NFTs Are Beanie Babies | Hacker News Reader

NFTs Are Beanie Babies

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30 pointsbrushfoot36 comments

My favorite part of NFTs is how celebrities were so quick to get in on the grift, updating their profile pictures, creating NFT domains, whatever they we're getting paid to peddle.

Now that the high is over, all of them are deleting their relationship to NFTs and not looking back.

They aren't even beanie babies, at least you can give a beanie baby to a child to play with.

You honestly don't get it. It's a digital item so you need to use a computer to play with it. No one expects to be able to play with fortnight dances in the real world. They expect to be able to use them in a game. A child can "play" with an NFT using a computer.

I'm not sure if staring at a monkey jpg counts as "playing".

My mother found some of my old ones in storage and gave them to my 5-year-old niece to play with. We laughed because the first thing my niece did: pull all of the tags off! It's kind of nice that she gets to enjoy them as just plain toys, instead of "collectibles".

NFTs are art-projects, status-symbols, patreons, access keys (conferences/private discords), and an experiment in IP law (as owning a Bored Ape confers merchandising rights.) The space is more interesting than just jpegs.

So using the access key as an example:

If I buy an NFT that grants me access to a very exclusive conference, how can I be sure that security will actually let me into this conference? Or how can I be sure at the time of purchase that the conference will actually happen?

No one can be absolutely certain of a future event, but you are being unreasonably negative.

Ok what’s the advantage of an NFT over a regular ticket then?

You would need to have a preexisting trust relationship with the issuer of the NFT. If it was originally minted with a keypair known to belong to the conference organizer or a trusted third party TicketMaster, then it'll probably be honored at the venue. If not, caveat emptor.

So how does this have any advantage over a regular ticket? (Other than “collectibles”)

As a buyer, you could validate the authenticity of a ticket from a reseller, so getting a counterfeit from a scalper wouldn't be a worry. I think that's it, though

I think NFTs will become used culturally to fight the perennial "Eternal September" -- or the phenomenon whereby a place gets ruined because its too popular; They will be used to signal identification with some group and then network with them. Societies/tribes/subcultures are about including/excluding who they do and don't want.

Why not just ban the accounts of people you want to exclude and not open account registration to the public? The system you're proposing presupposes accounts, login, and some form of external trust anchor; I guess you can use the NFT issuer as the trust anchor, but that just pushes the problem of deciding who gets in from account registration to NFT issuance. Users would be able to delete/recreate their accounts without re-proving their in-group status, but that's the only advantage I'm seeing for using NFTs in this system.

"The space is more interesting than just jpegs."

So is gravel.

trolling is such fun, such wow.

NFTs are a receipt. There are some areas where having a receipt/proof of purchase in hand is useful (ticketing/licensing), but that utility is separate from the thing you are proving to have purchased.

NFTs can be interesting if you're interested in novel licensing schemes or safe secondary markets for concert tickets, but it's definitely niche. The "interest in NFTs" beyond that is just everyone's natural inclination to try to make a buck before the music stops.

NFTs are a very broad category of digital property whose ownership is proven and accounted for by very secure blockchains. 99% of NFTs that exist today will eventually be worth 0.

That said, I think it's short-sighted to be writing them off altogether at this point in time.

If you're interested in seeing examples of NFTs which may continue to hold and grow in value over time dig into the 1/1 and generative art world and take a look at what is going on there now. It's very different than monkey jpg's and celebrity NFT grifts.

So hot take, I firmly believe NFT's at this is point an utter scam.

Digital property unlike physical property can be trivially & exactly replicated. That principle is what the entire web is based on. Downloading webpages, images, streaming media, et al are all based on creating an exact copy of the source material on the local machine. The only part that is different is the shared record, which _does not_ prove ownership. It proves that you have the private key for a token, but there is no ownership inferred beyond that of the token.

I do think there was potential for NFT's, particularly banal single use uses¹. But at this point it has become such a parity of itself I can't imagine any use getting any traction².

1: the best example I can think of this is postage for email. Create a token of the hash of an email sender/email receiptant/email subject & body & a timestamp of when the message was /will be sent. Then include the location of this in the email headers. 2: There is also the massive environmental impact. I don't think it is morally sound to support any type of NFT based system at this point.

For the future reference of anyone wanting to write text-replacement addons, using one of the techniques here https://stackoverflow.com/a/50537862 rather than simply doing `body.innerHTML = body.innerHTML.replace(...)` will avoid the problem of breaking links/scripts/CSS that happen to have your target phrase in the URL. Be kind to your DOM!

One of the things to like about the Bored Ape Yacht Club characters is that they are deliberately satirizing the buyers.

An ape because it is non-thinking, with stupid money to spare, buying an NFT out of boredom rather than interest.

Actually making fun of the buyers, your customers, isn’t a new thing in art but this is a particularly apt example.

This seems a bit insulting to apes, honestly. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen experiments that have shown non-human primates to be discerning with respect to cost/reward calculations.

> An ape because it is non-thinking

First, you're an ape. As am I and all other humans.

Second, the other great apes score high IQs:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/08/060801231359.h...

I can't just copy/paste a Beanie Baby although someone with enough skill and tools could create an exact replica of a Beanie Baby and there would be no way to tell the difference. At least you can verify if an NFT came off a specific contract not that it really matters.

yeah, but people can just steal people's digital art and mint fake nfts

Is it any more stealing than saving the digital art on your own computer?

The dude who sold you the bridge, did he steal it?

This meme is MONTHS old. I think "Internet Today" on YouTube used the phrase... 6 months ago.

Just got super nostalgic for my Beanie Baby collection!

You mean NFTs as tickets? NFTs as official driver licenses? Etc? Or hating on the use case of art while never having attended an art gallery showcasing a tin can that costs 5million?

NFTs as you pay top dollar for a random hash string. Because thats what you get. At least you can give the Beanie Babies to your kids to play with them when the market crashed.

Believe babies were not art. In any case my point (very obvious) was that NFTs have many usages and this is only one of them.

NFTs are more like baseball cards.

> After literal hours of reading, I think I know, I also think I am going to cry.

Why are you getting so upset over JPEG NFTs? 90% of all of these NFTs, especially the JPEG ones and projects will collapse.

Let me guess the template complaint: 'Grifters grifting on top of the entire grifting market?'

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