A Babe Ruth card is pretty meaningless, too. It's hardly great to look at but you can derive pleasure from knowing you own it for some reason.
They’re valuable to collectors as there is a finite supply of them. There is literally an infinite supply of NFTs, and the works they are a pointer to can be cloned digitally. There is no comparison.
There is a finite supply of a given NFT and infinite cards can be printed by someone else, you just only care for those minted by a particular authority in either case.
This is a lot of words to say "there is by design no way to do that". DeFi systems are all designed around the unspoken (although sometimes spoken, honestly) assumption that rules are bad and that the system should make enforcing them difficult-to-impossible. A fun exercise is to consider, if all businesses went to using *coin overnight and one accidentally overcharged your wallet, how would you get your coins back?
You do realize that replicas are a problem in the real world art world as well right? In real world art this is resolved by proving providence, in crypto providence from minting is trivial, but you still need to prove providence that the minting was honest.
I think you are confusing providence for provenance here
> any of the useful functions of NFTs have long been possible and many orders of magnitude less expensive using public key cryptography or digital signatures. A major useful function being the ability to buy and sell with purely digital money, was that possible before?
Yes? Even if you're exclusively referring to cryptocurrency when you say "purely digital money", it was already possible before the popularity of NFTs to accept cryptocurrency as payment for anything.
I'm saying you still needed https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721 to appear on the scene to facilitate NFTs, that implementation isn't as omnipresent as the possibility of buying anything with crypto.
Can't you do that at normal auctions using (for lack of a better word) a shill bidder?
You could, and it likely happens in some cases. However, an auction house is going to take significant fees as a percentage of the sale price and your shill bidder will want a cut as well. You’re also going to get a large tax bill because you technically had a realized capital gain and the auction house will report it. With NFTs you can do a blockchain transaction for a relatively small fee by yourself from your comp…
Ok, let's see if I'm following the discussion right. let's say you buy an NFT for using a GIF of the Techno Viking, from the Viking himself, and Reddit verifies it. Now you are the only person on Reddit that can have a Techno Viking GIF signature, yippee! Except I can make a new NFT of the same GIF and nothing in the NFT itself betrays that it wasn't issued by the real Techno Viking, so it's up to him, Reddit and you…
You're both correct and underestimating how broken NFTs are. If you buy an NFT that gives you nothing except bragging rights that you "own" this NFT. What ownership actually means when devoid of the associated rights is anyones guess. Buying an NFT of a GIF doesn't stop anyone from using that GIF on reddit. No one is going around checking if posted GIFs have a matching NFT out there and enforcing property rights base…
Not that I support NFTs much, but conceptually, how is that different than you buying a Marilyn Monroe from Andy Warhol and him printing the exact same Marilyn Monroe and selling it to someone else ? Hopefully in 2021 everyone would agree that the two are distinct artworks, even if the physical object is exactly the same to the human eye ; that's not what matters when buying art.
If you buy an NFT for a piece of art, you can't even sell prints of the piece of art. You can't take a pic of it and sell a t-shirt of the art. You own nothing associated with that piece of art, except for the NFT itself. It's such a strange, strange concept to want to invest in. What if they create a new NFT blockchain standard. Does the previous NFT become invalid? Is there anything contractual saying you can't hav…
If you buy a Babe Ruth baseball card you aren't buying the rights to Babe Ruth. It's the card itself which is valuable, as a product of the context it was issued in. I don't know why that part, as it translates to NFTs, is so difficult for people to understand.
You have the right to copy of that Babe Ruth baseball card and place it on a t-shirt. If someone uses that exact card's image to do this, you can sue them for copyright infringement.
What's to stop someone from finding a random artist on instagram that produces amazing work and selling it as their own on a website like that?
If the community cares they'll try and find out people that do that and blacklist them. hicetnunc does that, it's the only one I could speak to. That's generally referred to as copy-minting. EDIT: here's the hicetnunc community write up for basic steps to minimize the change you buy a copy-mint: https://github.com/hicetnunc2000/hicetnunc/wiki/Beware-copym... !
As far as I can see that is the valuable part of the work. But blockchains doesn't help with it at all.
He also created a painting that, upon being sold immediately shredded itself. They pulled the plug halfway through, though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXKE0nAMmg4
Did they pull the plug? I was under the impression that it was done halfway on purpose.
It apparently malfunctioned. He posted a video on Instagram of it a few days later of practice run that fully shredded it with a caption saying something like "worked in rehearsal"
> This would have been more interesting if the author had traced where all the money being plowed into NFTs is coming from. Not possible to trace where the money is coming from. In fact, someone can "sell" an NFT to themself in a wash trade between two wallets they control. The last trade price of the NFT is now recorded as the transaction price, but it's possible that money never actually changed hands. Want to have…
Can't you do that at normal auctions using (for lack of a better word) a shill bidder?
Yes, and it's rampant in all sorts of collectibles markets. There are some people doing it very publicly with vintage video game cartridges right now, and "pawn stars"-type game shows are largely marketing for the scam.