Dada of NFTs, the future is going to call this Cleese’s bridge for NFTs as we call Duchamp’s urinal. It will probably sell, that’s why he didn’t just tell us the joke but also listed it.
I don't really see the downside (oh yeah, planet's burning, but as the dog in the cartoon said, this is fine), if some rich jerkoffs buy it then Cleese can put the money into charity. I suppose one downside is that the NFT ponzi peddlers can now say "See, we're legitimate, even the founder of Monty Python is here!", but Cleese's comments about terminal insanity isn't exactly support.
I suppose everyone knows the emperors are naked, but hey, it seems like that's not stopping megabucks being made, and why should you miss out?
NFTs have already started mocking themselves, almost as soon as any money has been spent on it (for example banksy's "I can't belive you morons actually buy this shit: https://opensea.io/assets/0xdfef5ac9745d24db881fef3937eab1d2... selling for $350k). This is just another high-profile example (though I think it's a slightly pointier critique at NFTs).
Is it just me, or NFTs is just useless bragging rights about ownership of digital goods which can't be owned? You can make unlimited indistinguishable copies of an image. Do people really care who pretends to own it?
I mean I guess if you look at show of brands like Luis Vuiton (sp?) There are plenty of people willing to pay for said bragging rights.
As someone who's always mocked those brands and the people who buy them, it seems so strange to me though.
Christie's commissioned the Beeple work to sell as an NFT. Why would an auction house do that?
There is more to it than speculation. There is a con where something went on. Maybe the auction house commissioned the money to pay for it and had a 69.3 million fee.
It saddens me that journalists have chosen not to follow the money and ask the questions.
Wasn't there an app on iOS way back at the start that was just an image of a ruby/gem of some kind that cost $999? Some people actually bought it before Apple took it off the App Store.
This story is also a good parable of why Veblen goods [0] distort GDP as a measure of value creation. If Apple had decided to lean in to that market, raising the maximum app price to $1M, and those same 8 purchasers who bought the original I Am Rich purchased I Am Rich 2.0: would anyone really believe that that $8M of real-world value was created?
Accelerating inequality has led to a conundrum for the rich in addition to the obvious consequences for the poor: what do you actually do with that obscene wealth? [0] You can only consume so much luxury, and sitting on dollars results in tax liability and/or gradual depreciation. Gambling it on speculative assets and bragging-rights positional goods (whynotboth.gif) is pretty much the only game in town, especially when everyone else is doing it, and you can tell yourself a Greater Sucker story (which may or may not resemble a game of Chicken / "Push Your Luck").
NFTs and crypto are obviously realms for this to play out, but this same force is at work for speculative investing in startups as well. For every startup with a value prop, a market, and a revenue model, there are a dozen who are flush with cash solely for the purpose of attracting Greater Suckers, fueled by the same motive to park and/or gamble an asset portfolio.
Yeah. Cryptocurrency and "Web 3.0" is absolutely not all zero-sum, and I'm overall optimistic in the long-term, but much like the existing finance industry, a high percentage is definitely zero-sum or close enough on net.
People compare NFTs to trading cards. But if you already think those things are basically useless zero-sum speculative Greater Fool insert-other-overused-but-apt-buzzwords bullshit, your opinion of NFTs won't be improved much.
NFTs, in their current state and hype wave, are probably a little like the dotcom bubble. It definitely doesn't imply the internet and the world wide web are bubbles, but it implies a major disconnect of some kind. I'm more interested in the future of semi-fungible tokens and novel, creative uses of NFT/SFT smart contracts. Plus just smart contracts in general.
> what do you actually do with that obscene wealth? [0] You can only consume so much luxury, and sitting on dollars results in tax liability and/or gradual depreciation.
I'm not so sure. Owning $10-$50M homes in major world cities, flying in a private jet, summer homes, winter homes, no car cheaper than $200k, no car older then 5 years, private school for your kids, private tutors, etc. adds up fast. Not to mention the effort that goes into make sure you never have to fly business class again.
The obscenely wealthy seem to either be content (Buffet), focused on charity (Gates), or all over the place (Musk). Anything less than $100M is less interesting thank you'd think.
at least a louis vuitton bag can actually hold things in it, and you can't get an identical free one by right clicking an existing one and clicking "Save image"
or you can go to that part of town where you can get much cheaper knock offs of the LV bag. actually, there's several apps that are filled with these sellers that make it practically as easy as right clicking
Given every post on crypto / blockchain / NFT on HN is full of these exact same comments showing utter disbelief and bewilderment, for the past 10 years, the answer is “No, everyone here thinks like you.”
But, NFT's are selling "participation". You are not John Cleese, and you're not even all that funny. But you're an enormous fan, and happen to control an adequately-large amount of cash.
In the same way that you can hire Elton John to pretend to be your friend for a few hours, and play at your wedding, etc, you can also "buy in" to a very public partcipation in some art, or joke, or both ... at no meaningful cost to you.
Surely the market is limited. But people have paid a lot of money for a piece of toast, too.
In this case, it's no weirder than Cleese selling his socks for charity. Or profit! Who cares? Eat the rich, it's all good.
In “the bonfire of the vanities” by Tom Wolfe, this is ridiculed with the auction for an absurd statue which will become priceless because the author has suggested is going to commit suicide (or has alreay, I forget). The auction is hilarious.
I don't disagree with your conclusions. But I think it is easy to oversimplify this. Until it is obviously just... obvious. I think reality is more interestingly complicated.
> ownership of digital goods which can't be owned?
One interesting fact it is what the ownership means legally. If there was a successful image that an expensive NFT owner had, it wouldn't surprise me to see some legal shenanigans. This has not been tested yet. Capability does not give you the rights to make copies of digital art. "Can't be owed" is a rather brave claim I think.
> You can make unlimited indistinguishable copies
Interestingly it is not dissimilar to a lot of physical art. To the extent that some 'restorations' of damaged art contain a lot of paint of the restorer rather than the original artist. I believe there are many professionals who are capable of creating something visually indistinguishable from the Mona Lisa, say.
Without specialised equipment you would have a very hard time telling reality from a good copy. So I am forced to conclude (what dealers will say quite explicitly) that most of the value is in the provenance not the physicality. "NFT is rubbish" becomes less obvious, to me.
No physical item can be copied exactly with the same arrangement of atoms. There will always be an original.
Digital items have no original. The bytes are constantly copied, even in the creation itself. And every viewing creates another copy. And these copies have perfect fidelity. That's the difference.
> Is it just me, or NFTs is just useless bragging rights about ownership of digital goods which can't be owned? You can make unlimited indistinguishable copies of an image. Do people really care who pretends to own it?
In my understanding the NFT doesn't even cover the ownership of anything except the NFT itself. It's like owning a sheet of paper you write "certificate of authenticity" at the top on in sharpie, then sign yourself. You should probably write the bits in the middle in crayon.
> I mean I guess if you look at show of brands like Luis Vuiton (sp?) There are plenty of people willing to pay for said bragging rights.
Merch is at least an actual thing you can own and use, or get pleasure from by looking at (for works of arts e.g. prints & posters, limited run or not), sometimes tied to life events or memories (e.g. band, museum, or tourism spot merch).
All of the replies to you didnt really touch on what they are, a store of value. It's fair to think of them more like savings accounts.
You can buy a replica of a piece of art to look at it. You buy the original to store value. You hope it may appreciate as well. It could end up worthless. But until someone says otherwise, it has the value stored in it.
It's just like baseball cards. You can make unlimited indistinguishable copies, but you don't. The date they are printed matters for some reason. Who owned it previously, its last sale price at auction is part of its history and thus its value.
Sorare/ubisoft also has a much better value proposition. Theyve combined draftkings and pokemon into a live betting market with collectable cards that you can use to play a game, to win more. The early generation may be simple digital art, mostly worthless, but there will be more innovation to come. Part of the reason I think NFTs are the real deal is because I think the value of art is often stupid, and yet it still has value. Even if 99% of NFTs turn into nothing, there will be some early art from people that arent famous yet, that is someday found. I have no doubt there is an immense amount of mystery being planted, waiting to be uncovered. Whatever stupidity and hype and storytelling and history around artwork, that I dont understand, will translate to this realm as well. The lack of decay, fire damage, traditional theft, and loss will be an interesting wrinkle.
If anything this is a democratization of the wealthy auction scene. A new tier of field to play.
Alternative assets come in all shapes in sizes. I can store wealth in gold, comics, wine. Why not my name on a ledger listed as owner of nothing in particular other than the price I paid for it? The amount of hate they get on HN should be a clue that everyone is being over analytical and logical, and missing out on analyzing them through human behavior. They arent a robotic math problem, they are behavioral economics.
I can't wait to see an investable etf of sorts that lets people invest in a collection of NFTs like they would bonds. Youll have "curators"/"fund managers" assembling and storing a vast array of art, allowing people to diversify and own fractional shares of a bunch of art.
