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Comment by faefox | Hacker News Reader

NFTs: the thing nobody needed, let alone wanted, but which proved to be a sufficiently effective money laundering (sorry, "speculative") instrument that we all had to have it shoved down our throats for the better part of a year anyway.

Goodbye and good riddance.

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>NFTs: the thing nobody needed, let alone wanted

Its a good idea to handle ownership of finite digital assets. Imagine buying a song or video game online, and then being able to sell it or give it to a friend later, without having to go through a central authority (and not be breaking copyright law). Just like with a CD.

Unfortunately, 99% of NFT projects have been essentially penny stock schemes, so now that's what everyone thinks of them as.

> finite digital assets

That's a nice oxymoron you have there. Digital assets are not "finite" or scarce, that's their biggest strength: that they can be copied and shared infinitely. I know that some people hate that, and would love to change it (see DRM). But to hell with that.

That's not true at all. Any deed of ownership can be finite, especially if they refer to a physical object where there is a natural limit on the number of owners. Just because you can make infinite copies of the document, doesn't mean the legal system allows you to do that.

And there we end up relying on a legal system again to verify the asset and we're back to square one. If my NFT needs to be verified when I sell it, which it will, because there will be fakes, then we still need a third party.

Welcome to the real world, where technology can't solve social problems.

Can we pin this comment to the top of every HN thread?

The whole point about digital goods is that you don't "own" them. Read the contract.

You talk about consumers who buy a usage-license. But someone must create those content first, and holds the ownership on them. Which is usually the creator, or publisher, or someone who bought the ownership. And there are usually proof of this ownership, like contracts and such.

But why cram a finite-based system into a non-finite universe ? What's the point ? Haven't we understood that private property and ownership are not, in fact, better than sharing and common usage ? The digital world allows us to actually touch this, and we still import artificial restrictions that only benefit those who already have ?

How do you plan to buy or sell a song or a video game using NFT, WITHOUT A CENTRAL AUTHORITY? (emphasis on the important part of the question)

You would need a central authority (the copyright holder) to maintain a list of legitimate NFTs. However, you would not need to get their permission whenever you want to sell them.

How do you plan to sell some digital artifact is you either a) don't have a right do this, or b) have a right but the medium (NFT and blockchain) doesn't support transfer of the IP rights in any form? You would need the central authority to track IP rights and ownership in the centralised DB and which point why use NFTs in the first place?

> You would need the central authority to track IP rights and ownership in the centralised DB and which point why use NFTs in the first place?

You wouldn't need a single central authority, you could have multiple certifying agencies who would have their own reputation. Similar to how there are multiple ratings agencies that can certify a bond as AAA, or multiple art curators who can certify a painting as genuine, or different comic book graders.

The number of centralised authorities doesn't change the core problem in my question - how do you sell anything with attached IP rights when NFT infrastructure doesn't support this operation?

The NFT infrastructure supports buying and selling tokens. Attaching IP rights to that token can be done through the legal system, and third party agencies could attest on the blockchain that they believe the token has such a legal structure in place and properly set up (e.g. that the legitimate rightsholder has signed the release/deed/what-have-you in question).

I want to copy more, why would I pay to copy less?

The only reason to do that is if you want to obey copyright law. There is no technical reason stopping you.

This is something that NFTs don't address at all, though.

Even if ownership of digital assets or false scarcity were good ideas, NFTs never did any of this.

The spec was technically amateurish — basically just URLs in a bit of JSON in a slow database, with barely any connection to the asset. NFTs allowed regular non-IPFS URLs without any checksum, which allowed HTTP servers to change the asset at any time! And they had absolutely no uniqueness checks, allowing automating piracy!

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/14/22726556/signal-founder-...

You could literally copy an image, and make a new token for it, and there was no way to decide which token was the true one for any given image, except maybe if you trusted some central authority, haha.

> Imagine buying a song or video game online, and then being able to sell it or give it to a friend later, without having to go through a central authority (and not be breaking copyright law).

I don't have to imagine it. That's the reality right now without NFTs in the mix.

> Imagine buying a song or video game online, and then being able to sell it or give it to a friend later, without having to go through a central authority

Way too complicated, I'll stick with mp3s.

What makes NFTs any more effective at money laundering than cryptocurrency?

You can sell them to yourself (at arm's length, using separate entities) to establish a price, and then sell them to yourself again (using a different entity) to take the profit and launder the money. Crypto may be manipulated, but you can't just set an arbitrary price equal to the amount of money you need to launder.

Hypothetically?

If I made $1M of bitcoin proceeds-of-crime and I put it through a coin tumbler then cash out, it can't be directly linked to the crime - but I also can't explain where the money came from.

On the other hand, if my legitimate account creates some shitty digital art and auctions it, then my proceeds-of-crime account buys it, I get slightly less money (auction fees etc) but a good explanation of where I got the money from: I'm an artist, you don't understand my work because you're a dumbass.

Of course, there are plenty of other ways to launder money - feed the proceeds of crime through a fixed-odds betting terminal and I'm just a lucky gambler. Anonymously buy fine art with a suitcase full of cash, then resell it as something I found in grandpa's attic. Sue my own anonymous tax-haven company, and report a big payment as an out-of-court settlement. And so on.

This was a great explanation.

The price is more flexible. Any given coin pair is worth a certain exchange rate at a certain time, and an investigating entity could analyse historic coin prices, compare to the amounts exchanged as recorded on the blockchain, and deduce the actual value gained or lost.

With NFTs, each one is valued independently and the price is what you and someone-who-definitely-isn't-you-wink-wink traded it for most recently.

The tech isn’t going anywhere. Perhaps the speculative bubble over gif NFT’s is behind us but I guarantee there will be uses for unique on-chain tokens for a long time to come.

> The tech isn’t going anywhere.

When people say "good riddance" they don't expect all NFT code to vanish from existence.

They're just saying that it will be tucked into its own dusty corner of tech history, to be forgotten by the masses and especially by tech professionals.

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