You should consider an NFT to be something like a certificate. Some entity has issued you a certificate saying, e.g. you are the rightful owner of the Brooklyn Bridge. The value of certificates in NFT form is that they are difficult to forge and easy to verify. However, like a paper certificate that you might hang on your wall, the actual certificate is worthless. It is representative of something that may have value, e.g. proof that someone who owns the Brooklyn Bridge has transferred ownership to you. What matters is if other people believe the underlying item is worth something and accept control of the token as being sufficient to authenticate you as the owner. Obviously, in this case no one will accept this token in place of a deed for the bridge, but on the other hand if a government did issue tokens this way and recognized them in court then it might work out pretty well (until someone steals your crypto keys).
John Cleese Sells the Brooklyn Bridge as an NFT
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Re: John Cleese Sells the Brooklyn Bridge as an NFT
#222Is 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…
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…
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.
Re: John Cleese Sells the Brooklyn Bridge as an NFT
#223Re: John Cleese Sells the Brooklyn Bridge as an NFT
#224The original conceptual framework for NFT-like instruments is Nick Szabo's "Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority": https://nakamotoinstitute.org/secure-property-titles/ At the very end he says: > Largely unaddressed above is the problem of divergence between actual conditions and directory rights. [...] When divergence becomes too great, a solution to address the unreality of the title registry is needed. Almo…
I disagree, but this is a common objection which is worth addressing. Specifically I disagree that NFTs are grounded in that particular conceptual framework.
NFTs aren't attempting to be bearer instruments which convey ownership of some physical good, or even of a piece of intellectual property. Those require a corresponding Ricardian contract. This remains a good idea, but, to put it mildly, there are unsolved problems associated with it.
A NFT is just a baseball card, what you're proposing is more like a baseball player packaging up 10% of his lifetime earnings into 5000 instruments and selling those.
Baseball cards have provenance, scarcity, and IP protection of their appearance: that is, they're demonstrably produced by a company with a right to do it, there are only so many in existence, and it's illegal to make identical copies of the baseball card.
NFTs have two of these properties and an adequate substitute for the third. They're signed, giving provenance, and scarce, due to blockchain-verified artificial scarcity. It's not illegal to make copies of the referenced digital artifact, because what fun would that be? No one could load the image or whatever in a browser.
Nor is copyright currently assigned. I don't believe it's conventional to purchase copyright for an artwork along with the artwork itself, but I could be wrong about that, and it doesn't matter: this would be a cool thing to add to some NFTs, but we can just agree that it isn't a part of the package right now and move on.
But it is impossible to make an actual copy of the NFT itself, even with the private key used to sign the original. That makes IP protection an inferior good: it's fraud to make a forgery of a rare baseball card, but it's quite profitable fraud if one happens to get away with it.
Disclosure: I own no NFTs in the usual sense of the term, and don't intend to.
Re: John Cleese Sells the Brooklyn Bridge as an NFT
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
There can be as many NFTs for the same thing as anyone feels like producing. We could all mint a different Mona Lisa NFT.
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.
> Well yes. But anyone can make a reproduction of a Warhol print
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.
Re: John Cleese Sells the Brooklyn Bridge as an NFT
#226brilliant tongue in cheek.
Re: John Cleese Sells the Brooklyn Bridge as an NFT
#227You should consider an NFT to be something like a certificate. Some entity has issued you a certificate saying, e.g. you are the rightful owner of the Brooklyn Bridge. The value of certificates in NFT form is that they are difficult to forge and easy to verify. However, like a paper certificate that you might hang on your wall, the actual certificate is worthless. It is representative of something that may have value…
He isn’t actually selling the Brooklyn Bridge, but a (comically poor) drawing of the Brooklyn Bridge:
https://opensea.io/assets/0x9201a886740d193e315f1f1b2b193321...
So this is not really a scam, but rather a legitimate satire of recent NFT sales.
Re: John Cleese Sells the Brooklyn Bridge as an NFT
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Ther…
Isn't it possible to actually code it into the ethereum contract to send eth to a wallet when it's traded?
In theory. I've not seen a contract that does that, however.
This doesn't mean they couldn't exist, just that (in my current understanding) it's not part of the ERC-721 spec.
Re: John Cleese Sells the Brooklyn Bridge as an NFT
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well - Proof of Stake NFTs are already here: https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/ So all I'm doing is hoping everyone uses these instead.
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 "meaningle…
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.
Re: John Cleese Sells the Brooklyn Bridge as an NFT
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Well yes. But anyone can make a reproduction of a Warhol print 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.
See my other comments throughout this thread.
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.