[HN Gopher] Jack Dorsey Dorsey is attempting to sell his first t...
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Jack Dorsey Dorsey is attempting to sell his first tweet as an NFT
Author : pmlnr
Score : 52 points
Date : 2021-03-06 18:50 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| ineedasername wrote:
| _What you are purchasing is a digital certificate of the tweet,
| unique because it has been signed and verified by the creator_
|
| So basically it's an odd form of a digital autograph associated
| with this tweet, that the owner presumably agrees not to
| autograph again and sell to other people.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| I've been a cryptocurrency user and fan since early days, but I
| just never understood the purpose of NFTs. I couldn't get my
| head around Rare Pepes or Cryptokitties, but after seeing your
| comment, I can finally cement why I was sceptical all along -
| an autograph is a good analogy!
| quantified wrote:
| What happens if the autograph owner emails the hash to their
| friends? What does "own" mean here? They can all print it and
| frame it on the wall. Meanwhile Twitter's data systems go down
| and the tweet disappears, no one "has" the actual tweet.
|
| I wouldn't mind having $2M I didn't need to bid on this level
| of abstraction.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I guess you could print out the hash & get Dorsey to sign it
| by hand as well. That should be part of the deal. That way
| you know it's _the one_.
|
| Also, in the highly unlikely event of a hash collision, the
| Dorsey hash wins and the other hash has to go back to to
| /dev/null, metaphorical head held down in shame.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| This kind of thing turns up in post-scarcity sci-fi works. Are we
| really post-scarcity, yet? All of us on this planet?
| moonbug wrote:
| always suspected he was a wrong'un.
| mrwh wrote:
| Makes me think of Civilization, the game, somehow (which I used
| to spend far too much time playing and now have officially Given
| Up). You start money constrained, but by the endgame there's
| typically so much cash floating around that it ceases to have the
| same meaning. So what is the person buying here? An anecdote;
| except that the better the anecdote comes across the more that
| it's an investment too. Seems like madness to me, but then I am
| very much not at the silly money stage. Money still means
| shelter, rather than a way to keep score.
| mimikatz wrote:
| Can I sell the NFT of my retweet?
| cs702 wrote:
| Society deems that an original work of art by, say, Pablo Picasso
| is more valuable than an indistinguishable copy by an unknown or
| lesser known artist.
|
| Making a good copy of a Picasso is not that difficult. Go to any
| decent art school, and you will find artists who can competently
| forge a Picasso.
|
| Many owners of Picasso artwork in fact display forgeries, which
| they call "replicas" in polite company, and keep the original
| works in secure storage, safe from any possible damage. Most
| people cannot distinguish between an original work and its
| forgery anyway.
|
| In fact, even expert collectors are routinely fooled by
| forgeries![a] The authenticity of many works of art can be
| ascertained only by looking at provenance, documentary evidence,
| and historical context -- an imprecise process riddled with human
| bias and error.
|
| Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are like authentic works of art,
| except that their authenticity, contents, ownership, and
| provenance (including date of origin) are protected by strong
| cryptography, making forgeries impossible for all practical
| purposes.
|
| And society deems that an NFT representing the authentic first
| tweet by Jack Dorsey -- with its contents, ownership, and
| provenance protected by cryptography -- is more valuable than an
| indistinguishable copy of the tweet made by an unknown or lesser
| known person.
|
| --
|
| [a] For example, see
| https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=fake%20picasso and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_forgery
| dillondoyle wrote:
| art fakes are also a tax dodge. must have the piece in a museum
| share for a set % of time, in a freeport, etc.
|
| Was a great storyline on this in the recent half season of
| Billions!
|
| The billionaire keeps the real ones at his house & the fakes in
| a freeport (probably happens in real life a lot of Billions
| story lines are based in real world gossip - e.g. BDSM
| Schneiderman)
|
| In a funny scene prosecutor Chuck finds out and 'spills' wine
| on the real Van Gough and Bobby the billionaire has a epic
| grimace
|
| the end solution was the billionaire brought in the works by
| stealth helicopter at night then opened a new non-profit museum
| for fake art in his apartment to get the tax deduction. totally
| unreasonable and pointless but an entertaining show.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It seems it's not that hard to create fakes that even experts
| cannot distinguish. See "Made You Look" documentary on Netflix.
|
| An authentic painting is one the painter touched. An NFT? He
| never touched it. I just don't see the attraction.
