Ask HN: Trying to explain NFTs to family on Thanksgiving – am I wrong?
I tried to explain NFTs and crypto to family on Thanksgiving, but I don't think I was able to get it across across. I should have mentioned that many years before NFTs you could buy land on the Moon and get a certificate of ownership. There is no legal framework for owning land on the Moon, but that doesn't have to stop you from setting up a market for Moon land with your friends and trading your Moon acres for goods and services. As long as a group of people decided to use Moon land as money, they can use it as a way of enabling transactions. Like Monopoly money, it's essentially a way of keeping score of who owns what. Like casino chips, you might even be able to exchange them for dollars if the market owner (the casino) finds it profitable to maintain the illusion that they are real money. Just don't try to buy groceries with casino chips.
The operative phrase is "There is no legal framework," so if the Chinese decide to build a moon base on your land you're out of luck because you never really owned any land on the Moon.
Any day now someone will try to sell an NFT of the Brooklyn Bridge. In other words, NFTs are just another vehicle to extract money from suckers.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadFor trying to explain NFTs to your family? Probably. If your family trusts you with technology, the best way to actually talk about it would be implicitly imparting your opinion as a passing topic. Something like "you hear about those chumps spending real life money on randomly-generated pixel art?" If they show interest, chase it down and indulge their curiosity. If they don't really care, cauterize the topic with a joke or a banal comment like "I didn't know the public could get any dumber!" In any case, I'd bet the last thing anyone wants to do is launch into a blockchain-based seminar when they really just want you to pass the mashed potatoes.
I don't think anything can 100% prevent illegal activity, but eventually someone who abuses their power will get caught and be removed.
Banks hate competition, so they ensure the teller is not stealing money from the client.
The credit card/PIN combo sounds great until someone walks into the bank and says their wallet was stolen, or even, that you died last week and presents a forged death certificate. The point is every system has a failure point if someone is determined enough. NFTs can prove digital presence in a specific wallet, they can't actually prove who owns the wallet. No crypto asset can do that, which is why many people have gotten tricked into giving up their private key or recovery phrase.
In case of death, the bank ask for some papers signed by a judge that says you are the official heir, and they will check in the national death registry. No way they will believe in a piece of paper.
I don't claim it's impossible, but in both cases there is a lot of paperwork to ensure it's difficult.
These are legitimate questions and I'm just trying to understand.
The location of the NFTs (what wallets they reside in) is public knowledge on the blockchain. The enforcement part comes by proving you are the owner of one of those wallets. Can someone steal your ID, or your phone with a wallet on it, sure, but as I said earlier, nothing is 100% resistant to illegal activity.
Anyway I don't want to get into that. I would still appreciate answers to my questions (here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29363960 ) in case someone here is feeling charitable.
Say you take 10 grand to Bob's Casino in Las Vegas, buy chips and turn them into 100 grand at blackjack. You put the chips in your bag and go home to sleep because you're pretty drunk. Bob's Casino burns down overnight and Bob announces it he now bankrupt and going out of business. Your 100 grand in chips are now worthless.
The top answer for "are casino chips legal tender?" on Google is Because casino chips are not legal tender, they are not legally transferable. That doesn't mean some people don't try to exchange them for cash or chips at rival casinos. Although the practice was once popular in Las Vegas, the government stepped in to prevent money laundering and counterfeiting.
The U.S. dollar is the global reserve currency because it is backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. Government and people have confidence the U.S. will last. Bob's Casino chips are back by Bob.
NFT's are backed by who?
I don't see it as any different than buying and selling stock, unless you also consider that to not be real economic behavior.
There's also loans and interest earning activities.
I understand and agree that a lot of cryptoscams dominate headlines, but there, but most money laundering, terrorist and drug financing worldwide is in USD $100 bills. Crypto is a rounding error.
https://www.ticketmaster.com/promo/wpbgpv
https://imgur.com/a/8HZtpyp
It's a neat idea, but I'm not sure what the point of block chain does for anyone here. Am I ever going to sell my commemorative virtual NFL ticket? To who? Everyone who was at the game got one. No one who didn't attend the game would want it.
Look back at this comment in five years.
Are you telling me there is a legal framework so NFT ownership is enforceable? Or are you saying it's a game people have agreed to play? Edit: I didn't say you couldn't have an operative market.
From an excerpt of the book published in a 1996 issue of Caltech’s Engineering & Science magazine:
Feynman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him, “Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.” Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But he came back a few days later to say, “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don’t really understand it.”
John Gruber writes the simple explanations are the goal at Apple as well:
Engineers are expected to be able to explain a complex technology or product in simple, easily-understood terms not because the executive needs it explained simply to understand it, but as proof that the engineer understands it completely.
https://kottke.org/17/06/if-you-cant-explain-something-in-si...
