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Comment by arduinomancer | Hacker News Reader

I always thought this tweet summed up the ridiculousness of NFTs well.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1372739631846936581

I think the reason they seem silly to a lot of people is because when you buy an NFT there's nothing extra you can do that other people can't when you hold the NFT.

I can have the exact same experience as the NFT holder for free with no effort.

Sure technically you can also make copies of physical collectibles but its not (trivial + free) like copying and pasting an image.

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And, modifying 1 pixel from the image, results in a complete different NFT.

Not even that. You can upload the exact same image to a different URL and create a new NFT of that.

Sure, but that's like saying I can use my home printer to create a certificate of title for someone else's car. Obviously I can, but that doesn't mean that certificates of title for cars are pointless.

Titles are physical objects and backed by laws and the state and a centralized database available to all of government.

Many of the NFTs are not distributed even though they claim to be, so while they have the same kind of centralization, they have no such authority. If we were to grant them such authority, we'd want it to be a normal centralized database and the benefits of decentralization would not be needed. There would be no need for non-cooperative consensus either.

I don't understand your point. Someone could physically coerce you to transfer ownership of an NFT to them, just like they could with any physical item you own. You could try to use the legal system to get your item back, regardless of whether it's an NFT or a physical item. There's no centralized database for a lot of physical property that you own, and yet the legal system can still determine ownership. What is unique about NFTs here?

Yeah I don't know what is unique about them either. I agree all the things you list would not be assisted or made easier with NFTs.

Correct. I don't think anyone is claiming that NFTs solve the problem that someone could torture you until you transfer ownership to them.

No, we are talking about copying the underlying asset, not the NFT. If you could 3-D print any physical object perfectly down to the atom, the collectibility of the original item would be hurt a lot. If there were potentially infinite perfect copies of a Ferrari GTO, the prices would crash. Having a document that says "this Ferrari GTO is the original" would be what NFTs are today

> If you could 3-D print any physical object perfectly down to the atom, the collectibility of the original item would be hurt a lot.

This is an important thought experiment that I brought up in another comment, but my conclusion is the opposite: I think that efforts would still be made to determine which physical painting was the original one painted by the artist, and that one would still retain the value as long as the determination of originality remained well-respected. This already happens with paintings: there are extremely skilled forgeries that have fooled experts.

I think you're reading some meaning into my comment that isn't there. My point is simply that a NFT doesn't make a guarantee of uniqueness. A token can reference a file by its URL, but that file can also exist at other URLs, or (AFAIK?) other tokens can reference the same URL.

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