| xref wrote:
| The analogy breaks down at a copied painting being hard to
| distinguish but a copied piece of digital art is literally
| impossible to distinguish, right down to its hash.
|
| People who collect Picasso's want the piece the artists hands
| truly created, that's why copies hold no real value. By copying
| digital art you _are_ getting the work the artists hands
| created, the identical hash can prove it.
| fullshark wrote:
| Most of them want it for investment purposes + to be able to
| impress their peers/strangers. This might provide that same
| utility.
| orf wrote:
| It's not really ownership though is it. The tweet is Jack's, he
| can delete it if he wishes. It's more like buying a slip of
| paper that says you own this particular Picasso, but the person
| you brought it from still has full control of it and the only
| thing you can do is look at it through glass like any other
| visitor regardless of your slip of paper.
|
| And the whole fake/original breaks down in the physical world.
| How do you tie it to the physical goods in a way that can't be
| fraudulent?
| undefined1 wrote:
| > he can delete it if he wishes
|
| or by Twitter itself if Jack is at some point deemed
| problematic enough by modern puritans.
| orf wrote:
| If he turns out to be a Nazi, sure. Probably for the best.
| manjana wrote:
| > It's not really ownership though is it. The tweet is
| Jack's, he can delete it if he wishes.
|
| Would there not be some liability in doing so? Legally the
| buyer does own it (it seems) and Jack simply has control over
| it.
| bdonlan wrote:
| First, is a tweet even a thing you can own, legally? You
| can own the copyright and you can enter into a contract
| where you promise not to delete it, but a tweet is
| ultimately something that is displayed and processed by,
| and exists at the pleasure of Twitter; they're not a party
| to your NFT shenanigans and therefore not bound to any of
| it.
|
| As for the hypothetical contract not to delete it yourself,
| you'd probably have a good argument that there was no clear
| meeting of the minds - without an explicit description of
| what the author intended to be bound to by selling a NFT
| you'll have a hard time getting the courts to enforce
| anything about it.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| There's a famous story about Picasso.
|
| People would often approach him asking him to authenticate
| their artworks. One day this happened while an art dealer
| friend was present. "Fake!", says Picasso.
|
| The art dealer was skeptical, so he gave one of his own
| Picassos to a third party and asked him to check.
|
| "Fake!", says Picasso.
|
| "But Pablo, I _saw you draw that_. You gave it to me _with your
| own hands_! "
|
| "Bah. Anyone can do a fake Picasso. I often do them myself."
| fullshark wrote:
| 2.5 million leading bid right now.
|
| https://v.cent.co/tweet/20?s=u_o
| eznzt wrote:
| Does that person even have that amount of money? From looking
| at his timeline it seems unlikely.
| aarongolliver wrote:
| Seems like that's an ideal problem to solve using a
| blockchain/smart contracts (a distributed auction). If they
| can't verify these bids are real & will be paid out that
| seems like a complete failure of the technology.
| snicksnak wrote:
| The highest bidder claims he is willing to go up as high as 10
| million.
| juskrey wrote:
| Selling his digital autograph, not the tweet. Selling the tweet
| would imply passing full control over the original.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| So does it mean Twitter will also respect ownership based on
| whats on blockchain / contract?
|
| That would open up so many interesting avenues - new owner could
| delete, modify, hide it?
| lgeorget wrote:
| That's not what I get from the last sentence of the article.
| Apparently you just gain the exclusivity of the right to claim
| that you own the tweet. But @jack can delete the tweet and
| Twitter can shut down at any time and that doesn't grant the
| buyer a refund.
| roywiggins wrote:
| He's just selling something that amounts to an exclusive
| autographed copy as far as I can tell.
| sp332 wrote:
| Nope, it's completely meaningless outside of the blockchain,
| and people who agree to comply with ownership recorded there.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I find the idea of NFT interesting. Right now, the way it
| operates it feels like a giant MLM scam ( and in a sense, that is
| exactly what it is ). Still, I can see potential future if it is
| accepted as a way to keep track of 'digital collectables'.
| cyberlab wrote:
| > it feels like a giant MLM scam
|
| Yeah tell that to the cypher-punks who have been preaching
| 'speak math to power' for eternity. This is just crypto-porn
| evangelized by OG users of Twitter like @jack, nothing more.
