Imagine someone buys the Mona Lisa NFT for millions, and then you go and also buy the Mona Lisa NFT on another blockchain for $3.99.
Or better yet, make a blockchain that simply mirrors NFTs sold on OpenSea. Couldn't get what you wanted on OpenSea, come to SecondSea and buy the same NFT on our blockchain.
signed chains only work if they go through a trusted authority that reconciles them and provides it's own (authoritative) proof that the trade happened and you own it.
NFTs are valuable because people want them in the same way a US dollar is valuable because people want them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Richter
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Richter
There’s a law firm in Germany that crawls the web and tries to collect money from any page that posts an image they haven’t gotten permission to.
If you really want to make your brain hurt check out the rules around photos of buildings and the right to panorama.
But assuming you did make an NFT of a copyrighted work, then it’s simply asking if the courts consider it a derivative work, which I could see.
I don’t think is nearly as clever as you think it is though. The market just rightfully views these as knockoffs and values them as such.
Value comes from people wanting something and as they say, a person’s trash is another person’s treasure.
Also actual human people care about them.
Neither is true of the NFT cringe.
People care about a deed because it's a legal right to a thing that exists and does something. Nobody cares about the "Mona Lisa NFT" on any blockchain, extant or to be developed. The Mona Lisa is in a museum. You can go look at it, COVID permitting.
The "Mona Lisa NFT" is, however, a good joke. It is accompanied by many distinctly less funny jokes, like all of the art I've seen blatantly stolen to bake into a blockchain somewhere, but that one at least is sort-of punching sideways and not down.
We are talking about NFT X where someone paid $1M for. X is on Y blockchain. Creating X on Z blockchain is meaningless exercise. Why you may ask? Well, future bidders won’t consider X on Z. It’s no longer “X”. I guess uniqueness can then be considered as “X on Y”.
I think the Deed example up the comment chain perfectly illustrates this. Look, I have zero horse in this game. I probably hate this NTF culture as much as you do. But you’re missing the entire idea of NTFs. And so are most people here although the Olive Garden joke is pretty funny.
But at any rate, it isn't the "NFT culture," no matter how odious it is (and it is!), that I have a problem with. It is the thing itself and the desperate excusemaking so attached. It's "emotionally charged" because it is a scam whose externalities burn the planet on which we live. That should carry emotional charge. It is good to be revolted by nasty and selfish things.
Theoretically, I think NFTs are similar to real life unique items (there are many threads on HN going back and forth) with a caveat - NFTs can’t contain actual data of the JPEGs, but only a URL of the server serving it. That seems like a huge gaping hole in NFTs.
Fundamentally though, atoms or bits, pick your unique-arrangement medium. Try to sell it to people that are willing to pay for it.
Edit: I can’t comment anymore (limits) so I’m answering here. You switched the argument now. We were discussing uniqueness in the world of atoms vs bits. But now you’re arguing about energy usage. We can discuss that but it’s no longer the central argument.
I wouldn't buy them. But they're things that actually exist, and nobody needed to burn more energy than a refrigerator uses in a month so that they could record its existence in one of a dozen rivalrous venues--or to do so again to hand it to somebody else.
The absurdity here isn't just the tulip mania. Which is absurd. It's the vicious abuse of a shared planet to attempt to plant one's own batch and get out of Dodge before the whole thing collapses.
"People could buy less virtual stuff!" People could also just buy less stuff, and not pay grifters money for nothing.
Say there is an old Bugatti that rich people trade for tens of millions of dollars.
That is basically a token, and the cost to society is the original manufacturing cost plus the upkeep.
The inflated market price is a good thing, because it represents the potential consumption that rich people are not consuming and is therefore available for the rest of society.
On the other hand, if someone spends the same amount on a brand new yacht, then they are putting all that value into environmental impact, either directly or indirectly. And they're taking it away from all the poor and hungry, even if the yacht builders benefit and it "trickles down".
