to launder money. It's also much easier to buy your own artwork for ludicrous amounts, so you can make money selling it after some newspapers pick up the story, and no one will suspect that you did it.
Legitimacy, reputation, community. These things are scarce and important.
People like nfts. It’s pretty fun minting an nft on my own contract, then going to opensea and connecting my wallet and there it is. Then I go to Zora and connect, and there’s my files again. Then to showtime, still there. Open rainbow on my phone, everything goes with me.
Add on top of that resales, a royalty system, access keys to discord channels and tv shows, programmability so I can plug together my files however I like. Maybe I add a rule that you have to share the file with other people or it self destructs. Or you have to pet it like a tamagotchi.
All of the content is still freely accessible. NFT != DRM. So I can listen to all the music and see all the art. And I can have ownership of the things that are special to me. I spend 12hours a day on computers, why would we think digital artefact shouldn’t be valuable. Why would we think people wouldn’t want to belong to clubs and have a way of showing ownership of items relating to them. With a consistent way of referencing the data and signatures. All on the same api.
Yeah you could use pgp and share torrents and pay artists over Patreon.
But this is easier, faster, and more fun.
You know you're only commenting this to get a rise, though.
What about if i can make infinite identical copies of the watch? Things stop making sense once there is no scarcity.
I don’t need to use DNS to transmit/receive bits but only Google can transmit and receive from google.com using the DNS network
There’s nothing stopping people from setting up their own tribal network now that high speed reliable physical networks exist and cloud is push button deploy for an expert.
Like video subscriptions everyone is selling a platform to own memory addresses abstracted into a domain, and NFT.
Our internet is a multiverse of the same old electron states printing differently depending on preferences
I think humanity is starting to realize again the mainstream ephemeral value store (dollars) is not the only one. The network that generates these experiences is.
Who cares how much we spend (money is just an emotional abstract) so long as the network lives?
Long live the network
So far most comments here fail to understand that the economic value of an NFT, unlike traditional art through most of recent history, is not tied to scarcity of access to its media. If you want to learn more about this (very polarizing) paradigm and how it can benefit artists, I suggest the following links:
[1] - https://mattdesl.substack.com/p/hicetnunc-and-the-merits-of-...
[2] - https://jackrusher.com/journal/what-does-it-mean-to-buy-a-gi...
An NFT is just a token on a blockchain that you can't own a fractional part of. You might desire the state of that token in a card game, or a pokemon variant that's on-chain. If what it represents is something off-chain, it's still an NFT -- just only useful because scarcity is a hell of a drug to humans apparently.
The Ethereum improvement proposals are a good place to start for other use cases other than a vehicle for artists / scam artists or whoever to get rich.
"EIP-721: Non-Fungible Token Standard" https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721 is a good place to start if you want the hard detail.
For some value of sense the movie industry makes some sense. An NFT like a physical baseball card has zero actual utility save for the covetous feeling of ownership itself a mental disease now unmoored from physicality and actuality. It is an opportunity for us to view side by side people who cannot live indoors and in some places get enough to eat with people pouring more money than many people will ever see into abstract unrealized never to be satiated covetous greed that will only pay a return if they can thereafter pawn it off on someone even more foolish in the future.
>Surprisingly, during the court battles over the legality of the VCR, the studios began selling their movies on Betamax and VHS—to play on the very devices they were trying to outlaw. Trying to have it both ways, they began selling movies on video cassettes for retail prices up to $100). In 1977, Twentieth Century Fox was the first when they released Patton and MAS*H, which had been in theaters seven years prior, and The Sound of Music, which had its theatrical release in 1965. The first movies on videocassette weren't exactly new releases. Given a family of four could watch a movie at the theater for about $15 in 1977, $100 for a videocassette of the same movie seemed outlandishly expensive. But from the studios' perspective, that was a fair price to own a movie versus the lower price to rent a seat in a theater to watch it. The price Fox set for these first releases became the standard for the industry.
What's going to be interesting to watch is when one of the heavily CDN's used goes down so NFT owners are left with receipts of broken links, even better if a CDN gets hijacked and gets configured to return the same Rick Roll clip for every NFT link.
They're using IPFS and/or Arweave so nothing that can simply go down. Decentralization yay.