Does it sound stupid? Absolutely? Which is why it's just crazy enough to work.
Physical art is different. (hang with me here, but..)
"Investing" in a Picasso is an investment in a long-term store of cultural value that you speculate will appreciate more quickly than the S&P. Probably because you bet that the 1% will see outsized gains compared to the 99%. Maybe you also like the art and want to be the only person in the world who can display it. Also it can be very useful as a tax dodge.
"Investing" in a new and unknown artist is several things: a) speculation that they will become more famous and that you are tasteful enough to know it early (see: angel investing), b) patronage and participation (see: friends & family rounds), c) conspicuous consumption (see: conspicuous consumption), and finally d) purchase of an expression of art that you enjoy, which may or may not have resale value in the future if your priorities change.
NFTs are confusing because any persistent value is completely dependent on the continued agreement that exclusivity of relationship is valuable and transferable. What's it like to be the eleventh owner of an NFT? Presumably, it'd be pretty meh.
But to your point -- it's psychology not logic. Today's buyers are not looking for a store of value. It's just an exercise in one of two things: vanity or speculation. These are powerful things!
> Physical art is different. (hang with me here, but..)
No, it is not. Picasso died dirt poor, he never beneficiated in large sums from his paintings. It just happen he was crazy enough to make a name and now people brag about him.
Because I own 1,000 of them and convincing bigger idiots than I to buy them will make me lots of money.
I get that all “store of value” are arbitrary and that gold could be other things. But it seems funny to just pick random things and then try to convince others that it’s worthwhile. There are at least certain characteristics needed for a store of value and something completely arbitrary has a bootstrap problem.
I can at least look at art or play with a Black Lotus. Holding an NFT of a piece of art is stupid as a store of value because there are so many better stores (eg, an NFT that conveys ownership rights to a piece of art for example).
It’s the natural extension of luxury branding where just having LV would raise the price from $100 to $1,000. So may as well strip away all vestiges of reality and just allow the bullshit signaling part to be sold by itself.
Perhaps with people focusing on that, we can get more quality products IRL. I went to an eye exam where the optometrist was wearing arcteryx gear during my exam. Perhaps she was going to jet off to some location where that stuff was needed, or perhaps she just liked it for fashion. But nonetheless, when people start wearing things that need real quality for non-quality reasons eventually brands start wising up and selling at the same price but with worse quality.
> optometrist was wearing arcteryx gear during my exam
Arcteryx pieces feel great on, the same way avocados taste great in your mouth. And just like you'd likely be misleading people by using an avocado as an example of the average fruit, you are misleading people by using Arcteryx to stand in for technical outdoorwear.
Hell, that holds even if your optometrist was wearing a fucking rain shell in the office. Compare:
1. jacket made of mostly straight, rectangular pieces of material sewn together, then taped at the seams (which can rub against your skin) in order to make it waterproof, probably with long arms so it doesn't ride up when you raise yours (e.g., you end up with wrinkly, noisy sleeves)
2. jacket with fused seams, made of pieces that are fabricated to fit together and follow the contour of the human body, with thicker material fused only in those areas that were measured to be high abrasion
Number 2 is obviously the wrong garment to wear inside a climate controlled building. But it feels so much better than your run-of-the-mill slicker that I could see someone in and out of a building deciding to simply leave it on for a bit.
In other words, the technical specs responsible for those differences match "real quality reasons" for someone to decide to wear it for longer periods, even in conditions for which the garment wasn't designed.
And if it wasn't a rain shell, it's likely the piece was comfortable, breathable, didn't look like the average piece of outdoorwear, and was perfectly fitting for the conditions of an optometry office. (I own probably four of their Delta LT fullzips which are so light I sometimes forget to stop wearing them in the early summer.)
I hear you, I’m a big fan. But arcteryx isn’t just something that feels good. It’s good technical gear that feels good.
The more optometrists who wear it because it feels good, the sooner it sucks being technical because optometrists don’t care if it fails because they aren’t 200 miles from another version.
I don't want to pull you out of the techwear Matrix too early, but Arcteryx has used the model you're afraid of for some time: e.g., they make rain shells designed to wear in the city, etc.
Also, that is a model followed by every similar company-- a model started by Patagonia back in the day when a technical piece of clothing was literally a rugby shirt.
In short, if you woke up in a nightmare universe where all optometrists wear Arcteryx you'd probably end up with a few more pieces in their technical line.
I think the idea is that a lot of these come with publishing contracts built in so the artist receives a royalty if the token changes hands and the current owner has the rights to license the art.
For example if I sell you a song as an nft you could then license the song to Budweiser to use in a commercial and we both get paid. Think about how difficult this would be to arrange without the nft to handle the contract.
Song publishing seems like a bad example here — it’s insanely easy to make that arrangement in practice because there is an existing real world payment / licensing structure for exactly that transaction.
> I think the idea is that a lot of these come with publishing contracts built in so the artist receives a royalty if the token changes hands and the current owner has the rights to license the art.
I've not seen a single NFT that comes with an associated copyright license to the underlying work.
Additionally, the artist only receives a royalty if the token is sold on these marketplaces that enforce the royalty. There's no such thing preventing a private sale that doesn't pay it.
They’re even more useless than that. They’re exactly like those webpages that sell you a certificate that you own a particular star.
It’s literally that. Someone giving you a slip of paper ”You own Mona Lisa” and nothing more. The actual piece of art is elsewhere. Copyrights are not affected etc.
If you think it more like as Patreon then it makes much more sense. The ownership of the artwork (or whatever) is irrelevant. Similarly that Patreon members might get their names in the credits of a youtube video, token owners get their name in the blockchain. The key here is that both are public displays of support to the artist and not much more.
The issue is that everyone equates NFTs with NFT art. NFT art can’t have a tie in as part of a virtual world where people want to show ownership of specific digital items, but NFTs in general are more useful, especially for all-digital items.
Something like cards in Gods Unchained is a better NFT example than a picture.
They may hang on for years, or decades. You can still trade Beanie Babies and Cabbage Patch dolls on eBay. Three Stooges collectable plates from the Franklin Mint[1] don't seem to be selling well, though.
Lack of liquidity is implicit in non-fungible tokens. You have to find a buyer who wants the exact item you have. That may be hard. It may require paying for advertising, which means the return can go negative.
With a uniform commodity, there's a market with prices. Non-fungible markets don't crash, they stall. You can't sell, but that's not visible on marketplaces,
especially if they're designed to hide listings that are not moving. (This is common in real estate; un-saleable property is taken off the market, then re-listed, so it doesn't show as "for sale for 72 weeks".)
What we're probably going to see are markets with huge numbers of items that are not selling, but have high asking prices. This will create the illusion of value, because someone will add up the asking prices and claim that's a "market cap".
The illusion of volume and liquidity can be created with wash trades.
There are getting to be a quite a number of blockchain based virtual worlds, where you can pay way too much for virtual land. Few people actually log into those virtual worlds and spend time there; they just trade land. "The metagame is the game", some analyst wrote of Decentraland. (Which, despite its name, is totally centralized. You can't run a Decentraland server yourself.)
I used to go to art openings in SF, and sometimes we'd look at some bad piece and ask "will this be around in 10 years or will it have been tossed out?" Years later, I suspect most of it went to a Dumpster long ago.
Comically, when this is all over society will probably be geared around one of these, but hard to predict which one. In 500 years, we are just as likely to be using cryptopunks as the base of our exchanges as whuffie.
Of course, this is no reason to try to buy any for that purpose. It will probably be something silly like the first in game item that works across games and platforms or something. Having a red hat that will work across all games and be unique forever, now that’s worth something.
tbf if I was stupidly rich and not particularly philanthropically inclined, I'd see far more value in an NFT John Cleese personally mocks me for buying than any others
Having that it’s John Cleese this may truly become a very valuable NFT even if that wasn’t the intention. The only thing John can do to at this point is get this event as public as possible then denounce it as a big scam and refusing to cash in a very large bid. Alternatively he may actually help jumpstart the NFT
The obvious follow-up is to mint an NFT of the promo announcement/performance and sell that too. Obviously that would require its own performative announcement post...
I got "This is not available to you" or something like that, which I've never seen before. A few refreshes later (I also don't have a twitter) it worked though.
For me, this was caused by a buggy service worker; unregistering the service worker (from about:debugging > "This Firefox" > "Service Workers" on Firefox, dunno how on Chrome) should fix the issue
Next up will be a set of data on the wing-flapping rate of African swallow and the instructions for the Holy Hand Grenade.
All the comments about supposedly "owning" a copy of an item that is trivial to make perfect digital copies... exactly.
If, somehow, the NFTs could be made actually non-fungible, and backed by the legal system, the one killer feature would be repeating revenue for the artist with every subsequent sale. That could truly change the economics for the perpetually starving artists in the world. If that came to pass, it might be worth all the electricity and carbon footprint.
