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Comment by fumeux_fume | Hacker News Reader

99.9% probability it's a forgery. But many people stand to make a lot of money if it's sold so they'll try to find enough experts to say it's legit and everyone wins.

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There's an interesting application of the "greater fool" theory too. Even if the original buyer finds out it was forged, they potentially stand more to gain by continuing the charade and selling it to the next person. It becomes "real" by sheer collective distortion of reality.

This is a great explanation of the NFT market

How so? The analogy breaks down immediately. You're not trying to sell forgery?

With NFTs you're trying to sell something worthless too.

This is an endless debate which I won't get myself into.

Define worthless

I'm actually not sure how. What makes a forgery worth less than the original?

Worth less and worthless are two very different things.

But they aren't they related? There's clearly some dilution of value between an original and a forgery. I'm positing that NFTs are even more divorced from "originality" than forgeries – by a factor terrible enough to make them worthless.

But I'm not good enough to disentangle the mystery of originality and put the problem in concrete terms.

> I'm positing that NFTs are even more divorced from "originality" than forgeries – by a factor terrible enough to make them worthless.

But what does “worthless” actually mean? Does it mean something you happen to personally dislike? Does it mean something else?

When I say "worthless", I mean "close to 0 on the extension of the scale that stretches from an original to forgery".

You realise a ton of NFT’s are selling stolen art or breaching someone’s copyright, right?

I don't keep track of that, but I'll take your word for it. It doesn't invalidate what I said though. NFTs have more purposes than selling "stolen" art.

wait, genius idea, scan this and put it inside of an NFT along with the video of you burning the original! So much money!

> 99.9% probability it's a forgery. But many people stand to make a lot of money if it's sold so they'll try to find enough experts to say it's legit and everyone wins.

If only there was a NFT assuring it's provenance.

How would a digital NFT prove physical provenance?

It was a tongue-in-cheek comment, playing with the absurdity of NFTs being used as certificates of authenticity in art scams.

The most expensive painting ever sold turned out to be a ridiculously obvious forgery, so I concur with your statement.

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