NFT Replicas: An app to mint a replica of virtually any NFT
nftreplicas.net
nftreplicas.net
Part of the point of digital assets are that they can be copied. If you don’t want to copy them, you can validate with the issuing authority (which is virtually all NFTs as it is).
This is so obvious to me that it is tough to stop myself from believing that everyone knows this and is just ignoring it in an attempt to make a quick buck. There are much better arguments for cryptocurrency. I happen to think they are generally overvalued and overhyped, but there is also real utility at the heart of it that people can believe in and project forward. NFTs seem to be stupid all the way down.
As someone still fairly new to this industry still enamored with all the naïve big-picture stuff I was under the impression that the ease and immediacy of copying digital information was nearly the ENTIRE point. Or at least the biggest characteristic that distinguishes digital information technology from other human innovations historically. That and hash tables maybe.
As a former art school hippie I regularly start to get creeping FOMO regarding the NFT train, and feel like Im fighting the future or being stubborn.
Then I remember NFT / Crypto advocates are the ones fighting the future with this sad attempt to impose clunky energy consuming systems of false scarcity on digital systems that undermine that kind of old-world scarcity on a foundational level.
Again, I don't know what I'm talking about but Im enjoying learning more from these threads / posts.
In a decentralized world, a digital yet scarce item can be created, distributed, and reused. A game can go under, and a new game can pop up and respect the accumulated wealth of the community. A game can fork, where half of the community plays one teams version, and half plays a different one, with nobody losing their assets. A rogue developer can entice people to play by inviting people to reuse tools they acquired from a rivals game. A counterfeiting blacksmith can forge their own weapons, and a dark side community can vote to allow them in game, while a light side community can vote to only allow official weapons. What it will all come down to is consensus, the developers (and players voicing through where they spend their attention) of the game deciding which items should be allowed to be imported and which shouldnt. IMHO, there is something cool about the player stats of an RPG being isolated and separated from the game itself, and always owned by the player not the game company.
From an investment perspective, I can see why it looks as dumb as anything in the physical speculative art world. But as a game mechanic, it does seem to offer a useful utility that previously depended on some server staying up forever or trust in a closed system. This is a brink or cusp, where theres a good idea out there somewhere, and maybe someone has or hasnt executed on it yet, but if it has been made into something truly useful, it still isnt popular enough to be well know by us plebs yet.
They also, more simply, act as a membership card or vip pass. You can spend money to join a club, and then you get the corresponding experience that comes with it. Take for example the Matrix NFT. I fully expect there to be some somewhat cool experiences that real people get to really experience by consenting and paying to join that social experiment. Sure it could work roughly as well as a database entry at a central authority, but decentralization is one way to allow easy transfer of your membership to someone new when youre done, without the game developer having to care or keep track of who is who. It turns into Willy Wonka, whoever holds a golden ticket is allowed in, copying tickets isnt possible.
Your premise rests on this question. My counter is what is the value in creating scarcity beyond just trying to make money? Your examples are about people investing in money and not losing those assets. Your experience example is not really digital scarcity if I understand your hypothetical correctly. It is about a real physical scarcity, the number of people who will be let into the experience, being represented in a digital world. There is no new innovation there.
To me the idea of creating scarcity out of something that is not scarce is done for one and only one reason, for a financial benefit.
Gameplay balancing.
We've crossed a very blurred line of gaming, role play, and real life. Whos to say which is which anymore.
I dont think profitability and production of gaming are mutually exclusive. Why cant game creators also make money for their work?
A game company can disappear, and the players can pick right up where they left off, with a new game, remake, or a reverse engineered copy of the server.
Why cant financial gain be a PART of the whole? People can both collect pokemon cards, and play with them. It's not mutually exclusive that you have to declare youre one or the other. Although NFTs probably should include a "you opened the wrapper" function, to create additional scarcity as people destroy the value of their items by making them less digitally pristine.
If there is demand, this can and will happen anyway. There are countless examples of fans continuing to mod and/or host games after they were abandoned by the original creators. The only difference is that you want to import your assets from one game to another. The only thing being preserved here are the assets from the old game. The only added value from NFTs is preserving an investment in the old game.
>Why cant financial gain be a PART of the whole? People can both collect pokemon cards, and play with them. It's not mutually exclusive that you have to declare youre one or the other. Although NFTs probably should include a "you opened the wrapper" function, to create additional scarcity as people destroy the value of their items by making them less digitally pristine.
No one is saying that you can't have fun with your Pokemon cards. But Pokemon cards and decentralized digital scarcity are not interchangeable concepts. Decentralized digital scarcity appears to only be motivated by money.
In the same way that the market will refuse to believe I printed an authentic pokemon card, the game players decide which printers/minters are valid game token producers. If the community decides to respect a certain game production team, that becomes reality. A game company being in charge only lasts as long as the players believing in them. It's the polar express basically.
This is a problem created to fit the solution. Why in the name of God would anyone want to re-introduce scarcity into a post-scarcity space? Such a person is so narcissistic, so greedy, so sociopathic that they would deny others something they could have for nothing in order to enrich themselves. It is sickening.
> A game can go under, and a new game can pop up and respect the accumulated wealth of the community.
People keep saying this and it makes no goddamned sense. They didn't accumulate any wealth, they accumulated some entries in a database somewhere. A developer could even more easily just make a game that uses those assets without all the artificial scarcity.
Besides, I'm not saying we shouldn't compensate creators. Unfortunately even though the digital world is post scarcity the one where our bodies reside is not and creators need to eat. However, I don't believe that shoving scarcity into a post-scarcity space is the way to go about that.
Your words - my software can be copied even though I sell it.
exactly the same with NFTs.
My Digital art can be copied even though I sell it as an NFT.
NFTs don’t enforce scarcity at all, not of the artwork itself.
Yes, and one that is fundamentally flawed, and never should have been attempted in the first place in my opinion, but I think you'll agree that an NFT is not quite the same thing as DRM.
> Your words - my software can be copied even though I sell it. exactly the same with NFTs.
Ok, there's a semblance of an argument here I don't actually think is complete bullshit: If one can sell software without DRM, which can be copied by anyone, what exactly is being sold? To which I am forced to reply with things many NFT promoters say: supporting the developer, the concept of legitimacy, etc.
But, if that's all that an NFT is, then it is effectively just a donation. The problem is that NFTs claim to be much more than that, they claim to be a groundbreaking new technology that enables people to do things they never could do before[0], but that's obvious bullshit since people have been selling software in the same way I have sold software for 50 years.
If you're going to claim something like an NFT proving ownership, the only reason for that to have any value is if ownership confers some right or privilege that is otherwise lacking. For software, let's say it gives you access to direct support from the developer.
