> It has honestly surprised me that a bunch of people I thought were smart...

Nobody is universally brilliant. Newton spent as much time on alchemy as he did physics. Maybe NFTs are just the modern alchemy, as they do seem to turn random items into digital gold.

>Newton spent as much time on alchemy as he did physics

I don't think that was an act of unbrilliance. It just didn't happen to work out.

> It just didn't happen to work out.

Nobody is privy to the full content of Newton's mind and his mental processes. One could also argue that his metaphysical preoccupations positively influenced his scientific accomplishments. Heck, at a meta level, is not Newtonian Physics intellectual 'Gold' end result of processing the 'Lead' in his head? That's alchemy.

I mean splitting and fusing atomic nuclei is something that happens all the time. Hard to claim he was wrong, just a few orders of magnitude off on the energy required to do it.

He also tried his hand at investing, without much success:

https://www.businessinsider.com/isaac-newton-lost-a-fortune-...

Newton also lost huge sums of money investing poorly. Which is quite literally the same thing as now.

Was it really alchemy or proto-chemistry? After all Newton lived in time when chemistry was only starting to be defined. And it took quite a while to come up with proper ideas.

Oh but NFTs have a very clear value proposition: money laundering.

They literally have no value other than what is attributed to them, so if you want to clean up some money you just have to buy an NFT with legit money for X, then sell it to yourself using less-than-legit money.

Now you own all legit money, and have only spent some minor transaction fees.

Will that really work long run? It seems too obvious.

But thank you, that’s the most concise explanation I’ve seen for exactly how people could use NFTs to launder money.

If this is happening, would you expect to see a bunch of NFTs go from nothing, then sell for a large amount, then not move again?

Oh also I think you’d also have to declare capital gains tax to do it properly, but that’s better than laundering money via income.

> Will that really work long run? It seems too obvious.

it is supposedly something that happens often with physical art, and there have been a lot of attempts to prevent it via regulation, e.g. the AML Standards for Art Market Operators[0].

In crypto space as usual we're at the "frontier" state where lack of regulations allow shady behaviours, and they will until the authorities catch up and crypto becomes "normalized".

[0] "Once purchased, the art can disappear from view for years, even decades." https://www.moneylaunderingnews.com/2019/03/art-and-money-la...

Wow that means OpenSea is like the Silk Road of money laundering.

I became convinced that NFTs are worth something after understanding that there is little difference between an outrageously expensive watch and a rare NFT.

One shows off your wealth in person, the other will let you show it off online.

How? You can't see if I own any NFTs right now. You can't see it in gmail. You can't see it on facebook. You don't get ads saying "rich NFT holders in your area!". No one knows or cares if you own an NFT.

You can see what people own by their wallet address.

The watch example is apt, similar to a Richard Mille being a flex that 99% of people won’t ever notice or understand it conveys status.

People are going to flash their wallet addresses at bars or at business meetings?

We already have strong social taboos about flashing bank accounts. The whole point of status good is they convey wealth rather than tactlessly showing a total.

You've never seen where these brags occur?

See if this feels familiar:

Paris Hilton buys NFT of Hello Kitty! creator's DNA, says "crypto is the future"

Paris Hilton is possibly the world's richest and best known idiot. The flex here is having a news article written about you. Paris Hilton bought an NFT to stay relevant. Not to become relevant.

The fancy watch market is much much broader than celebrities

"Trust me this watch makes me very cool!"

That’s only because the infrastructure for it isn’t there yet. Doesn’t mean it won’t eventually happen

Twitter is adding ownership verification for NFT profile pictures.

> Twitter is adding ownership verification for NFT profile pictures.

Twitter seems to have too many engineers.

> Twitter is adding ownership verification for NFT profile pictures.

Then what if someone mints new NFTs based on (say) the same images used for the cryptopunks cartoons?

You could get your extremely online bragging rights for an affordable price.

Except you can't, practically speaking--as the price is baked into the "brand".

But you’d get twitter verification. Or will twitter only recognize one chain for NFTs?

How do you handle someone minting multiple nfts of the same image on different chains?

Twitter, if they build their verification correctly, should determine NFT's sovereignty via the smart contracts, not the chains. Thus, CryptoPunks will only exist on one chain & one smart contract.

