I just realized NFT's have even less overhead than dog shit.
https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/bunny_honey_using_rabbit_manur...
I learn a lot of things on HN. But, this was a surprise, and a genuinely interesting one.
Poop for the win, I guess.
Guano used to be mined for gunpowder, to the point where the US annexed a few islands after the Guano Islands Act of 1856. If bat guano is usable as fertilizer, we could design some basic guano-collecting bat shelters that act like an automatic litterbox for cats.
The bats get a home, and the equivalent of a flush-toilet, while we get bats, less bugs, and plenty of batshit ideas.
> The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) established the Plowshare Program in June 1957 to explore the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The program took its name from the Bible (Isaiah 2:4), "they will beat their swords into plowshares."
https://st.llnl.gov/news/look-back/plowshare-program
Strangely, Wikipedia makes no mention of the source of the name.
I'm going to be a fucking billionaire. I'll finally have a car with doors that open like this!
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220414005731/en/CF-...
The question is will crypto and NFT's push us over the edge before we get to that point. Alongside the thousands of other similar things like people driving large SUV's instead of fuel efficient cars before we go fully electric.
What if the NFT is dog shit?
In particular dog-shit has more intrinsic value than NFTs.
Hard to say how big that proportion is.
These companies are dripping with untrimmed fat and lack of focus on serving customers via building dumb projects that never get used.
No one is melting down their Rolex for base metals. Lol. Yet they can be an extremely sound investment.
Given that, the decades now that Pokemon cards have been sold, the implications buy in would have (i.e., if you went all in on Pokemon cards as soon as they hit the market, you presumably are going all in on every big IP CCG as a potential investment path, or just as liable to pick losers as winners. Those Star Trek CCG cards haven't exactly held their worth), I'm pretty sure you're not coming out ahead even if you did.
Please note that I use the word owing very liberally here
In this case, the card is an image file and the third party is math (the smart contract that issued the token).
Sentimental value is based on sentiment, so you probably shouldn't try to apply objective logic to something that is subjective to every person and expect useful results.
There's no canonical block chain. So the same image can be resold on any number of blockchains and every buyer can claim to be the "owner" with the same legitimacy. Which is zero legitimacy. There's not even a meaningful way to verify the person selling an NFT had any rights to do so.
With a signed baseball card if you have physical possession of it then you're the owner. You have exclusive control over access to the card. Even if the card's inflated value drops because no one is willing to buy it, you still have a physical card to enjoy.
Re legitimacy: how do you prove that any piece of artwork for sale in the real world is legit (the seller isn't violating someone's copyright or selling something stolen)? With an NFT at least, there's no such thing as a fake bored ape; the contract address that defined those is known. You can copy the image, you can even mint it, but it will be a trivially differentiable from the original, since it will belong to a different contract.
Valuation is irrelevant to this discussion.
[1]: https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/standards/tokens/erc...
As with regards to sentimental value, I'm actually in favor of the concept in this context of collectible trading but I hardly see any application in the NFT world like for example yesterday someone posted an article about an NFT built atop Dorsey's debut tweet on the platform that plummeted a whooping 99% in value and the investor lost around $3 mln on his trade, that made me think what sentimental value could this tweet for him to warrant such a ridiculous valuation but I couldn't find an answer except it was just a vehicle of speculation for him, a very risky and foolish one in the end.
They tend to follow that dynamic. NFTs look like the the Gen X / Millenials' beanie babies [1].
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1265821/us-nft-user-demo...
[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nft-to-beanie-baby...
There is no way to determine what collectibles are worth 'investing' in, they generate no cash flow, and they have a large carrying cost. Further, the market for purchase is extremely small; even if you manage to luck out in collecting something that appreciates in value, finding an actual buyer is itself hit or miss.
Even with Rolexes, which you call out, every article I've seen talks about -specific models- of Rolex. Not all of them. And the reason for that is the scarcity; if you happen to buy a sufficiently rare model, that is sufficiently iconic when you want to sell, yeah, it'll be worth more, and provided you can find a buyer (the scarcity compared with demand likely means you can, but the market is inefficient; there is no obvious safe place to sell the watch that will get bids from any and all interested parties, unless it's so high value as to warrant a well known auction house) you can liquidate it at a higher value. But that's a lot of ifs.