Again, the problem is that people already do that, and it doesn't require anything near as complicated as the entire NFT system! It's just a bog standard entry in a bog standard database that so and so owns a license. The decentralization buys nothing because if I stop supporting it no one will care that you have that license anyway. You could say that it allows someone to resell that license, but again we already do that today, and I could just as easily refuse to recognize a resold NFT as I could anyone's resold license because there's a history of ownership.
It really just looks like a giant scheme to try and convince people they're paying for something they're not.
[0] presumably not just having a new way to rip off rubes.
But yeah I think of NFTs as a novel way to support digital art. Not much else, just pay the artist. Same as buying a painting really, except you don’t really own the painting anymore.
The idea that buying art is anything BUT supporting an artist is pretty funny. It’s as if we’ve normalised art as either an investment or a museum that we can’t touch. Buying art was always meant to just let the artist do his thing!
Selling digital art before NFTs was a complete pain! Before them you had to go with an agency or gallery, they took a cut, they had to like your stuff. It was absolutely painful, full of gate keeping and bullshit I (and many others) hated. Now you just mint (hopefully on a low carbon chain) and off you go, you tweet about it, get some attention, make some money. It’s simple. The fact that there’s a secondary market for it, well there always was one for art.
It certainly attracted a bunch of rubes who buy ape JPEGs but there is an honest revolution in digital art happening right now. Look into FXhash on tezos, I’ve lost count of the amount of generative art on that market and it’s really really mind blowing. People are coding amazing stuff on there and selling it, something which used to be virtually impossible without a gallery and a rep and a bunch of nonsense.
I think an NFT is a form of DRM that doesn’t enforce scarcity - ie you own A license to that artwork but that doesn’t give you the right to it. That license can be bought and sold, maybe eventually that will have value (my personal favourite is that NFTs should allow you to remix the artwork into your own art, but who knows).
Traditionally people bought art to possess it, look at it, and display it for others.
> Buying art was always meant to just let the artist do his thing!
No, that's kinda what patronage was all about. We have crowd sourced versions of that.
> Selling digital art before NFTs was a complete pain! Before them you had to go with an agency or gallery, they took a cut, they had to like your stuff.
That wasn't necessary though, you could sell art all sorts of ways. You could even just set up your own online store if you wanted. All NFTs seem to have done is take advantage of the hype-chasing and speculation crowds.
> there is an honest revolution in digital art happening right now
You've lost me here. Literally nothing about what you're describing requires NFTs other than convincing people to pay money for the NFTs by tangentially tying them to art. It is enabling artists to hack human psychology for money, not enabling brand new kinds of art.
But I am intrigued by the use case of allowing a large number of individuals to patron a given artist (and give them recurring income on subsequent resale of their work). All else being equal, I would prefer to live in a society where artists and other makers have time to follow their passion and create instead of spending their time on some job just to pay the bills.
So to the extent that NFTs can enable that, I'm tentatively onboard.
And what extent is that? There are plenty of ways to send money to an artist, both with crypto and without. What value do NFTs add, as far as patronizing artists?
As far as I know, that's a pretty novel offering.
EDIT: for grammar
There's nothing that makes this capability unique to NFTs or crypto - you could sell a license to an artwork that has similar terms.
Yeah, you're probably right here.
This is a slight pivot in discussion but - you're right, the proper license agreement (if enforced) would give a similar effect. And there's a strong argument that NFTs, DAOs for gathering capital, etc are just serving functions similar to Patreon or Kickstarter.
But there are a lot of projects popping up and getting varying degrees of attraction in the crypto space.
Maybe crypto isn't making many new things possible - but it might be making lots of things a little easier?
https://www.businessofbusiness.com/articles/nfts-turning-art...
You still need a centralised entity to enforce ownership, making the blockchain redundant.
A future attempt might be better, maybe.
People don’t understand what artists used to have to do to make a living. They complain about carbon usage yet I know many talented artists who had to work for BP, Shell and ICE car companies so they could pay their rent. On Tezos the chain is low carbon usage anyway.
Artificial scarcity--having something others can't.
Interesting NFTs are those that: prove identity, serve as a key to a private community, yield tokens with utility, prove ownership of an asset that generates royalties, augment a gaming experience, etc.
What's unique about how NFTs solve existing problems is fundamental to crypto - the data layer is open source, so everything is composable. Maybe the folks here working for large cap tech firms in effort to monetize proprietary data are offended by that.
In the next two weeks, I'll have my PGP keys discoverable, on blockchain, two clicks away from anyone with (unrestricted) internet access. Just find me at joshjames.eth and boom, you can virtually guarantee a secure communication channel with me. Outside of a physical abduction or hardware compromise of my private keys, this pattern no longer requires a middleman to host my pubkey.
If those things want to be taken seriously they need to divorce themselves from the term "NFT", demonstrate that blockchain is necessary, and use the best tech (e.g. privacy-preserving zero-knowledge protocols for anything involving identity/authentication/authorization).
1. Royalties paid to the band
2. Allow you to check they're authentic tickets
3. Allow you to sell them online to people in a trusted away (atomic transactions for money, so no you send it then I pay/you pay then I sent it)
I'm only in my mid-30s but I'm deathly afraid to stick around to see what the mid-40s or 50s will be like.
Mark your comment down and revisit it in a few years, having an opinion on the sidelines is just fine. Now let the downvotes commence.
If you dig in my own comments on this website you can probably find discussions from 2017 or even earlier where I ask when people think that cryptocurrency tech is going to finally deliver something useful. It's always "one or two years from now". It's always "we're early". Remember ICOs? Remember how it was going to revolutionize IoT? Remember dapps? Remember lightning? It's been around the corner for years now.
Can you think of a single other technical innovation that required so much faith and patience before it delivered? Maybe self-driving cars, but even then I'd argue that it made immense progress compared to blockchain technology.
In the end you can hype it as much as you want, it's still fundamentally just a crappy, slow, extremely inefficient append-only database that's only relevant because it's super good at supporting pyramid schemes.
"We're early" in the internet had the dotcom bubble, the development of mobile 3G infrastructure and devices, the advent of smartphones, the VC-fueled app craze, and then eventually, now. The innovation mostly occurred in certain geographical areas, under the control of a relatively small population, with global impact.
The progression of blockchain technology - and dare I say culture - is speedrunning the history of human communication, including currency. Mainstream attention is high, but not adoption of paramount fundamental tech like ENS for identity and reputation. I'm guessing critical mass sometime in the next 18-36 months.
I also worry you may be subject to observation bias and ensuing feedback loops; if you primarily encounter negative headlines around crypto, it reinforces your opinion. But there are treasure troves of data, assembled by tens of thousands of exceptionally talented engineers, researchers and philosophers, that are also available for your observation. I wonder, if you spent some time there, perhaps your opinions would be more plastic.
