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Comment by rewma | Hacker News Reader

> Whether the data representation is a piece of cardboard or a JSON string replicated on 10,000 Ethereum nodes or a tulip or a Venmo balance is arbitrary; it just matters whether a lot of humans are looking at the same thing. And for the time being, a lot of humans are looking at crypto ledgers!

But are they really? I mean, are there that many humans waiting in line to have a JSON pointing to a tweet?

There were a few reports of NFTs going on the market for thousands of dollars, but at least the ones I'm aware of sounded an awful lot like people buying their own NFTs and leaving that out from the report.

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FWIW, I am personally shocked that anyone wants to buy small pieces of cardboard with photos of baseball players on them at all, much less for any appreciable amount of money just because one happens to be "rare" (whatever the hell that means, as clearly anyone with a printer and some cardboard can make their own)... that doesn't mean that someone else is valuing them for some reason, and they clearly do; that most small pieces of cardboard with pictures on them aren't valuable is kind of irrelevant to the idea that some are.

> FWIW, I am personally shocked that anyone wants to buy small pieces of cardboard (...)

I fail to see the relevance of your personal preferences to the discussion, as my point was that the cases I'm aware of sound an awful lot like shills trying to inflate the value of something with no market value whatsoever.

As a concrete example, there was a HN discussion a couple of months ago on how a kid reported a couple thousands of dollars worth of sales from NFTs, but it all sounded like a mix of straight up fraud and money laundering. A few comments in the discussion point out that the kid's father works in finance and it sounds he is trying to case in on the NFT trend.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28326220

> But are they really? I mean, are there that many humans waiting in line to have a JSON pointing to a tweet?

This is just your belief in what people would want to do, and is irrelevant to whether people out there exist, and I am claiming (seemingly successfully, as my comment is resonating with a number of people) the same thing would probably be said with just as much confusion by anyone who really considers how utterly pointless a baseball card is.

"art blocks" had a trading volume of $100M last week [1].

And that's only one of the more notable nft projects.

[1] https://nonfungible.com/market/history

Were those real trades, or just the same few people trading back and forth between themselves as part of a pump-and-dump scam?

To me the more likely use seems not a pump-and-dump scam but rather money laundering - get a plausible and legitimate money trail as "capital gains from digital art investment" from some dirty bitcoins coming in from, for example, a ransomware payout.

Have a look at the sales (lower down the page) of say these:

https://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks lowest price available $386k(!)

or more detail on artblocks: https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/art-blocks average price $39k

or these: https://www.nft-stats.com/collection/boredapeyachtclub 90th percentile = $168k

> are there that many humans waiting in line to have a JSON pointing to a tweet

There are a lot of humans waiting in line for other digital assets that don't do anything, like Fortite skins. That's also just a row in some database, what's the difference?

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