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Comment by NoOneNew | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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