But yes, scarcity is precisely it. That is what NFTs are trying to bring to digital assets. Whether it will succeed or not is an outstanding question but I wouldn't straight up dismiss it altogether. Especially considering the sheer amount that has been spent on digital goods in video games which you would say have precisely zero value. Don't get me wrong, the space will be filled with scams just like real world collectables are (late night infomercials for coin collections right?)
Just like with the NFT of the first tweet, 'due diligence' for collectibles is just speculation because there is nothing to base it on. Most investments have cash flow of some sort you can evaluate. Not collectibles. The expected value of every collectible trends negative, since it's a physical thing subject to wear and tear, and most physical things depreciate.
NFTs are worse than collectibles in that the scarcity isn't even of the thing; it's just an artificially created scarcity around "ownership" of an infinite thing. Unprovable ownership, no less.
If you 'invest' in a Rolex, at the end of the day you have a nice watch. If you 'invest' in an NFT, at the end of the day you have a freely available graphic.
In terms of digital goods in video games...yeah; companies have been selling digital goods for their games without NFTs for years. Not sure what NFTs are bringing there.
Collecting physical items is different than NFTs even if you want to collect things just to resell them. With an NFT you've just got a database entry saying you "own" a thing. You don't have any exclusive rights to it. If anyone else can view it they can save a copy and happily enjoy it forever.
With a physical item you have possession of it and exclusive control over access to it. If you let me see it I can't make a copy of it to keep for myself. Even if you don't melt it down for its raw materials it retains some value due to just being a physical artifact that can be experienced.
The blockchain entry is meaningless. There's no canonical blockchain. There's no enforcement around blockchain entries. It's got the same real world validity as a text file on your desktop that says you "own" the Mona Lisa.
People will spend money on status symbols and will continue to for a long time. NFT's (or something else like them) in a world with metaverses will likely become status symbols. Doesn't mean any individual aesthetic NFT has value but the general concept could survive and mirror the trends seen in (expensive) clothing brands.
And the majority of people won't care and will think it's a complete waste of money.
That’s a kind of weird thing to say.
NFTs are uniquely identifiable, self-executing code, that conveys legal ownership to the holder of the NFT. NFTs can and often do represent ownership of an asset, sometimes the asset. That in and of itself gives NFTs tremendous amount of intrinsic value as a tool that represents title of ownership and can facilitate trust-less transfer of title/ownership. I think you are right NFTs in their current use case are most often, but not entirely, used to represent ownership of classes of assets that are meant to be transferred/sold, but intrinsically NFTs still value as a tool that can represent ownership of a give asset.
In other words one might say dog-shit has more intrinsic value than a written contract, except that contracts can and often do create enforceable terms (though not always) thus giving contracts intrinsic value, as evidenced by contracts being one of the most successful tools in all of human history as part of the historic record as far back as the written record goes.
> NFTs can and often do represent ownership of an asset, sometimes the asset.
> That in and of itself gives NFTs tremendous amount of intrinsic value as a tool that represents title of ownership and can facilitate trust-less transfer of title/ownership.
That is a lot of word salad.
Does an NFT confer ownership to any real, personal or intellectual property as understood by any currently existing legal authority?
My understanding is that the answer to that question is "No", invariably presented as "No, but..."
Is my understanding wrong?
I can use my imagination and predict a future where some form of the tech can be. But on a different note, traditional art doesn't need to be understood by any existing legal authority and people collect art. Although a lot of high value art is also used for money laundering. I just don't see a huge difference between the two in the creative category and at least NFTs have some interesting tech to them.
The content of the artwork is immaterial. Physical possession and real ownership are very well legal concepts and well covered by the corpus of laws essentially everywhere. There's even international laws covering possession of physical things.
Well legal nuance often is.
> Is my understanding wrong?
Yes. NFTs can convey ownership of real, personal and/or IP.
For example, take Bored Apes Yacht Club NFTs. If you own a BAYC NFT, then you receive commercial IP rights to an underlying image.
Assuming we both reside somewhere in the US, if I were to begin commercially producing products bearing your image, then you individually (as opposed to Larva Labs the company that created the copyrighted image) could sue me for injunctive relief and damages.
