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Comment by thesuperbigfrog | Hacker News Reader

It is a verifible, public receipt that someone bought something.

It cannot be faked and anyone can verify that it happened.

Could you give an example of how this works in the real world? Can I create a hash of a PNG of the Mona Lisa and sell that to the highest bidder, and who owns the Mona Lisa in that case? Can I change a single pixel in the PNG, create another hash and sell it again, over and over? Can I sell it once more as a JPEG or in a different resolution? Can I sell it on multiple blockchains? What happens to my ownership of Mona Lisa if I die and nobody knows my private key?

Better to use this tech as digital certificates of authenticity, or records of provenance of digital ownership, rather than a means of tracking physical inventory.

To use a comparison: if you buy a game skin from an app, a record of ‘digital ownership’ is modified in some central database. If you imagine a technological solution to this same problem that doesn’t rely on centralized payment processors and ownership databases, you might end up with something akin to NFTs.

The same concerns seem to apply -- I can change the value of a single pixel in the skin, and sell it again as a new NFT.

In that case, it would be a new NFT, with its own contract address (and hash), and users seeking to collect the original token would not find any interest in a copy. You can test this theory yourself, by minting new CryptoPunks (or whatever) with slightly altered pixels—or even the exact same pixels—and see if anybody values them as highly as the original.

The gamification part of NFTs is to not be the last one holding the bag.

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