| [deleted]
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| >>I can see potential future if it is accepted as a way to keep
| track of 'digital collectables'.
|
| I can see a situation where every real life high-end product
| has an ID associated with it too. Leading to less fraud.
| There's also a definite future in first sales and all the
| following resales as a way to preserve value for collectibles.
| perfmode wrote:
| what is a digital collectible? what is the value of a
| collectible?
|
| i can't put my finger on it
|
| but feels like a strong bout of collective insanity
|
| high on ideas
|
| abusing language and metaphor and analogy to the point we no
| longer understand what is real and unreal
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think with this it is good idea to look into other
| "collectible" markets. Many of them have massively increasing
| valuations. So this is just people trying to get early on
| some new market...
|
| Still, at least with physical things, we know there is
| limited quantity of quality. Same can't be said about digital
| products...
| K0SM0S wrote:
| Thing is, "value is in the eye of the beholder". It might be
| material in a strictly biological setting, or idealistic
| (subjective) in a post-scarcity environment. We're somewhere
| in-between with the digital world, the value of the
| superfluous (e.g. collectibles) is able to rise as material
| needs are more easily covered (using an ever-smaller fraction
| of resources).
|
| To put it simply to the point of absurdity, if we were a
| "magical" (in Arthur C. Clarke's word) civilization without
| any outstanding needs, we could still play some for-profit
| economic game and spend quadrillions buying autographs,
| because it wouldn't lessen anything of importance.
| Conversely, if you're barely eating enough, you won't spend
| resources on anything else than getting more food, because
| that would lessen your chances of survival.
|
| The degree of perceived insanity, I think, thus entirely
| depends on who you are as a beholder of value, where you fit
| in the material [?] idealistic spectrum. Pretty sure Africans
| with $1/day feel this is perfectly stupid, but your average
| billionaire might find it a funny hobby, like collecting some
| cards of the digital era. There will be a market for that, I
| think crypto-manias proved as much.
|
| It's all relative to an observer, IMHO.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I understand your question, but at the end of the day, what
| is value? Why is a one can of soup more collectible than
| another physically identical can of soup beyond 'intangible'
| knowledge of it having been owned by a historical figure? In
| practical sense, things are worth only as much as someone is
| willing to pay, and someone is willing to pay 2.5m.
| pizza234 wrote:
| Based on my reading of the "12 million dollars stuffed
| shark"1, this has the same mechanics as the market of a
| piece of contemporary art (I'd go as far as considering
| that this is, essentially, an art piece).
|
| In such markets, pieces are status, which has nothing
| really to do with matter (in a physical sense).
| Specifically:
|
| - status is sold; Jack Dorsey is famous, and his first
| tweet is strongly symbolic;
|
| - status is acquired/purchased; the buyer has the money for
| the purchase, and he'll fits the item likely in a sort of
| private collection.
|
| The status interpretation can make more intuitive the
| nature of the transaction/item, dispelling the insanity
| interpretation.
|
| It needs to be considered also that this can be very
| conventional speculation; in this sense, it would appear
| intuitively "not insane", like financial instruments (of
| course, in another sense, they are fundamentally insane
| :)).
|
| 1=https://www.amazon.com/Million-Stuffed-Shark-Economics-
| Conte...
| spijdar wrote:
| Sure, it's all on a sliding scale, but I think GP's point
| is the lines are blurring into insanity. At least a can of
| soup is a tangible object and is more "realizable" to our
| beings than some information stored on a database in some
| FAANG datacenter. Depending on your perspective it's all
| ridiculous or all rational, but at least the can of soup
| can be interacted with "natively" by our bodies without
| needing a trillion dollar technology stack to even sense in
| the first place.
| Tossrock wrote:
| "FAANG datacenter" really highlights the absurdity of
| including Netflix in the acronym - they have no data
| centers of their own, as they're built entirely on the
| AWS stack.
| vsareto wrote:
| I highly doubt Jack is doing this, but it seems like
| another good vehicle for money laundering. Here's an
| essentially worthless tweet I set at an unreasonable value
| as an NFT or whatever.
|
| Maybe he's doing a proof-of-concept for something else
| Twitter is developing (almost infinitely more likely than
| Jack doing money laundering), but this stuff just seems
| weird for rich tech people to do. This is like certificates
| of authenticity for random infomercial products, just on
| the blockchain.
