Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain the correct version from your perspective? It doesn’t clarify anything if you just declare someone else incorrect but won’t say why.

View on HN

What capableweb said is correct. NFTs do not confer any ownership of, rights over, or special access to anything else, real-world out digital. When you buy an NFT of an artwork, you aren't buying the artwork, you are only buying the NFT.

As far as I know, the inventors of NFTs do not claim that they do. But it seems like a lot of people talking about and perhaps buying NFTs don't understand that.

In your description, what's the difference between an NFT and a gag USD million bill with Bush, Obama, Trump or Biden's face on it? This makes it even harder to understand why anyone should care. Hell, it starts to make the people who thought Beanie Babies were a long term investment seem smart.

I think the point is that people believe NFTs are something other than that, so they buy them. Imagine there was a news story every morning about somebody different buying a gag bill for millions of dollars whose only important quality was that it would be very difficult to forge another. Literally the same situation. But also literally the art market, so there's that.

Physical art at last has the property that you can look at it and enjoy it, and that only the person who possesses it can decide who gets to do that.

How much of art's value stems from that enjoyment? You're right, probably a negligible amount. For investors, the only important property of physical art is that it's extremely hard to forge.

And yet people report less enjoyment from looking at art if they think it's a reproduction or forgery, even if they're told it's so close to identical that it fooled the experts.

NFT Art, imo: They are future contracts for ideas in the metaidea market. They have monetary value because crypto believers think and some work and some gamble to make it go HUGE and make all believers a lot of money. It's an emergent marketing scheme and donation mechanism. It's actually genius. Triple-entry accounting has a huge number of desirable real-world applications, not to mention it's a living part within the larger ecosystem of crypto, which people believe holds IMMENSE value for the future.

> and make all believers a lot of money

Somehow I think it will transfer money from believers to a small group of non-believers.

and then back to believers when they sell :D

Well for starters, the gag bill is real.

> When you buy an NFT of an artwork, you aren't buying the artwork, you are only buying the NFT.

So it's like a certificate of proof that you donated money to an artist that you can then trade and sell and possibly make a profit from.

If I'm understanding this correctly.

You can't even verify you donated money to an artist. Unless the artist confirms the public key used for the token, you have no fucking clue who made the token.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com