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Comment by nfw2 | Hacker News Reader

Do digital signatures really make the blockchain obsolete if they fill the same niche?

Even if blockchain are technically equivalent to digital signatures, it seems like it has some real advantages from a business perspective: - it is capturing the market of people who want to buy "official" digital assets and is becoming the de facto way to do so - the market is one that should have strong network effects - gaining the trust of that market is crucial to supporting these sort of trades

I still think NFTs are a bubble that will come back down to Earth eventually. But I also find sneaker and stamp collectors equally perplexing, and people don't discuss these phenomena with the same sort of skepticism.

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>But I also find sneaker and stamp collectors equally perplexing,

People for the most part don't get rich off of stamps. Is more of a hobby than an investment.

I know people who made a decent living from sneaker trading though.

Same. Know a handful of ppl making well into 6 figures a year selling on StockX.

Yeah I grew up in the hood and some of the more successful people from my area started their financial life by sneaker trading.

you can make a decent living in all kinds of nonsense if you can either find a way to predict collective mood swings or just get lucky. with millions of people scheming at blockchain stuff there will be thousands getting lucky over and over thinking they are smart

But at what point do we qualify something/someone as “smart”? I’d argue that someone that’s getting lucky over and over again are clearly on to something. As the saying goes: “You create your own luck”.

> But at what point do we qualify something/someone as “smart”?

That's a good point. We can only give our guess based on what we know. For example, people regarded Alan Greenspan as "smart" before 2008. I now think he is an idiot at best and a horrible, malicious person at worst (the truth is probably somewhere in between). Maybe things will change in a few decades and people will then recognize him as "smart" again? It is pretty silly trying to predict the future.

> I’d argue that someone that’s getting lucky over and over again are clearly on to something. As the saying goes: “You create your own luck”.

I present Sir Isaac Newton as a counterexample. Clearly a smart person but just because someone is smart does not mean he was right about everything. In fact, we know now that his nonsensical "work" with alchemy killed him. I am positive that this fad will fail. I am just annoyed that now the name web3 is taken by this nonsense.

Most of the entertainment industry is about predicting collective mood swings.

People made good money selling Beanie Babies, Baseball Cards and other fads... at the beginning of those.

For many people, NFTs are also a hobby not an investment. You just hear about the investors because they are the loudest.

> NFTs are also a hobby not an investment. You just hear about the investors because they are the loudest.

Or the only voice, because no one else is interested in looking at a hash for fun. The real artwork is easily digitally duplicated and so if your hobby was to look at the art, you do not need to purchase the NFT.

Spending a few dollars on NFT "ownership" is worth it to me to have my name next to something, just like spending $10 on a League of Legends skin is worth it to some people to have their name next to a piece of artwork in a video game.

I am literally interested in looking at a hash for fun, since it shows up online in NFT viewers with a little picture of it in my account. $10 is such a small amount of money to me, if I didn't spend it on an NFT then I may have bought a CS:GO skin or hypothetically some Candy Crush lollipop hammers, spent it at the arcade or put it into a slot machine or something. The NFT sparks better conversation.

That's before getting into the fact that if I buy an independently drawn NFT, that $10 doubles as a donation to help support the artist's work, and the NFT becomes public proof that I helped financially support the artist.

so NFTs are Candy Crush lollipops, but not attached to a particular game?

That's probably the weakest of my examples, since lollipop hammers are at least valuable for their utility within a video game.

I would think of art NFTs as more like character or weapon skins - completely useless except that it's visually appealing and you can show off your "ownership" of it to other people within the game. With art NFTs, the "game" so far is just NFT viewing tools, social media profile pics, etc.

Actually, premium Steam profile borders might be an even more apt analogy, since they aren't tied to any game and are also useful solely for vanity.

Of course, then you have NFTs that actually do represent usable in-game items like with Axie Infinity or Gods Unchained, but that's an adjacent topic.

You can also spend money and get a star named after you. I suppose you could assign an NFT to the stellar coordinates and sell the stars as well.

Not only could you sell stars as well, you could sell the same star on multiple chains!

I'd totally buy a star NFT sold by God, which is the correct equivalent.

And how would you verify that the address the NFT is sign with belongs to god?

I would presume God would find a way to make his intentions clear, maybe through his earthly agents in his church.

