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Comment by andreilys | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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> It increases their status within the crypto community and gives them access to exclusive networks/events.

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.

> It's also yet another example of NFT sellers taking something that costs $0 (or near $0) to create

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".

Noticing a lot of takes on here that are side-stepping the "You don't actually own anything" part to suddenly focus on community buildings, as if a community has formed on the basis of receipt collection

> 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.

Money laundering?

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