Hacker News Reader

The Real Real is a $1b company because people care about provenance in the real world and now there's a place for it in a digital space. Do I think Bored Apes are worth thousands of dollars? Absolutely not. Will it crash? Absolutely.

Do I think it is starting as a stupid toy and may eventually do more interesting things? Yes. If Reddit gives you an NFT for being a top poster for a year in a specific subreddit so you can show it off on Discord and Twitter, I don't see much value in that, but there are plenty of people who do, a lot.

Exactly, it's all about showing off social status. All communities have way to convey status, even HN.

Medals for distinguished service to a social media corporation’s mission to sell advertising.

There's no reason for that Reddit thing to be an NFT. Twitter or Discord could simply integrate w/ Reddit API and pull that shit up.

And with the NFT, it doesn't show that you are the rewarded user, just that you have the trophy, since it could be transferred.

Just that you are the wallet holder, the contract could block transfers.

- This is the case only if we put aside web3.

- NFT can have data on the .json file, so the rewarded user can be recorded.

Or the blockchain is the API, which is public, and requires only a single integration point for everyone.

> Or the blockchain is the API, which is public, and requires only a single integration point for everyone.

You don't need a blockchain for interoperability, neither does it enforce interoperability.

You do not NEED it, but it can enable it. In the situation above the benefit is you, the recipient, are never again dependent on Reddit to validate that award for you. As long as the blockchain continues to exit, you, the wallet owner, maintain “ownership” over that award.

Considering how much most HN users rail against centralized services and things others not to turn stuff off, it seems like the value is obvious to me.

> You do not NEED it, but it can enable it.

How so? Why is it any better than a public API?

> In the situation above the benefit is you, the recipient, are never again dependent on Reddit to validate that award for you.

You're assuming that Reddit would create an NFT that doesn't grant them any special power. Why would they do that? Why wouldn't they create a blockchain NFT with an admin address that they own and which can do pretty much anything?

> Considering how much most HN users rail against centralized services and things others not to turn stuff off, it seems like the value is obvious to me.

You can be centralized on a blockchain though, e.g. using an admin address as I described.

> How so? Why is it any better than a public API?

Specifically in that using my API won't require you to pay him money. There are other reasons they'll claim but once you dig through the chaff that's what it comes down to.

Massive global adopted blockchains will indeed provide additional interoperability, thought there's none now.

Just consider it something like decoupling in coding but for the whole internet.

Globally adopted standards provide additional interoperability. What does this have to do with blockchain technologies?

Yeah, I agree it does not have to be blockchain, any "consistently online" and widely adopted thing will do.

Is the trophy for winning a sporting event actually worth anything beyond it's material cost to someone who didn't actually win the event?

Except a token is unnecessary unless it needs to be transferrable. Reddit is a centralized entity, so they can attest to you being the top poster (and even cryptographically sign that attestation) without the extra cost of posting it on a blockchain.

Which is what StackExchange has been doing for years.

A token is hardly necessary then either.

1. Artist creates work, signs it with his good old fashioned PGP key, publishes it.

2. Patron pays to "sponsor" the work. Artist makes a bundle of the work and patron's public key, and signs it with his own. Publishes it.

3. Patron decides he has to "sell" his patronage. He takes the bundle from 2, adds the buyer's public key, and signs it. Optionally, the artist signs it too to indicate he's OK with the "transfer". They publish it.

Are there ways to cheat? Yeah, if you're confident no one has downloaded the signed document that you published, you can try double-selling. But that's risky: if you're wrong, someone can publish the signed document and prove that you are a fraud.

This illustrates that most of the utility of "distributed blockchains" come from simple digital signatures. If all parties are accountable, public identities, this simplified scheme is strictly superior.

And remember, we're talking about art and public patronage here, not trade of illegal goods. The whole point is that you want people to see it and associate it with a public, accountable identity.

People definitely care about the price of the painting on your wall, the price of your car, and the price of the restaurant they’re eating at, though.

Even if they don’t directly care, you had better believe that the price of a Rolls Royce shapes the way that people think about them; and you buy one because of the way people will think about it. Same goes with the art you put on your wall (an incredible painting that you got for cheap will never be as cool as something by someone whose art is in the MoMA, even if it’s still very cool).

I’m not sure NFTs are going anywhere either, but some people definitely care about receipts. Conspicuous consumption can be very conscious.

These are the worst type of people.

Signalling is how mating works which leads to procreation that repeats the same process. If you don't signal your worthiness by winning contests, looking good, showing money, earning respect or in any other meaningful way, you are less likely to find a good matching spouse that will lead to more copies of you down the road.

sounds like straight out of the manosphere

Yes, that’s true of say chimpanzees.

