> Most of the NFT marketing I've seen is very fast and loose about this —

Stop listening/reading marketing material then and dive into the technology itself.

> people will talk like it's owning the item but only when pressed will admit that it means owning the NFT pointing to the item.

Yes, most people (on both sides of the "love/hate" side of NFTs) misunderstand the technology and what promises itself makes.

> This is conceding the author's point: a hash on a blockchain has no innate value and being the purest form of a fiat currency with weak backing means that nobody has a strong reason to need them. Nobody buys a hash because they like the pattern of ones and zeros.

This is such a rabbit hole and where you end up is "Nothing has value" or "Everything has value". I guess you can put me in the camp arguing for the latter, even for crazy things like "high-art" that I don't really get, but I understand that some people value it.

> When the most popular cryptocurrencies used are not PoW, this will be more convincing. Right now it's Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a rounding error.

No, I think you misunderstand what I mean. "Cryptocurrencies" is an umbrella term for a lot of things. The authors argument that "cryptocurrencies" are bad for the environment is just not true, just like "serverless" cant be called bad for the environment. It's the implementation that matters, not the concept.

> Most of the NFT marketing I've seen is very fast and loose about this — people will talk like it's owning the item but only when pressed will admit that it means owning the NFT pointing to the item.

But that’s totally reasonable. No one is going to misinterpret that unless they’re deliberately being uncharitable. This is just a normal usage of imprecise language, not very different than saying you own a house when technically you have a mortgage, or saying you bought an album on iTunes when technically you bought a revocable license to play the album under certain restrictions.

> This is just a normal usage of imprecise language, not very different than saying you own a house when technically you have a mortgage

Lol, this is a joke? You have the rights to live in your house even if you have a mortgage, the house isn't going anywhere, it is a contract with lots of meaning. NFT's on the other hand doesn't mean anything at all.

Here is a link to a house: https://www.google.com/maps/place/California,+USA/@37.455368...

This is backed up by the ycombinator server, and as the owner of this link I can change the data etc.

Does this mean that I own that house? No. Do I own the picture of the house? Still no. Do I own that link? No, not even that. I just own this post that is stored on the HN server. That is how NFT ownership works.

Do you want to pay me $100 for this post? It means you can own this post which links to a house, cool huh?

You're mistaken on the basic mechanics of how NFTs work.

The only difference is that the post would live on a blockchain instead of a company server.

If you are talking about all the surrounding infrastructure, then that has nothing to do with NFT's. An NFT provides exactly the same value as a forum post. Someone can build a service which scrapes my forum posts and uses that to put links on another website based on some ownership details, so you can look at your owned posts there. You could make a whole game with assets based on forum post data etc, sounds exciting right!

Edit: Oh I forgot the other big difference. NFT's are crypto and therefore people pay insane amounts of money for it! Nobody would pay money for a forum post, that is just silly, but slap crypto on a forum post and wow, now we are talking!

Could you elaborate what the poster was a mistaken on?

Well, owning an NFT is absolutely nothing like posting a link to a Google Maps view of a house on Hacker News. It’s hard to go into detail on why those things are not alike without having more information about where this misconception is coming from.

Minting an NFT is exactly like posting a forum post. It looks like this, even has the same interface. Then people can buy this forum post from you.

https://downloads.intercomcdn.com/i/o/336157696/3a04454c884a...

Have you seen anyone talk about “right-clicker mentality”? There are a ton of people who are surprised that NFTs have no claim on ownership or access restriction because everyone's talking about it as if they're something other than a vanity URL.

I'm no expert on how that phrase is used, but it seems to me to be a pejorative aimed at people who claim (or act as if) a digital copy of a piece of artwork attached to an NFT is the same thing as the NFT, which is not the case. In other words, the people being accused of having "right-clicker mentality" are the people confused about what the NFT is, not the people making the accusations.

>This is conceding the author's point: a hash on a blockchain has no innate value and being the purest form of a fiat currency with weak backing means that nobody has a strong reason to need them. Nobody buys a hash because they like the pattern of ones and zeros.

And what's the "innate value" of an original painting, compared to a forgery? They look identical to the naked eye, and can probably fool a fair chunk of experts as well. Sure, you might be able to tell the difference using some advanced analytical methods (eg. carbon-14 dating or whatever), but does the slightly lower carbon-14 isotope content justify the massive premium?

That's the wrong level: NFTs are like the receipt showing you paid money, not the artwork itself. Even a forged artwork can be enjoyable to look at, although you'll probably wish you'd paid less, but it's unlikely that anyone is going to want to hang the receipt on the wall.

>but it's unlikely that anyone is going to want to hang the receipt on the wall.

You're right that rich people probably aren't going to be hanging receipts next to their original paintings, but they certainly will bring up the fact that it's an original at every possible opportunity. The "original-ness" is definitely where all the value is coming from, whether from owning the original painting, or the "original" NFT.

But you own the painting. With the NFT, all you have is a URL pointing to a hosting service which anyone else can access and you have to keep paying if you want it to stay online.

>But you own the painting

But you still paid a few million more for the original painting, even though it's virtually indistinguishable from a replica. It's more helpful to think of an original painting as a bundle of two things:

Original painting = thing that looks like a painting + bragging rights

An NFT is just the "bragging rights" part of the original painting, and the JPG that anyone can access is the "thing that looks like a painting ".