Hacker News Reader

Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

Deeds have the force of law.

Also actual human people care about them.

Neither is true of the NFT cringe.

Same with the Mona Lisa NFT. Future buyers would only buy from the original blockchain where they can check the books to make sure someone paid millions for this in the past.

I said actual human people. Of the constant pump-and-dump hype about NFTs online, most seem to be bots and the rest seem so foreign that I'm half-convinced they came from outer space.

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.

I feel like these discussions are emotionally charged.

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.

The meaningless exercise, by-and-large correctly identified by people who are not involved in NFT excusemaking, was the desperate clutch at the thing on the first blockchain. It is the attempt at relevance for a deeply compromised thing itself, not its content. So yeah. People might be talking past one another, and it's not the fault of folks who Just Don't Understand Crypto, Man that it's the case.

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.

What are your thoughts on Baseball cards that sell for absurd prices? Or real life painting auctions that sit in a warehouse acting as a unique object. It’s all very absurd.

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.

Collector items exist, and while a certain amount of resources have to be burned to preserve them, on the whole, they seem to me like a positive effect on the environment.

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.

> What are your thoughts on Baseball cards that sell for absurd prices?

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.

well, but if you buy an artwork at auction and then fly it to your home, then fly it to a museum to show it, etc. you are also consuming a lot of energy. A lot more than an NFT. Real-world things & experience generally require a lot more energy than virtual ones. In the big scheme of things, if people start buying less real world stuff and more virtual stuff that's good for the environment, even if for now the system is inefficient. So take your pick - is your argument against NFTs based on the environment or physicality?

This isn't that complicated. They are foolish because they are do-nothings. They are evil because they are consumption for the sake of consumption at a scale that's hard to fathom.

"People could buy less virtual stuff!" People could also just buy less stuff, and not pay grifters money for nothing.

> Well, future bidders won’t consider X on Z.

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.

Haha, that sounds exactly like buying a fake Mona Lisa print. “I’ll consider it, sounds like a bargain”.

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.

Not the same thing. You're comparing the relationship between a fake version of an artwork and the artwork itself to that between two digital objects both of which are derivative of a third thing. The third thing is the analog to the artwork, making the metaphor unusable

What if a bunch of us fork the original blockchain and stop caring about the original blockchain? What stops it?

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?

Forks have already happened. See the Bitcoin derivatives and Etherium vs Etherium Classic. You can read up on it if you want to know what happens. You don’t have to guess.

>What stops it?

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.

Ummm No.

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

Hmmm… Interesting point. I had heard of this but forgot.

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.

it's a digital signature. You can simply agree with a group that it will be valid - just like you can agree in trading that closing a deal by saying 'done' on the phone is valid.

You don't need a blockchain for digital signatures.

yes agree

The physical force of law is consensus by violence.

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.

It’s not the consensus mechanism that matters, it’s the enforcement of the relation between a record of ownership and an actual physical asset. Ownership of a token or wallet may be inalienably ensured by the blockchain. The right use that property for one’s benefit in the physical world must be enforced by someone’s violence - the owner, if not their agent, if not the state. A irrevocable deed on a blockchain is worthless if it does not also entitle me to forcibly dispossess someone of the property, and preferably the agents to do that on my behalf.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com