Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by smabie | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

smabie

I mean they have value: otherwise you wouldn't be able to sell them?

You can call them a scam but they're clearly not worthless.

Flipping NFTs can be incredibly profitable.

View on HN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

Just because there are currently people willing to pay a lot of money for something, and there are currently people making money flipping that thing, doesn't mean that thing will be valuable in the future.

Sure, but many things don't retain value. Your thousand dollar smartphone will be worthless in ten years. Your car will probably be worthless in twenty. People make the mistake of treating them like cryptocurrency which they aren't, but just because they're stupid and will be worthless doesn't make them worthless now.

Yes but a car and a smartphone provide so much more day to day value than the items being discussed so that's not really a good comparison. Tulips, while pretty and fragrant, won't help get work done, transport items and people to where they need to go or provide a valuable communication channel in an emergency. An, NFT, while potentially entertaining, is a lot more like a Tulip and has absolutely no similarity to a car or a smart phone in this context.

It's not about retention of value, it's that there never was any real value. A smartphone or car is useful; if the buy/sell price of my phone or car was $0.01 I would still need them, if the buy/sell price of most (all?) NFTs was $0.01 nobody would care about them.

It obviously has real value. People are spending a lot of money on them.

Every time I see a discussion about NFTs, it seems people assume that other people value things the same way as them. It’s a major cognitive bias called naïve realism.

People value things differently then you. I literally pay more money for things made by bands I like, for example.

No? It has perceived value, but unto itself its value is zero

The value of a car to someone who never leaves a walkable city is less than zero. The only reason they'd even accept a free car is because someone else would buy it off them. There is no such thing as inherent value. Even something as basic as food is worthless to someone who has no use for it.

Just because something will not be valuable in the future doesn't mean its not valuable right now. Valuations change all the time.

Agreed. For example, tulips were extremely valuable in the Dutch Republic in 1636.

They have value because people think they will have a bigger future value. People think they will have more value in the future because there will be a bigger sucker willing to buy it from them. That's it. There's no step along the future ownership chain where it actually creates, yields, or transmutes into any sort of fundamental value.

So assuming you've done your research, it is known up front to be worthless and yet you are buying it anyway with the intent to defraud someone else. Or you haven't done your research and you end up being the sucker in this setup. Either way, art NFTs are pretty definitionally a scam.

The word "scam" is thrown around far too much by critics of cryptocurrencies. Think what you will of bitcoin or ethereum, but neither one is a scam. NFTs, on the other hand, unequivocally are scams.

NFTs in itself are not a scam. When I genuinely mint a photo I own the copyright of and set a price, you can simply chose to buy it or not. In the case that you buy it, you're not scammed. The price was clear, and you got what you ordered.

You can think of NFTs as being overvalued or worthless, but that doesn't make them a scam. Just don't buy them. Likewise, NFTs don't come with any promise that they gain in value, that too is on the buyer.

NFTs aren't rights to photos, or any other kind of tangible or intangible property right. That would be an actual property. But that's not what NFTs are.

Largely true, but rapidly changing. Some marketplaces do allow for copyright license statements to be included in the mint.

The better marketplaces include verification of authorship. Adobe is including proof of authorship into its suite of tools.

There's bots now crawling for knock-offs and cross chain mints.

So in the best of cases...if a verified author mints a verified work, which includes a copyright/usage statement, and I buy it...what do I legally own?

I think that's a question for the lawyers.

They only have value if you can find a buyer. Most NFTs that are minted are never resold.

…which applies to everything. Anything only has a market value when someone else wants it.

Heck I have old things that I want to get rid of but because no one really wants it, I can’t sell it for any price that’s worth the effort, despite being a physical item having intrinsic value.

Those items do not have value to anyone except for you.

That’s my point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com