Normally, when these kind of things happen, the receipient of that money tends to do something cool with it like dontating it to causes. However, I think it would be very apropos for Cleese to just keep any earnings.
This is the key conceptual leap you have to make to understand NFTs, or cryptocurrency for that matter.
The blockchain is a consensus mechanism, with the emphasis on consensus.
A lot of people agreeing on something having value means that it has value to those people. They can then exchange that thing among themselves and thus transfer the value.
One person saying something has value means it has value to them. If no one else accepts it has value, it can't be used to transfer value.
And a standard database transaction that can be done with pre-existing technology already can do this too? Like seriously, NFTs are not breaking new ground. This is just an excuse to piss away something that could be converted to objectively far more useful fiat.
The fed needs to raise interest rates and get the free dumb money out of the system as soon as possible so we can suck these schemes dry.
Frankly, I think John Cleese is trolling all of the NFT fans.
> movie props, collect stamps, let authors sign their books
All those things have intrisinc values. If tomorrow the market for movie props, stamps and signed book went straight to 0, the owners would keep those objects for themselves, they have sentimental values, not just financial.
If the market for NFTs goes to 0, you have a worthless GUID, cool.
> You judging those people says more about you than them.
Ouch, reading into it, much? I don't begrudge collectors their collections. I understand those because they own an object that holds value, either to them or to others.
The way you put it in the parent comment is "I'm spending money so that I have a story that I can use to flex on people later," which I just can't grok as a motive for spending tens of thousands of dollars.
But the very value of that specific NFT is to have been there when it happened. Buying this NFT 10 years from now will be useless, you were not part of the movement.
... Meaning a logical next step arises: you should create and sell a "I, koonsolo, was there when this NFT was a thing" NFT, which will perpetually be associated to you whoever buys it.
You can run a piece of mathematics that not one person in a thousand would understand, but there is no way to show it off, like in a book case or hang it on a wall.
But given that most valuable art is sitting in deep storage in free ports, I am not sure it is a problem.
Does being the winning bidder on this actually make you the owner (i.e. transfer all associated IP rights to you) or do you just get a higher res version of the image if you win? Both? Neither?
IMO, NFTs are relevant as pop culture artifacts of a tokenized economy. It's less about the art, and more about the artist and buyers as a collective story. Valuations are high due to liquidity, technology and timing as a cultural shift.
They don't call it 'contemporary art' for no reason. We all know that the drawing itself is worthless but the signature is what is 'valued'.
NFTs are just giving life to 'contemporary art' again which can be shortened to 'con-art'. Allowing celebrities a get rich quick route with their signatures. Heck, even an AI can paint something and auction it at Christie's and then re-auction it as an NFT.
As for this NFT and the rest of them, No thanks and no deal.
I think this an unfair characterization of contemporary art. I don’t consider myself an expert by any means, but I’ve been to a couple of contemporary art museums (Mass MoCA and one in Kanazawa) and enjoyed both experiences. I believe that the bulk of artists producing contemporary art work very hard at their craft for very little reward. Certainly most of the works I saw featured looked like they required a lot of effort to think up and execute. There were also certainly some pieces that raised an eyebrow and made me think “that’s art?”, but that’s part of the fun IMO.
The art collector market is where things tend to go sideways. Collectors do often seem to value the name on the signature over everything else. But in most cases when you see those crazy high sale prices at auction, the money is not going to the artist but rather to some other collector. So I don’t think it’s fair to call an entire genre of art a “con” just because of how rich art collectors behave.
The name of the artist is "gcp-nyc", which is evidently a reference to George C. Parker, the only con artist who has successfully "sold" the Brooklyn Bridge to date: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_C._Parker
Well, if NFTs are a scam, then anything you buy for money is a scam. Usually we reserve "scams" for "trickeries", fooling someone out of their money, when they don't really want to. In this case, people are willingly buying NFTs.
Maybe a better word is to use "hyped" or "mania" or something, because it's not really a "scam" as no one really own NFTs as a whole and are fooling others.
Disclaimer: I'm myself not into NFTs because it mostly seems like hype at this point, I own zero NFTs myself and have no interest in buying. But I also care about accuracy.
People being scammed, by definition, don't know they're being scammed. Otherwise they wouldn't be scammed. They also willingly buy something they believe is real.
Not a scam in this case. John Cleese has signed the work himself, provided video evidence of its authenticity, and minted it on his own behalf. John Cleese is a famous humorist. The owner of this NFT will have a signed, authentic, John Cleese NFT. You can't copy and paste that. Even if John Cleese decides to mint 100 more of these, you'll have verifiable providence of NFT #1 of John Cleese's Brooklyn Bridge.
The drawing, of course, is quite ridiculous. But what else would you expect from one of the masterminds behind the "Ministry of Silly Walks"?
At least John Cleese clearly mentions "I have a bridge to sell you" in the video in his tweet.
That saying is a reference to the scams of George C. Parker who "sold" the Brooklyn Bridge a number of times to gullible people, and from the context of the video it is clear he is referring to that.
I'd like to defend NFTs from a slightly different angle.
(Leaving aside the carbon emissions - let's assume everyone finally switches to Proof of Stake)
They are stupid. They are pointless. But then so is most of the art world - and going a step forward - so is much of what we value.
As several people have pointed out they are no less arbitrary than a limited edition print vs a commodity print. The value of fine wines escalates exponentially whilst the extra utility you get from any quality improvements trends towards nothing.
Much of what we value is pointless and bordering on delusional. But unless you're a wandering ascetic or superhumanly utilitarian in your consumption (hint - you're probably not even if you think you are) then the difference is one of degree rather than of category.
The critic, which you do not address, is that (most) NFTs pretend to give assurance of ownership to an "original" digital asset.
The problem with NFTs is a conceptual one not a technological or psychological or societal one. The problem with NFTs is digital "products" by their nature cannot claim originality.
Art might be stupid, but you can actually make the claim of having an original insert_coin drawing, despite its value.
I thought I had covered this point by talking about limited edition prints.
A print is a print is a print. The artist simple decides to make a set of 5. If someone later makes a run of 10,000 - why is the former more valuable. The artist might never actually touch the print. They are simply authorizing them.
NFTs cannot guarantee the ownership of an original digital asset despite its claims because a digital asset has no original.
They cannot even guarantee the ownership of a limited production "edition".
I agree. But my point is that this is only a matter of degree more stupid than the concept of limited edition prints. Or $10000 cigars you can't smoke. Or a hotel room that costs similar amounts per night. The list goes on.
They can guarantee part of a limited edition, if the contract is written such that only x tokens can be issued. If a future contract issues more copies, then that release will be less valuable by nature of it being later/less exclusive, even though it’s the same physical file.
How about photographs? Even back in the days of silver chemistry printing, it was fairly straightforward for an artist like Ansel Adams to go into the darkroom and print up more copies of his pieces. Most famous photographers, in fact, hire assistants who do the actual duplication to their formula, and then they sign, date and number the prints. Today, when even fine art photographers print their results via inkjet, it’s incredibly easy to reproduce as many copies as you want.
For modern graphic arts, the value has always come from being part of a serialized limited edition.
> For modern graphic arts, the value has always come from being part of a serialized limited edition.
The value to whom? To the artist the actual negative is clearly the most valuable to own. Original Ansel Adams negatives are actually very very valuable.
Things, actual things, have value because they are physical, and the closer to the original the more value they have. Negatives have the most value, prints have less value, and a digital jpeg of an Ansel Adams photo has almost no value. I know, I "own" several.
> and the closer to the original the more value they have.
Do you see the step you've just taken?
It's no longer about authenticity, it's about proximity to authenticity. Would a reproduction from the original negative by someone other than Ansel Adams be more valuable than a different type of reproduction? If so, why?
I am fully aware of what I am saying: things have value not only because of what they are or what they are made of, they have value for other reasons.
NFT people claim things only have value because of what they are, an art piece has value because it is an art piece, because it is beautiful to look at or whatever, and that visual property can be stored on the blockchain. That is where they are failing. They are missing 99% of the reasons things have value, and why they cannot understand two seemingly identical things having widely different values.
I think there is a flaw in your reasoning but it's hard to be sure because your last sentence is rather hard to parse.
> They are missing 99% of the reasons things have value,
Can you clarify?
> they cannot understand two seemingly identical things having widely different values.
We're not talking about the value in a piece of art - or even the value of owning an original piece of art.
Ownership itself is a social construct. Back to my limited edition print comparison:
You own one of a series of 100 prints or a photograph by a famous artist.
I "own" a reproduction of the same work that is high enough resolution to be indistinguishable from your print.
Assuming you can prove the authenticity of your print (maybe there's a chain of custody you can verify) - your print is worth thousands and mine is worth simply the cost of making another copy.
> The problem with NFTs is digital "products" by their nature cannot claim originality.