It's exactly the same logic as the famous Eisenhower speech about national defense taking away from the needy.
One simply needs to make the mental transition to considering all wealth the property of society.
Most people seem to have it all backwards, where abstract tokens and bank accounts are a waste, and consumption is "creating jobs" which is good.
Crypto, as far as I can tell, neutralizes things through requiring undue consumption to create the tokens, so it seems to me like a massive step backwards.
I'll consider X on Z, it sounds like a bargain. Sure, it's only X on a small blockchain, but I like X and some apps I use support Z.
You’re right, and that is a totally rational thing to do. I suspect that the market of fake paintings and prints is in few billions at least. They’re quite popular. But that doesn’t stop the art auction “scams” at Christie’s and Sotheby’s.
My point is eventually blockchains, if they are going to succeed, will find their success in the barrel of a gun, and at that point will be no different than any other centralized government system?
The reason I can't mint my own currency is because, ultimately, men with guns would make me stop. Few would care about my currency at first, but market forces are not enough to stop it.
Decentralized social pressure doesn't make a stable currency and it won't make a stable blockchain until there's a powerful central entity backing it. At that point, what is the point?
Reality. Reality is what the majority choose to believe it is. If youve put the effort in to convince enough people that your chain is the truest chain, congrats.
I can create 1 million bot accounts, transfer the NFT within myself, each time bidding a high amount and eventually reaching $10,000,000
Would a new sucker bid $11 million on that? Yes.
This is the true nature of NFTs. Everything and anything can be faked and duplicated
What if the buyer confers with the artist about the authenticity of the NFT + Blockchain that it originally was put on?
Unrelated: If you haven’t seen NFT Bridge skit from John Cleese, it’s pretty funny.
State/NFTs on a secure blockchain have a force of law, which is what the proof-of-X consensus mechanisms are. Consensus by game theory/computation.
On a normative note, saying "actual human people" don't care about something you either don't like or don't understand is closer to what I would describe as cringe.
I can own a share on a blockchain, but if I execute a takeover who will cut the locks on the factory gates? I can buy a house, but who will evict the squatters? I can buy lunch with ETH, but I can’t eat it if someone with a gun suggests I hand it over.
Does that central entity also need to enforce NFTs? And if so, what's the point of NFTs?
Sure, you could legally get into trouble for making fake copies, but what really the biggest barrier is that the people who collect these things care a lot about it.
If you don’t care about collecting a particular thing, then you were never gonna get it to begin with.
"I own a Mona Lisa NFT."
"Oh really?? You mean THE Mona Lisa NFT?? How did you manage? I thought that was owned by Louvre!"
"No, i mean, I bought this one on SecondSea"
"Ah ok. I bought it on ThirdSea just to test. It's free after all. But nice, good for you."
There are a bunch of EVM compatible chains, and people already forked many smart contracts over to them.
How can the HN crowd miss the point by such a length?
Who came to your blockchain and sold it to you? Is there a bridge to move value from the existing blockchains over to yours? Who runs the bridge? Alternatively is there an exchange that allows withdrawals to your blockchain, again, to move value there for transfer at all? Its not just about the nodes.
So because their wouldn't be a collision it doesn't matter that the non-owner minted these earlier.
Even if they did, to be ironic, the social proof from that official issuance, would attract all the value, ignoring these. Which has also happened before in the NFT space.
If the owners gave validity to this collection later, it may accrue actual value despite being incapable of being a claim to any building or land or franchise.
You have to check your own collection, or collections you find interesting. There’s not going to be a push notification.
Whether its a collection of polaroids or a collection of nfts its the same in this regard. (except you could make your own tool to know about the bids and volume in real time with the NFTs, and the chain of prior purchases and prices are built in, compared to physical goods on ebay or trying to aggregate and archive craigslist where you also wouldn't be assured of those pieces being actually part of the desired collection)