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Comment by Zealotux | Hacker News Reader

NFTs are one of these things that truly makes me feel like an old man, and I'm not in my thirties yet.

You get used to that feeling: there’s so much money whose holders can’t think of productive uses that these bubbles happen periodically – during the 90s it was dotcoms who were guaranteed to lose money on every sale still having enormous valuations, with the ensuing collapse then leading investors to pour money into the “safe” housing market, etc.

The blockchain bubble has had enough speculators pump money in that there’s a whole industry creating things like NFTs trying to prop up valuations, and that part of the cycle always lasts longer than seems possible to anyone prone to thinking about the market analytically rather than emotionally.

Ha such a true statement. I am mid-thirties but I agree with the sentiment with regards to sales of digital art as NFTs.

I can see a use for NFTs such as for concert tickets but a JPG or GIF? Sorry but we already have good protocols in place to transfer ownership, copyright, etc. of artwork to someone that has been used for centuries. A blockchain isn't needed for a god damn GIF sorry.

NFTs are the trading cards to Bitcoin's pet rocks.

I'm still looking for funding to develop my Pet Rock Remote Control.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N1AamI__Rg&ab_channel=MarcC...

They are like the SHA-1 of a celebrity’s played lottery ticket, where you own the rights to the hash of the numbers on the expired ticket.

Just turned 40, early bitcoin adopter, no idea what the fuck this shit is. Congrats kids with yer NFT and tweets and meme stonks, gtfo my porch

My PokeMon Go has got up and went.

http://holyjoe.org/poetry/anon7.htm

Gotta catch em all

Feels like they really jumped the shark pretty quick and I just started hearing about them.

Seems closer to trading cards than just about anything else so I haven't even done enough research to wrap my head around the technical side of what people are doing with them yet.

Think of them as creative gambling devices.

I think of them as the canonical infinite of fiat currency. More than any other thing, they are ONLY the value of 'getting everyone to agree they are this value'. It's beyond meaningless, but there's a fundamental nature to what it is: a pure power play.

You might as well go, 'I have eleventy billion dollars, prove me wrong' and save a heck of a lot of energy. It will all come down to how many weapons you can bring to bear, regardless.

>...they are ONLY the value of 'getting everyone to agree they are this value'.

This is true of all kinds of tokens. The real takeaway is that cryptocurrencies are now so valuable that there are a plurality of individuals with over $100M, no taste, and no sense. This is a result of massive flows of money into the space. Fungible tokens are trivial replacements for large swaths of any financial system. There are great things going on adjacent to this sideshow.

Money laundering.

It's the art market, digitized.

This is actually

The best perspective I've come across on NFTs so far. Looking at it from this framework suddenly it makes more sense to me how something like this could potentially survive

They might make more sense when they are actually used in other applications. For example, NFTs representing probably rare digital playing cards (like magic the gathering).

No, they still don't make sense. What do you gain from "representing" a digital object? Nothing. You already have the digital object. The "representation" adds nothing to it.

All of these crypto things are protocols. The representation and actions on the representations are possible because everyone agrees on a protocol for it. Imagine a future where everyone agrees on using these representations where it makes sense by using the same protocol, just like everyone agrees to use the http protocol. In this case, it's an introduction of scarcity to digital items that wasn't possible before, and that has value in possibly lots of different environments.

The only value in faking scarcity is increased extraction by the latest wave of rent seekers. The world should be striving as hard as possible to move toward post-scarcity, and instead we are burning cities' worth of energy on...lucky numbers.

I'm sure there are many artists who would disagree with you and who aren't rent seekers at all. And they benefit massively from scarcity in the digital space. That's just one group, there are many others.

Making something more scarce only creates value if the thing being made scarce has negative value. It's basic arithmetic.

Some coworkers were talking about NBA Top Shot and I felt completely out of the loop. Now that I have done some research, I have wedged it into my theory that spending money and ownership is a social activity and therefore can mitigate loneliness.

Hypothetically? You could make a computer-based trading card game, where you must own the NFT to play the card in-game.

The advantage to the game maker, over just storing ownership in a SQL database, would be making it more like physical collectable cards (with 'limited printings' and 'first editions') that some chumps will pay six-figure sums for.

The direct advantage to the player of owning the NFT would be playing the card in-game, and the benefit of an NFT over normal digital items would be letting them "invest" while feeling assured them the game maker wasn't 'printing' more cards.

Obviously, a lot of people aren't interested in 'collectables', pay-to-win, skins/hats/lootboxes and so on. I'm certainly not. But there is an existing market for digital hats, baffling though it may seem, so there's precedent for people trading in-game digital items for real money.

> The direct advantage to the player of owning the NFT would be playing the card in-game,

"Thinking out loud here", so this may be wrong, obvious, or both.

I wonder how that would work. Presumably, the game maker would create a rare "card" and put it on the blockchain, and transfer it to a player in a transaction. That player could then transfer it to some other player, etc.

To be used in a game, a player would have to be able to prove that they are the rightful owner. The player would be represented as their private key ("wallet"), and any "card" that is sent to the player would need a chain of signatures that lead back to the creation of the card by the game maker. I think that blockchain would only be able to represent the custody of the "card", the barter would likely have to happen off-chain. ie, you send me $100 or 1mBTC or whatever and I will sign over my card to you...

I guess you missed out on the POGs craze then?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogs

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