Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 270 posts

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#51

Post by basch »

librish wrote: post #9

I don't have any problems with people buying or selling art for large sums of money, nor do I have a problem with people classifying art as pretty much whatever they want. The only thing I mind are the people pretending a real problem has been solved with NFTs. In any current (or conceived as far as I know) implementation of NFTs you have to trust so many people, technologies, and companies that the blockchain being…

At the end of the day doesnt the trust still fall back to the author? If you are getting 1/1 of a digital autograph or something, you are trusting the author to later not make more autographs.

Even if the institutions that authenticate the autographs go away, their record of the work they did so far is printed into the permanent record, no?

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#53

Post by whalesalad »

I don't get it. I just don't understand. One, why did anyone want to buy this meaningless video? Two, why did it need to be done via NFT, and finally why for such a large sum of money?

Is this a form of money laundering? I am so confused, no part of this makes any sense to me at all.

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#54

Post by delecti »

hoppyhoppy2 wrote: post #23

My main basic questions remain after reading about these NFT sales. Why can't someone just buy all rights to this video the same way a company can buy the rights to a film? What does the blockchain do that a couple lawyers and some paperwork couldn't? Why a blockchain-based digital "certificate" instead of just a certificate? Does my birth certificate or marriage certificate or college diploma need an upgrade to an N…

An NFT is essentially a trading card for the thing that it's attached to. Just like you don't "own" Babe Ruth in any meaningful sense by owning a Babe Ruth trading card, you don't "own" the artwork associated with an NFT by owning the NFT itself. The exception is if there's some arrangement external to the NFT that links ownership of the NFT to ownership of the thing.

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#55

Post by vaer-k »

endisneigh wrote: post #24
vaer-k wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would happen if you sold to someone the deed to a house you do not own?

This is not the equivalent situation. It's more like I decide to sell an NFT to your comment.

It totally disagree. I think it is quite equivalent. The difference is that we don't have a centralized authority to recognize valid NFTs, as we do for deeds. But if we did have a central authority, like perhaps the artist responsible for the work protected by the NFT, and if the artist made it clear and public that only the NFTs she recognizes could be considered valid proof of ownership of her works, then indeed an NFT would function like a deed.

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#56

Post by colinmhayes »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #28

The only explanation for NFTs that made sense to me is that people with an interest in the network (e.g. early investors) are bidding up some choice NFTs to make news and drive interest in their network. There is no actual market for NFTs at these prices, but that doesn't stop groups with deep pockets from pretending like there is by purchasing well known memes for eye popping amounts. If internet "celebrities" are a…

Could be money laundering related too. Buy NFTs for small sums with clean crypto, sell it to your dirty wallet for inflated sums. In order for something like that to work there needs to be plausible deniability so they also buy NFTs with clean wallets which would explain the volume. Plus the legitimate crypto speculators see these crazy numbers and jump aboard too.

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#57

Post by vaer-k »

Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #33
vaer-k wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would happen if you sold to someone the deed to a house you do not own?

That would be fraudulent, but that's not what I'm suggesting. I suppose I could sell a token for Hacker News, I just couldn't claim that the holder of the token gets any kind of special privilege here.

In that case sure, you could do it, just as you could sell someone a deed to a rock you picked up off the street.

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#58

Post by smnrchrds »

Are there laws to prevent owners of culturally significant artworks, e.g. van Gogh and da Vinci paitnings, from being destroyed, and from being shipped to countries that do not have regulations against them being destroyed? It seems the free market is moving in the direction of valuing destruction of art more than the art itself. In the absence of regulations, it would be a matter of time until some investor buys up a bunch of masterpieces, turn them into NFTs, destroys them, and ends up doubling their money in the process.

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#59

Post by bloak »

ALittleLight wrote: post #17

I would describe myself, usually, as not a jealous man. I don't recollect the last time I've felt jealousy. But, something about NFTs provokes anger within me. Maybe that anger is jealously. It feels like NFTs are a mockery of the "market" for lack of a better word. When I think of what I would need to sell (items or time doing labor) to get these amounts and how incredibly useless NFTs actually are... It's frustrati…

I remember some of the people who worked hard designing the hardware and software that went into feature phones being outraged, perhaps in a similar way, by the stupid amounts of money people were spending on ringtones at that time (about 20 years ago).

Re: Charlie Bit My Finger video to be taken off YouTube after selling for £500k

#60

Post by thinkingemote »

Is NFT an eternal copyright now? An NFT is basically a deed of ownership, like buying up property.

Such products will never see the public domain, as they are owned forever. I wonder if the major publishing companies are eyeing these up

Post reply on HN