Hacker News Reader

Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

None of that requires NFT though. Literally all of that can be accomplished as well if not better without crypto being involved in any way.

View on HN

Yes, that is another debate. My comment was more of a response to the many others I've seen debating whether NFT implies ownership of the art or what happens if the server hosting the image goes down (less of a problem if IPFS is utilised). My point is, it's irrelevant. And it never implied ownership of the art, so people who try to pass it off as such are woefully misunderstanding the technology and are probably scammers, and the people buying them are idiots. Cryptokitties, cryptopunks etc. are only valuable because they were the first ones doing these things, sort of like the "million dollar webpage" back in the day. There is literally no point in making an NFT without utility now, unless the minter is someone popular and in that case the NFT is a bet on their fame rising in the future and becomes a speculative asset (just like regular celebrity art).

> Cryptokitties, cryptopunks etc. are only valuable because they were the first ones doing these things, sort of like the "million dollar webpage" back in the day.

Exactly. A few original JPEG NFTs will survive, but 90% of the late comers and copycats will fail.

> There is literally no point in making an NFT without utility now, unless the minter is someone popular

Precisely. That ship has sailed and this is why you see a popularity of copycat NFTs JPEGs upon copycat JPEGs since that they know it is a scam. They are taking advantage of the market before it collapses just like the wild west of ICO scams in 2017. Now the SEC has put a stop to that and has regulated them as securities, [0] making unregistered ICOs as illegal. Similar regulations may happen to NFTs.

The only form of NFT that seems to have some value, valid use-cases and utility is a blockchain domain name which is likely to surpass the nonsense of useless NFT JPEGs.

[0] https://www.sec.gov/ICO

It is not a different debate, though. If, as you say, there is literally no point in making an NFT without utility now, yet being an NFT does not distinguish NFTs' utility from the alternatives, then what is the point? It is just that which follows in the quote: ...unless the minter is someone popular and in that case the NFT is a bet on their fame rising in the future and becomes a speculative asset (just like regular celebrity art).

Using NFTs offloads asset management to a generalized third party solution so you don't have to implement your own marketplace and trading, the decentralized claim being the main thing making it viable (otherwise you'd just be handing over the keys to your digital warehouse to some random entity). Whether that is desirable or the right fit for your application is another question, but the tech clearly has differences.

IMO the benefit to users is the ability of self custody and the benefit to businesses is that you can easily plug in to an existing ecosystem. Do you really want to spend time developing your own version of various things like marketplaces and trading for your platform or do you want to just make an NFT and utilize the existing ecosystem around them.

If you own the marketplace you can take an x% cut of every transaction. Seems like something that would pay for itself pretty quickly?

1. You may not want to dedicate resources to creating and maintaining a market place. It's much less work to just add a digital item to your game / product. There might be a better use of your time / resources.

2. There already exist NFTs that take a x% cut and give it to the creator.

>IMO the benefit to users is the ability of self custody and the benefit to businesses is that you can easily plug in to an existing ecosystem. Do you really want to spend time developing your own version of various things like marketplaces and trading for your platform or do you want to just make an NFT and utilize the existing ecosystem around them.

Literally every major game company has created their own marketplace despite Steam existing. So yes: they really do want to create their own marketplaces. If NFT's somehow gain traction in mainstream games, they aren't going to allow things from some random public blockchain, they will force users onto their own. You're delusional if you think they're going to forego that revenue stream because of the one-time investment of creating a market. That's not even a rounding error in their budgets.

I never said that this would be good for large game companies. To me NFTs remove control from them which is not desirable. I think it fits better with smaller companies or people outside of the games space who just want to quickly add digital items to their products which are able to be bought, sold, traded, etc.

Similarly self custody isn't great for all users. It's great that a company can get you back your items if you get hacked.

I just gave some pros and not any cons in my previous post.

Building a marketplace is too hard, but building a in game system to handle any kind of asset with any kind of specification that user might wanna play with is easy?

>building a in game system to handle any kind of asset with any kind of specification that user might wanna play with is easy?

I never said that, nor did anyone bring up something like that. Your game system only needs to handle your own items. It's on the developers of wallets and NFT marketplaces (aka not you) on supporting all different kinds of NFTs.

Web3 and its communities sure make all the above easier to setup and get working.

I don't know if it is easy but it is certainly expensive (I see people paying $200 to create an NFT.)

Most NFTs are still made on the Ethereum mainnet which has huge gas fees indeed. There are alternative protocols which make it cheaper but it's a pain (and expensive) to move over to those protocols.

There are some projects working on reducing this though, for example zkSync is doing some really interesting work on a layer2 solution that feels like you're staying on the Ethereum mainnet but the fees are highly reduced thanks to the zkRollup algorithm.

I saw my friend mint an NFT for $1.40 the other day just to showcase the work zkSync has been doing, at this cost it'd be super interesting for real world uses beyond just art provenance.

What if you were a journalist in Crimea and wanted to provide content behind a paywall like Substack or Patreon?

What it seems you're arguing is that the use-case that justifies NFTs is facilitating criminal behavior. (In this case, it's criminal behavior that you or I may deem socially or politically beneficial, but nonetheless criminal.)

A decade on from The Silk Road and this is where we continue to be with crypto.

It's not illegal for the journalist to receive donations and sell their work.

By specifying Crimea and ruling out existing payment structures for journalism based around traditional banking like Substack or Patreon, you imply that the journalist in question is in some way committing an illegal or transgressive act that requires a degree of anonymity from governmental authorities.

No, companies based in the US or that want to do business in the US are the ones that cannot serve the Crimea-based journalist, but the journalist is in the clear.

What if I'm a guy who is really good at picking the winner (and spread) on a football game? Or the movement of a stock or other financial instrument within a specified period of time?

Now what if I'd like to sell access to that genius on a marketplace, locked behind an NFT, bid on, tracked and tied to a leaderboard etc. Now let's say I have generated Token X with the value of "TSLA Feb. 29 2022", inside of which lies the closing price of Tesla on that date, with the value being tied to my previous performance on similar picks...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com