Frankly, I'm mocking it. Or trying to. Riffing on it? NFTs strike me as obvious nonsense -- why not use all that energy for something more useful, like piping /dev/urandom to /dev/null -- but NFT sales of obvious nonsense, of an algorithmic corruption of an artistic representation of a shared cultural totem, are almost high art.

Like, unpleasantly high art. Way too high art. Art that makes me want to go lie down for a bit.

It's just digital trading cards, like pokemon or baseball cards. Just amateurs are running the show now, but the NBA already got in on this, so if you want something more legit: https://nbatopshot.com/

Hey now, they're not just "digital trading cards, like pokemon or baseball cards"! They're also an enormous waste of resources!

Yeesh. At least collectors of sports memorabilia have some memorabilia to admire. I can't imagine what value-add there is for "NBA Top Shots" that I can't replicate by backing up a short clip of the play. My solution is more durable, too!

All of money is imaginary and all things have a representative monetary value. All of the above are imaginary things. Work from this basis, the rest of this will make more sense. So now if you use your imagination, we can start lining up some value. What value does gold have in World of Warcraft?

You can admire your digital trading cards! Just check out this program I made that cycles your NFT's as background wallpapers for your computer. github.com/NotaRealThing /s

Gold is just a rock. Why do all humans value that nonsense so much?

No, gold is an amazing substance in its own right. There are rarer and scarcer metals, but gold is special. This conversation relies in some part on the ductility and conductivity of gold to power our computers. It doesn’t tarnish and it is very malleable. This means you can shape it into some very beautiful and durable forms with even crude hand tools. The potential value add is very large. It’s use to back currencies is largely symbolic but it was chosen for good reasons.

Gold is also impractical to synthesize by modern methods!

Also it is very dense, silver is not so it could be forged too easy.

Gold has properties that are similar to copper (highly electrically and thermally conductive, lustrous, and malleable), with the added benefit of being corrosion resistant. Many of the industrial applications of gold and copper are similar.

Which would suggest that if gold and copper had the same supply, the demand would be similar and thus the price would be the same. It turns out that's approximately correct— the ratio of gold and copper's prices is similar to the ratio of their supply.

> waste of resources

Are you able to provide data comparing the footprint of NFT's to baseball cards, Magic the Gathering cards, paintings, etc?

Do you even know what you're talking about? Or just regurgitating some talking points you heard somewhere?

No, it's digital money laundering

Lately HN feels like just recycled Matt Levine.

Which is high praise (except for the recycled part).

Data art is anti-dada.

> Frankly, I'm mocking it. Or trying to. Riffing on it?

Frankly, you failed :-)

I'm as sceptic to crypto as almost anyone but this was one of the nicer ideas.

No I'm pretty sure he did fine, NFTs are little more than a vehicle for money laundering and a joke for a normal people.

These are awesome! Thanks for putting your work out into the world, turtlesoup.

In my free time I make paintings of outputs from GANs/Deepdreams/etc. I've been wanting to paint something based on a model trained on illustrations, but I hadn't seen anyone decent GAN trained on that kind of dataset yet. Thanks for sharing your code, this is really exciting to see!

I haven't either (beyond anime / animals, which is widely explored ala https://www.thiswaifudoesnotexist.net/) -- if you do see anything let me know.

Tangentially related, one more of my favourite parts of this work an artist that made illustrations of some of the fucked homers: https://twitter.com/turtlesoupy/status/1349541080719478784

Given the rise of Loot and other text-based NFTs, you might want to NFTify this too. I know Loot does this by creating a URL with the text in it that points to a text image generator.