That's the beauty of it. Yes, the digital good by its nature is infinitely replicable [0], but everyone knows and (hopefully) understands that, and that is not what it is being sold with the NFT. The NFT, as I understand it, represents a totally new type of "ownership" that has no analogue in previously established forms of ownership. The closest thing to NFTs are securities, where the value of the security is almost always speculative in nature. NFTs just take this to its teleological end. Yes, an artist or John Cleese can go ahead and mint another Brooklyn Bridge token, but doing this would degrade their reputation and make their future work less valuable and attractive to buyers, just like a company that keeps minting stock indiscriminately is going to have a harder time selling that stock. John Cleese selling a token is actually very cool in my opinion, because he didn't have to call Goldman Sachs to make it happen. I see a future where we have premier blockchains where all the top assets will be traded. Someone selling farts [1] and such will not be on those blockchains (unless those farts become highly regarded, which they might), and the blockchain itself will be a sort of crypto-artistic expression. I think this is just the beginning.
I may not be able to put it back in the same blockchain, which is a different issue, but if I only care about the bits that make up the “coin” I can absolutely copy them. I could even copy the entire blockchain.
AND the problem is not with the token, you can own all the original tokens for an image you want, you still don’t have anything different than a jpeg.
> I may not be able to put it back in the same blockchain
Look, if you can figure out how to double spend BTC, go for it. There's $1 trillion on that chain right now just waiting for the first genius with a copy-paste button to come along and take it.
It's not a different issue at all. A Bitcoin is not a thing you can copy. The UTXOs only exist on the chain and only mean anything in terms of the chain.
> you still don’t have anything different than a jpeg.
Yes, you do. You have verifiable providence of a unique digital signature (not unlike an autograph). You have a programmable, pluggable, leverageable, tradeable, asset that interacts seamlessly with hundreds of different applications (and rapidly growing).
Copying the value is a different question, but I can copy the data all I want.
> Yes, you do. You have verifiable providence of a unique digital signature (not unlike an autograph)
You have a signature that a token is valid on the chain, cool. As long as it stays on the chain of course. But that’s all it is, it does not make one jpeg the original and another one with the same bits the copy.
> (Leaving aside the carbon emissions - let's assume everyone finally switches to Proof of Stake)
I don't know how you get to defend something when you're sidestepping the biggest problem with NFTs.
I'm fine with stupid and pointless things as long as your stupid and pointless things don't wreck the environment. If someone decides to poison the local water supply because it's an "art project" they still poisoned the fucking water supply.
Thanks I've been looking for a PoS blockchain in production. Will check this out. Do you know any others?
I really enjoy NFTs conceptually, much more than crypto in general actually, and I really don't get a lot of the hate. If you remove the emissions aspect (which is the non-starter for me), I think it's so cool that there is a way to create scarcity in the digital world, even if that scarcity is totally "meaningless." Yes, there are some goods with inherent value: food, shelter, heat sources. But NFTs are far from the first type of asset that has no inherent value, and that includes both the cyber and real worlds. Humans like to curate and collect, and NFTs are just an expression of that drive.
What I wonder if why NFTs suddenly took off now. I remember hearing about them years ago.
Cardano is a production proof-of-stake blockchain. It has the fifth-largest market cap.
However, Ethereum has virtually monopolized the DeFi space. It is supposed to move to PoS, especially considering that transaction fees are insanely high due to recent demand.
You can't even run a hello world on cardano yet. but it has that market cap, with the expectancy that all users who buy in now will become super rich soon (Tm)
It's weird for me to read HN and see people speak of PoS as some kind of new cutting edge technology. Maybe some of the issues with it may or have may not been solved but it is so damn old now that it's 2021.
Like the first live real money implementation of a PoS chain was done by SunnyKing back in like...I want to say 2012, but maybe 2013. SunnyKing was the same guy who went on to make the somewhat interesting PoW function via finding largest prime numbers(arguably somewhat useful PoW, certainly more than double SHA-256), Primecoin.
Then in a larger scale there was NXT which was like 2013-2014ish, full PoS.
I don't care about the merits of these particular chains, but PoS was one of the earliest innovations in blockchain tech. The lineage was roughly something like:
0. All the centralised pre-Bitcoin cypherpunk digital currency stuff from the mailing list like Bitgold, Chaumian ecash whatever.
1. Bitcoin
2. Namecoin(decentralized DNS)
3. Feathercoin/Litecoin(Bitcoin with 0.25 block target time and 4x total coins), arguably shouldn't be on the list for 'innovation' but Litecoin is successful(at some point they changed the PoW work function to scrypt so I guess it counts, there were other scam coins around this time too doing the same thing. So I don't necessarily mean Litecoin was 'third place' overall, just that it ended up rising from the pile of shit).
4. Different forms of PoW functions. ie Litecoin doing scrypt so people could still use their ATI Radeon 4xxx to mine and not order ASICs from shady companies), Cryptonight stuff maybe(lies about it being 'developed on the darknet for years and being related that cicada thing' before and such, hard to make an accurate timeline for that one(ended up forked off as Monero, possibly post-PoS tech)).
5. PoS, 2012-2014ish. Probably didn't come before different PoW functions but it might have switched with #4's place, hard to remember the exact timelines, but people were trolling and making fun of PoS ever since it was theorized. Probably because a true fully realized PoS that is superior to PoW is a threat to the massive investments one must put behind PoW systems, which also becomes the root of their 'nothing at stake' arguments against PoS, which certainly had merit back then with early PoS implementations. I wonder if those truly got solved.
This was all like 2014 at the latest. Very old stuff but crypto is full of sales snakes(not targeted at you at all) who try to sell other peoples old open source tech as new modern innovations. It's a familiar pattern. People sold Bitcoin as private and anonymous for years...like way too long.
I'm imagining now there will be a point when PoS is 10+ years old and people will acting like it's the newest thing on the block still.
nft's don't poison the environment in and of themselves. First of all they don't NEED to exist on a proof of work blockchain, and second whether or not you make or trade nft's people are still going to be mining bitcoin and ethereum. your criticism here is of proof of work, not nft's. please don't conflate the 2. there are plenty of reasons that nft's are silly, but proof of work isn't one of them.
Until NFTs move away from proof of work I'll continue to criticize them.
It's like expecting good intentions and then being surprised when a few bad actors ruin things for the larger group. Tragedy of the commons is exactly why stuff like this should be called out, each and every single time.
I think in 1-2 generations people will look back and wonder about how dumb we were about our energy consumption regarding the environmental challenges we were facing.
Most of ou current Christmas folklore is pretty pointless lights being a pretty recent invention when compared to christian religion timespan. Same as for Christmas trees, they were pretty much on point when everybody had a wood stove to throw them in after Christmas and warm the house. Pretty pointless nowaday when you live in a flat...
Do you play video games, then? Because arguably it isn’t NFTs that consume power...it’s the GPUs. GPUs do way more than NFTs, and there is data that shows that gaming consumes way more than blockchain.
If my mom is any indicator, many consider video games stupid and pointless. Value is in the eye of the beholder.
These are the sources I've used when I've gone looking, but it doesn't help that we don't actually do industry-by-industry energy consumption comparisons.
Maybe this is a the case, however there are, I would guess at least a billion people on earth who play games. there is nothing even close to that using blockchains. If blockchain energy usage is even vaguely in the range of games it can still be considered an enormous --possibly-- unnecessary usage of power
Maybe this is the case, but when we start judging what constitutes unnecessary usage of power, we get in the business of telling people what they can and cannot do with hardware they own. Last I checked, the HN crowd really doesn't like that kind of thing.
If you want to bring the data you mentioned we can have a conversation, however I would be very surprised if it came close to the 50-130GWh mark for just bitcoin alone[1].
These are the sources I've used when I've gone looking, but it doesn't help that we don't actually do industry-by-industry energy consumption comparisons.
A quick search finds that a single bitcoin transaction consumes around 773.80 kWh. That's enough to power a video game console, like a PS5 for example, for around 3100 hours. So the simple act of buying the video game to play would cost vastly more electricity than playing it ever will.
Whether or not gaming as a whole consumes more power than crypto as a whole isn't the question, it's whether or not crypto would consume more power per person using it than per gamer playing games. As in, give everyone a ~fixed power consumption quota - where is that power "better" spent, gaming or crypto?
I honestly don't know where the power is better spent. There are quite a few industries I personally find superfluous in the world according to my personal set of values. Ironically for this context, I consider bitcoin to be among them.
But I also don't think judging the industry on power consumption is particularly fruitful, unless we want to look industry-by-industry and weigh utility vs energy, which we do not do. We do this for blockchain because calculating this is easy. We don't even have these numbers for, say, the stock market, so we don't even know how good or bad that is. We can't answer the first questions that arise from this kind of analysis.
> We don't even have these numbers for, say, the stock market, so we don't even know how good or bad that is. We can't answer the first questions that arise from this kind of analysis.
