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Comment by zepto | Hacker News Reader

Strangely a lot of articles about NFTs get confused about that.

I've also seen self-styled NFT experts get confused about that too. One particularly amusing example involved a "senior NFT stragetists" getting upset at people screenshotting themselves doing the right-click-save-as thing some of those ape NFTs, and being very confused after someone explained to them that they only "owned" the token, and not necessarily the image itself.

At least the NFT fad has been entertaining, I suppose.

It’s no mystery why. It remains unclear why the ownership rights of a digital signature — which do not also convey the ownership rights to the digital object signed — have any value whatsoever. So everyone not NFT-pilled assumes that the explanation is wrong and fills in the gaps: you must mean the NFT owner owns some portion of that image, right?

Think of it like a patron buying a piece of art but donating it to the public (museum, church, public square, whatever). You still get the prestige, but you avoid the hassle with keeping the art stored yourself.

The prestige of buying a piece of Microsoft office clip art and dropping it on the floor of a mens room in the basement of a museum.

We can't all be Rockefeller or Carnagies! I get your point - most NFT does not have great prestige and is probably more a question of speculation. My example was more to explain why formal ownership of a piece of art could be valuable even if it didn't mean ownership of any physical object or even ownership of the copyright. For people paying hundreds of millions for a van Gogh, the purpose is probably not the physical access to the thing (I assume it is just in some safe vault anyway, when not on loan to a museum) and it is not because they expect great returns on selling reproductions either. It is just the prestige of ownership and probably the hope that the piece sell for even more in the future.

What you say is true of historic artworks like a Van Gogh.

Almost no NFTs are in any way like a historic artwork.

An algorithmically generated cartoon character that is one of thousands, simply isn’t valuable. The fact that you have what amounts to a receipt for paying for one, is more a mark of stupidity than prestige.

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