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Comment by jensensbutton | Hacker News Reader

> storage, fakes, and transaction costs. NFTs solve all three

NFTs solve none of these problems. The underlying asset is not stored on the blockchain and can be deleted at any time. Fakes are unaddressed since you can only validate you are the owner of a specific url and there's no guarantee that what you own is the original version (bytes are easy to copy). Any validation of authenticity must happen OFF of the blockchain in which case why are we doing this again? Transaction costs are a function of the market (even on the blockchain) and are not at all connected to NFTs.

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> The underlying asset is not stored on the blockchain and can be deleted at any time.

If the asset is stored on IPFS, as many are, this is simply not true. Even if the asset falls off the network (which the creator, owner, NFT holder, and anyone else can prevent by pinning it themselves) then as long as you have the file(a) and the IPFS software you can put it back at any time, and it’ll have the same URL thanks to content addressability.

I’d certainly agree that any NFT that links to a digital asset in a mutable / non-content addressable way is worthless.

You can argue against this all you want but these arguments sound eerily similar to the "it's just a slow database" type arguments of yesteryear.

Bubbles can eventually have value, weirdly - their irrational nature can sort of act as a forcing function taking us out of a local maxima, facilitating the creation of entirely new unforeseeable and previously-impossible things that actually have value of some sort. With cryptocurrencies you could argue they facilitated (through smart contracts and then distributed exchanges) the creation of massively-multiplayer online gambling games with no barriers to entry for publication & interface with the financial system where people win through patience and steely nerve. You may think more-advanced open-source casinos are not good for society, but they certainly hold economic value.

If I wanted I could write a smart contract for a MMO gambling game like POWH3D and publish it tomorrow. That isn't a capability I used to have - quite a few hoops to jump through to get a game onto a casino floor, or start up an online gambling website.

> If I wanted I could write a smart contract for a MMO gambling game like POWH3D and publish it tomorrow. That isn't a capability I used to have - quite a few hoops to jump through to get a game onto a casino floor, or start up an online gambling website.

The previous restrictions on starting your own online casino have never been technological. It's really not that hard to set up your own online casino using non-blockchain technology. The main hurdles are entirely legal. Gambling has a ton of regulations and restrictions in virtually every jurisdiction, and many governments are more then happy to aggressively punish those who break the rules. Regulators aren't going to look kindly on your MMO gambling game just because "it uses the blockchain."

And sure, maybe you can more easily evade regulators by making a blockchain casino, over a traditional online casino. But to me, "creating illegal casinos more easily then before" isn't a particularly compelling use case.

Not sure what you _thought_ I was saying, but I was only saying parent's statement about NFTs is wrong. This was not a statement about the impact of cryptocurrencies on society.

You seem defensive. Find a comment that requires the above defense.

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