If you are concerned that this would need to happen off-chain, and I would need to trust my channel to God NFT launch announcement, then you are of course correct, but note that is is not a slight on NFTs.

NFTs are conceptually no different than the "Google Digital Art Marketplace", except people are less concerned it will be shutdown in two years.

Beanie Babies, Baseball Cards, Comic Books all had period of rampant speculation whos markets were destroyed once people who "invested" tried to turn their assets back into cash. Hobbyists just suffer through these periods.

Anecdote time, I was at an Xmas party and people were talking about what crypto they were investing in. I said I speculated a bit, then got spooked and got my money out of Crypto.com. (which wasn't easy). This got everyone interested, they had no idea how to turn their Crypto back to dollars. The market is going up, because there's a one way flow of money.

> I still think NFTs are a bubble that will come back down to Earth eventually. But I also find sneaker and stamp collectors equally perplexing, and people don't discuss these phenomena with the same sort of skepticism.

While I agree with basically all of your comment, I'd like to point out that plenty of people in the online space look at the sneaker market with the same skepticism... but that skepticism isn't stopping teenagers with rented bots from making some serious money buying and flipping new releases.

Skepticism was a poor choice of words on my part. I think skepticism is absolutely the right response for both sneakers and NFTs.

What I should have said is that it seems a lot of people dismiss NFTs with a certainty that doesn't seem justified considering there are other collectibles like baseball cards without any inherently valuable physical properties that have retained their value long-term.

I honestly don't know anything about the sneaker world besides that it exists, so that shouldn't have been my example.

I actually think there is an interesting and nuanced conversation to be had on what fundamentally is different between an NFT and a baseball card. But that doesn't seem to be the conversation anyone is having.

I have been thinking of this as well. Pokemon cards as NFT would work, but why would the Pokemon company (the central entity) be ok with having a decentralised solution for it? What does the company get?

NFTs need support of the big names but they already have better solutions for what they want. Currently NFTs are creating their own set of *mon cards but I don't see why I would want that.

Another example - currently digital games aren't resellable and NFTs could solve that problem. But why would Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft etc want that?

A couple of things to note here:

- New brands are created all the time; you don't have to be Nintendo to do so. maybe you get bought be Nintendo after.

- Big brands ultimately still need to go where the customers are.

- What the blockchain gives your digital good is a sense of permanence. This may not matter for an individual purchaser who simply wants to speculate in a hot market, but there would be no such market if the ownership ledger was run by single company. The narrative that these ownership records exists on a blockchain that will survive any particular startup failing underpins the whole thing.

Well one major difference is that a person could ruin their cards or bend them.

There is also the grading system and you can't really make the card go up in grade, just down.

The whole boom in the 80s really started because boomers came into their prime earning years. When they were kids baseball cards were mostly to put in their bike spokes to make a clicking noise or thrown around so cards in great shape were in short supply. Most importantly though they were not coins or stamps that their parents collected.

I use to listen to a radio show 5 years ago for card collecting that the whole show was basically people calling in and the host telling them the cards were not worth anything.

This past year though is the all time high for sports cards but we already well off the peak.

The problem with NFTs is they came along at the peak of the everything bubble so the prices have nothing to do with reality. Digital collectibles make perfect sense and are no less goofy than anything else people collect.

Not something I would ever buy but ultimately nothing is as goofy as the price of an original Mark Rothko painting. To me that is the gold standard of collectibles and the rationality of the collectibles market.

> I honestly don't know anything about the sneaker world besides that it exists, so that shouldn't have been my example.

Fair enough! As a neat entry point into it: the sneaker reseller world is incredibly high tech: the bot platforms make huge amounts of money and have quite good UX these days. Impressive bits of tech, even if I despise what they're used for.

Baseball cards now have value, in the period of 1990 to 2000 they were pretty worthless after the bubble of the late 80s crashed. They retain value though nostalgia, as soon as they become an investment again, and speculation starts, a new bubble will build, with a crash following.

Totally agree. Sport card collecting is just as ridiculous as the concept of NFTs.

A piece of thin cardboard changing in value based on a guy hitting more home runs.

Stamps and coins are the WW2 generation version of all this.

Practically everyone has their own personal form of gambling and at the same time everyone believes all the other forms of gambling are foolish.

> it seems like it has some real advantages from a business perspective

Even if homeopathy is just placebo, homeopathy has better marketing.

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