And I say in 2025 I'll be having the same discussion I had in 2017 and I'm having right now as somebody will reply to a comment I make on HN telling me that whatever cryptofad of the day is 18-36months away from mainstream adoption.
With enough spin you can make everything sound revolutionary. Smart contracts are effectively like stored procedures, just ridiculously wasteful.
Before 2020, I was interested in crypto as an academic exercise. In 2021, it became an urgant need. I don't think i'm alone, to me crypto is an exit from the large tech monopolies that dominate our world today.
Nfts may or may not be the blockchain's killer app (I think they are), but the average person's track record identifying a technology's killer app is a tad less than perfect
How is a bit of data on a blockchain pointing to a URI a breakthrough? It's utterly ineffective at proving ownership of anything, since the data at the uri can be changed, or more likely - the entire server will disappear at some point in time. And then what about uris on the blockchain pointing to illegal material (things that are actually copyrighted by someone through the legal system, CP, etc)?
Obviously storing actual data on-chain is too costly as well (both financially on the large chains, and practically/environmentally on any of them).
Everyone I know who's into NFTs and crypto was a con artist before blockchain and they'll be con artists after. Wait until I tell you about the drug addict scammers I know that started a crypto coin of their own and got a friend who knows literally nothing about crypto to write their whitepaper.
My hunch is that crypto is focusing on the wrong things. I suspect we’ll never have land registers in blockchain (dumb idea anyway).
In NFTs crypto kind of stumbled upon something important, because digital art didn’t have a way to be authenticated by artists themselves, they had to use galleries, it was a mess. Now a digital artist can just drop his stuff onto the world and authenticate it. This was a Real Problem, if you make physical art you can just go to the local arts and crafts or Etsy and charge money for it. But digital art was really hard to monetise. So crypto came in a bit sideways and solved a Real Problem People Had.
Curiously they seem to really focus on “real world” problems, like banks or land registry or whatever, when I’m starting to think this is the entirely wrong way to see crypto. I think it needs to focus on problems that exist in the digital arena Only IE data ownership, data portability.
But the obsessions of the original conceptions around crypto are hard to kill, and I feel like right now there’s a lot of resistance to leaving the Nick Szabo idea of “smart contracts will replace lawyers”, same as it was before with a lot of Nakamoto’s ideas. But I think the “crypto will replace lawyers” and “crypto will replace banks” folks will be sorely disappointed. I see a very low percent chance crypto will change that much about banking just due to the security issues.
Is it though? Honest question since I'm not an artist. But looking from the outside: For ongoing support, Patreon/Flattr/etc. are a common solution. For specific work, you can commission a piece and pay for it through whatever channel, even with cash.
I also know the average income I saw being generated from Patreon was low. Not high enough to quit your day job, more of a second job type thing. NFT income is incomparable, I know of cases of people who are now millionaires.
NFTs are essentially just a way to sell digital art in a way that approximates physical art auctions, and in that regard they are an overwhelming sucess.
NFTs open a new World of opportunity for me. Not only can other humans easily collect, and compensate me for my work, I also have a whole new stream for consuming royalties. Now think further about the ecosystem potential and all the third parties that consume my unsplash content for free today, NFTs can change that.
> Not only can other humans easily collect, and compensate me for my work
They could have done it before, what makes you think this technical change will make people want to fund artists more, beyond a momentary financial mania?
2. Just my opinion - I believe that over time people will increasingly value digital assets, I don't think we're even close to understanding their utility. NFT collectors are a growing segment for artists and things like virtual galleries will represent new places to showcase and share those collections.
Edit - I think people should make an effort to distinguish between visual and "technical or attributable" ownership. Too often these threads on NFTs are, "how do you own something if I can copy it" (the picture). That's missing the point. I don't care if you replicate my NFT and its visual identity, I will always be the owner of the underlying attribute and the evolution of that attribute.
Do you confer a license to the photo that I can use elsewhere? Can I use it in an ad? Can I sell copies of it?
To get in the right mindset, you should stop thinking of NFT's as pictures. That's not the primary use case. It's a stupid game that became popular. NFT's are just tokens on the open blockchain that you can exclusively control.
Generally not.
> NFT's are just tokens on the open blockchain that you can exclusively control.
Exactly this, and nothing more.
People rant and rave about how this is a huge when for digital artists while ignoring the darker side. I see more and more small artists venting their frustrations in fighting with the NFT markets to get their stolen art taken down. Also in dealing with crypto bros cyberbullying them for refusing to participate in this whole crypto shit show.
Outside of that, 99% of the artist I know are super happy NFTs exist and they can make money out of them.
Indeed you haven’t even told us how many digital artists you know. Only that you are one.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/11/22325054/beeple-christies...
But when they come in here and try to tell us all how this incredible new technology is going to revolutionize the world, that's obvious bullshit.
It’s nice that you can say you “own” your very own star as stipulated by the star rights granting corporation, but in reality it means nothing other than you can say so… but I can claim a million other stars without needing a corporation and no one can take them away from me but also anyone else can make a claim on the same stars.
That’s all NFTs are right now - a novel way to invest in artists. And that’s remarkable, and good enough for me.
Maybe Wikipedia can sell NFYs to “articles” and avoid the donation button?
Now that you have a market for it, people use it. Something something human nature.
To understand the space, you need to come to terms with the fact that asking "is this a legitimate human need" isn't a useful or relevant question. Instead, you need to ask, "for people who are already demonstrating that they have this human need, does this technology enable that need to be met more efficiently."
You might think the human need isn't legitimate, and it might not be legitimate, but if you think that way you're going to miss what's happening.
It's the same as the lesson from the Paul Graham and Fred Wilson AirBnB exchange, where just because you personally don't have the need doesn't mean that the need doesn't exist.
2. Investing in the imaginary shouldn’t be peddled by charlatans.
3. Comparing to Airbnb is inaccurate and intentionally misleading.
4. Sentences 1-2 are circular.
Airbnb is a useful example, though; consider its context of hotels, VRBO, couchsurfing. These are proven human needs with associated economics that starkly contrast with the precedent for NFTs - Tumblr likes and retweets.
I think the original comment isn’t arguing that “this isn’t a legitimate human need.” I think it’s arguing that neither the tech is innovative nor the offered solution is unique.
You mean like Beanie Babies? "limited" collectible physical objects that went up and up in value.
Never heard of them? Yeah, that's because they stopped going up in value. Then stopped having value at all. It was about 20 years ago, who remembers that?
When Kellog's is making NFTs, it devalues the entire platform.
Trading cards aren't a fitting analogy, because only a few companies were/are in that business, and they each ran specific product lines. They're more similar to old lego sets in that sense.
NFTs are pogs.
The irony is that being digital, bits not atoms, make it easy to make copies.
Oh you invented digital scarcity?
Now you have 1000 copies of the "digital scarcity" business.