Alternatively, if someone were to mug you and force you to open your phone and transfer your BAYC NFT to their wallet, it would most likely be considered grand theft because the dollar amount of the property involved. Further, you would also have a remedy in civil law to sue the criminal for the damages. It’s not treated any differently that any other property theft.
And of course if you buy the BAYC NFT and later sell it for a profit, the IRS treats it as a capital gain and you have to pay taxes subject to penalties and enforcement action.
From the legal perspective most recently Wyoming passed a law creating and establishing the first DAO LLC legal entity, which is a LLC that can be algorithmically managed by smart contracts/holders of NFTs. This further formalizes legal recognition under the law.
Conceivably you could use it the same way you'd use a ticket to be redeemed for a later good or service which would presumably be recognized by existing legal authority.
I haven't heard of any actual NFTs that granted any powers that your average pog doesn't though.
Not sure how familiar you are with the NFT space, in another comment I used Bored Ape Yacht Club as an example, let’s start with that.
If you own a pog, does that give you commercial rights to monetize the copyrighted artwork on the pog? Admittedly I’m not overly familiar with the pog market, but I don’t think purchase of any pog gives the own any underlying commercial rights to the IP.
It’s true not every NFT/NFT collection bestows the owner with commercial rights to a copyrighted work, but Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs is just one example which provides owners commercial rights to the underlying copyrighted image.
More importantly copyrighted works, like artwork, are not the only assets an NFT can represent. Further, you are correct with your example that they can be, and in fact have been, used to represent the right to redeem for a specific good/service by any bearer. Ticketing is in fact one such real world example.
I can make you a pog that bans you from a club while you hold it too, for the bored apes example. Generally a bouncer will remember you when you come back the next day without the log though, which is a slightly better ban than NFTs can handle
What I can't do is make a pog that burns your house down when you try to sell it or give it away. That's a feature unique to NFTs afaik
I don’t agree that is the only problem they solve, but assuming arguendo all an NFT did was solve the problem of trust, then that alone makes them more intrinsically valuable than dog shit. I mean I think HN has really lost the forest for the trees when it comes to NFTs.
Indeed the whole problem here is that we're trying to assign intrinsic value to something which isn't fungible in the first place (which makes the notion of a market for them somewhat problematic).
So yeah I'm going to maintain that NFTs are, by design, all extrinsic value. And if someone is offering free NFTs or free dog shit you're more likely to get some use out of the latter.
I only own 1 NFT that was free to mint (NFT Worlds) and the floor value is ~$20k, plus they airdropped some tokens worth over $5k. It also just so happens this is one of the NFTs someone will get more use out of than dog shit.
Market value aside, the intrinsic value of the NFT is that at any moment I can trustlessly make it available for acquisition and the prospective buyer doesn’t need to worry that it’s a counterfeit, and I don’t need to worry about any chargeback. However, you are correct that depending on the asset a given NFT represents, there could be additional real world components rendering the NFT to something of legal title to a real world asset, but the intrinsic value of the NFT remains (the ability to trustlessly sell/acquire legal title in a censorship resistant global market).
I don't know where people get this idea that reducing demand for borrowing and increasing savings is supposed to raise the interest rate. Borrowing more money increases the demand for capital and thereby the interest rate.
If the government didn't have to borrow a dollar for every dollar that was taken out of circulation the interest rate would be negative and people would be discouraged from saving more than others want to be in debt.
This is true, but missing an important aspect: This is what happens when you have an economic boom that primarily goes to the already-wealthy.
When there's an economic boom that goes proportionally (or more) to the middle-class and below, there's no need to figure out where the money should go. It goes to fixing up the house, to paying down debts, to paying rent, to buying new clothes.
The only time money "needs a place to go" is when it's coming in to people who already have more than they know what to do with.
Decentralizing wealth and giving employment opportunities to those who actually need them is more of a Rootbug/Freiwirtschaft thing.
Only if you only know how to count to five.
6: Berkshire Hathaway
9: UnitedHealth
10: Johnson and Johnson
11: Visa
12: Walmart
13: JPMorgan Chase
14: Procter and Gamble
15: ExxonMobilYeah, it’s not a place to “park” money. That idea at this point sounds like conspiracy theory stuff.