But what stops someone from minting the same jpegs elsewhere? Possible there is some mechanism I’m unaware of

My thesis on this revolves around the idea of "brands." I wrote about it more in depth here: https://www.robertchung.me/people-dont-understand-nfts

> I became convinced that NFTs are worth something after understanding that there is little difference between an outrageously expensive watch and a rare NFT.

> One shows off your wealth in person, the other will let you show it off online.

That's some pretty faulty logic, there. You're looking at it from the wrong end: it doesn't matter if you can imagine an object could be used as a wealth-status symbol, what actually matters is if it's actually recognized as one by a community with enough power for their recognition to matter.

Also, expensive status-bauble watches are stupid, too.

They are stupid, but rich people sometimes wear them for a reason, if they ever get stranded in a messy situation and their wealth is confiscated, they can still sell their watches and other miscellaneous items to bootstrap themselves outta poverty zone.

> They are stupid, but rich people sometimes wear them for a reason, if they ever get stranded in a messy situation and their wealth is confiscated, they can still sell their watches and other miscellaneous items to bootstrap themselves outta poverty zone.

Huh? That doesn't make any sense.

1. "if they ever get stranded in a messy situation": I'm interpreting that as a situation where they need to barter the watch or use it as a bribe. However there's hard limits on how much they could realistically get for a watch due to the seller's desperation and the buyer's risk (I'm guessing a few thousand dollars), even if they paid tens of thousands or more for it. The cheapest gold Rolex you can find (or maybe even a knock off) makes far more sense for this use case than some elite status watch.

2. "if ... their wealth is confiscated": anyone confiscating their "wealth" to the point where they're in the "poverty zone" more than likely will confiscate valuables like $100k watches, jewelry, art, etc. Planning for that to be your "back up wealth" is about as dumb as planning on living in your garage if you ever lose your home.

Expensive watches are supply limited (both by the brand’s intention and the availability of watchmakers).

Besides, expensive watches look really pretty and shiny. NFT is not.

> Expensive watches are supply limited

Exactly like NFTs. Not defending NTFt's just pointing out your argument isn't making much sense as presented.

The thing that is attached to NFTs is generally not supply limited though (in the sense that is much easier to create a digital thing, whether that is game item, art or some kind of record than a watch).

I can create some trillions digital bits, then mint trillions NFTs for each of them.

Can't you sign a lot of time the same hash? Just use another initialization vector, salt, hashing algorithm, and you get a new nft.

One of the key aspect of blockchains is the fact that they're - by construction - timestamped.

But who cares? I mean outside of crypto enthousiast folks.

This would make sense if collectors weren't hiding behind pseudonyms such as "@crypto888crypto" and "@7Surfer7Silver7".

Hint: it's not about status. It's about pumping the price of eth.

The exact same thing happened with Ethereum (and crypto in general) in 2017. But look how much it's rebounded after that crash. I still don't think it's a good long term investment, but it's been an amazing way for some people to make life-changing money. Sadly, I'm not one of them.

It's a good investment dude. I'm not trying to shill or anything here but Ethereum is literally the "internet" of finance. It democratizes and brings access to basic financial building blocks like we've never before seen in history and truly anything can be built on it. Unironically it's the future of finance. Don't listen to the Luddites and cynics here. Do the research yourself and try it out for yourself and it becomes glaringly obvious.

Using defi is how I would imagine typing in a chatroom or accessing a website felt back when the web was just in its infancy.

You are 100% right, and also downvoted.

Welcome to HackerNews, a place that should think startup-like progressive, but really is technology conservative.

I love defi simply for the fact that I hold the keys to my money, not banks or a central entity.

the problem with crypto is that people see it and treat it as an investment and a commodity, not an actual currency. People horde crypto and don't spend it.

Ethereum?

Or Ethereum2?

>It has honestly surprised me that a bunch of people I thought were smart really think NFTs are a good long term investment.

How is this relevant to a Bitcoin conversation?

What surprises me is the constant negative drum beat against Bitcoin on Hackernews. Mostly based on speculation.

> What surprises me is the constant negative drum beat against Bitcoin on Hackernews.

