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Comment by benburleson | Hacker News Reader

Wait, NFT creators never considered the fact that others could create NFTs from an identical digital source?

Oh, the creators did. The suckers who bought the NFTs didn't because they had sufficiently little understanding of the tech to fall for it.

That would violate NAP, so why would anyone do that?

It doesn't because it's already in my RAM. Or swap. If you're OK with it being in swap, you gotta be OK with me saving it to disk manually.

Blockchain is magic, didn't you know?

Exactly. There are strong selection pressures against anybody who thinks about anything too much here. In the POSIWID sense, the purpose of NFTs is obviously not to provide a reliable market for digital goods.

It's just the next in a long series of things one can hype (bitcoin, blockchain technology, ICOs, DAOs) such that money comes in and the promoters and speculators can divert some of that money flow into their own pockets. It doesn't have to actually work. It just has to sound good enough that suckers buy in. It's all magic beans.

There is no way for a blockchain to magically know how owns the copyright to a work. Multi-year court proceedings are sometimes necessary and people still don't agree.

It is shallow criticism that often amounts to no less than "blockchain bad because it can't do that magical thing".

NFTs cannot solve this, and therefore don't want to. Once you accept that, they work perfectly fine for their actually intended purpose!

Exactly my point. Blockchain technology is useless here; it's a bad match for the problem of ownership.

I agree with you that NFTs work perfectly fine for their true purpose. In the same way that Bitcoin, a complete failure for its stated purpose, works great for its current purpose: enabling grifts, scams, frauds, and assorted light financial crime.

Creators did. NFT shovel sellers, aka the marketplace builders, didn't care.

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