1 bitcoin transaction takes more power than 100,000 Visa transactions.
> But I also don't think judging the industry on power consumption is particularly fruitful, unless we want to look industry-by-industry and weigh utility vs energy, which we do not do.
That's exactly what I think we as a society should do. We are limited on the amount of sustainable power generation, so looking at cost vs. value is exactly what we should be doing. Especially when something comes along that does the same basic thing as an existing system, but 100,000x more expensive.
You seem to assume that very little energy will be spent to acquire coins for staking. If there is real interest in ether and stiff competition to stake (and there better be for proof of stake to work), I'm afraid that won't be the case.
It will harm the environment, but no less than the rest of our economy. There are two problems being conflated here. In basically all of society, people harm the environment in order to acquire resources. In proof of work, you go one step further and proceed to destroy the resources you just acquired. This is because destroying resources via reversing hashes is a costly signal that cannot be faked and is hence not susceptible to a Sybil attack.
Proof of Stake doesn't have this problem. The mere act of owning a coin does not entail the destruction of value. In proof of stake, you just make money, probably harming the environment along the way as you do, and buy the coin. That's it. The resources you obtained are not destroyed, they are passed on to whoever you bought the coins from.
In both proof of work and proof of stake people are doing work (using energy) in order to obtain money.
In proof of work you work to obtain mining equipment and electricity and then use that to perform the work of securing the network (nothing is “destroyed”). You are then paid for doing that work. The more work you do relative to other miners, the more you will get paid.
In proof of stake you work to obtain eth (for example) which then grants you the privilege to run validators. The more you stake, the more validating you can do. You are paid money for successfully validating, and charged money for failing to validate. You will need to do more work to replenish money spent on unsuccessful validation. Ultimately, the more work you do relative to other stakers, the more you will get paid.
It’s going to be a little more difficult than it is for proof of work to measure how much total energy is used by proof of stake, but it still should be doable. Maybe it will be less than the energy used by proof of work, but maybe not.
I can look at the Mona Lisa - either the original or a reproduction. Does that mean "owning the Mona Lisa" is meaningless? How about "owning the copyright on a painting that is on the internet"? Worthless or worth paying for?
Well yes. But anyone can make a reproduction of a Warhol print. But there is a chain of custody that adds value.
I'd like to reiterate that I think the value in a Warhol print is also stupid. It's less stupid than NFTs but the point I'm trying to make (apparently unsuccesfully) is that these differences are matters of degree rather than type.
We humans have a multitude of ways to invent value that is built on sand.
We have many fictions we indulge in about authenticity and value.
NFTs are a new fiction. They might even be dumber than other currently accepted fictions.
But the discussion is "which of these fictions is the most stupid?" rather than "NFTs are stupid". We are already a long way from genuine utility or intrinsic value and into the realms of social consensus and value-through-association.
Can they? A proper reproduction would involve replicating Warhol's screen-printing process exactly. Probably easier than painting a replica Picasso, but... still pretty involved.
Minting an NFT is trivial, you can do it with the press of a button, at scale. You could mint an NFT for every single item in the Library of Congress with a for-loop, if you could pay the transaction fees.
Owning a physical painting grants access to the object, so for example you can study the texture of the brush strokes, the canvas, take samples of the paint, smell it, destroy it, produce copies or images of it at any level of detail or resolution you like. None of this is possible with a digital reproduction.
If I own the copyright of an artwork, even one 'on the internet' I have exclusive rights to reproduce it commercially. For example I could sell prints, while it would be illegal for others to do so. The existence of the latest pop songs on Youtube doesn't stop the copyright holders commercialising it.
NFTs don't by themselves confer any of these rights or privileges with respect to the thing they purportedly represent.
I think the majority of the value in art nfts will be derived from being part of the provenance, or being part of the history of the beginning of 'owning' digital art, much like owning a famous painting. By extension it could be applied to digital culture, for example the tiktok guy riding his skateboard is selling that meme as an nft. So if collectors are good (and lucky), they are basically able to buy their way into a niche of history by being associated with works that represent periods of cultural significance.
Sure that may seem stupid to most people, but most people don't even get why regular art is significant or can be very expensive. Personally I would attribute it to my lack of understanding rather than dismiss it outright.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 326 ms ] threadI suppose everyone knows the emperors are naked, but hey, it seems like that's not stopping megabucks being made, and why should you miss out?
I mean I guess if you look at show of brands like Luis Vuiton (sp?) There are plenty of people willing to pay for said bragging rights.
As someone who's always mocked those brands and the people who buy them, it seems so strange to me though.
They absolutely don't. There's no art collectors or amateurs in this game, only speculators.
There is more to it than speculation. There is a con where something went on. Maybe the auction house commissioned the money to pay for it and had a 69.3 million fee.
It saddens me that journalists have chosen not to follow the money and ask the questions.
Did they? I thought it was his investor "Metakovan" who commissioned it. Following the money is rather hard in an all-pseudonym system.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
NFTs and crypto are obviously realms for this to play out, but this same force is at work for speculative investing in startups as well. For every startup with a value prop, a market, and a revenue model, there are a dozen who are flush with cash solely for the purpose of attracting Greater Suckers, fueled by the same motive to park and/or gamble an asset portfolio.
[0] https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/karen-petrou-wealth-inequal...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Rome_(podcast)
[2] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.danoeh.antennapod/
People compare NFTs to trading cards. But if you already think those things are basically useless zero-sum speculative Greater Fool insert-other-overused-but-apt-buzzwords bullshit, your opinion of NFTs won't be improved much.
NFTs, in their current state and hype wave, are probably a little like the dotcom bubble. It definitely doesn't imply the internet and the world wide web are bubbles, but it implies a major disconnect of some kind. I'm more interested in the future of semi-fungible tokens and novel, creative uses of NFT/SFT smart contracts. Plus just smart contracts in general.
I'm not so sure. Owning $10-$50M homes in major world cities, flying in a private jet, summer homes, winter homes, no car cheaper than $200k, no car older then 5 years, private school for your kids, private tutors, etc. adds up fast. Not to mention the effort that goes into make sure you never have to fly business class again.
The obscenely wealthy seem to either be content (Buffet), focused on charity (Gates), or all over the place (Musk). Anything less than $100M is less interesting thank you'd think.
Given every post on crypto / blockchain / NFT on HN is full of these exact same comments showing utter disbelief and bewilderment, for the past 10 years, the answer is “No, everyone here thinks like you.”
But, NFT's are selling "participation". You are not John Cleese, and you're not even all that funny. But you're an enormous fan, and happen to control an adequately-large amount of cash.
In the same way that you can hire Elton John to pretend to be your friend for a few hours, and play at your wedding, etc, you can also "buy in" to a very public partcipation in some art, or joke, or both ... at no meaningful cost to you.
Surely the market is limited. But people have paid a lot of money for a piece of toast, too.
In this case, it's no weirder than Cleese selling his socks for charity. Or profit! Who cares? Eat the rich, it's all good.
> ownership of digital goods which can't be owned?
One interesting fact it is what the ownership means legally. If there was a successful image that an expensive NFT owner had, it wouldn't surprise me to see some legal shenanigans. This has not been tested yet. Capability does not give you the rights to make copies of digital art. "Can't be owed" is a rather brave claim I think.
> You can make unlimited indistinguishable copies
Interestingly it is not dissimilar to a lot of physical art. To the extent that some 'restorations' of damaged art contain a lot of paint of the restorer rather than the original artist. I believe there are many professionals who are capable of creating something visually indistinguishable from the Mona Lisa, say.
Without specialised equipment you would have a very hard time telling reality from a good copy. So I am forced to conclude (what dealers will say quite explicitly) that most of the value is in the provenance not the physicality. "NFT is rubbish" becomes less obvious, to me.
Digital items have no original. The bytes are constantly copied, even in the creation itself. And every viewing creates another copy. And these copies have perfect fidelity. That's the difference.
In my understanding the NFT doesn't even cover the ownership of anything except the NFT itself. It's like owning a sheet of paper you write "certificate of authenticity" at the top on in sharpie, then sign yourself. You should probably write the bits in the middle in crayon.
> I mean I guess if you look at show of brands like Luis Vuiton (sp?) There are plenty of people willing to pay for said bragging rights.
Merch is at least an actual thing you can own and use, or get pleasure from by looking at (for works of arts e.g. prints & posters, limited run or not), sometimes tied to life events or memories (e.g. band, museum, or tourism spot merch).
You can buy a replica of a piece of art to look at it. You buy the original to store value. You hope it may appreciate as well. It could end up worthless. But until someone says otherwise, it has the value stored in it.
It's just like baseball cards. You can make unlimited indistinguishable copies, but you don't. The date they are printed matters for some reason. Who owned it previously, its last sale price at auction is part of its history and thus its value.