A physical painting could also have attractive qualities (texture/depth, color, reflectivity/diffusion/sparkle, etc.) that a flat print might not have. (On the other hand, a print might correct some deficiencies in the original such as damage, cracks, or fading.)
Suppose we have a well-known photo of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was scanned twice and separate NFTs were created and sold. The data & hash is different because the scanner had different dust patterns on the glass each time. But visually - it's the same photo. And they were sold with the promise that they were unique in the world. Which is technically true (the math proves it), but a reasonable person would not think so.
A legit source like the NYC Museum of Modern Art would be trusted to sell NFTs that are unique and collectible. However "Bob's online NFT Shop" has a really nice website & sales brochure and so far has relied on his Terms of Use to quash any rumors of selling dupes.
People have to ask themselves why they are buying an NFT.
If they are buying it because they have a genuine interest in owning the NFT then they might want to make sure what they are purchasing is "authentic". Which I imagine in this case means there isn't, and won't be, an NFT that has more claim to being "authentic".
The more popular case for buying an NFT, I imagine, is for its value. Whether that be to sell it for more or simply to own something of value. In this case authenticity doesn't really matter. Two years from now it is entirely possible that MOMA's NFTs are entirely worthless. Everything with a brand is going to be trying to sell an NFT.
Consider trading cards based on 90's cartoons. Both Pokemon and Dragon Ball were popular cartoons. Only Pokemon cards cards though still have any value, to my knowledge.
More than trying to recognize whether the source is legit people have to understand the NFT culture. "Bob's online NFT Shop"'s Starry Night NFT might be worth millions in the future while MOMA's version is worthless. The value isn't really about authenticity. Both could be entirely forgotten tomorrow as it turns out that people don't care about art NFT and it turns out that COVID variant NFTs are the thing that has staying power.
I was trying to think of a good way to include this thought. The scenario I had in mind was that Bob turned out to be really good at keeping his servers running, while MOMA had a data center crash and bad backups, and so lost the way to prove their NFTs were issued by them. So Bob's became worth more because they were the only ones that were traceable to their origin.
> Both could be entirely forgotten tomorrow as it turns out that people don't care about art NFT and it turns out that COVID variant NFTs are the thing that has staying power.
NFTs turning into this decade's Beanie Babies is a real possibility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beanie_Babies#Collectibility
It would take a while to explain provenance in crypto space. It's largely based on credibility and ownership of addresses. Once credibility and address is established, it is a simple operation to prove the Bridge picture came from a specific artist. Things like ENS (Ethereum Name Service) are examples of deep support for provenance in Crypto.
That said, NFTs are no more and no less irrational than buying the right to have your name slapped on anything else. Plenty of people will give money to have their name placed on a wing of a building or a park bench or what have you. NFTs allow you to have your name placed in a public ledger. If you value having your name in some specific public ledger, more power to you. But yeah if you wouldn't pay some random dude named Jim to declare you "Jim's Certified Owner of the Brooklyn Bridge" why would you pay him for "Jim's Brooklyn Bridge NFT"?
This nails it. People have been carving their names into historical monuments for centuries, or at least putting locks with their names on bridges.
This isn’t really the salient point. You can buy and sell useful things with no legal framework (and people do all the time) and that doesn’t make it a scam or a scheme designed to sucker people. The difference is that NFTs have no inherent, tangible value. In that sense it’s more akin to something like baseball cards, or art. Things that have no inherent value, and are easily reproduced, but can be verified to be “authentic”.
Edit: I get my knowledge of Andy Warhol from these three documentaries, which have some conflicting information but paint a picture of a man who wanted to make a lot of money.
Andy Warhol - The Complete Picture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnhqRiJ4KH8
The Life of Andy Warhol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDIdjvezp2U
Andy Warhol Documentary Film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQXpqQO4vaE
The art business is a game for rich people. I don't think I'll bother with because I can't compete at that level due to lack of funds.
They are currently being used for digital proof of ownership to digital memorabilia, but in the future expected to be used for real things (like licensing rights, representation of a gym membership etc).
They are legal (unenforceable or not is not the point), as much as if you wrote on a piece of paper in college to your roommate that you agree to answer, everytime he calls you on the phone and asks "Who's your daddy", with "Jeremy", is legal.
When you are buying a tweet, you're essentially buying a digital memorabilia. When you're buying Linkin Park's Mike Shinoda's doodles, you're buying digital patronage (as in, Mike Shinoda will always acknowledge the owner of the NFT as the patron of his doodle).
The value is that it allows for ownership of a specific asset that cannot be argued against. It is immediately accessible, communicable, and you can verify ownership of said asset.
Instead of making nfts for land on the moon, replace the asset with property deeds. And replace/automate whatever you can cost efficiently in the property deeds process and infrastructure with blockchain.