171–180 of 195 posts
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I honestly don't know if this comment is a joke or not.
Don’t shoot the messenger - usually stuff like this starts out being dismissed and laughed at. I don’t own any art NFTs buts not hard to grok the thesis of those who do. It’s not about tulips, just like Bitcoin wasn’t.
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If you own a Meebit NFT it’s actually the extant legal system that determines what that means. https://meebits.larvalabs.com/meebits/termsandconditions And note you don’t own the media and that what owning the NFT means can change.
“(b) Ownership. (i) When you purchase a Meebit, you own only the NFT, not any associated Art. Each Meebit is associated with a non-fungible token (an “NFT”) on the Ethereum blockchain. When you acquire a Meebit, you own the NFT, not the associated Art, or any other Meebits Materials (as that term is defined below), or any Third Party IP.” Not really sure what point you are trying to make. With Meebits, you don’t own…
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> Nothing more, nothing less. Nothing.
As a reminder: > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. > Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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> What's your point? That because I'm "somehow on the same wavelenght" as "the NFT crowd", that I have "lack of common sense" by association? No. I said "wavelenght", not "same as". It seems to me you are looking at the price action of some NFTs, the price action of the ETH token and the volumes on the auctions houses built on top of Ethereum, plus the social hype being generated. And using those as your starting poi…
>Sometimes no matter how hard you look there is no underlying value beneath the price action, there is no reason or rhyme as to why people become maniac about stuff, and feel like they MUST have it. ...like people paying millions for an original painting rather than getting a replica made for $100k (or whatever) for their private collection? My point isn't that NFTs have underlying value (whatever that means), just t…
The official art market action amounts to 50B/yr. Of the aforementioned figure the vast majority of that is then sent on loan to museums and thus produces revenues for the museum and passive income for the owner.
Let's say 5B is the amount that people pay yearly for paintings they intend to keep in their private collection.
Let's further say the average amount that a collector spends in a year to enrich their private collection is 5M.
5B/5M = 1000 individuals.
Of course we are 8 billion humans, you'll always find 1000 individuals who behave in a way that you cannot explain logically or whose actions leave you scratching your head.
> Original painting = thing that looks like a painting + bragging rights
> An NFT is just the "bragging rights" part of the original painting, and the JPG that anyone can access is the "thing that looks like a painting "
A person with common sense would not even think about splitting the experience and the bragging rights, or even re-arrange something as self evident and self-explanatory as watching a painting in a museum.
You are trying to come up with this explanation in order to justify NFTs and their price action, pretending to know what goes on in the minds of people who buy them, to further reverse-engineer the value that they see in them.
NFTs buyers not only aren't doing all the above reasoning, but they hardly know why they buy them.
In conclusion, there are some things that are just self evident, and need not to be explained. Even in the case of a person spending millions for paintings which will never be sent to museums.
If a common sense person is invited to some rich person mansion and are shown a private collection of real paintings worth millions the thought that come up is inevitably: "A hard working rich person who likes expensive stuff and is not afraid to spend to enjoy life"
If on the other hand a common sense person is invited to some crypto-rich person mansion and are shown a collection of hashes and blockchain transactions pointing to a JPG on twitter or imgur....the thought that comes up is inevitably: "A stoner cryptobro who won the lottery and now is wasting away their money paying 6 figures for some monkeys JPGs"
It’s weird to keep using the Mona Lisa, when there’s a much more apropos metaphor intimately connected to crypto: NFTs are like naming rights. Crypto.com did not buy the Staples Center, and doesn’t have the right to charge admission. They bought (leased, really) the right to have their name associated with it. Some of that has the force of law, but a lot of it is social convention too. Here in Chicago, the Willis Gro…
It's a fools errand to try to equalize NFTs with anything from the physical reality we live in. NFTs are exclusive to blockchains and have no real-world counter-part, I think that is a part of why people are so confused about them. No analogy is perfect, and makes it hard for people to understand what they really are about. NFTs are not like naming rights, nor domain names, nor is it art, nor is it anything else. Eas…
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Not sure how that's related to art though. Of course a self-referential system is good for internal consistency. The issue comes with trying to use it for anything outside the system, such as monkey jpegs.
Not at all. It clearly works just fine as the marketplace volume suggests. Go right click save a CryptoPunk and try and sell it. Go make a BAYC clone and try and sell it. Try it out on chain, deploy your own copy of the smart contract. Or go and create a website and set up a Paypal account and try to sell some JPEGs. Let me know how that works out. Even if you succeed in making money, like selling a fake Gucci purse,…
Where we disagree is our value judgement of that. I just don't see that as being useful per se, imo there's enough ways to move numbers around using computers already, a novel one can't really get me all that excited, especially considering its resource cost.
I have yet to see a good argument for crypto that doesn't boil down to that.
I think it's one of those "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" scenarios. Marketplace volume isn't a good in itself if the markets don't do anything useful and waste a bunch of energy, but to people bought into crypto and capitalism really deeply it seems to be enough to get excited.
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Clearly not. If an artist with an on-chain reputation such as Beeple creates a digital artwork and mints it on-chain and continues to do so over time and that artist's work becomes sought after, the reputation and history and story of that work being created and minted and transferred is as good as any other form of provenance. What makes the iTunes MP3 marketplace valuable? What makes the Amazon Kindle text file mar…
> What makes the iTunes MP3 marketplace valuable? What makes the Amazon Kindle text file marketplace valuable? The law. Copyright law makes acquiring these works via other means slightly more difficult. Like NFTs they are just a failed attempt to force artificial scarcity into a post-scarcity space. > Why does itunes and Kindle not bother you? They do, but they don't have scammers constantly trying to sell their shit…
Copyright law does not exclude someone from releasing on an open source blockchain as opposed to a monopoly app store.
