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Comment by ethanbond | Hacker News Reader

Then in what sense is owning a token owning anything?

> The little prince was still not satisfied. "If I own a scarf, I can tie it around my neck and take it away. If I own a flower, I can pick it and take it away. But you can't pick the stars!" "No, but I can put them in the bank." "What does that mean?" "That means that I write the number of my stars on a slip of paper. And then I lock that slip of paper in a drawer." "And that's all?" "That's enough!"

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry satirized NFTs 70 years before they were invented!

Forget the idea that owning the token represents something. Buying an NFT just means you bought the NFT itself; it does not mean you bought the image, have access to the image, bought any rights to the image. It just means you bought the NFT.

Kinda missing the point of NFTs there, it's a collector's item and I can't spend $2.6m to buy the actual physical book, but I could spend $2.6k to buy an NFT with 1000 editions which was minted by the owner of the physical book. I don't care about Jorodowsky's Dune, but if I was a fan I could then show off my NFT on twitter, or <<the metaverse>> or just print it out and frame it.

FAQS

- Can't someone else just download the image and pretend they own it? Yes, just as someone can buy a fake LV bag and show it off. Other collectors will still know, and don't care about the fakes. As the tech becomes more mainstream, sites like twitter will show whether you actually own the NFT you claim to.

- Can't someone else mint their own NFT? Yes, but like with real collectors items, provenance matters. Just like one can forge a perfect Picasso but without any plausible proof of origin it would not be worth much.

- Can't they decide to mint more "fragments" after the fact, therefore diluting the price of each of the 1000 editions. No, the smart contract that governs the NFT can't be changed.

- Won't the link inside my NFT die? No, the link is usually just a SHA256 hash of the content; with the content being hosted on IPFS. It's all p2p so as long as a host somewhere in the world has a copy, you can always find the content by hash, even if the underlying technology changes with time.

The problem that they don’t have the rights to make digital copies of the book let alone sell digital copies remains

So NFT's are just a way to introduce artificial scarcity for what is otherwise a reproducible digital good? A way for people to flex money on things that don't exist? They're like DLC skins in a video game - worth nothing, other than showing off that you spent $x dollars?

Kinda? Most things are reproducible. Limited edition sneakers are reproducible, and yet scarcity makes them worth thousands of dollars.

Is it stupid to pay $10k for some hard to find sneakers? maybe, but people do it because they have the money and they're collectors, or they want to flex. Is it more real because there's a physical item which costs maybe $20 to manufacture?

It's not like your example with the DLC skins, DLC skins are not limited in any way, the game company can create more and more of them. An NFT collection is limited, there will never be more than the amount the contract specifies (unless the contract leaves that open-ended intentionally). The creator can't simply sell new ones, because using a new contract would make the new ones lose all inherent value.

It's exactly the same as how certain sneakers are worth $10k and others that are from the same brand, same designers, same materials are worth $100 – provenance matters, and knowing it was released in an extremely limited way makes something more valuable.

As far as I understand it, NFTs usually represent the title for the copyright, etc for the piece of art or whatever other non fungible item it is supposed to represent. Honestly NFTs should be pointing to a legal document showing that it's acting that way in addition to a copy of the image asset. 2 urls. Maybe NFTs do or should have an addendum part for transactions, so you can add URL or hash updates as hosting goes down.

When you transfer an NFT from one address to another, you have transferred title to whoever owns the private keys for it.

> As far as I understand it, NFTs usually represent the title for the copyright

You don't understand it. This is false. NFTs do not represent copyrights of any kind, either in theory or in common practice.

You’d need a separate legal contract that was valid in whatever jurisdiction saying the owner of an NFT owned the copyright. At which point the NFT is basically superfluous, because the contract is doing all the work and at that point you may as well just have the contract itself.

An NFT is more like an autographed photocopy of something. Except apparently a lot of NFTs on popular platforms are created from stolen digital art, so you get the fun of not even being completely sure if the autograph is actually by the creator of the art (but it’s verifiable that is is by the creator of the token).

It's just like having your name plate under a painting at a public museum

Not really. Those are on loan, which is not the default state of a piece of art.

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