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Comment by spoonjim | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I actually think that scarcity is the only thing that NFTs have. I almost think of them as the purest distillation of scarcity. Everyone knows you can get a perfect copy of a Vermeer done for $10k. Why is the real Vermeer worth more? Because the guy with the real Vermeer knows that while you can have the lighting and you can have the shadows, you can’t have the scarcity. And the concept of an NFT is just the end game of that line of thinking.

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Right, because the creator of the NFT totally can't just mint another token right after you buy the first one. Oh wait, just kidding they can. And there's absolutely nothing you can do, because you don't _actually_ own the thing, you just own a trivially replicated pointer to the thing.

It's ok though, because at least the original will definitely be the one to be valuable, and not the 42nd, 69th, or 420th. Right? Right??

But that’s exactly what the scarcity value of a Vermeer is (which is 99% of the value). People can make infinite numbers of copies. NFTs just kind of lay that bare. It’s almost like the concept itself a performance art. “Can we cleave off the scarcity from the art/history/je ne sais quoi that fuels the hoarding of other scarce artifacts, and just sell that disembodied scarcity in a marketplace?”

You seem to have missed the fundamental truth that NFTs are not scarce. With the example of a Vermeer, you create one original thing, and then imitations of that thing. Minting multiple NFTs of the same thing is creating more originals, but of the same thing. One is not somehow "more original" than the others.

This is a difficult concept for people to get their heads around because of the obvious but incorrect parallel between original art and reproductions. It would be slightly closer to say that an NFT is a photo of a Vermeer. Anyone can make more originals at any time and there's nothing you or anyone can do about it.

My understanding is the NFT is essentially a signed object like a URL. So I think the analogy would be Vermeer signing photos of his painting. A nice thing to own sure but as the number of copies increases the market value tends towards 0.

Have you heard of artists selling limited edition prints? The number of dot paintings Damien Hirst has his assistants produce is limited by what exactly?

Yes - NFTs are not scarce, but the only property of an NFT is scarcity! It's like something Marcel Duchamp Salvador Dali would have thought up. It's exclusivity without having to drag yourself out of bed and get to an exclusive nightclub.

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