Sorare/ubisoft also has a much better value proposition. Theyve combined draftkings and pokemon into a live betting market with collectable cards that you can use to play a game, to win more. The early generation may be simple digital art, mostly worthless, but there will be more innovation to come. Part of the reason I think NFTs are the real deal is because I think the value of art is often stupid, and yet it still has value. Even if 99% of NFTs turn into nothing, there will be some early art from people that arent famous yet, that is someday found. I have no doubt there is an immense amount of mystery being planted, waiting to be uncovered. Whatever stupidity and hype and storytelling and history around artwork, that I dont understand, will translate to this realm as well. The lack of decay, fire damage, traditional theft, and loss will be an interesting wrinkle.
If anything this is a democratization of the wealthy auction scene. A new tier of field to play.
Alternative assets come in all shapes in sizes. I can store wealth in gold, comics, wine. Why not my name on a ledger listed as owner of nothing in particular other than the price I paid for it? The amount of hate they get on HN should be a clue that everyone is being over analytical and logical, and missing out on analyzing them through human behavior. They arent a robotic math problem, they are behavioral economics.
I can't wait to see an investable etf of sorts that lets people invest in a collection of NFTs like they would bonds. Youll have "curators"/"fund managers" assembling and storing a vast array of art, allowing people to diversify and own fractional shares of a bunch of art.
Does it sound stupid? Absolutely? Which is why it's just crazy enough to work.
"Investing" in a Picasso is an investment in a long-term store of cultural value that you speculate will appreciate more quickly than the S&P. Probably because you bet that the 1% will see outsized gains compared to the 99%. Maybe you also like the art and want to be the only person in the world who can display it. Also it can be very useful as a tax dodge.
"Investing" in a new and unknown artist is several things: a) speculation that they will become more famous and that you are tasteful enough to know it early (see: angel investing), b) patronage and participation (see: friends & family rounds), c) conspicuous consumption (see: conspicuous consumption), and finally d) purchase of an expression of art that you enjoy, which may or may not have resale value in the future if your priorities change.
NFTs are confusing because any persistent value is completely dependent on the continued agreement that exclusivity of relationship is valuable and transferable. What's it like to be the eleventh owner of an NFT? Presumably, it'd be pretty meh.
But to your point -- it's psychology not logic. Today's buyers are not looking for a store of value. It's just an exercise in one of two things: vanity or speculation. These are powerful things!
No, it is not. Picasso died dirt poor, he never beneficiated in large sums from his paintings. It just happen he was crazy enough to make a name and now people brag about him.
I meant it in the simplest way, which simply means "support".
Yes, physical art, baseball cards, gold and whatnot all have a long history and vast amount of people who participate in the trade.
NFTs in comparison are super new, and the only people who seem to chip in are those who either have some stake in there or bored.
NFTs might be a good store of value eventually. But right now dumping millions in there seems like a huge gamble.
I get that all “store of value” are arbitrary and that gold could be other things. But it seems funny to just pick random things and then try to convince others that it’s worthwhile. There are at least certain characteristics needed for a store of value and something completely arbitrary has a bootstrap problem.
I can at least look at art or play with a Black Lotus. Holding an NFT of a piece of art is stupid as a store of value because there are so many better stores (eg, an NFT that conveys ownership rights to a piece of art for example).
Everyone understands that baseball cards are just like savings accounts!
Perhaps with people focusing on that, we can get more quality products IRL. I went to an eye exam where the optometrist was wearing arcteryx gear during my exam. Perhaps she was going to jet off to some location where that stuff was needed, or perhaps she just liked it for fashion. But nonetheless, when people start wearing things that need real quality for non-quality reasons eventually brands start wising up and selling at the same price but with worse quality.
Arcteryx pieces feel great on, the same way avocados taste great in your mouth. And just like you'd likely be misleading people by using an avocado as an example of the average fruit, you are misleading people by using Arcteryx to stand in for technical outdoorwear.
Hell, that holds even if your optometrist was wearing a fucking rain shell in the office. Compare:
1. jacket made of mostly straight, rectangular pieces of material sewn together, then taped at the seams (which can rub against your skin) in order to make it waterproof, probably with long arms so it doesn't ride up when you raise yours (e.g., you end up with wrinkly, noisy sleeves)
2. jacket with fused seams, made of pieces that are fabricated to fit together and follow the contour of the human body, with thicker material fused only in those areas that were measured to be high abrasion
Number 2 is obviously the wrong garment to wear inside a climate controlled building. But it feels so much better than your run-of-the-mill slicker that I could see someone in and out of a building deciding to simply leave it on for a bit.
In other words, the technical specs responsible for those differences match "real quality reasons" for someone to decide to wear it for longer periods, even in conditions for which the garment wasn't designed.
And if it wasn't a rain shell, it's likely the piece was comfortable, breathable, didn't look like the average piece of outdoorwear, and was perfectly fitting for the conditions of an optometry office. (I own probably four of their Delta LT fullzips which are so light I sometimes forget to stop wearing them in the early summer.)
The more optometrists who wear it because it feels good, the sooner it sucks being technical because optometrists don’t care if it fails because they aren’t 200 miles from another version.
Also, that is a model followed by every similar company-- a model started by Patagonia back in the day when a technical piece of clothing was literally a rugby shirt.
In short, if you woke up in a nightmare universe where all optometrists wear Arcteryx you'd probably end up with a few more pieces in their technical line.
For example if I sell you a song as an nft you could then license the song to Budweiser to use in a commercial and we both get paid. Think about how difficult this would be to arrange without the nft to handle the contract.
I've not seen a single NFT that comes with an associated copyright license to the underlying work.
Additionally, the artist only receives a royalty if the token is sold on these marketplaces that enforce the royalty. There's no such thing preventing a private sale that doesn't pay it.
This doesn't mean they couldn't exist, just that (in my current understanding) it's not part of the ERC-721 spec.
It’s literally that. Someone giving you a slip of paper ”You own Mona Lisa” and nothing more. The actual piece of art is elsewhere. Copyrights are not affected etc.
Something like cards in Gods Unchained is a better NFT example than a picture.
It has emotional value.
Lack of liquidity is implicit in non-fungible tokens. You have to find a buyer who wants the exact item you have. That may be hard. It may require paying for advertising, which means the return can go negative.
With a uniform commodity, there's a market with prices. Non-fungible markets don't crash, they stall. You can't sell, but that's not visible on marketplaces, especially if they're designed to hide listings that are not moving. (This is common in real estate; un-saleable property is taken off the market, then re-listed, so it doesn't show as "for sale for 72 weeks".) What we're probably going to see are markets with huge numbers of items that are not selling, but have high asking prices. This will create the illusion of value, because someone will add up the asking prices and claim that's a "market cap". The illusion of volume and liquidity can be created with wash trades.
There are getting to be a quite a number of blockchain based virtual worlds, where you can pay way too much for virtual land. Few people actually log into those virtual worlds and spend time there; they just trade land. "The metagame is the game", some analyst wrote of Decentraland. (Which, despite its name, is totally centralized. You can't run a Decentraland server yourself.)
I used to go to art openings in SF, and sometimes we'd look at some bad piece and ask "will this be around in 10 years or will it have been tossed out?" Years later, I suspect most of it went to a Dumpster long ago.
[1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/Franklin-Mint-The-Three-Stooges-Dec...
Of course, this is no reason to try to buy any for that purpose. It will probably be something silly like the first in game item that works across games and platforms or something. Having a red hat that will work across all games and be unique forever, now that’s worth something.
It's like Cleese is personally making fun of the buyer!
I'm pretty sure this will go down as the Pet Rocks of this era. But... I'm not entirely sure.
Sigh. NTF is just more nonsense.
https://twitter.com/JohnCleese/status/1372944852325789704
It's brilliant parody, as usual, from Cleese. Regardless of what you think of NFTs, you will get a good laugh.
Only nerds want a smartphone
Bitcoin is a scam
NFTs are just stupid
Just because I don’t like the aesthetic qualities of NFTs does not mean the whole space is bunk.
AOL keywords, WAP phones, pets.com stock, self driving cars are two years away, X.25, VR, Hydrogen Cars.
All the comments about supposedly "owning" a copy of an item that is trivial to make perfect digital copies... exactly.
If, somehow, the NFTs could be made actually non-fungible, and backed by the legal system, the one killer feature would be repeating revenue for the artist with every subsequent sale. That could truly change the economics for the perpetually starving artists in the world. If that came to pass, it might be worth all the electricity and carbon footprint.
Laden or unladen? In a vacuum?
That's no longer a concern for an increasing number of NFTs minted today[0].
0. https://svilentodorov.xyz/blog/nft-electricity/
"I won, I won, I finally came out ahead!"
Prunella Scales appears.
"Thank you, Basil!"
Yoink.
"Remember when John Cleese sold the Brooklyn Bridge? Look, I have that NFT that he sold!".