The point is, there's no scarcity built in to an NFT. Scarcity builds far more value than a position in line.
Personal Opinion: By selling NFTs - metadata about the art and not the art itself - their integrity as an artist is already somewhat suspect in my mind.
Would it be accurate to say that, from another perspective, the counterfeit NFTs I issued would stay on the blockchain in perpetuity, with no on-chain indications (aside, of course, from timestamp and key) of their fraudulent nature, and that they could be resold over and over to defraud additional careless buyers? Is there some sort of registry of fake/fraudulent NFTs or is it all caveat emptor, hope you read the right blogs?
Those with half knowledge are curious about their insane transactions.
Those who are dumb or greedy or both, think NFTs are the next best thing.
Events like this will even out the playing field, as the dumb ones will fear that their investments might wnd up on the torrent interwebs.
It’s wild how divisive nfts have become. I’m pretty sure everyone has such an abusive relationship with money and value that they’re blinded by it all and fearful of anything that embraces it. That probably makes sense as an attitude to have, but it’s also silly.
- Generational: I grew up playing Habbo hotel, club penguin, TF2. I am comfortable with the idea of digital goods. You pay for something that is not real and can sell ‘it’ later. ‘Ownership’ is a decidedly different concept for me and many other younger people. If I ‘own’ a hat in TF2, I can display it on my avatar, but I really have nothing. It’s a piece of code in Valve servers that renders some pixels on my characters head. Imagine if you buy some NFT art, and the metaverse becomes popular. You will have the ability to display the art (in your ‘house’ or something). If you think this is dorky and no one will bother, think about the resistance then explosion of social media in the mid 2010s.
- Hatred of crypto: people hate crypto ideas for various reasons. Either environmental reasons, social pressure (from news and friends), fear of missing out, resentment at having missed out etc. I don’t comment on the validity of these beliefs, but they cloud peoples judgement either way.
- Lack of openness to change: it is just a weird concept, like many crypto concepts. Even the thought that there could be underlying value to crypto currency was indeed a radical notion. Now it is mostly accepted (in my experience). The only people who don’t accept it are older and less willing to uproot the institutions which served them so well. Banks and traditional finance are still entrenched in our society. There are a huge set of people that have interests which oppose crypto. This is fine, I don’t blame them for disliking crypto. It is just something to keep in mind when making decisions.
I hope my perspective helps some people.
Then again, it's also possible that people who dislike NFTs don't misunderstand or hate them, they understand them perfectly and hate them anyway. And maybe you misunderstand them as well.
NFT is just a technology. It's entirely possible to understand the technology and still hate it, e.g. I understand what nuclear weapons can do, yet I still hate them to some extent and would prefer they didn't exist.
Not saying this is correct, just saying that you don't seem to leave open that possibility in your post. For the record, I don't really get NFTs. I mean, I kind of get how it's the same as autographs / collectibles, which I vaguely understand, but I don't particularly get how mapping that into a digital-only setting makes sense to people. But then I probably fall into some of your boxes above :) (I'm 36, I think blockchain is mostly overhyped though I do think cryptocurrencies specifically are interesting. I do think I'm open to change but who knows?)
In the case of NFTs I can just download any NFT myself and show off with it. It's like everyone being able to show off a hat in TF2, but the people having paid only have the advantage they can boast in chat about the fact they paid for something available to everyone.
HN is really good for tech & SF housing market news, but god awful for any other types of information because the users here think they are experts on every topic.
If you are actually interested in how NFT's work, interesting projects using them, or just want to have a conversation around the topic that isn't just snarky morons jacking each other off, I highly encourage you to engage some of these communities on twitter, telegram, or discord.
Its a really fun space right now and there are lots of projects looking for solid web devs if you are in the mood for a challenging side project.
Then you should explain what they are.
If you can't (or won't), why should we care?
> If you are actually interested in how NFT's work, interesting projects using them, or just want to have a conversation around the topic that isn't just snarky morons jacking each other off, I highly encourage you to engage some of these communities on twitter, telegram, or discord.
If it's not a scam or cult, then just publish something on the web. "Can't explain it here, come chat with us on discord" has big "free personality test" vibes.
I'm not a blogger or evangelist, plenty of people are and discuss this daily. Go find them on Twitter if you care, or not, makes no difference to me.