Fortunately, we have the option to aspire to something better. I’m not saying such signalling etc doesn’t exist, just that in the same way as I choose not to assault or murder people when I’m angry at them, I also choose to present myself and choose my partners based on personal qualities rather than superficial crap.

Seems I’m generally speaking a lot more fulfilled, content, and happy in life than those who choose to live like chimps.

You have definitely signaled to your partner, even if you're not aware.

And not everything you signaled was profound and you might not have even realized your partner chose you for the shallow parts, even if they'd never admit it directly.

Would you then expect rich people to be the only one able to reproduce, or at least that as a group they would reproduce more than poor people? Because the exact opposite is true in the US, the poorer you are, the higher your birth rate: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

> Signalling is how mating works

If you buy a jpg for 300k while you could have bought a nice house with that amount of money, you are honestly unfuckable and being unfuckable and gullible is all that you are signalling.

Besides, it's women who do the signaling, that's because they can't approach to save their lives.

NFT crowd should grow some balls, approach, get rejected and repeat until success...like real men do, instead of buying monkey jpg to "signal mating"

> Nobody ever had a problem with verifiable receipts when attending concerts or buying a car or eating at a restaurant

Sorry, but spoken like someone who has no idea how the fashion industry operates.

Seriously though, it’s one thing to not like the superficiality of the fashion market, but to deny that NFTs exploit the same demand (for less-gauche proof of wealth) seems wrong.

I think OPs point is NFT style guarantees exist without NFT technology.

Recently I learned folks appraise ‘64 mustangs based on VIN and markings - so they know how close to the “first off the lot” that mustang was. They don’t need a blockchain to do that.

I think there is a valid point to this take - humans don’t need irrefutable cryptographic proof that something has a story attached to it; they just need enough compelling evidence the story attached to an object is true. And the kinds of stories folks value tend to be human stories (this is the crown worn by so and so, this is the finger bone of saint so and so, etc.) which NFTs can’t capture.

The NFT is not about cryptographic proof. It's about creating something that such a story can attach to for digital pieces of art; w/o the token, digital art has no ownable identity.

You indeed do not need a blockchain - the artworld has been doing it using paper certificates for a long time. But these are conceptually the same as an NFT, just accessible and tradable.

Hey, I have a ticket to your favorite band. I’m selling it for $25 and you really want to buy it from me, but you don’t know me - this is our first contact! How do you buy it from me?

Reputation of the provenance and authenticity of goods is an entirely different problem.

Sure! The tricky bit here, in my mind is:

1. How do you know the ticket is valid?

2a. How do you know I send the ticket after you pay me?

2b. How do I know you send the money after I send the ticket?

3. How do you know I don't send the ticket to someone else too, if it's digital?

A ticket is valid if and only if it gets you into the concert. You can ask the concert organizers to validate tickets for you. Most concert organizers have concentrated on two sites that allow them to validate tickets. That is why Ticketmaster is valuable, despite its terrible reputation.

A cryptographically signed I owe you is and will always be meaningless. What is meaningful is the signature at the end of the chain, when the concert organizer lets you in.

The nice thing of selling on concert tickets on a public block chain is that it's public, so those tickets can be invalidated easily. Everybody hates ticket resellers.

In person with cash or stubhub.

Stubhub has a 10% fee for the buyer and a 15% fee for the seller. It also can’t guarantee tickets are valid, they do guarantee a refund to the buyer if they’re false though. This is more expensive and less safe than an NFT ticket.

> 10% fee for the buyer and a 15% fee

What are the gas fees and how do they compare to the average concert ticket?

Very fair question! On Ethereum the fee would be stupid high. However Polygon has fees of around $0.02 so say I'm looking to make myself a bit of a profit for making the UX nicer with a website we'd be looking at around $1 fees.

I keep using this example in NFT arguments but no one has actually done it yet. Screw it, I’m going to launch this and prove it works (or admit my defeat lol). Time to open vscode.

And what makes you think that ticket sellers would implement such a system? The pure goodness of their hearts?

(My understanding is that NFTs can be constructed to charge a fee on transfers. At least, this is what I've been told by people trying to promote their use for artwork...)

This would require a smart contract, a react front-end to make the UX a little nicer, and a little maintenance. If I charge $1 fees per ticket tx I'd undercut the market and it wouldn't be that hard.

Do you think Ticketmaster charges so much because their copy of MySQL runs on crushed Ming vases?

They charge as much as they do because they have removed a lot of competition from the market (see e.g. jwz - https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2018/01/31.html). There’s no reason why they would implement an NFT where they’d get less money — in fact, they’re the kind of unethical weasels who’d figure out as many ways to hide fees in the smart contracts and play games with the blockchain they use to maximize their take.