Heck, I would even pay money for that. First of all for the bragging rights, and second of all because I'm sure plenty of people would pay for it.
But $50k is a bit over my budget ;). But in no way am I surprised that there is somebody out there that wants to pay this amount.
If anyone is surprised by this, you probably also don't understand any other collectibles.
This is the key conceptual leap you have to make to understand NFTs, or cryptocurrency for that matter.
The blockchain is a consensus mechanism, with the emphasis on consensus.
A lot of people agreeing on something having value means that it has value to those people. They can then exchange that thing among themselves and thus transfer the value.
One person saying something has value means it has value to them. If no one else accepts it has value, it can't be used to transfer value.
The fed needs to raise interest rates and get the free dumb money out of the system as soon as possible so we can suck these schemes dry.
Frankly, I think John Cleese is trolling all of the NFT fans.
You judging those people says more about you than them.
All those things have intrisinc values. If tomorrow the market for movie props, stamps and signed book went straight to 0, the owners would keep those objects for themselves, they have sentimental values, not just financial.
If the market for NFTs goes to 0, you have a worthless GUID, cool.
Ouch, reading into it, much? I don't begrudge collectors their collections. I understand those because they own an object that holds value, either to them or to others.
The way you put it in the parent comment is "I'm spending money so that I have a story that I can use to flex on people later," which I just can't grok as a motive for spending tens of thousands of dollars.
... Meaning a logical next step arises: you should create and sell a "I, koonsolo, was there when this NFT was a thing" NFT, which will perpetually be associated to you whoever buys it.
You can run a piece of mathematics that not one person in a thousand would understand, but there is no way to show it off, like in a book case or hang it on a wall.
But given that most valuable art is sitting in deep storage in free ports, I am not sure it is a problem.
Does John Cleese post this address in a tweet, or how is it associated with him?
Yes, he has done so.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlQNPg5-hgk
(But you have to say it in Forrest Gump's voice.)
NFTs are just giving life to 'contemporary art' again which can be shortened to 'con-art'. Allowing celebrities a get rich quick route with their signatures. Heck, even an AI can paint something and auction it at Christie's and then re-auction it as an NFT.
As for this NFT and the rest of them, No thanks and no deal.
The art collector market is where things tend to go sideways. Collectors do often seem to value the name on the signature over everything else. But in most cases when you see those crazy high sale prices at auction, the money is not going to the artist but rather to some other collector. So I don’t think it’s fair to call an entire genre of art a “con” just because of how rich art collectors behave.
I see a dollar equivalent, but I don’t see how they translate from the 0.015 figure.
EDIT: Never mind. Apparently, the symbol Ξ refers to the Ether cryptocurrency.
Maybe a better word is to use "hyped" or "mania" or something, because it's not really a "scam" as no one really own NFTs as a whole and are fooling others.
Disclaimer: I'm myself not into NFTs because it mostly seems like hype at this point, I own zero NFTs myself and have no interest in buying. But I also care about accuracy.
People being scammed, by definition, don't know they're being scammed. Otherwise they wouldn't be scammed. They also willingly buy something they believe is real.
Yes, people are stupid. Does that mean they are being scammed? No, they're just idiots.
New technology, same scam
The drawing, of course, is quite ridiculous. But what else would you expect from one of the masterminds behind the "Ministry of Silly Walks"?
That saying is a reference to the scams of George C. Parker who "sold" the Brooklyn Bridge a number of times to gullible people, and from the context of the video it is clear he is referring to that.
(Leaving aside the carbon emissions - let's assume everyone finally switches to Proof of Stake)
They are stupid. They are pointless. But then so is most of the art world - and going a step forward - so is much of what we value.
As several people have pointed out they are no less arbitrary than a limited edition print vs a commodity print. The value of fine wines escalates exponentially whilst the extra utility you get from any quality improvements trends towards nothing.
Much of what we value is pointless and bordering on delusional. But unless you're a wandering ascetic or superhumanly utilitarian in your consumption (hint - you're probably not even if you think you are) then the difference is one of degree rather than of category.
The problem with NFTs is a conceptual one not a technological or psychological or societal one. The problem with NFTs is digital "products" by their nature cannot claim originality.
Art might be stupid, but you can actually make the claim of having an original insert_coin drawing, despite its value.
A print is a print is a print. The artist simple decides to make a set of 5. If someone later makes a run of 10,000 - why is the former more valuable. The artist might never actually touch the print. They are simply authorizing them.
For modern graphic arts, the value has always come from being part of a serialized limited edition.
The value to whom? To the artist the actual negative is clearly the most valuable to own. Original Ansel Adams negatives are actually very very valuable.
Things, actual things, have value because they are physical, and the closer to the original the more value they have. Negatives have the most value, prints have less value, and a digital jpeg of an Ansel Adams photo has almost no value. I know, I "own" several.
Do you see the step you've just taken?
It's no longer about authenticity, it's about proximity to authenticity. Would a reproduction from the original negative by someone other than Ansel Adams be more valuable than a different type of reproduction? If so, why?
I am fully aware of what I am saying: things have value not only because of what they are or what they are made of, they have value for other reasons.
NFT people claim things only have value because of what they are, an art piece has value because it is an art piece, because it is beautiful to look at or whatever, and that visual property can be stored on the blockchain. That is where they are failing. They are missing 99% of the reasons things have value, and why they cannot understand two seemingly identical things having widely different values.
> They are missing 99% of the reasons things have value,
Can you clarify?
> they cannot understand two seemingly identical things having widely different values.
We're not talking about the value in a piece of art - or even the value of owning an original piece of art.
Ownership itself is a social construct. Back to my limited edition print comparison:
You own one of a series of 100 prints or a photograph by a famous artist.
I "own" a reproduction of the same work that is high enough resolution to be indistinguishable from your print.
Assuming you can prove the authenticity of your print (maybe there's a chain of custody you can verify) - your print is worth thousands and mine is worth simply the cost of making another copy.
How is this less silly than NFTs?
Sentence 1 is trivially true. Sentence 2 differs from my understanding but more importantly - I don't see how it connects to our previous discussion.
So far, "ownership" has meant "vague association." If people really wanted to own IP, you'd think there'd be a boom in song rights, but there isn't.
https://globalnews.ca/news/7285773/music-streaming-revenue/
That's the beauty of it. Yes, the digital good by its nature is infinitely replicable [0], but everyone knows and (hopefully) understands that, and that is not what it is being sold with the NFT. The NFT, as I understand it, represents a totally new type of "ownership" that has no analogue in previously established forms of ownership. The closest thing to NFTs are securities, where the value of the security is almost always speculative in nature. NFTs just take this to its teleological end. Yes, an artist or John Cleese can go ahead and mint another Brooklyn Bridge token, but doing this would degrade their reputation and make their future work less valuable and attractive to buyers, just like a company that keeps minting stock indiscriminately is going to have a harder time selling that stock. John Cleese selling a token is actually very cool in my opinion, because he didn't have to call Goldman Sachs to make it happen. I see a future where we have premier blockchains where all the top assets will be traded. Someone selling farts [1] and such will not be on those blockchains (unless those farts become highly regarded, which they might), and the blockchain itself will be a sort of crypto-artistic expression. I think this is just the beginning.
[0] https://twitter.com/_Lord_Enki_/status/1372976176411578369
[1] https://nypost.com/2021/03/18/nyc-man-sells-fart-for-85-cash...
I may not be able to put it back in the same blockchain, which is a different issue, but if I only care about the bits that make up the “coin” I can absolutely copy them. I could even copy the entire blockchain.
AND the problem is not with the token, you can own all the original tokens for an image you want, you still don’t have anything different than a jpeg.
Look, if you can figure out how to double spend BTC, go for it. There's $1 trillion on that chain right now just waiting for the first genius with a copy-paste button to come along and take it.
It's not a different issue at all. A Bitcoin is not a thing you can copy. The UTXOs only exist on the chain and only mean anything in terms of the chain.
> you still don’t have anything different than a jpeg.
Yes, you do. You have verifiable providence of a unique digital signature (not unlike an autograph). You have a programmable, pluggable, leverageable, tradeable, asset that interacts seamlessly with hundreds of different applications (and rapidly growing).
Copying the value is a different question, but I can copy the data all I want.
> Yes, you do. You have verifiable providence of a unique digital signature (not unlike an autograph)
You have a signature that a token is valid on the chain, cool. As long as it stays on the chain of course. But that’s all it is, it does not make one jpeg the original and another one with the same bits the copy.
I don't know how you get to defend something when you're sidestepping the biggest problem with NFTs.
I'm fine with stupid and pointless things as long as your stupid and pointless things don't wreck the environment. If someone decides to poison the local water supply because it's an "art project" they still poisoned the fucking water supply.
So all I'm doing is hoping everyone uses these instead.
