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Comment by koonsolo | Hacker News Reader

Your house analogy is not really correct, since in a digital space, you can have an infinite number of the same house, and an infinite number of people living in that house.

I consider it more like a certificate. Some cool architect made an incredible house. Lots of people live in that exact same house. But there is one who can say he bought the certificate straight from the architect himself. It doesn't give him anything extra legally.

You can indeed argue what extra value this 'certificate' really has, except for some bragging rights. But I think that is the point of it: bragging rights.

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Exactly. NFTs are digital trading cards. I don't know why people can't wrap their heads around the simple concept.

Oh they can, but that's just the public appearance; they get excited over them because they see them as potentially high return investments. But of course, the big fish already got their money (and added it to the pile they earned from a couple of scam coins, artificially inflated crypto, etc).

Nobody is under any illusions here. Except the media and their gullible audience; the media is in on it and the people behind it have a financial interest in it, and the gullible audience is easily impressed with techno-jargon, the potential of getting rich overnight, and FOMO.

So Shaquille O’Neal bought this Bored Ape NFT: https://opensea.io/assets/0x60e4d786628fea6478f785a6d7e70477...

Are you claiming that this NFT, which everybody knows passed the hands of Shaq, will be worthless in the future?

Bored Ape is kind of like the art of Andy Warhol. Yes, the creators of bored ape made a lot of money, but so did Andy Warhol. Is there anything wrong with that?

If you want to call that all a scam, that's fine. But somehow calling Bored Ape a scam and Warhol art not, is weird. Warhol also had plenty of critics.

If you don't like NFT's that fine, no problem with that. But maybe you could at least try to understand why some people want to spend money on that. And not "because they are a gullible audience".

> Are you claiming that this NFT, which everybody knows passed the hands of Shaq, will be worthless in the future?

That's very likely, yes. It's just some digital trading card that he once owned. It's nothing in comparison to an artifact like a shirt from a game or even an autograph. And what are those worth? Much much less than what this URL was passed around for between rich crypto wash pumping bros.

> Are you claiming that this NFT, which everybody knows passed the hands of Shaq, will be worthless in the future?

In this case, absolutely. https://checkmynft.com/?address=0x60e4d786628fea6478f785a6d7... ("Asset Strength: Poor")

The NFT is a simple link to an URL hosted at boredapeyachtclub.com. Even if the owner backs up the image on IPFS, the NFT won't point to the IPFS backup; the NFT will always immutably point to BAYC's website.

Inevitably, BAYC will go down, and when it does, the NFT will be a receipt pointing to nothing.

("But it's a receipt to nothing that Shaq once held!" … yeahhh, sure.)

Worthless but beautiful?

Well, they’re digital receipts. Because the thing that it’s representing could still disappear or go away. Maybe that has heaps of value, maybe once the server ther points to the thing you’re meant to own goes down or the asset at the url changes it becomes worth 2 parts of sweet f all

> Because the thing that it’s representing could still disappear or go away.

Not if you, the owner, or someone else, stores a copy. Even if the URL associated with the URL is broken, it doesn't change the fact that it still represents the thing people want it to represent.

NFTs are not a backup system for your data.

But then the receipt is even less representative of the underlying thing you’ve gone and bought in opensea or whatever. Like, it’s not even pointing to the same bits on the same platter somewhere that’s meant to be so special.

Don’t get me wrong, I get that it’s not meant to be a data backup and it can be totally disassociated from the ‘thing’ - but setting that concept up and just being a bit more aware of what you are actually getting might make some people a bit more hesitant to buy a digital receipt with a url that may or may not 404 in the future. Great, you’ve got a receipt - for something that potentially millions of people also have a copy of. What makes your receipt at that point, if/when the underlying disappears, worth anything?

And how do you want to prove that the copy you made had the same content that was stored behind the URL? What if the host changes the content behind that URL to something completely different. No one can prove that it's actually the thing you copied that was behind this NFT. It's really worthless in my eyes.

A hash of the bytes is really is really useful for this kind of authentication. But for actively traded and popular NFTs that isn't strictly necessary. The community knows what they represent.

They are not cards, they don't store any meaningful data unless you could make the resource immutable.

They are more like "Digital trading links-to-assets-you-have-no-control-over"?

Your mistake is thinking that it matters where the data is stored. But storing your trading card image file in the Github Arctic Code Vault just makes it more permanent, it does not change the nature of your NFT at all; neither does storing it on the blockchain.

The thing is, that the NFT is just worthless data as long as you don't know what's behind it. And if the people that currently do no longer believe in NFTs the nodes will disappear and your data stored on the blockchain is gone as well. In the end the blockchain is just a decentralised transactional database, I really don't get the fuzz about it. With proof of stake it even looses a big chunk of that decentralisation.

Doesn't the nature of the NFT have anything to do on the content to be found under that link?

NFTs are promoted with those images, and if that's unimportant, then what's the difference between an NFT and some random coin transaction?

Of course, but that content can still exist if the link is broken.

In fact, the file is itself only one if many representation of thr artwork. Reencode the jpeg, you get a different file, but we still think it and the NFT are linked.

That's what they want you to believe. The truth is, to keep the influx of money into the crypto-sphere flowing, you need more people to invest money. This gets harder though, because most people who really care about crypto already invested.

There are only so many monkeys you can attract.

NFT is a solution to this problem: You promise a high return of investment for additional monkeys to invest.

This keeps on going until the whole thing crashes down burning. Those who invested first and really care already pulled out their share. The monkeys will suffer though.

Thanks for calling me a monkey. Also thanks for calling me smart of taking profits (I can't lose in crypto anymore).

I used some of my profits to send Ukraine some ETH, so did many other people I see.

So monkeys invest in crypto. What do you call those that keep fiat? Fiat like the Turkish lira or Ruble.

What about a Russian who bought some stablecoins right before the war, is that also a monkey?

There's some "lots-of-money-involved-therefore-valuable" fallacy going on here. The thinking goes:

* NFTs are explained, they sound kind of pointless

* but there is so much money involved!

* so much money involved brings lots of smart folks

* there are lots of smart folks working in NFTs space, they cannot all be wrong

* hence, there must be a there there, and we're are not smart enough to understand it

intense post-truth world vibes here

If they were just trading cards, then they'd be bad, a Ponzi scheme where everybody's trying to convince everybody that their trading cards will be worth more in the future.

(One way the scammers promote the Ponzi scheme is by saying "these trading cards are so much more than trading cards," in deliberately confusing ways. That's why "people can't wrap their heads around the simple concept." The scammers are trying to conceal it.)

But NFTs are way worse than trading cards, because every time you transfer one, it wastes more electricity than an ordinary person uses in a year. So this Ponzi scheme is damaging the planet, too.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 "Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C"

Buying assets low and selling high cannot be a ponzi scheme, no matter how you try to position said asset.

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