This is the whole point of Web3. The idea that these centralized services can be replaced by peer-to-peer transactions over open source software and the digitization of assets like gig tickets as NFTs.

Yes, and it shows why that vision is a pipe dream: Ticketmaster isn’t centralized by accident, or because there haven’t been hundreds of attempts to build competing services. They’re centralized because they spent many millions of dollars centralizing that market and related ones so they can extract as much money as possible.

Blockchains not only don’t change that, they encourage it by so heavily favoring the richest participants. There’s no way an unethical incumbent would use that as you hope rather than how they’ve used everything else, and without access to the venues and artists in their network you’re going to be limited to the smallest places and bands.

EDIT: remember, everyone not getting paid by them hates Ticketmaster. Their website has been terrible since the 90s and their random fees have been the subject of rants and jokes for just as long. There have been several generations of developers who thought tickets shouldn’t cost so much, knew their musician friends hated Ticketmaster, and said “hey I know Perl/PHP/Python/Node/etc. and could build a better website!” They all failed, and it would be really critical to ask what you’re bringing which is different and especially whether this is actually a technical problem or you have power to apply leverage to the business problems.

Cui bono? Who benefits? Who makes money from that? No one who runs the infrastructure? Why would they build it?

What do you think the transaction cost is in Ethereum for your NFT ticket? Cause from what I'm seeing right now, it's equal to the cost of your fancy concert ticket. 2 sales (one to the scalper, one to the sucker) means you've just paid 300% of the cost before the middleman even got paid.

Literally around 2 cents if you use the Polygon network. Layer 2 solutions would be perfect for this because A. you can bundle ticket sales and B. you don't need tickets to sell immediately, it's okay to wait a couple minutes.

Did anyone actually implement any blockchain-based ticketing? Why do you think the fee collected by a company doing that would be lower than StubHub?

Importantly, wouldn't those tokens be... fungible...?

Now imagine that any industry can easily do the same thing stubhub did without reinventing the wheel every time.

my story: I was in Barcelona, wanted to go to Primavera Sound to see Pavement, went outside the gates, met a guy who was selling his ticket, gave him the money and

BOOM!

5 minutes later I was under the stage.

If you sell it to me as an NFT, how do I know it‘s not a fake NFT ticket or even a fake event?

All potential solutions to that question have one thing in common: An event has by definition a centralized entity, which is the organizer. Everything that a blockchain supposedly solves in event ticketing is after all a solution due to digitization, not decentralization.

I don't like NFT too but have some knowledge about it.

> If you sell it to me as an NFT, how do I know it‘s not a fake NFT ticket or even a fake event?

This is actually not a problem at all:

  - It's not likely you'd buy ticket for some event that you don't know/not interested.
  - The event official (which you already know) should publish these info for query:
    - The blockchain  
    - The contract address  
    - The NFT token ID

If you bought a proclaimed ticket NFT but it's fake, the only possibility is the official that you trust is a fraud.

Ok, so I‘ll have to check with the event official.

How often do you actually know who that really is? Let‘s say Beyoncé is coming to the arena closest to you. Are you aware of who actually organizes that event and is in charge? Ticket buyers most often don‘t know and don‘t care.

Plus, if I have to go to the central entity and check all that data, where is the benefit of going decentralized?

Hey, no matter how you buy a ticket, it'd have to be verified by the official eventually.

> How often do you actually know who that really is? Let‘s say Beyoncé is coming to the arena closest to you.

Interesting, so you are saying either:

  - Beyoncé official publish nothing about the event
  - We have no way to look up the ticket info

Not likely IMO especially if we are talking stars like Beyoncé.

> Plus, if I have to go to the central entity and check all that data, where is the benefit of going decentralized?

Well, de-centralization is nothing about convenience, and it's not just about ticket-selling.

I totally agree that blockchain & web3 is not mature at all comparing to how it is now, and I don't think it's going to be success unless they find a way to generally interact with real-world technically and legally.

> Nobody ever had a problem with verifiable receipts when attending concerts or buying a car or eating at a restaurant.

They do when buying physical artwork, coins, stamps, pokemon cards or other collectibles. There are plenty of things people buy that are only valuable because they are provably "genuine", and would be worthless if they were exact replicas with no provenance.

> Nobody ever had a problem with verifiable receipts when attending concerts or buying a car or eating at a restaurant.

My friends won a contest for an all inclusive trip to the Super Bowl a few years ago when it was in Arizona.

Flight was good, hotel was good, but they showed up to the stadium for the game... fake tickets. Someone scammed the people running the contest. (I think it was a radio station -- need to check)

NFTs fix this in a way nobody else in the industry is.

Ummm... I think your friends were scammed. By the radio company. Never intended to procure the (very expensive) tix.