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Comment by folli | Hacker News Reader

The thing is: you can list all of the arguments against NFTs you want (and I'm not even disagreeing), we know that rationality has no say in determining the market value.

There are currently too many examples, starting from the TESLA stock price to all the meme stocks (GameStop, GME). Even the price of Bitcoin is completely irrational.

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That is a specious comparison. Tesla and Gamestop stock confer legal ownership of companies that produce billions of dollars in revenue per year. An NFT is a digitally signed text file uploaded to a blockchain... there is a massive difference between the two. More importantly, blockchains are massivevly inefficient when compared to digital signatures which already accomplish the ostensible value-add of NFTs.

I hope the NFT meme dies soon.

At least for some, you can ballpark it. Decentraland land is said to sell by the millions. Virtually nobody plays that game. In the hundreds of virtual worlds out there the price is maximum ~$300 per month. That doesn't compute. Of course as gambling instrument it is fun, but there is no price discovery here, just a passing fad novelty

There is going to be some actual value in the nft mechanism, but in a future version of it (apparently this already exists). Right now the nft market doesn't give long term incentives to creators to maintain the high value of their work

creators tax trade of their work and get a cut on every transaction, so there is an incentive to keep interest high in long term

>The thing is: you can list all of the arguments against NFTs you want (and I'm not even disagreeing), we know that rationality has no say in determining the market value.

It does, when, eventually, shit gets tough and bubbles bust.

Then people fall from buildings or cry themselves to sleep for having been stupid.

On good times, sure, the sky is the limit...

How do you think people suddenly re-determine a rational price for artwork during a bust?

If enough people stop buying it and there's no-one left who thinks he higher than the current price the price will go to 0. NFTs have no intrinsic value.

But no artwork has any intrinsic value. How's that new or interesting or worth saying? If you think NFT's are irrational because they have no intrinsic value, then you think all artwork is irrational, which isn't a useful thing to say because it's in practice valuable because people value non-intrinsic things like art, culture, history, and that's just humanity.

>But no artwork has any intrinsic value. How's that new or interesting or worth saying?

Millenia of selling fine art have shown that they have some intrinsic value and can maintain it well over centuries (I don't e.g. expect a Caravaggio to drop to anywhere near cheap) - just not a use-value.

NFTs on the other hand are not "fine art", and don't have the same associate proven track record. They're closer to the pet rock and the hula hup.

In general terms, nothing has "intrinsic value", including gold and petrol. If a society doesn't use petrol (for cars, factories, etc) for example, it's value is zero.

> In general terms, nothing has "intrinsic value"

...so how are NFTs any more unusual than anything else?

In that it's not just a snapshot of current "how much people pay to buy/sell" but also "how much is this item proven historically/able to maintain price/a good idea"...

Like the proverbial tulips, NFTs don't fare well on the latter.

Doesn't have to be a distinction between god-given naturally-occuring-intristic value vs worthless junk.

There are also BS market fads.

Artwork is commonly hung up as decorations in houses, offices, etc.

You can also buy mass-produced artwork at stores that have zero collectible value, so the value of that is entirely intrinsic.

I'm not sure looking at your Opensea collection has the same value. While NFT owners will gladly tell you how much they enjoy looking at their collection, if the collection was all of a sudden worthless, they'd probably stop looking at it. In that scenario, right-clicking produces the exact same value.

Given that, the entire value of most NFTs is in scarcity and demand for a scarce product, which is totally fine. NFTs are still super-early as well and I have no doubt they will rapidly add more non-collectible value. Some are already doing this in building exclusive communities, events, etc. for owners and those uses for owners will continue to evolve and grow.

> Artwork is commonly hung up as decorations in houses, offices, etc.

And people 'hang up' their NFTs on their Twitter profiles.

I guess that’s useful for the crypto crowd who spend their entire day shilling on Twitter then. ;-)

They don't determine anything. They just suddenly don't have money to buy it / prioritize other things, and the price drops to what still available buyers can afford (and in the case of NFTs, likely zero).

That's just a normal market operating. That doesn't demonstrate any kind of abnormal irrationality. People eat out less when they have to prioritise other things. That doesn't make restaurant prices irrational.

This isn't the gotcha you think it is.

>People eat out less when they have to prioritise other things. That doesn't make restaurant prices irrational.

They can be, if people see them as investment opportunities which they are not...

There is a gray market for reservations at trendy restaurants.

Which pays very soon and quite stably.

You don’t buy a restaurant meal and expect to be able to resell it later, let alone expecting it to go up in value. You consume it. NFT is a different sort of market.

I'm pretty sure 99.99% of people are just buying them as a bit of fun. Almost nobody is seriously expecting them to be an investment.

Could you source that opinion? I’ve seen the exact opposite viewpoint propagating.

Whenever I see one of those big Twitter arguments about right-clicking, it always turns out the person is joking and just winding people up for fun.

> Almost nobody is seriously expecting them to be an investment

This one, I mean.

Sure, but if the thing you are speculating with doesn't matter, why not just use something completely arbitrary instead?

For example here is an random UUID: 6f50fde3-a7f0-433b-a9b1-8ef6d665905b. How much money would you put on it?

I've never seen that UUID before in my life, it must be priceless!

I've already right clicked your UUID: 6f50fde3-a7f0-433b-a9b1-8ef6d665905b

Without a blockchain to formally prove that you own it, can anybody even own anything at all?

The Blockchain only proves the first derivative of ownership. It can't prove the user owned the object before putting it on the Blockchain.

Yes, in the same ways society has done for thousands of years.

But it’s here on HN and now there’s a very clear and practical way for this user to prove he originated this UUID before anyone else who tries to claim it. What do we suppose that’s worth in dollars?

He probably right-clicked it from somewhere else.

It's "a great copy of Mona Lisa", instead of parent comment's real Mona Lisa. Sure they look the same, maybe exactly the same, maybe binary-level same, but that's not what really matters. What matters is the social contract, minting and/or owning the original. If a celebrity generates a random GUID and puts on blockchain as an NFT, I'm pretty much sure that it will sell. A random GUID is worthless. A random original of a GUID generated by, say Elon Musk, is.

The bits are colored all different!

Good point. He needs to own 44a81fec08e4290afb90b780e5d94e15980b08050a402374b3a7a6e59c83a736 (the SHA256) as well.

I hereby formally claim 6f50fde3-a7f0-433b-a9b1-8ef6d665905b.

This HN comment will probably last longer than a random blockchain.

I agree, @xdennis owns it. It doesn't matter what's written on the blockchain, it's the majority (50%+1) that decides who owns what.

Even with blockchain data can be trivially copied. Ownership of data is an illusion.

My post on HN proves that I own it, but I am willing to sell you a share.

That's not a particularly valuable number. How about 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0?

Oh no! You scoundrel! The Industry is ruined because of likes of you!!

Looks rare

The article isn't about market value though. It's about people cutting off business with Discord when they teased an NFT feature. And refusing to work with people who work on NFT protects in general.

The price of cryptocurrencies is currently massively, massively manipulated. Not just "investors with deep pockets buying and selling strategically", not just "insider trading", but outright pumping massive amounts of fake money into the markets, and dishonest exchanges.

Yeah I agree. BTC is severely underpriced.

If the whole thing is irrational, how can it be underpriced? Or: What makes you think the true price (if one exists) is higher than it currently goes for?

Well, the true price is the marginal cost of production, isn't it? So yeah, bitcoin seems to be overpriced. Unless it is a currency, of course, their supplies behave differently.

The underpricing is what's irrational.

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