They're receipts showing that you "own" the card on display in the public square. And more than one receipt can be minted for that card. The most you can hope for is the earliest timestamp on the receipt.
For example, it wouldn't be hard for an artist to publish a video saying "Hey folks, this is my public key, and these are the NFTs for these pieces of art", and then publish that video in multiple forums like Twitter, YouTube, etc. Then if someone tried to come up with different NFTs for the same pieces of art, the NFT holder could just point to the video (and, as you say, if the artist was malicious and tried to dupe his own NFTs, the earlier one would win).
This kind of "identity validation" is all over the cryptography space already - that's basically how Keybase proofs work. Heck, lots of HN commenters put their proofs in their HN account signatures.
So then how do we know that artist actually created that art? For all we know, that artist took someone else's work and was just the first to mint NFTs for it on that particular chain. Maybe the legitimate artist minted NFTs on a different chain later so nobody will ever believe they created it because of the timestamp.
As I understand it, this sort of 'theft' is happening all the time right now.
Not just "an artist", anyone can. And they do. Many artists' works are being exploited in this way without their consent or even knowledge.
FYI, the down arrow is not an indication of agreement, it is an indication of quality. If you disagree with me, at least have the common courtesy to comment.
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It's a shame the acronym NFT has become synonymous with digital images. As a concept it's a huge idea with so much potential. The issue is people now hear NFT, and their mind shuts down thinking it's some stupid monkey picture thing.
Everything you can do with an NFT, you COULD do with a centralized database. The problem is then you have to trust that database. You have to trust the person running it, you have to trust they will still be in business, you have to trust the person running it will allow other people to connect to it (or get stuck in their walled garden).
We're pretty far into this Web 2.0 experiment with centralized services. The experiment is over, the results are in. We can't trust them.
Does decentralization solve all problems? No absolutely not. Does it have a whole new set of problems? yes, but hopefully we can work through most of them. To me, the trade off of a more open ecosystem is worth it. If email was created in Web 2.0 it probably would have been stored in a database, and there would be little accessibility outside whoever created it. It would look like whatsapp.
What NFT's give us, is the ability to own a unique digital assets in an open system and not have to rely on ad driven business models. It's a digital asset which can be ANYTHING.
That's just it. I do trust the bank. The bank has stood for several human lifetimes (might have changed names, but the same bank). They have overwhelmingly served people reliably. The deposits are insured by the government that has stood for several human lifetimes. They are accountable legally and practically. Bad transactions can be reversed thanks to the trusted processors, banks, and government.
> We're pretty far into this Web 2.0 experiment with centralized services. The experiment is over, the results are in. We can't trust them.
What on earth are you talking about? I've never had money taken from my bank account without my permission. Those few cases of fraud I've experienced have been detected and resolved swiftly, with little activity required from me.
Meanwhile with a blockchain you have to trust the majority of unknown actors. People I don't know, from states where theft of my money might go unprosecuted, if the actor can even be detected. Bad transactions cannot be reversed. Fraud? I'm SOL. And then there's the fact that crypto enables ransomware. And the environmental costs. Absurd.
> What NFT's give us, is the ability to own a unique digital assets in an open system and not have to rely on ad driven business models. It's a digital asset which can be ANYTHING.
We already have this in the US and other nations, it's called copyright, and the courts will enforce it as well as they can. NFTs do not provide an enforcement mechanism, they still rely on the legal system, and a pointer to a uri does not prove what object was originally at that uri.
If you move this to NFTs you have a few advantages. The workflow would look like this: Band creates NFTs (maybe via a website?) and they now exist in the bands wallet. Band puts them up for sale with a smart contract. Fans buy the tickets. Fans can attend the gig by showing the ticket is in their wallet to enter. Fans can resell the tickets if they're allowed to via another smart contract with the a small royalty going back to the band. Don't want the ticket to be resellable? Add a boolean flag to the NFT in its metadata. Want to check the ticket is authentic? Check it's tx history back to the bands minting (or check the NFT address exists in the list of valid tickets on the bands sale site or something). There are some UX issues here but they should all be solvable. Use a chain like Avalanche and the tx fees are $0.02 at the moment.
Essentially the whole man-in-the-middle central company that manages the creation, sales, resales, etc, becomes an open-source peer-to-peer infrastructure. This same thing could be true for game licenses or really any truly digital item. These assets become programmable and new business models are becoming viable while old business models are in theory obsolete - obviously this has some huge caveats: the UX on web3 sucks, we need to migrate from proof-of-work so it's not environmentally awful, and we need to disassociate ourselves with the scammy $1m NFTs. Also some edge cases need to be solved like how customer service will work if something goes wrong.
I mean the most fundamental thing about the blockchain and NFTs still blows my mind from time to time - these transactions are atomic and stop double-spend attacks. I can set up a transaction with you where you pay USDC and I send an NFT for a bands ticket, and we know for certain that at the end of the tx you're going to have that ticket and I'm going to have that money. No "you send it first, I don't trust you" or escrow service needed. The fact we can stick a Turing-complete program in the middle of that and add things like verification the ticket is from the set of authentic tickets, or that it's only valid if the USD is worth 1.25-1.30 Euros to avoid slippage, is just awesome (to me).
Any kind of argument here would have to start with an explanation of why it wouldn’t be possible or practical to just start a new ticket company that does this all for free/very cheap.
No, it isn't. How would you buy a ticket from me online when you don't know me? The only real option is to use stubhub which requires us to both create accounts, put our credit cards in, verify ourselves, you put the ticket up, me to buy it, and for me to not know the ticket is A. not been purchased by someone else B. authentic.
A decentralised app that runs this requires a smart contract to mint tickets and a smart contract to wrap reselling them, plus a web UI to tie it all together. An open source developer could build this and charge $1 per tx to maintain it.
What's the centralised alternative?
This is all technologically possible. The reason platforms usually do not let you do this is due to business requirements. Why would the business switch to a platform that strips their ability to control resale if it isn't something they want to begin with? If they do want resale, its trivially possible with existing boring tech.
Up until now it’s been difficult to do this because the prohibitive cost of centralized services - with Web3 you have all these building blocks available without a high cost central party managing databases, cloud costs, staffing, etc…
Edit: To clarify I’ve seen end users and bands want resale, it’s just not very profitable and hard to control fraud.
To summarize I’m saying that I think and hope that Web3 will have these businesses purpose as features of the infrastructure :)
Crypto posts always take every problem as a technical problem without understanding that there are very few technical problems but intentional business restrictions. Those businesses have no incentives to move to a platform which takes this power out of their hands.
There is nothing stopping ticket sellers from allowing refunds on tickets which put the tickets back in to the available pool to buy again.
Kinks need to be worked out, sure, but in ten to fifteen years artists will not be beholden to corporations. That is something to work towards and be very proud of.
