€2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP • Hacker News Board

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#241

Post by mpeg » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 3:18 PM UTC

ethanbond wrote: post #219

sneak wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NFT data is public, generally.

Then in what sense is owning a token owning anything?

Kinda missing the point of NFTs there, it's a collector's item and I can't spend $2.6m to buy the actual physical book, but I could spend $2.6k to buy an NFT with 1000 editions which was minted by the owner of the physical book. I don't care about Jorodowsky's Dune, but if I was a fan I could then show off my NFT on twitter, or > or just print it out and frame it.

FAQS

- Can't someone else just download the image and pretend they own it? Yes, just as someone can buy a fake LV bag and show it off. Other collectors will still know, and don't care about the fakes. As the tech becomes more mainstream, sites like twitter will show whether you actually own the NFT you claim to.

- Can't someone else mint their own NFT? Yes, but like with real collectors items, provenance matters. Just like one can forge a perfect Picasso but without any plausible proof of origin it would not be worth much.

- Can't they decide to mint more "fragments" after the fact, therefore diluting the price of each of the 1000 editions. No, the smart contract that governs the NFT can't be changed.

- Won't the link inside my NFT die? No, the link is usually just a SHA256 hash of the content; with the content being hosted on IPFS. It's all p2p so as long as a host somewhere in the world has a copy, you can always find the content by hash, even if the underlying technology changes with time.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#242

Post by Waterluvian » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 3:18 PM UTC

cfj wrote: post #235

Waterluvian wrote: post #115

So many conversations here and on Twitter focus on laughing at these people. But I think the most likely explanation is that they’re not this stupid. That it’s some form of fraud.

Are you familiar with Hanlon's razor?

Sure. And Occam's razor. These are nice one-liners but not rules to base perspectives on.

What I'm focusing on is how everyone loves to feel smart, and most do that by making others feel dumb. And when you are anti-something (yes, I am anti NFT), you have further motivation to just chalk it up to, "haha look at these bozos."

The more useful, and in my opinion, more likely hypothesis to spend all our oxygen on is, "what kind of fraud might be going on here?" For example, did someone just make a ton of money by convincing a bunch of chumps to fund this?

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#243

Post by jaclaz » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 3:19 PM UTC

TheDong wrote: post #15

jaclaz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Disclaimer: I know nothing about this specific auction, and may be missing some key detail. This is simply an observation and speculation from a naive bystander Sorry, but how do you know it was a DAO (whatever it is)? From what I could find: https://www.capital.fr/economie-politique/dune-le-storyboard... >Les enchères se sont rapidement envolées et ont donné lieu au final à une rude bataille entre deux enchérisseur…

The twitter thread this post is to retweets the DAO in question claiming responsibility, specifically this twitter account: https://twitter.com/TheSpiceDAO Googling finds this website: https://dune.foundation/ , and some info about the etherium they raised here https://juicebox.money/#/p/spicedao Maybe this is some sorta elaborate hoax, but it looks like it's real eth, so unless juicebox is also in on it, it seems li…

Yep, but all this is "after the fact".

In real time you are either on the auction in person or at the telephone, and there is someone else on a telephone connection.

How do you know who that someone else is?

All you know is the auction firm personnel on that phone line raises against your bid and conversely all the someone else knows is that someone (you in this hypothetical case) is offering and counter-raising.

To go from 25,000 to 2,500,000 (100x) two bidders are needed, and the question remains, given that one of the two is some crazy[1] guy backed by a DAO, who is the other one (almost as crazy as the first one).

[1] as seen by a "normie"

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#244

Post by secludedrelish » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 3:21 PM UTC

ethanbond wrote: post #219

sneak wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NFT data is public, generally.

Then in what sense is owning a token owning anything?

It's just like having your name plate under a painting at a public museum

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#245

Post by mpeg » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 3:22 PM UTC

haasted wrote: post #131

SahAssar wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the linked parent forum post. They are talking exactly about putting the actual images on the blockchain.

Well, they won't. All NFTs are hosted on hilariously centralized services like googleusercontent.com and similar. Browse through https://opensea.io/ , the most prominent NFT marketplace at the moment. Digging through the DOM of their website will reveal a lot of links to quite standard content storage solutions. They usually go through a bit of trouble to prevent people from simply clicking "view image in new tab" to…

Almost all NFTs are hosted on IPFS. Opensea shows a CACHED version of the image, because pulling them directly from IPFS puts unnecessary strain on the network and is comparatively slow.

The contract for the NFT generally just points to an IPFS identifier (a sha256 hash of the content), and it's up to the viewer (a website like opensea) to decide what ipfs gateway to use. Even if the ipfs network died you could still use other p2p methods to find the content, as long as someone was still hosting it.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#246

Post by mpeg » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 3:23 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #163

pjc50 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't really put content on the blockchain, that costs a surprising amount because of all the proof-of-waste. What happens is people put the content on a host and the URL on the blockchain. I suppose in theory it could be kept in IPFS, but few NFTs seem to bother with that.

IPFS isn't hosting, it's transport. You can't "put something on ipfs" and expect it to stay there any more than when you "put something on http".

Most IPFS gateways allow you to pin content, plus they will automatically pin popular content to keep it available.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#247

Post by ethanbond » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 3:23 PM UTC

secludedrelish wrote: post #244

ethanbond wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then in what sense is owning a token owning anything?

It's just like having your name plate under a painting at a public museum

Not really. Those are on loan, which is not the default state of a piece of art.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#248

Post by ben_w » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 3:24 PM UTC

Huh, second time today that this specific Garry Brannan has entered my… feeds? I guess I can call Hacker News a feed.

And I thought the work video from 5 months ago was surprising coincidence, given I otherwise only know him from The Technical Difficulties: https://youtu.be/3rEEnjA1_eA

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#249

Post by SuoDuanDao » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 3:26 PM UTC

Hokusai wrote: post #216

mschuster91 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whether it's about wealth, ideologies or any other aspect of lifestyle: Suddenly it's right there, dangled in front of them. And for what it's worth, what is considered "luxury" has become more and more accessible/affordable or is not a status symbol any more: 7-series BMW models can be leased for ~800€ a month, luxury watches have fallen out of fashion, expensive clothing items can be rented or you just go for the…

> what is considered "luxury" has become more and more accessible/affordable or is not a status symbol any more This seems to be the reality for many HN users. But not being able to buy a home or even pay rent seems quite common in the general population.

It would seem luxuries have gotten more accessible while necessities have gotten more dear. Not sure what that says about global versus local inequality.

Re: €2.6M spent for a book at auction, believed they would own the IP

#250

Post by ben_w » Mon, Jan 17, 2022, 3:26 PM UTC

jl6 wrote: post #158

For most of human history, people have lived in small, local information bubbles which were hard to penetrate with facts from the outside world. We see this manifest as the pre-industrial global patchwork of weird and wonderful religious/spiritual/cultural variety. Then somehow the world started to join up and information began to seep into local cultures and sweep away a lot of these pre-rational beliefs. And for a…

> But in the last ten years, something seems to have arrested this direction of travel and reinstated local bubbles of thought, insulated from outside challenge.

Been going on a lot longer than 10 years. I saw the same thing in the late 90s, and the only reason I didn’t see it earlier than that is that before then I wasn’t really looking.