> If it's not a scam or cult, then just publish something on the web.
There are hundreds of whitepapers on the topic freely available all over the web. Every project worth following does this and there is no shortage of it.
Honestly your comment is exactly what I meant, just pretentious HN users who can't be bothered to do a cursory search on the topic and just want to be spoon fed information.
then as soon as people can make money from the tech, people who decide it's an immoral scam and have no curiosity take over the conversation
the internet has convinced us that people who believe something strange must be wrong
An NFT can be traced back to the creator. So you don't have the same history or satisfaction of giving back to the creator of the NFT.
I think people on here are getting too caught up in the technical. I can print out a shiny charizard pokemon card but it isn't the same thing is it?
A better way to think about NFTs is exchanging a monetary gift to the creator of something you enjoy for a collectable.
In this case it is bit for bit identical. My inkjet printer Charizard would never pass as real.
> A better way to think about NFTs is exchanging a monetary gift to the creator of something you enjoy for a collectable.
This is called “buying art”.
Authenticity and supporting original creators is important to people.
(day 148 of the log) https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...
NFTs are a scam, but this is completely missing the point.
Unless the point is that every digital property is a scam.
NFTs are represented to people as buying ownership of something, as if you are the one true owner of whatever-it-is and it is yours to do with what you will, including selling or re-selling it.
Most digital content (think films, music, games) is not bought, it is licensed. You buy the license which grants you some rights to consume it, but there are also restrictions (thou shalt not redistribute, re-sell etc) and those rights are often not irrevocable.
I'm happy to answer any questions about it that you may have.
...
WTF? We destroyed our planet for this?
----
NFTs are simply JSON and JPEGs and people have deluded themselves into thinking they destroy the planet. This is quite a ridiculous situation.
Blockchains produce blocks that get mined at regular intervals regardless of how much data or value is transferred with each block. The dubious argument is that since blockchains spend electricity to mine blocks that means they are destroying the planet. and therefore JSON and JPEG transfers are also destroying the planet.
Even if you believe this, your fight should be against dirty power plants and end there. But meanwhile, Ethereum is migrating to proof of stake before next summer and will become 99.9% more energy efficient. I'm sure that we'll still hear the trope though.
The only thing that scares me is the size.. how is it 20TB total? That's a lot of jpegs..
Would it be theft if someone views that image, and thus saves it? Like via the browser/cache, to the computer, or whatever.
I can see that it would be a copyright violation if someone actively hosts that exact picture. Shouldn't be much different from hosting copyrighted audio or video clips.
But then again, if you host that picture on some public website - just the mere fact that someone views it, would also mean that their computer probably has already stored it?
With that said, I do think that sharing copyrighted material, goes under digital theft. And in this case, someone has explicitly shared the media/data.
(I'd imagine that this varies from country to country. What is theft in one country, may not be the same in another.)
I'm really puzzled about why aren't they publishing a low-res copy of the image, and sending the buyer of the NFT the unpublished high-res version. That way only the buyer (and the artist) would have that file, and by keeping it secret they could make it rare, albeit not necessarily valuable.
And because the marks think that they're gonna get rich off owning a blockchain pog with a link to a monkey jpeg, the art doesn't have to be good, either.
A lot of projects actually do assign a license to the sale.
I don't like NFTs personally (wasteful, scam-ridden, investor bro culture), but if you compare them to how art has worked for the past century (or more) it's not so different. If you own a Banksy the certificate of authenticity is far more valuable than the actual artwork, which is easily reproduced. It's all kind of silly.
ca813206fc37742ed2bf192c97f6c7db56686321
It says I own Banksy's hat.
Now, the site I bought it from has since gone offline and the person I bought it from deleted his email account and I lost the paper receipt, but there's my certificate of authenticity.
I OWN BANKSY'S HAT
Do you want to buy it from me?
You can have the exact same bytes without an NFT backing it up and have functionally the same goods - as demonstrated here.
Cryptowarriors will come along and say something about how the NFT proves "ownership" or "provenance", but that's just ideological blindness. All NFTs do is wrap an pointless market layer around a digital good, for no reason and with no benefit to anyone, while using up electricity and killing the planet to power the insanity. Ideology at its worst.