FXhash has created a generative art market like it’s never existed before, it’s created an amazing art scene without precedent I’ve ever seen. It also allows for generative art to interact with the blockchain to make every art piece unique.
IE if you mint on FXhash, each generative art piece is slightly different due to a randomising function in the art pieces. This means each and every NFT is unique since they all went through a slightly different values for some of their features. I highly recommend anyone criticising NFTs to think about this since it’s an absolutely groundbreaking achievement in digital art that just wasn’t possible before. The artists scene around FXhash is just incredible.
To call this an “absolutely groundbreaking achievement in digital art that just wasn’t possible before.” is comically absurd.
If your argument boils down to “show me how people made lots of money on it”, then that is just confirming what I already believe. No substance, just profiting on hype.
Just all these darn artists making money! How many artists salaries have you paid off this month with your salary Gigachad?
"Why would I want to create a replica?"
Many NFTs have [rocket emoji] in price and are not affordable for most people. This allows you to still own a replica of a famous NFT. Think of it like an exact print of a favorite piece of art. The source of the NFT will be exactly the same as the original and it will even show up in your crypto wallet.
"How much does it cost?"
The price for a replica starts at 0.001 ETH. Each time a particular NFT piece is replicated, its next replication cost will double. So be sure to replicate popular pieces early!
"Why can't I replicate a replica?"
Do you want black holes? Because that's how you get black holes.
This reminds me of the 'save as' art theft meme.
Then I read the following in the FAQ:
> The price for a replica starts at 0.001 ETH. Each time a particular NFT piece is replicated, its next replication cost will double. So be sure to replicate popular pieces early!
> Why can't I replicate a replica?
> Do you want black holes? Because that's how you get black holes.
Pretty sure the pricing is part of the whole joke[0]. It sounds an awful lot like the fictional cryptocurrency I came up with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26120703
[0] God I do hope it is a joke
The quicker can we play through this entire thing, the sooner it will be over.
In practicality, with the abundance of popular NFTs out there and the starting price of just 0.001 ETH (which is around 4 bucks), I'm not exactly expecting to make much from this. Hell, it cost me over $400 in gas fees just to deploy the contract, I'd be counting my lucky stars if I even recoup that!
And to be clear, the price doubling is not global, but applied to each specific source NFT.
Scarcity on it's own does not equal value. The value comes either from social consensus or direct utility.
Real numbers are scarce. There's only one of each.
I first noticed this incongruence with time tested business models when all Bitcoin related business plans/pitch decks, they'd never even list price comparisons as a competitive factor - arguably the #1 most important metric to address when wanting to disrupt an industry or model.
Blockchain has almost no practical uses right now but it does provide a way to make something digitally unique, even if it's just a JSON with an ID and an URL. Not saying the data is unique but the ledger entry is. Only one wallet can own it at a time and it's easily proven. Maybe it will never have any practical applications but I don't see how that could be done without a blockchain.
This is an important point that a lot of the crypto bros don't seem to grasp.
Antiques and thrift stores are crammed with millions of things that are scarce. One-of-a-kind, even. But still nobody wants them. Eventually the cost of storing them becomes more than they're worth, and they go into the trash.
This gives me ideas! Who wants to join me in this new fad?
Except that unlike the original object, or even a replica, "an entry on the blockchain" has -- no intrinsic value whatsoever. It's basically like you're buying the rights to a "Like" on that painting, or trading card, or whatever. Nothing more.
My hunch though is that 90 percent of the people buying these things are utterly oblivious to this distinction. And that, plus "it's new" and "it's value is just going to keep skyrocketing" is essentially what is driving the NFT "market" as such.
I also don't disagree with your second paragraph.
Gosh, I don't know -- a loaf of bread? A shiny new car?
Do you understand the meaning of the word, actually?
But it's still scarce.
So what?
Anyway, my point with that parentheses was that there are a lot of things that has no intrinsic value but still has value on the market.
I didn't mean to come across with attitude.
Only that your question about intrinsic value seemed rather .. weird.
My point with that parentheses was that there are a lot of things that has no intrinsic value but still has value on the market.
Can you provide some examples, please?
I can think of plenty of market assets which have what we might say is slightly abstract kind of value -- "brands", naming rights to stadiums, etc -- but still, it's pretty straightforward to see the intrinsic utility they provide, and that this easily translates to dollars.
With NFTs though -- there just isn't it any. Other than to sell to the next sucker in line.
EDIT: Wait, I can think of one asset class that compares to NFTs: signed sports memorabilia. Which of course have crap resale value (except for items signed by ancient players like Joe Dimaggio). But the modern versions team franchises regularly crank out -- not so much.
NFTs are mostly just that. An ID minted by Wallet X which itself is unique and the social contract gives it a value. That's it.
I guess one important thing to understand in these discussions is who exactly are you worried about?
-The original creator?
-The initial purchaser/minter from the original creator's collection?
-The person that currently owns the item in that collection?
-The replicator?
-The replicator that tries to sell a replicant?
-A future buyer that is trying to figure out which one to buy?
These are all distinct people with distinct realities. But people arbitrarily talk about a random one of these market participants as an indictment of the entire NFT concept, when each one is experiencing something unique that is either the same as the existing art world or better. Out of all 6 market participants, none of them encounter something worse than the non-NFT art world. Out of all 6, some of them encounter something better.
Is it inherently valuable? No, but it's scarce. There's only one such entry on the blockchain and it can only be owned by one wallet at a time.
It's all a social construct.
The value in NFTs exists by that same social contract. You can't ignore that relationship when criticizing them, otherwise you're attacking a strawman. Try attacking a steelman argument for NFTs, and you may actually convince some proponents.
No, it’s because the valuable object is physically scarce, and exists as a material historical artifact independent of any ledger. NFTs have never and will never have these attributes.
You can't ignore this reality when advocating for them, otherwise you're peddling a fantasy.
Collectible cards are scarce by design. Manufacturers print millions every year. They could reproduce the same card for decades. They could also print them on demand. Whenever someone orders the card, print it for them, and ship it out. It is artificial scarcity.
Collectible cards must be graded and registered to be valuable. An unregistered Michael Jordan rookie card would be assumed to be a fake. They exist in a ledger.
The social contract between collectors and manufacturers is what creates the value. The manufacturer agrees to generate verifiable scarcity, and the collector agrees to purchase seemingly worthless cardboard and ink at a markup.
This seems an arbitrary restriction to me. Why must something be independent of a ledger to have value?
If you are saying that something requires a ledger entry to have value, then you are simply proving that it has no intrinsic value.
> An intrinsic theory of value (also called theory of objective value) is any theory of value in economics which holds that the value of an object, good or service, is intrinsic, meaning that it can be estimated using objective measures.