I really enjoy NFTs conceptually, much more than crypto in general actually, and I really don't get a lot of the hate. If you remove the emissions aspect (which is the non-starter for me), I think it's so cool that there is a way to create scarcity in the digital world, even if that scarcity is totally "meaningless." Yes, there are some goods with inherent value: food, shelter, heat sources. But NFTs are far from the first type of asset that has no inherent value, and that includes both the cyber and real worlds. Humans like to curate and collect, and NFTs are just an expression of that drive.
What I wonder if why NFTs suddenly took off now. I remember hearing about them years ago.
Tezos, Cardano, Algorand just to mention a few of them.
Example of creating an NFTs using Algorand: https://developer.algorand.org/tutorials/create-and-manage-n...
However, Ethereum has virtually monopolized the DeFi space. It is supposed to move to PoS, especially considering that transaction fees are insanely high due to recent demand.
Like the first live real money implementation of a PoS chain was done by SunnyKing back in like...I want to say 2012, but maybe 2013. SunnyKing was the same guy who went on to make the somewhat interesting PoW function via finding largest prime numbers(arguably somewhat useful PoW, certainly more than double SHA-256), Primecoin.
Then in a larger scale there was NXT which was like 2013-2014ish, full PoS.
I don't care about the merits of these particular chains, but PoS was one of the earliest innovations in blockchain tech. The lineage was roughly something like:
0. All the centralised pre-Bitcoin cypherpunk digital currency stuff from the mailing list like Bitgold, Chaumian ecash whatever.
1. Bitcoin
2. Namecoin(decentralized DNS)
3. Feathercoin/Litecoin(Bitcoin with 0.25 block target time and 4x total coins), arguably shouldn't be on the list for 'innovation' but Litecoin is successful(at some point they changed the PoW work function to scrypt so I guess it counts, there were other scam coins around this time too doing the same thing. So I don't necessarily mean Litecoin was 'third place' overall, just that it ended up rising from the pile of shit).
4. Different forms of PoW functions. ie Litecoin doing scrypt so people could still use their ATI Radeon 4xxx to mine and not order ASICs from shady companies), Cryptonight stuff maybe(lies about it being 'developed on the darknet for years and being related that cicada thing' before and such, hard to make an accurate timeline for that one(ended up forked off as Monero, possibly post-PoS tech)).
5. PoS, 2012-2014ish. Probably didn't come before different PoW functions but it might have switched with #4's place, hard to remember the exact timelines, but people were trolling and making fun of PoS ever since it was theorized. Probably because a true fully realized PoS that is superior to PoW is a threat to the massive investments one must put behind PoW systems, which also becomes the root of their 'nothing at stake' arguments against PoS, which certainly had merit back then with early PoS implementations. I wonder if those truly got solved.
This was all like 2014 at the latest. Very old stuff but crypto is full of sales snakes(not targeted at you at all) who try to sell other peoples old open source tech as new modern innovations. It's a familiar pattern. People sold Bitcoin as private and anonymous for years...like way too long.
I'm imagining now there will be a point when PoS is 10+ years old and people will acting like it's the newest thing on the block still.
It's like expecting good intentions and then being surprised when a few bad actors ruin things for the larger group. Tragedy of the commons is exactly why stuff like this should be called out, each and every single time.
I hang up decorative lights around Christmas time. Is that not okay with you, or do you not find it pointless?
Thankfully we have an amazing new technology called Light Emitting Diodes so we don't have to worry about that theoretical problem.
Most of ou current Christmas folklore is pretty pointless lights being a pretty recent invention when compared to christian religion timespan. Same as for Christmas trees, they were pretty much on point when everybody had a wood stove to throw them in after Christmas and warm the house. Pretty pointless nowaday when you live in a flat...
If my mom is any indicator, many consider video games stupid and pointless. Value is in the eye of the beholder.
Source?
I can't think of a way to immediately gather any evidence for this either way but it seems like a plausible position to take.
(However - I think the value > utility chain is easier to argue for with gaming. I'm not making the same argument as the parent post.)
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257768246_Electrici... - US energy consumption by video game consoles in the US alone was 16 TWh in 2010
[2] https://grist.org/article/video-games-consume-more-electrici... - Globally, PC gaming (not console gaming) was estimated at 75 TWh in 2018
[1] https://cbeci.org/
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257768246_Electrici... - US energy consumption by video game consoles in the US alone was 16 TWh in 2010
[2] https://grist.org/article/video-games-consume-more-electrici... - Globally, PC gaming (not console gaming) was estimated at 75 TWh in 2018
Whether or not gaming as a whole consumes more power than crypto as a whole isn't the question, it's whether or not crypto would consume more power per person using it than per gamer playing games. As in, give everyone a ~fixed power consumption quota - where is that power "better" spent, gaming or crypto?
But I also don't think judging the industry on power consumption is particularly fruitful, unless we want to look industry-by-industry and weigh utility vs energy, which we do not do. We do this for blockchain because calculating this is easy. We don't even have these numbers for, say, the stock market, so we don't even know how good or bad that is. We can't answer the first questions that arise from this kind of analysis.
Crypto isn't competing against the stock market, it's competing against something like Visa. And we can answer that comparison: https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co....
1 bitcoin transaction takes more power than 100,000 Visa transactions.
> But I also don't think judging the industry on power consumption is particularly fruitful, unless we want to look industry-by-industry and weigh utility vs energy, which we do not do.
That's exactly what I think we as a society should do. We are limited on the amount of sustainable power generation, so looking at cost vs. value is exactly what we should be doing. Especially when something comes along that does the same basic thing as an existing system, but 100,000x more expensive.
Proof of Stake doesn't have this problem. The mere act of owning a coin does not entail the destruction of value. In proof of stake, you just make money, probably harming the environment along the way as you do, and buy the coin. That's it. The resources you obtained are not destroyed, they are passed on to whoever you bought the coins from.
In proof of work you work to obtain mining equipment and electricity and then use that to perform the work of securing the network (nothing is “destroyed”). You are then paid for doing that work. The more work you do relative to other miners, the more you will get paid.
In proof of stake you work to obtain eth (for example) which then grants you the privilege to run validators. The more you stake, the more validating you can do. You are paid money for successfully validating, and charged money for failing to validate. You will need to do more work to replenish money spent on unsuccessful validation. Ultimately, the more work you do relative to other stakers, the more you will get paid.
It’s going to be a little more difficult than it is for proof of work to measure how much total energy is used by proof of stake, but it still should be doable. Maybe it will be less than the energy used by proof of work, but maybe not.
Does crypto have a (significantly) larger carbon footprint than video games? Probably not. I think video games (and crypto) are pointless. ymmv.
There can be as many NFTs for the same thing as the (edit: anyone) artist feels like producing.
[1] https://nitter.eu/joshmillard/status/1370088760663179266
[2] https://blog.erratasec.com/2021/03/deconstructing-that-69mil...
I'd like to reiterate that I think the value in a Warhol print is also stupid. It's less stupid than NFTs but the point I'm trying to make (apparently unsuccesfully) is that these differences are matters of degree rather than type.
We humans have a multitude of ways to invent value that is built on sand.
The point is that an NFT only shows a chain of custody for the NFT. It does not imply anything about the originality of the Warhol.
We have many fictions we indulge in about authenticity and value.
NFTs are a new fiction. They might even be dumber than other currently accepted fictions.
But the discussion is "which of these fictions is the most stupid?" rather than "NFTs are stupid". We are already a long way from genuine utility or intrinsic value and into the realms of social consensus and value-through-association.
I still suspect most people think they're getting an exclusive license for a piece of artwork, and not a bit of performance art.
They almost certainly believe that the goods pointed to by the token are non-fungible. Not that they have a non-fungible reference to a fungible good.
It's quite a shabby business in many ways.
But that just makes it even more akin to the mainstream fine art market.
Minting an NFT is trivial, you can do it with the press of a button, at scale. You could mint an NFT for every single item in the Library of Congress with a for-loop, if you could pay the transaction fees.
I get your point but I'm sure we could swap out another example that illustrates the point a little better.
If I own the copyright of an artwork, even one 'on the internet' I have exclusive rights to reproduce it commercially. For example I could sell prints, while it would be illegal for others to do so. The existence of the latest pop songs on Youtube doesn't stop the copyright holders commercialising it.
NFTs don't by themselves confer any of these rights or privileges with respect to the thing they purportedly represent.
1. A limited edition print doesn't confer copyright
2. A limited edition print isn't the original
3. A limited edition print may never have been in the presence of the artist.
Sure that may seem stupid to most people, but most people don't even get why regular art is significant or can be very expensive. Personally I would attribute it to my lack of understanding rather than dismiss it outright.
To all you pumped up to be the next Zuck, I would be coding a NFT site.
Oh yea, I heard these companies take your word that the bits are yours. People are ripping off online artists/originators.
I've briefly looked into a NFT markets and the cost was a few 10s of cents. Where were you looking?