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Re:Ask HN: NFTs legit or mania? by carmen_sandiego on Saturday March 06, 2021 @05:19PM (#26371042)
I’m personally at the stage where it seems like such obvious silliness that I feel like I must be missing something, and so I avoid expressing this opinion anywhere that I might be held accountable for it at some point in the future. But I still suspect that I’m right, naturally.

Definitely interested to hear arguments to the contrary though.

Re:Ask HN: NFTs legit or mania? by atweiden on Saturday March 06, 2021 @06:42PM (#26371609)
Kind of off-topic, but there's an excellent documentary called The Spider’s Web [1] that explores how society reached this point of valuing increasingly ridiculous displays of paper wealth and the financialization of everything through the lens of British offshore wealth secrecy schemes.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np_ylvc8Zj8

Re:Ask HN: NFTs legit or mania? by awillen on Saturday March 06, 2021 @05:24PM (#26371072)
Wow, only one comment on here and it's exactly how I feel, but articulated better than I would've.

In a theoretical sense I can see how they'd be valuable - limited supply and high demand and all that - but in practice it just seems like the prices of some of these early ones are too bonkers for it to be sustainable.

Re:Ask HN: NFTs legit or mania? by JMTQp8lwXL on Saturday March 06, 2021 @07:55PM (#26372063)
Relieved to see others saying it seems like an inside joke that they just don't get. What I don't understand is how content is verified. If I sell you a digital clip and the rights to it, who's verifying I had the permission to transfer those rights: that I owned the image/video/etc at all?
Re:Ask HN: NFTs legit or mania? by Rule35 on Saturday March 06, 2021 @09:06PM (#26372485)
Nobody and nothing, and this is generally impossible.

Essentially what you do is just encode a trusted party (or multiple) and do what they say. This way you get "trusted" data in the blockchain for scripts to use. For instance, who owns a house, or the closing price of a commodity, or who won the super bowl (or an election). As you can imagine this just makes them a target for corruption.

Re:Ask HN: NFTs legit or mania? by jka on Saturday March 06, 2021 @05:47PM (#26371225)
Given that content creators retain copyright over work they upload to platforms, that platforms explicitly provide that guarantee, and that much of the current NFT craze is around speculation on already-potentially-valuable digital content, I agree.

One possibility that occurs is: for decentralized infrastructure, where no organization can attest to the identity of an original author, then it might make sense for that author to 'claim' their content when they upload it (at which time, for most authors, it would have zero value).

That could be a way for authors to retain and claim value for their work over time, while also making a public copyright claim.

That's all conjecture on my part; I don't really understand the hype yet, either - or whether it will last.

Re:Ask HN: NFTs legit or mania? by jka on Sunday March 07, 2021 @05:44AM (#26374802)
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26373108

A risk that springs to mind is: unlike the legal concept of copyright ownership, an NFT could easily be accidentally lost by the person who holds it.

Re:Ask HN: NFTs legit or mania? by Skhalar on Sunday March 07, 2021 @07:11AM (#26375281)
To me it just looks like another way to get scam everyday and stupid rich people...
Re:Ask HN: NFTs legit or mania? by xpose2000 on Saturday March 06, 2021 @05:28PM (#26371102)
yeah, this is either a bitcoin like scenario that the initial boom is happening or we are a bunch of idiots that we thought this was a good idea. At this point I have no idea. The amount of money going around is eye opening