If you use "what someone last paid for it" as a measure of intrinsic value, then they have intrinsic value.
Clearly this doesn’t meet the requirements of an objective measure.
A single tulip bulb was purchased for 2500 florins in 1636. That represents 10 years of a skilled laborers earnings at the time.
If you believe that the price an NFT sold for on a ledger represents its intrinsic value, then you must also believe that a tulip bulb’s intrinsic value was equivalent to 10 years of skilled labor.
Obviously this is absurd, and history proved it so.
How would a bunch of subjective meatbags be able to come up with an objective measure?
If everyone agreed that X is an objective measure, it could still be wrong.
Give me a concrete example of what you think is an objective measure.
I agree that the example you provided is a more "objective" one, more grounded in physical reality - a tulip costing the same as a 10 years' salary.
> Obviously this is absurd, and history proved it so.
Had the tulips kept their scarcity, and had social interest remained at such high levels, couldn't it have kept its value?
An example I have is gold: people have been hoarding and valuing it for millennia. Sure, it occasionally crashes, but so do a lot of assets. Is it in a constant bubble? Is it overvalued? What is the intrinsic value of gold? It is not very useful in itself, but it is in demand and scarce, as opposed to fiat currency, which is in free fall.
http://pricedingold.com/us-dollar/
I argue that value comes from what people attribute it to be. The markets are an aggregation of such value decisions from many people.
> Had the tulips kept their scarcity,
They did.
> and had social interest remained at such high levels, couldn't it have kept its value?
You mean if the tulip bubble had never burst would we still be paying 10 years of a skilled persons salary for one? Sure.
It’s worth noting that the courts ultimately held the debts owed for Tulip futures to be ‘gambling debts’…
Exactly. There is no guarantee the NFT bubble will burst! People might keep enjoying these, and investing a significant portion of their lives.
- stocks and real estate: people use "objective" metrics like discounting cash flow. But the time preference for discounting cash is subjective.
- precious metals and commodities: there are "objective" stock-to-flow metrics, but they all assume people will still desire precious metals, commodities, and the resulting products. This desire is subjective.
Discounted cash flows, etc, are all ways people use to come to their ‘subjective’ conclusions.
It ends up being circular though - yes, human judgement is ultimately part of the equation, but that judgment end up being based on a prediction of future value, and often we can use understanding of markets or the intrinsic value of commodities to industrial processes to assess this.
Many people are arguing that the value of NFTs is in fact not based on an intrinsic value to future processes, and is purely a subjective bubble.
Arguing that all valuations have a component of human judgement and that people may just continue to like NFTs is not a counterargument.
A counterargument would be to explain how that will continue to be valuable independent of the subjective component.
Generally people seem to dodge this, and instead just say ‘everything is subjective’, i.e. the postmodern view.
> It ends up being circular though - yes, human judgement is ultimately part of the equation
Well, I am glad you admit humans are who ultimately set prices on markets.
> but that judgment end up being based on a prediction of future value, and often we can use understanding of markets or the intrinsic value of commodities to industrial processes to assess this.
I interpret this as a more informed subjective value, but this discussion did not quite convince me there exists an intrinsic value.
The fact that you need X kg of flour to create Y kg of bread might be useful in knowing when the market prices for flour and bread are "consistent" - you call this "intrinsic value of commodities to industrial processes" - but I am of the opinion that demand prevails: the relative demand for bread and flour is what sets their relative price, and it can vary for reasons completely different from the industrial processes considered for an "intrinsic value".
Nevertheless, I thank you for going in circles with me, I feel like I have learned something, and I hope I expressed my own ideas clearly enough.
I will not follow this discussion for long; but if you feel like continuing, my e-mail is on my website which is on my profile. [3]
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29663787
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_theory_of_value
Nobody disputes that bubbles and sentiment exist.
What is in dispute is the idea that they are the only things that determines value.
It’s ok that you are not convinced. Once you go down the postmodern rabbithole of believing that everthing is subjective, there is no way out through dialog.
NFTs are artificial scarcity ahead of time with the purpose of emulating ETFs, hidden behind a fake 'new' concept of a digital deed (which is what a blockchain already is, no need for NFTs for that). Digital 'goods' however, are always replicas. There is no 'true' version. All they are is an attempt at monetary manipulation of people during the time in which they aren't as well-known and regulated as ETFs are.
I also find that when we start applying analogies to something as an argument we are detaching from the reality of what we have. It is meant to simplify, and appeal to people who are not familiar with the topic at hand. No matter how wrong the analogy is (or right) we are inherently shifting the conversations to something different. I know this analogy is trying to say an NFT is scarce, but it IS quite different than a Michael Jordan rookie card in its execution, management, and a lot of the things that make a Michael Jordan rookie card worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
How is a NFT drawn by a random artist of a random image worth so much?
Going that line of thought, what happens if two people make the same picture into a NFT?
Anyone can make an NFT of Nyan cat. That doesn't give it value.
If the original creator of Nyan cat creates an NFT of it, and only one NFT, suddenly it has a ton of value.
So who gets the replication fees? Is this just a cash grab by the authors of the site?
If people want to do more with it, they can do that too.
Is it physically possessing something? Is it a receipt? Is it provenance? Is it the ability to destroy something permanently? Is it the ability to deny others access? Is it irrefutable and verifiable proof, without trusting any single entity, that an entity holds an exclusive status relative to a good?
minting a completely image onchain is also not too expensive and can also be passed on to the community, as most relevant NFT collections are minted by the community and not the artist. people stand up their own websites for this, the people minting their own artwork directly on the marketplaces are their own segment and that has remained a race to the bottom with starving artists crowding it.
Ownership has limits, in the real world those are regulated by the government. In the digital world they can be regulated by a DAO. But ultimately, there are benefits of ownership, and responsibilities to ownership.
If you ask “well, how do you know that’s their real deviant profile?”, at that point, it’s not a crypto/NFT problem, but an identity problem. My understanding is that keybase.io was one way to do that, but I never used it so I can’t say much. What if a scammer registered the keybase first before the real artist? Not sure what happens in that case.
What about keybase? Have people figured this out in a decentralized way?
For example - Kevin Rose has minted 1000 NFT's for "membership" of his podcast VIP group. Users had to pay ~3 ETH (~$12k) for each one - but he hasn't yet told them what the benefits of holding will be, when they'll come, and how long they'll be offered for.
As a user, I might be prepared to pay a membership for these benefits (being able to cancel any time) - but why would I risk $12k up front, having no idea what I'm getting? What incentive does he have to offer beyond the bare minimum to sustain his reputation?
The only way it makes sense is if it's about pure price speculation. Can anyone enlighten me on how this is progress?
An artist can attempt to additionally bundle explicit rights into an NFT transaction. Just like they can attempt to bundle a physically copyright assignment with a sale of physical art. But they don't, in either case, thats not how the market has formed. Its a very uncommon thing that also has nothing to do with the technology, but the technology can help it, its still not what people are doing.
