There are people who happily pay $10,000+ for an Italian purse. There are people who are happy with a $10 Chinese knock-off.
There are people who happily pay $2,000 for an Apple laptop. There are people who are happy with Linux on a $100 machine from Goodwill.
There are people who go outside to feel the breeze. There are people who are happy with a fan.
I don't understand NFTs at all. But I have to remind myself that often value is subjective.
I feel like NFTs today are roughly where altcoins were in 2012. Lots of good fundamentals to the ideas, but most of the implementations are really missing the mark. Whatever the NFT equivalent of Ethereum, Zcash, Sia, etc is... it's not here yet. And it may yet be a year or two until it first appears.
On the other hand, the morality of NFT's is already mainstream while the usefulness is an open question that's leaning toward "not really".
This is the weirdest sentiment that I see all the time on HN, but enough people express it that I have to accept it as both widespread and genuine.
However, I think that if you think $2000 US for an Apple laptop isn't the best value for money you can get on the laptop market, then you're either very good at finding bargains or completely bonkers.
Yes, macOS is no longer for developers. Yes, for extreme workloads I use my linux ryzen7/2080ti or the cloud rather than the MBP. Yes, they had a strange couple of years with the keyboards.
But honestly, they're the best hardware hands down. Not just the best absolutely, but the best per dollar. And personally I love macOS, but I'm just a manager these days so I guess I would, right?
It's rock solid running win 10 pro, has extremely low DPC/ISR latency for ASIO music recording with Ableton, can chew through blender modeling with cycles, and I can do all my dev work in vs2019 and intellij with zero hiccups.
I challenge your assertion that you can't find equivalent if not superior hardware per dollar as what apple offers. Maybe you're just not looking hard enough.
FWIW, I used my Trump Bumps to buy a new MacBook for my wife, and I plan to use my Biden Bonus for a new MacBook for me. (Assuming Apple releases one with a large enough screen in the next six months.)
An NFT is really just a digital autograph. Not even really an autograph, isn't it a cryptographic signature? Which would surely need to be random by nature, so the artist can't even do something unique with that. It's external to the work itself.
You can say this about literally every non-productive asset, including NFT's real-life counterparts eg. painting or trading cards.
When imaginary cryptohashes have limited supply, it's kind of pointless, or at least there is nothing good for the buyer or society.
Furthermore digital assets undergo similar attrition to physical goods through people losing access to their goods. The BTC block chain is notorious for its forgotten wallets.
The same can be applied to physical goods as well. Why do people pay millions for the original painting, even though they could probably get a replica that's identical to the naked eye for much less? Clearly they're interested in more than it being "as good as the original".
I'm a dev at pruf.io and this is one of the many things our platform is designed to do.
What scares me is that there are artists who I don't think understand how scammy this is. They've drunk the kool-aid and accepted the handwaving "you don't need to know how it works, just that it exists" explanations. Creators who wanted to make an honest dollar but ignorantly perpetuated the scam could find them themselves in hot water.
To be fair, if they're doing it honestly the value proposition is "Support the artist and get bragging rights for having done so!", which doesn't become a scam (or at least any more of scam, depending on your view of bragging rights) just because there's a scammy secondary market that the patron doesn't necessarily have to participate in.
I think there is a case to be made for NFTs, but would also not be surprised if you're right that it ends up with mostly bag holders.
The only thing you "own" in the physical goods sense of precluding other people from using it, is the NFT itself. It is exclusively assigned to you, other people can't conceptually say they own it.
Another example of how that divide manifests is how would someone show off their NFTs? Art is easy, hang it on the wall conspicuously with canister lights. You could do the same with an NFT piece, or you could put it on your profile or something, but anybody can do that. You're not showing off your NFT, you're showing off the art. Your NFT is just a jumble of cryptographic data. It has to be random for functional reasons, I presume, so it's not like the author can make your NFT a piece of art in and of itself.
NFTs are revolutionary for digital assets and allow for something beyond the world of licences as well as much greater scaling.
Fads like CryptoKitties are completely irrelevant to the core tech, just like Bitcoin is in the grand scheme of things irrelevant to the potential of block chains.
ETH NFT refers to the smart contracts that you would use to digitize ownership of a house or any other (physical or financial) unique asset that you might trade.
You can nest an NFT under an ERC20 token, too, so that you can sell partial ownership tokens in your NFT.
Of all the use-cases in crypto, I think digitizing ownership is the one that seems most likely to be actually used for a non-trivial volume of non-speculative trading.
When it comes down to it, the entry on the local tax rolls or property registration office is going to be the one that counts.
NFTs are the digital equivalent of a vehicle title, that's the strongest usecase (proof of ownership), IMO. I'm not too keen on the collectibles/art usecases, they're probably the easiest/low-effort ones.
ex, if the law requires an actual notarized handwritten signature to transfer ownership, what you and I do on the blockchain will simply not count when it comes down to it.
If I accidentally burn the NFT that represents ownership of my house I'm definitely still the owner of the house, there's no world where a government would shrug and say "I guess nobody owns it anymore, oops"
That value does not disappear if the state + courts also build in processes for over-ruling the on-chain owner of an object and forcibly transferring it to someone else. The core value here comes from how much easier it is to clear all of the red tape in a fully programmatic world.
Before I buy an NFT, I'll have to check the GovLedger anyway to make sure that NFT is actually that person's to sell, and hasn't got a lien on it or something else that means they can't actually sell it.