The only reason these marketplaces exist as monopolies is because direct distribution of creative content for profit has traditionally been difficult to manage. That's all.
> They do, but they don't have scammers constantly trying to sell their shit as some kind of revolutionary new future you have to get in on before you get left behind!!1!
Only because the dust has already settled from the same thing that happened during the dot com boom and the consumer electronics boom and the mobile app store boom.
> What disturbs me is the shift from people viewing artificial scarcity as a desperate grasping at straws from people who can't deal with information post-scarcity to people touting artificial scarcity as the glorious technological future.
Copyright enforcement over monopolistic marketplaces is a form of artificial scarcity. Come on, you know this. Napster was leaps and bounds ahead of any distribution method for music back in the 90s. Cost of music redistribution has been near zero for over 20 years. It doesn't cost the band anything to have their music copy pasted on a torrent site. The entire scheme of copyright protection is an archaic method of introducing artificial scarcity for items that are cheap to reproduce (yet sometimes capital intensive to produce). NFTs are no different.
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>Sometimes no matter how hard you look there is no underlying value beneath the price action, there is no reason or rhyme as to why people become maniac about stuff, and feel like they MUST have it. ...like people paying millions for an original painting rather than getting a replica made for $100k (or whatever) for their private collection? My point isn't that NFTs have underlying value (whatever that means), just t…
> like people paying millions for an original painting rather than getting a replica made for $100k (or whatever) for their private collection? The official art market action amounts to 50B/yr. Of the aforementioned figure the vast majority of that is then sent on loan to museums and thus produces revenues for the museum and passive income for the owner. Let's say 5B is the amount that people pay yearly for paintings…
Source? Moreover, considering that museums need donations/government subsidies to stay afloat, I doubt "making money" is the primary reason people/institutions buy art.
>5B/5M = 1000 individuals.
>Of course we are 8 billion humans, you'll always find 1000 individuals who behave in a way that you cannot explain logically or whose actions leave you scratching your head.
So your point of contention is that NFTs have too many people relative to the amount of people buying expensive original art?
>A person with common sense would not even think about splitting the experience and the bragging rights, or even re-arrange something as self evident and self-explanatory as watching a painting in a museum.
I'm seeing a lot of words devoted to dismissing my comment, but many words being devoted to explaining why my comment is incorrect. Declaring "self evident and self-explanatory" does not make for an argument. I don't see how "a person with common sense" would buy your explanation of people paying millions for the imperceptible 0.000000001%, so they can enjoy it more.
>In conclusion, there are some things that are just self evident, and need not to be explained. Even in the case of a person spending millions for paintings which will never be sent to museums.
>If a common sense person is invited to some rich person mansion and are shown a private collection of real paintings worth millions the thought that come up is inevitably: "A hard working rich person who likes expensive stuff and is not afraid to spend to enjoy life"
>If on the other hand a common sense person is invited to some crypto-rich person mansion and are shown a collection of hashes and blockchain transactions pointing to a JPG on twitter or imgur....the thought that comes up is inevitably: "A stoner cryptobro who won the lottery and now is wasting away their money paying 6 figures for some monkeys JPGs"
The thing that ties both of them is spending money on a non-productive asset, which serves as a costly signal[1] of your wealth. Old paintings definitely have more awareness than NFTs, I'm not going to dispute that. However, all that means is that old paintings are more mature than NFTs, not that paintings are valuable and NFTs are completely worthless. Before archeology was a thing, ancient artifacts probably had zero value beyond scrap, but nowadays there's a thriving market for it. Maybe NFTs will turn out to be like beanie babies, but maybe they'll turn out to be like artifacts?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory#Human_honest...
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> What makes the iTunes MP3 marketplace valuable? What makes the Amazon Kindle text file marketplace valuable? The law. Copyright law makes acquiring these works via other means slightly more difficult. Like NFTs they are just a failed attempt to force artificial scarcity into a post-scarcity space. > Why does itunes and Kindle not bother you? They do, but they don't have scammers constantly trying to sell their shit…
> The law. Copyright law makes acquiring these works via other means slightly more difficult. Like NFTs they are just a failed attempt to force artificial scarcity into a post-scarcity space. Copyright law does not exclude someone from releasing on an open source blockchain as opposed to a monopoly app store. The only reason these marketplaces exist as monopolies is because direct distribution of creative content for…
Yes, there were scams at the beginning of those booms, but at the same time, there were obvious real world applications that end users benefited from right from the start, and absolutely no sense of doubt that there was value in them.
>The entire scheme of copyright protection is an archaic method of introducing artificial scarcity for items that are cheap to reproduce (yet sometimes capital intensive to produce).
True.
> NFTs are no different.
Obviously false. NFTs don’t have the law preventing you from ignoring them.
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Giving cryptovoxels a little too much credit. Its one digital museum but there can be infinite other ways to display nfts.
Correct, my point wasn’t to emphasize cryptovoxels but provide an existence proof where holding an NFT confers unique rights. There are many others.
For example, I can offer a free milkshake to anyone who parks in my parking lot in a yellow car.
Then yellow car isn’t doing anything in this situation, I am, and if I can always change my mind.
Then same is true with cryptovoxels and NFTs.