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Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

While i vaguely agree, crypto/blockchain/whatever has one unique aspect that is "valuable":

It creates a scarcity in an internet full of abundance. You can copy/paste a JPEG or MP3 a million times (hello piracy), but you can't own an NFT or coin you don't actually own. Sure, you can copy/paste the underlying JPEG, but thats not the same. There will only be 1 blockchain owner.

This unique property of scarcity is a valuable property for financial products, in an obvious way. The issue is that an abundance of a scarce product is ripe for fraud. Oh, and of course there is no answer for the on-chain to in-IRL conversion for things like ownership.

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Except that you can mint the NFT on an infinite number of chains, since the chains are also digitally created. Sure, maybe you can't own one on _that_ chain, but really, who gives a shit?

In the end, this is a less interesting beany babies.

> but really, who gives a shit?

Who gives a shit about anything? Luxury goods have value from name only? Who cares about baseball cards or stamps? They're so easy to print on a inkjet that anyone can have any card they want?

This is just another example of "not made for you" collectors. Its scarce because the creator said so, and because its auditable without trust.

Blockchain does not equal bitcoin which created scarce money that can't be inflated which has value

Outside of money you don't need scarcity

> Blockchain does not equal bitcoin which created scarce money that can't be inflated which has value

Blockchains created scarcity. Not bitcoin. Bitcoin uses a blockchain to enforce its particular scarcity. Blockchains enable auditable history, meaning that we can have "only one" true owner (per chain) and one true chain - that's good for money, yes.

> Outside of money you don't need scarcity

Yet people seem to love it. I personally have no interest in NFTs but I understand that people like collecting, and its a way to collect that's verifiably true (presumably, it'd be humorous to find the exchanges were just CRUD app with sql ledgers).

Blockchain is not the same as a blockchain. Blockchain is a hashed data structure from bitcoin. While "blockchain technology" is used in completely different context. The two and not related technically

But in the end, they are the same. The major difference between a merkle tree (or patricia trie or whatever is implemented in x or y) and "blockchain technology" is the distributed consensus algorithm. Blockchain - by your own definition, is "blockchain", because its a hashed data structure with a distributed consensus algorithm. Now, of course I'm splitting hairs; and the reason for it is that merkle trees (or hashed variants) aren't groundbreaking or new - they've been around for decades. What is somewhat interesting is the proposition of a distributed structure with the same properties. The groundbreaking innovation from "blockchain technology" stops there.

But then not the same because one as you say is just a datastructure that has existed already and uses standard computer science constructions. But the data structure is also revolutionary? That's a contradiction. So the other blockchain is not a datastructure but a separate unrelated concept

You misunderstood my comment. The novel part isn't the data structure, its the consensus mechanism tied to that specific datastructure. The fact that is used to implement cryptocurrencies and whatnot is irrelevant - you can implement crypto without "blockchain" (by using a typical non-distributed datastructure, called "a database"). In fact, the buzzword for that is "private blockchain".

Ok so we agree blockchain and blockchain are different. Also private blockchain would be a 3rd definition as that's another nonsense word that people use

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