| perfmode wrote:
| is value ultimately monetary? is money ultimately of value?
| [deleted]
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| The value of collectibles is a supply and demand issue. A
| piccaso has the extra ordinary value (price) because at least
| 1 person is willing to pay for it not because picasso was
| such a great artist. Digital is the same except that you can
| make millions of exact copies. The token gives it scarcity
| and by extension value.
| mpalmer wrote:
| This is the evergreen discussion about the valuation of art,
| and it doesn't stop art from being highly valued.
| mindslight wrote:
| Digital collectible? Like my FLAC collection, no blockchain
| involved, that I can happily share with friends?
|
| NFTs are the new shitcoins, without even a pretense of being
| generally useful. Digital Beanie Babies will surely be worth
| something long term, but nowhere near the bubble we're about
| to see.
|
| Then again, Bitcoin itself is the original _non-fungible_
| token, lacking the critical ecash proprietary of
| untraceability. So what do I know.
| breckenedge wrote:
| My working assumption is that these digital tokens sell for
| so much because they are great for estate/inheritance tax
| evasion. With these digital tokens, you have something that's
| very liquid, immensely portable, unseizable, and doesn't
| depreciate like normal cash that you can hand down to your
| kids.
|
| https://newrepublic.com/article/147192/modern-art-serves-
| ric...
| WalterBright wrote:
| I expect if Elizabeth Warren gets her way in crushing
| people who have a lot of wealth in stocks, they'll shift
| their money to collectibles. I.e. instead of investing in
| productive things like industry, they'll invest in useless
| things like art objects.
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| Art collecting has been a way to bypass taxes and launder
| money. I read an article where it was used for bribes. A
| person buys an art piece for 1000 bux and then sells it for
| 2000. Once the transaction is done no one outside the
| transaction knows it's a bribe. NFTs will make the process
| easier.
| fullshark wrote:
| If it impresses people + you can resell it for more than you
| paid for initially then it's worth buying.
| [deleted]
| fermienrico wrote:
| Is it just me or recently in last year or so I am noticing more
| and more of ... I don't know what to call these:
|
| - Baseball/pokemon card auctions
|
| - Bitcoin and crypto in general
|
| - Meme stocks
|
| - and now this NFT stuff
|
| It is all exploding. Usually, this was limited to much smaller
| stage and scale, besides may be the art world. Ofcourse auctions
| are older than the dust, I am just noticing increasing pyramid-
| schemes/tokens/scarcity-driven-value-stores and personalities
| such as deepfuckingvalue/elon/chamath/etc.
|
| Is there an underlying pattern here?
| xiphias2 wrote:
| While collectibles are superior to fiat currencies as a store
| of value ($2T was just printed from nothing without any limit
| to do it in the future), Bitcoin is divisible, which gives it a
| great liquidity advantage. I expect most collectibles to
| decrease in value compared to BTC in the long term.
| pmlnr wrote:
| Currency was never meant to be a value store, ever. The US
| gold backing was a silly thing to start with. A currency's
| _function_ is to be a glue, a common denominator.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| ,,Currency was never meant to be a value store, ever. ''
|
| It's not that simple. If people wouldn't use it for store
| of value, seignorage wouldn't be so profitable for banks.
|
| Gold backing was also very profitable for banks, as they
| could sell the gold and lie to people about the gold still
| existing. It wasn't like people wanted it: gold was taken
| away by force and by shaming people who hoarded it.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I really lean towards the view that it's just because people
| are stuck inside. I'll be a lot more concerned about the trend
| if it persists into 2022.
| KirillPanov wrote:
| > Is there an underlying pattern here?
|
| Fiat money printing.
|
| It causes speculative bubbles.
| rasz wrote:
| Inflation. People have too much money, and nothing to invest
| into.
| jowsie wrote:
| It's basically MLM's but instead of tupperware they're peddling
| FOMO.
| bitdizzy wrote:
| Financialization of everything until tokens themselves become
| financialized.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Isn't "tokens themselves become financialized" basically
| Bitcoin?
| ralusek wrote:
| Growing distrust of institutions. General increase in
| postmodern philosophy, deconstructing concepts of inherent
| value. Stock market valuations increasingly decoupling from
| underlying business to the point that everyone realized we were
| just betting on abstract entities. Large portion of the
| population not earning enough for traditional investment
| vehicles to net returns that would meaningfully impact their
| lives, so instead going for YOLO meme investments for a
| marginally slim chance at completely changing their lives. I'm
| sure there're more reasons.
