Comment by amanzi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amanzi | Hacker News Reader

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This is the key quote for me: "...leaving many baffled as to why so much money is being spent on items that do not physically exist and which anyone can view online for free."

I honestly do not understand the current state of NFTs... I mean, I understand the technology, and I understand what a smart contract is, but really - what is the point of "owning" this tweet: https://twitter.com/jack/status/20 and why would you pay $2.9m to "own" it? Another article (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/22/jack-dorsey-sells-his-first-...) tries to compare "owning" the tweet/NFT to owning a virtual autograph, but that still doesn't make sense to me.

What if Jack Dorsey quit Twitter in a rage and deleted his account? That tweet would vanish. Or perhaps Jack gets fired from Twitter, and Twitter deletes his account? What exactly does the owner of that tweet get for their $2.9m?

It may well me that buying tweets is stupid, and that no one will ever again pay even a dollar for the NFT of that first tweet, I don't know.

Nevertheless - it doesn't matter if Jack Dorsey deletes his account, or even Twitter shuts down. The tweet cannot disappear in the same way that all historical events continue to be a part of the human story. It sure would be nice to have a copy - the Internet Archive probably will, and surely others. But the fact that Twitter existed and that Tweet existed will never stop being true, and once the website disappears, nothing changes for the person who owns that NFT: There are no rights that he loses, nothing tangible that disappears for him.

You might as well buy the rights to the first transatlantic flight, or maybe just go name a star.

Well notice that you don't "buy the rights" in any sense, but sure, someone might buy "the first transatlantic flight", if it was sold by the pilot who flew it, much like Tim Berners-Lee sold an NFT to the WWW.

The key difference to naming a star, as always, is that the person selling this thing to you has a moral claim to it.

Quite honestly I feel like them buying it only mattered to the person who got paid.

While they may have lost nothing, did they gain to begin with?

I find it hard beyond bragging rights and then finding the next fool

Maybe you can sell an NFT of the NFT itself?

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