Why does that surprise you? As the article from this discussion shows, there is strong evidence supporting the idea that crypto in general "it's just a big scheme".

Those of us who have been here for a long time heard this story plenty of times before.

Ah, but this time it's different?

Distributed technology eats everything.

> Those of us who have been here for a long time heard this story plenty of times before.

Getting into a pyramid scheme early does not grant anyone any special insight onto how it is not a pyramid scheme. All they get is the benefits from getting in early, confirmation bias, and an irrational belief that not only past performance guarantees future results but also there is absolutely no growth ceiling.

I would love to be in a pyramid scheme where people keep sending me money.

But that is not the case with crypto is it.

Maybe take a look what pyramid schemes really look like. Here is the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme

You are just looking at one specific type of pyramid scheme. See for example:

> Matrix schemes use the same fraudulent, unsustainable system as a pyramid; here, the participants pay to join a waiting list for a desirable product, which only a fraction of them can ever receive.

You pay dollars expecting to get a lot of dollars in the future. This is why most pay for bitcoin, and since it is impossible for everyone to make money it is a pyramid scheme. The future payoff can only happen if a lot of other people pay more dollars, which will be used to pay you. And since the system constantly extracts money to pay for all the hashing it is impossible for everyone to even break even, people will lose a ton of money in the end.

This is different from normal currency trading. When you buy dollars you are betting on the US government and the US market to be strong so the dollar gains value. Bitcoin however doesn't have any backing like that, it is a negative sum game.

Edit: The core concept of pyramid schemes is this, basically it is a business model which requires infinite new entrants to be sustainable. Bitcoin is like that, it only works as long as bitcoin enthusiasts continue to recruit new people to invest in bitcoin. Hence bitcoin is a pyramid scheme, even if there isn't any tax on sub transactions.

> Pyramid schemes are based on network marketing, where each person in the pyramid is tasked with bringing in their own subordinates and in turn profiting from their sales or recruitments. This fails because it essentially requires an infinite number of people to join the company.

First of all, I didn't have to go into a waiting list to buy crypto.

Second of all, I didn't buy crypto because it will give me an infinite supply of money given to me by subordinates.

I buy crypto when I think it's undervalued. I sell when I think it's overvalued. Doesn't everyone????

I'm also not recruiting any subordinates. So sorry, but your pyramid scheme theory falls short.

> "it's just a big scheme".

Who's doing the scheming, I wonder?

> Who's doing the scheming, I wonder?

As with all pump-and-dump schemes, obviously those who pump it.

Let's put it differently: what concrete, real-world, tangible value is there driving crypto speculation? Is there any at all?

It boggles the mind how crypto proponents try to frame crypto in general and their own investments in particular as something that has this sky-high intrinsic value based only on potential popularity and a belief that they can pump them up indefinitely.

> what concrete, real-world, tangible value is there driving crypto speculation?

For a possible answer, please read my other post in this thread.

> For a possible answer, please read my other post in this thread.

You've posted an awful lot of messages, but the only one remotely related to crypto's intrinsic value was the following post which makes no relevant point at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28902307

In it, your main thesis is that you allege that crypto offers a way to "completely shield value", which is outright and patently false.

Even so, trying to portray crypto in general and BTC in particular as serving as a store of value is an absurd notion from the start, as it's renowned for being highly volatile and so prone to crashes that halve it's value that crypto's hardline proponents already invented the concept of periodic corrections.

> It clearly has no value beyond speculation and the bubble will pop.

Many things have actually no intrinsic value (like art) yet don't lose value over time that much.

Depends on what art we are talking about. Plenty of it has lost value over time. Ofc, what is popular and big name keeps being popular. But outside that group there is lot of examples that aren't as valuable as it was at one point.

Art has value as a money laundering scheme and so do NFT’s.

Although I’m hopeful maybe someone will find a decent use case for them.

> Art has value as a money laundering scheme

That's IMO a very reductive view. While - true - art is used to launder money, that's not the only thing that lends it value.

If that wasn't the case, there wouldn't be any brick and mortar museums left in the world and you could buy the original Mona Lisa for a dime - since everyone else would have a 16k x 16k reproduction of it, essentially identical to the original.

Somehow, that does not happen.