A shirt whose price increases by 1 euro with every purchase | Hacker News Reader

A shirt whose price increases by 1 euro with every purchase

driesdepoorter.be

63 pointstomsonj36 comments

Currently at #183. Regarding my asking price of €190 for my mint-condition shirt #4, some people say I need to have more faith and HODL. Others say I’m contributing to a worse society by trying to find the next greater fool.

What stops a Chinese factory to print a 1000 shirts with 0004 embroidered and shipped all over the world? This is just a NFT esque grift.

It is actually a reasonable use case for a NFT

Not sure why you are downvoted. This is indeed the exact use case for which NFTs were invented.

Because the NFT isn't the t-shirt. You can own the NFT and the physical t-shirt, and sell the NFT to someone else but give them a fake t-shirt. They don't suddenly have a real t-shirt just because they have the NFT.

But it does require buying one real shirt/NFT for each fake a scammer sells.

We used to have these thing called a Certificate of Authenticity that came with memorabilia, no blockchain required!

NFTs were created for the very reason that certificates of authenticity have no value unless the ledger from which they were issued is not public.

How can you know there wasn't more certificates printed than tee shirt created ?

How do you know it's a real certificate in the first place ?

How about you loose the certificate ?

Seriously there really is no reason to not prefer a digital certificate versus a physical one, it is on all accounts superior.

You certainly wouldn't argue cryptographic keys are useless because we have physical ones on any other matter if it wasn't for following the "I don't like blockchain" trainwagon.

What if you lose the private key to the NFT?

What if you sell the NFT with a fake item?

What if the blockchain splits and there's now two NFTS?

What if people collectively think that NFTS are stupid and forget about them, so now the physical item owners are no longer the same the NFT owners?

Definitely not "on all accounts superior."

You don't raise any problem specific to digital certificates here, but rather just the ones that are present on physical ones and still present on digital ones. No solution is perfect, but it still removes a lot of the previous ones. And for each of the issues, the digital solution is far superior / more efficient than the physical one.

> What if you lose the private key to the NFT?

Just the same as with physical certificates that you loose. You maintain a revocation list and ask the original artist to issue a new token for you after attesting your piece authenticity himself.

> What if you sell the NFT with a fake item?

No system on the planet can prevent you to do that, unless you were able to non destructively watermark your art piece, which has been tried and failed a billion times. Preventing you to display, resell, and risk of prosecution has proved to be a good enough deterrent. If you have a solution to that problem, feel free to disclose it, we will all trash NFTs and switch to it. Or maybe not, because you would still have to store _somewhere immutable_ the actual fingerprints of the pieces ...

> What if the blockchain splits and there's now two NFTS?

You don't have to care about that. At the time of selling, if the buyer asks you to choose either fork, trash your NFT on the blockchain you don't want to support.

Honestly just replace "NFT" with "SSL certificate" in all your questions and you will have an answer.

> What if people collectively think that NFTS are stupid and forget about them, so now the physical item owners are no longer the same the NFT owners?

How do you think that works at the moment ? countless art galleries that certified art provenance checks do not exist anymore. Are you arguing you would prefer chasing down old employees / experts to check your paperwork than run a signature check...?

Before criticizing NFTs I suggest you try to think deeply about what it means to actually work with physical authenticity documents.

> You can own the NFT and the physical t-shirt, and sell the NFT to someone else but give them a fake t-shirt

That's a very smart way to achieve nothing. You now have created an actual copy on a shirt, at your cost, and proceeded to still own a shirt that has no market value now that you don't have it's authenticity proof. Seems like a very smart thing to do.

Usually there are ways to tell counterfeit from a real item.

Only if the cost of making a better counterfeit exceeds the cost of the legitimate item. It's a t-shirt, it doesn't have a chain of attestation.

It doesn't cost much for me to write my signature, but people can still detect forgeries.

Unless the counterfeit shirts were manufactured in the same factory, with the same process, I don't think they'll be identical. Dries Depoorter might be adding the numbers herself by hand, so unless the counterfeiter has the same tools as he does, there will likely be differences.

Respectfully, I fear the latter. Trying to generate value through specious/arbitrary scarcity, and hoping that demand (willingness to pay) will rise because of that arbitrary constraint on supply. Maybe this is the future, when it seems increasingly easy and cheap to create "things" (t-shirts, widgets, design, prose text, code, music ...), and in large number. The original hope for mechanization/automation is that people's free time and creativity could be devoted to creating new, better, or just more personally satisfying things. I definitely do like the t-shirt as a satirical statement on Bitcoin and NFTs though, if that is what is it. Good luck!

Great comment. I have decided to insure my mint-condition #4 for €185. Even though the shirt is its own receipt, €185 is the replacement cost.

I notice 100 shirt owners like me have taken out the same policy. So, average replacement cost for a tragic dry-cleaning mistake in which all 100 insured shirts are lost is actually €235.

Obviously, any insurance company recognizes me as a sophisticated customer, so they offer me a choice: they could preventatively buy and store shirt #185 today, if I should ever need it, for an extra €10, or add a policy rider to insure the €50 difference between the replacement price and €235, for an extra 5.

I know it's completely different, but somehow feels similar to the Million Dollar Homepage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage

Went ahead and headed over to the MDH and clicked on 20 links. Only two worked. Wondermark.com (apparently a comic strip) and... SendShit.co.uk. lol.

Yep, thought the same. Both are social games with very simple rules. Always wondered what makes social games like these, and by extension also social networks interesting or not.

If this is at 183 euros, it means that the artist made 16,653 euros so far. Very impressive.

Are they an artist or one of the greatest marketers

Right. Paraphrasing, any sufficiently popular art piece is indistinguishable from marketing.

This reminds me of that early internet web page where you could buy a pixel for $1.

It seems novelty pricing can be quite successful!

Here's how you calculate the total spent on the shirt so far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_progression#Sum

16,836€ (183 sold)

Weren't 182 t-shirts sold? That would put the total amount made to 16,653.

But yes, that's the way to calculate it.

I think you're right. A price of 183 means that the seller is offering it to potential buyers at 183, not that it has sold at 183. So your calculation is correct.

Yeah my bad, 183 t-shirts were sold but your total is still correct because the first one was sold for 0.

EDIT: Someone bought another one, so my initial total is now correct lol

Did it start at 1€?

> First shirt was embroidered on 25 February 2024 with the price of 0 euro for Dries.

At €0 according to that page. He kept that one himself (so 183 shirts have been distributed, of which 182 were bought). Shirt 0183 is the 184th shirt.

Pinboard pricing model escapes containment.

I wonder what happened to that?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8751170

Interesting. Reminds me of TeeFury, which only sells a T-shirt design for 24 hours.

What's the incentive to buy? Get a shirt with a low number for the prestige?

…or a high number to brag!

Missed the chance to call them NFTshirts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com