"But I like physical things because theyre valuable to me because I can touch them and look at them without a computer", okay, there are multiple generations of people that don't care by now. Compare it to the digital things then.
These populations do care that their earned digital goods are arbitrary modifiable and revokable entries in a company database, and have different limits about how much money they put towards something like that, versus this format of possession.
The "right click and save as" "screenshot" and "twitter photo" people would not have access. Even the replicants discussed in the OP here would not have access.
Additionally, many popular NFTs, like BAYC, get airdropped many things for attention, some of which have varying degrees of value, or BAYC may be the only ones available to mint another new NFT being dropped. This would be enforced at the code or smart contract level. It is common for many less valuable or otherwise uninteresting NFTs to partner up and collaborate with other NFTs to make this chain of communities. Sometimes that results in some level of value. By common, I mean over the last 5 months in the NFT space. This concept has pre-dated NFT related things, and some of my best trades have been from either receiving airdrops or claiming things that went on to have a lot of value. But I really like some of the worthless things I've claimed too.
Feels like the "access to physical events" problem was solved before NFTs.
> The "right click and save as" "screenshot" and "twitter photo" people would not have access.
But per original question - if I wanted to use any Bored Ape as my Twitter photo, is there anything stopping me?
Take your point re: additional digital goods being delivered on chain, just feels a little anemic vs the richness of everything else available for free (or behind a membership) online. If users didn't care primarily about price appreciation, not sure whether that part would be exciting.
Maybe it requires the collector gene to be enthused? If so, can these kinds of Web3 applications ever go mainstream as Web2 apps?
I don't really consider it solved, has Ticketmaster solved festival passes in a way everyone likes? When organizers aren't using ticketmaster, is transferring the ticket solved or is it rife with scams and abuse and arbitrary restrictions and guesswork. The tertiary benefit is also not something NFT's are aiming to solve. You asked and got an answer about what people are doing. Not what it was created to do.
There is nothing stopping you from using a Twitter photo. Also not something an NFT was claiming to solve. This is just a viral strawman where other people created a use case that wasn't presented and then criticized that use case to discredit the other thing. If you want to pretend to own something valuable or be part of a community you can still do that. I don't really understand what that means to you. I guess that's a good follow up question, what does that mean to you?
There is nothing wrong with speculation. This is not exclusive to the NFT space either when it comes to art or any collectible. I'm really having trouble with all the higher standards you are procedurally generating for this one space.
In any case, membership is actually a good example. If NYTimes stopped making infinite memberships, paid monthly, and instead limited it to, say, 100,000 memberships and some of their operation was funded by a portion of royalties when one of the membership was traded, what would the memberships cost? What would people be willing to pay? What would NYTimes have to do to make people willing to pay for access to their investigative journalism? All that's happening is that you are seeing price discovery in a place where there was none. Replace NYTimes with one of the finance ones like WSJ, if that's easier. or with Soho House memberships.
I hate Ticketmaster as much as the next guy, but had a fine experience with the resellers (e.g. StubHub) which offer many things NFTs do not - like customer service (with an actual phone number), a centralized record if I lose my ticket, refunds if the seller mis-represents, no requirement to buy an asset that will likely fluctuate wildly in price, and transaction fees likely lower than gas fees. Not sold on giving up those benefits.
> If you want to pretend to own something valuable or be part of a community you can still do that. I don't really understand what that means to you. I guess that's a good follow up question, what does that mean to you?
I haven't been part of one of these communities, so hard to comment on the value of being a true member or just appearing to be one. If Bored Apes lost 99% of their value, would the community remain equally rich and engaged? What do they truly have in common?
> If NYTimes stopped making infinite memberships, paid monthly, and instead limited it to, say, 100,000 memberships and some of their operation was funded by a portion of royalties when one of the membership was traded, what would the memberships cost?
I'm skeptical limiting access to quality journalism and inflating the price can really be counted as a good use case. For a Soho House membership, I'd much prefer to pay a monthly rate based on what I'm receiving - rather than speculate that (a) they'll continue improving the offer, such that the value of my token will increase; (b) the broader NFT market won't crash.
Soho House's financial team would also likely want to project their earnings next year without making assumptions around sustained interest in NFTs.
(Non NFT tickets fluctuate wildly in price. Transaction fees on almost all chains are extremely low as gas is negligible in cost, with Ethereum mainnet being an exception.)
So we have less revocable or irrevocable digital goods that are tradable, scarce per collection that provably predates any subsequent issuance, tertiary benefits to physical and digital access, and membership. Even if this technology only was considered to do any of each of those things moderately well, instead of replacing any incumbent implementation, you still have trouble with .... what exactly? We've now agreed that each one is a single asset that does many things at least decently well without any custom implementation needed to be built even if the existing ONE thing in each category has an okay incumbent, and you get a fun picture to go with it. Yes, to some people that has aggregate value.
What are you still having trouble with at this point:
-Whether you should ever own/possess one?
-Whether you should ever use money to own/possess one?
-Something about speculation being bad?
-Something about not knowing if the market will still be there for resell and wondering if that would make everyone else leave the NFT space?
It seems like cognitive dissonance to me, since some of these ideas compete with each other.
Which NFTs include a central authority able to re-issue my ticket if I lose it, address mis-representation by sellers, give refunds if the performance doesn't happen, etc? Isn't that lack of a central authority - and its attendant downsides - core to the medium?
> Non NFT tickets fluctuate wildly in price.
Which non NFT tickets have fluctuated like Bored Ape NFTs this year, and which are highly susceptible to market sentiment for the entire ticketing medium?
> What are you still having trouble with at this point:
Trying to understand how many people I respect have such enthusiasm for a medium which appears to have many downsides vs the status quo - and not yet a killer app like e.g. Gmail, Maps, Facebook to justify the Web2->Web3 transition. No doubt I'm missing something, just trying to understand what.
There's been enthusiasm for smart contracts for 5+ years, but which mainstream consumer or B2B apps have yet implemented them for non-speculation use cases?
How would it be progress for the New York Times to restrict access to quality journalism - or for Soho House to expose its future cash flows to extreme market volatility?
Many festivals have direct sales for a few hundred dollars, resold for a few thousand before the festival occurs and the ticket is redeemed. Similar price moves are much more common in the NFT space than a move to a Bored Ape amount ($200,000 at time of writing). If several hundred percent isn't considered volatile enough for comparison, that really discredits the good faith efforts of this conversation.
> but which mainstream consumer or B2B apps have yet implemented them for non-speculation use cases?