If the idea is the blockchain is permissioned and the state can choose which transfers to allow and can forcibly recover NFTs, why not just use a database?
Regarding liens, it seems simple enough to say that if someone does not own an NFT "free and clear", then they cannot transfer it "free and clear". It might even be a different NFT entirely (a "liened NFT," where the original un-liened NFT is held in trust by yet another smart contract, with limited or conditional ownership rights given to the lien holder.)
The reason not to use a database is interoperability. Any smart contract can transfer these NFTs according to infinitely nuanced scenarios, and only during disputes would a court need to get involved and forcibly transfer the NFT according to a judgement.
The typical case where all is not equal in finance is where currently parties transact via a trusted intermediary like a clearinghouse (who might take a 1% fee, say), and a startup wants to allow parties to transact directly, thereby capturing the fee as upside. Large financial institutions don’t tend to trust small startups that might implode any month, but they can (sometimes, it seems) be persuaded to trust a distributed ledger.
Suppose I die taking my wallet keys with me; how do my heirs inherit my NFT-ized house?
If the government is minting these NFTs and deciding which transfers are legitimate and which aren't, why are we bothering with all this?
Basically: at some point, an NFT will become separated from the ownership as recognized by the people who count (banks, governments, etc). Without a mechanism to reunite them, the NFT is not very useful; but if there is some sort of mechanism, it's really that mechanism that determines ownership, not the NFT and you might as well use a centralized ledger.
It’s important to understand that these tokens aren’t going to replace the existing legal system (much though the anarchist/libertarian wing of the crypto community might wish it). They just enable certain transactions to occur with lower overhead and time delay. This is about improving friction in the happy path, not providing new solutions for every conflict case.
Personally I don’t think there is a reason to put your primary residence one the blockchain (you don’t trade it that often). But it’s interesting for places where you might want to trade assets at higher frequency (eg micro loans, supply chain finance, etc) and maybe there is a real-estate trust angle too.
No they aren't, and least not until they're recognized by law as such.
I’m sure there are many asset classes where you can’t write such a contract but I don’t think your categorical rejection is correct.
Are you implying that laws should come before inventions/ideas?
So, let me get this straight: you have an NFT that represents the deed for a vehicle, but the law does not recognize the NFT as the deed for the vehicle... if you don't see any problems with that, boy do I have a bridge to sell you.
You have a piece of paper that represents the deed for a vehicle, but the law doesn't recognize the "paper" as the deed for the vehicle...(this during the time of clay tablets)
Was that clear? or do you still have that bridge for sale?
There are people who sell deeds to land on the moon (https://lunarland.com/), but they're worth little more than the paper they're printed on, because they have some of the same deficits in legal recognition that NFTs have. Those people have no more ability to will their certificates into having legal force than NFT advocates have.
In short, an NFT is little more than a trading card (representing only itself) unless a court would side with the possessor of an NFT against competing claims for whatever property it's suppose to represent (e.g. transferring ownership of the property/rights to party A using traditional means AND transferring the NFT to party B). If the court picks party A, the NFT meant nothing.
I made a point, which you missed and you're telling me that I missed your point? seriously?
I'm just telling you that this technology is suitable for doing the job of a paper-title, but in a digital way. Is it that hard?
So, it's made, and costs 150 a bottle. Why? Ostensibly, it's good scotch whiskey, and it's a limited run, 10 years in the making.
So why tokenize it?
Gamification.
Only people with the actual bottle can play.
Open it, scan the qr under the cap, then you can share the official tweet from posh-makers whisky announcing the opening of the bottle.... "that was us last night, good times all around!" maybe you get a 25 dollar certificate for your next limited run bottle. It's a social flex, and it's great publicity for the brand.
...and the remaining 237 bottles just went up in price. Fast forward a few years, and somebody has one of the last three bottles.... Which is mostly because he can actually prove he has one of the last three. Now its worth 270k.
This is supposedly the company the movie Ex Machina used for the CEO’s Jackson Pollock.
I’ve been tempted to get one from them. :-)
https://www.quora.com/Did-they-use-an-original-Jackson-Pollo...
I'm sorry, but I simply don't. Not trying to be contrarian, but reproductions bring me a very different joy and appreciation than provable originals. I agree some things in crypto are scams, but NFTs, in my opinion, have a really important function in some domains.
The whole things feels like a scam to me. Taking the best part about digital goods (that they’re non-rival) and attempting to hack on scarcity for the purpose of exploiting a psychological flaw.
The most charitable interpretation is that it's a way to reward artists for creating digital art in a new way.
The HN article for this comment thread shows the risk here though. If the monetary incentives become pushing these tokens, then the most successful 'creators' will be the people that can maximize getting people to pay for these dumb tokens. The incentives are bad and you end up with the 'artists' being mostly ICO style scammers.
It's like the corrupting influence of ads on media, tokens value will be a similar but different corrupting influence.
You could argue how is this different than monetizing anything? I think it's because of the pseudo-value/speculation driving people to spend more on the hope of a future return. That's the psychological hack of fake scarcity.
These tokens are already diversified beyond anyones control.
Tokens take that a step further and make it worse.
Incentives create the world. On one side you have Apple Arcade trying to align incentives for a better global outcome/end state. On the other you have in-app purchases, loot boxes, and NFTs - trying to maximize profit for the house.
A stone is a physical object, some stones are worth more than others.
You can call the fact that humans apply value to thing a scam but that would give you a suboptimal understanding of the world.