Its crypto and everything else. At this point you can stop looking. If you are doing a crypto app and trying to make a sales process and funnel for people not in the crypto space, then you're wasting your time. There are already 2-3 trillion dollars of value in the space and high volume onchain and offchain. Many people are providing financial services to speculators, just like people that provide ... financial services to speculators in the rest of the economy. People extract value by making some other aspect of the ecosystem easier for other people.
> How would it be progress for the New York Times to restrict access to quality journalism - or for Soho House to expose its future cash flows to extreme market volatility?
The question is how much would the owners pay for that access. Not whether it is a viable business model the issuer gambled on. There are plenty of NFT projects that didn't get enough resales for that half-year-old model to be seen as viable for royalties or the community. Some are actively traded enough that it doesn't turn out to be a rip off. Guess who still earned all the money from the original sale but only talked about what they might do with royalties from after market sales, so the question is always "whose problem is it".
People are enthused because they get to experiment. Just move a function around, alter one variable in a class and viola' the hit of the week and $24,000,000[1] that people are very appreciative of. Maybe they've done something sustainable maybe not. People want to participate for whats possible. The prices from the original issuer are moderate/predictable or even free, the stuff that makes the headlines is just all enthused people that need to make their own objective decisions.
[1] https://www.adidas.com/into_the_metaverse/mint here Adidas is embracing that people like to buy and resell their merchandise, frequently at massive premiums, so they are only letting NFT holders authenticate to purchase for a specific future drop instead. They were about $800 each and they sold 30,000 of them. A merch flipper can price their own potential future revenues accordingly, or just be an actual collector first in line to collect the merchandise. Each experiment is different, available to be debated in isolation, it is impossible to use a broad brush because the word NFT is involved. Obviously someone is free to put one of these on their twitter avatar, it should be obvious that this won't help them with access to the Adidas drops. "Oh my god speculation I knewwww it, bot infested free for alls were so adequate", just a strawman for some fun (or is it), we can laugh
I just read https://networked.substack.com/p/web3-i-have-my-daots and there's a cute analogy about buying the Mona Lisa, but only getting a record written in some obscure room saying that you own it, i.e. you never actually take possession of the Mona Lisa. You can tell people you own it, but they have to go the obscure room and verify your ownership. Who would do that, for literally anything, especially a jpg?
I forget the name of assets that designed merely to show wealth (e.g. a Hummer), but those work because everybody sees you with that asset, constantly. For NFTs to work in the long term, you would have to expect people to validate authenticity of these things.
edit: Veblen is what I was looking for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
People are seeing NFTs as a kind of payment system of sorts. A modern turn on donations or alms.
Can the likes of the Times, National Review, WaPo, WSJ, etc., use NFTs in lieu of a subscription model?
You buy the rights to “own” an article or whatever.
or showcase my collection on gallery.so?
also some of the popular NFTs these days are cc0 licensed, so they do in fact encourage copies! I hope the trend continues.
cc0 nft - nouns.wtf
nouns.wtf
The value of the NFT is not primarily in how it looks. The value of the NFT is in the provenance, the history, the background of the creator, etc.
This why Onement V, a blue background with a lighter blue vertical stripe, is worth $30 million https://www.wikiart.org/en/barnett-newman/onement-v-1952
The painting is something my toddler could create. The background of the artist and the piece's history is what gives it value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnett_Newman
Joking aside - NFTs have more in common with concepts of intellectual property than they do physical works of art. Physical objects have scarcity for mostly physical reasons. IP and NFTs have scarcity because we've decided they should.
I see the same argument rehashed over and over, and it's the same reason HN as a collective never understood or embraced crypto in general - a total lack of understanding combined with a total lack of imagination.
If your standard is 'there is lots of money in it, therefore it is cool & good and should be embraced' then sure, I will freely admit that both contemporary art and NFTs pass that standard. So do televangelism, diamonds, and robocalls.
That, and the fact that there is only one, it's not digital, and it can be authenticated (and also the artist is dead, so it is guaranteed there won't be any more).
The "value" of an NFT is that there is only one unique occurrance of it in a pile of bits called a blockchain. It is very hard to hang it on a wall.
Web3: not satisfied with the fundamental principle of digital abundance, we invented digital scarcity.
It's worst than that because almost all NFTs are only an pointer/URL and the art itself is not on the chain.
I create myartwork.jpeg. Somebody creates an NFT of it. Later, I create an NFT of it. Even later a bunch of people make NFT replicas of both. Which NFT is legitimate? The blockchain doesn't know.
Then why can't they just be the arbiter of what the real JPEG is and skip a whole step?
1) Regardless of if the physical painting is the original or a copy made a talented painter, you can still enjoy how it looks on the wall. The painting doesn't magically disintegrate if you find out the certificate was forged. You also have no option but to buy it (or a replica) if you want to place it own your wall.
With an NFT, the art itself is available to anyone, regardless of if you own the NFT. You never needed to buy an NFT to enjoy the art. The only thing of value in an NFT is the NFT itself, not the art that it represent. If the NFT is not authentic, it's a much bigger deal because now it loses all of its value, not just a portion of it.
2) Creating a fake painting that looks "original", even to an amateur that doesn't know anything about art, is hard and expensive. Even when the painter isn't trying to pass it as the original one, it can easily cost thousands of dollars to get decent quality replica that looks close to the real thing.
To replicate the art of an NFT, it just takes a few clicks. It's not difficult or expensive to copy it. If you can't figure out how to do it, you probably don't need to spend more than 10$ to get someone online to do it for you.
I can easily print out a high-quality Mona Lisa and put it on my wall, and I can enjoy it, but I wouldn't pretend I own it.
> To replicate the art of an NFT, it just takes a few clicks. It's not difficult or expensive to copy it. If you can't figure out how to do it, you probably don't need to spend more than 10$ to get someone online to do it for you.
It is mathematically impossible to copy the NFT. It isn't the same smart contract, it isn't the same NFT. It is theoretically possible to arrange atoms in the precise location of a physical object, however.
Even a half blind person would tell you the print doesn't look anything like the painting. If you want something that looks close to the really thing, it's difficult to make. There is modern art that would be cheap/easy to replicate (eg. a blank canvas made by artist trying to create a debate about what is art or not) but anything that you are likely to want on your wall will easily cost you >500$ to replicate properly in its original size (they are larger than they look).
>It is mathematically impossible to copy the NFT. It isn't the same smart contract, it isn't the same NFT. It is theoretically possible to arrange atoms in the precise location of a physical object, however.
I wrote it poorly, I was referring to the art behind the NFT that you can replicate easily. If I see a very cool picture and want to use it as my wallpaper on my laptop, I don't need to recreate the exact same smart contract with the same wallet key or pay for the NFT, I can just copy the picture in a few clicks. The picture will look the same with or without the NFT
And again, you are fully allowed to disagree, I’m trying to explain the mentality of the NFT purchaser and it’s similarity to the physical art world.