| [deleted]
| Ekaros wrote:
| I'm starting to believe that both or even all sides are in
| the game now. Rich have more money than places to put it.
| People distrusting markets look at this thing and feel FOMO.
| And then you have some average guys with extra money and time
| to look at things they are nostalgic about.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| Uneducated guess: Quantitative easing of the US dollar has led
| to some people to accumulate an outsized proportion of the
| money and are now seeking higher/easier returns where they can.
| In my mind, recklessly.
| snicksnak wrote:
| Everytime i read "quantitative easing" I chuckle, because
| this thing is stuck in my head
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k
| matwood wrote:
| Maybe all those old baseball cards I have will finally be worth
| something...maybe...
| Ekaros wrote:
| There is probably some value in those. Large part of market
| is nostalgia. I would personally now sell any of them that
| have risen substantially. They might go up more, but
| eventually they go down when the generation who have
| nostalgia is gone... It's common pattern that can be seen
| with things like cars, outside the very special ones.
| jariel wrote:
| There's definitely evidence of huge pools of liquid capital and
| probably an expression of bad economic policy i.e. QE vs.
| minimum wage.
|
| I suggest there's a time for both, but the time as long since
| passed for a minimum wage hike or other, better demand-side
| initiatives instead of the supply side economics that have
| dominated for the last 40 years.
|
| I'm note speaking politically or ideologically, just
| pragmatically.
|
| That we have people holding 3 jobs with no healthcare in an
| economy where people are paying $500 for shoes and 'digital
| art' and other speculative things is just not healthy.
| fermienrico wrote:
| > 3 jobs with no healthcare in an economy
|
| > $500 for shoes
|
| Why are they mutually exclusive? Should people give up
| luxuries?
| jariel wrote:
| ? Yes. Paying $500 for shoes you won't wear is less
| important than food, or making sure that your kid is
| supported and shows up to class so that we don't have to
| blame it on the schools.
| dandanua wrote:
| It looks like the idea of money got completely detached from a
| useful value. Probably due to the world scale corruption. This
| is not going to end well.
| pmlnr wrote:
| To me the absolute insanity of a unique digital thing in 2021 is
| that digital storage mediums are utterly, insanely fragile, even
| compared to paper, let alone a laser engraved corrosion resistant
| metal sheet.
|
| I understand unique value in a Black Lotus Magic the Gathering
| card, which will easily outlast any digital storage media you can
| buy today.
|
| Aren't we getting a little ahead of ourselves by unique digital
| things when there isn't even a way to store it without a global
| network, slurping silly amounts of energy, and of what's hardware
| requirements is crippling the semiconductor availability?
| outside1234 wrote:
| Why would anyone want a digital autograph?
|
| It is not like you can frame this in your living room - what is
| the appeal?
| dreadlordbone wrote:
| At The International 2013 (a DotA tournament), in person
| viewers received "autographs" of the players that could
| attached to items in game. I told them on the Steam market
| place for almost $1,000.
| robryan wrote:
| In that case there was scarcity in the game. A limited number
| of people could display these on their profiles/ complete a
| collection. Compared to a Tweet that anyone can view and that
| the buyer has no control over it doesn't seem to be quite the
| same thing. A Tweet equivalent might be if the purchased
| Tweet was now only viewable on the buyers timeline.
| thrill wrote:
| Well, if you own the rights to something, you can control the
| commercial use of it (assuming non-commercial use is not worth
| the effort to restrict). I leave the commercial utility of
| Jack's first tweet as an exercise for others (because I have no
| clue).
| VectorLock wrote:
| I don't think NFTs almost ever attach any intellectual
| property or copyright ownership to possession of the NFT.
|
| It's more like a collectors card of some thing. Purely
| abstract.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Sure, but that's a legal right that lives in law, not on the
| blockchain.
|
| And I'd be shocked if this NFT actually included that sort of
| ownership as part of the deal.
| sp332 wrote:
| It's exclusivity. This is just creating something exclusive
| purely to be exclusive.
| pmlnr wrote:
| Each and every output of `uuidgen` is exclusive...
| sp332 wrote:
| Yes but these are hard to forge. This is like a PGP-signed
| UUID in a bittorrent.
| pmlnr wrote:
| Just because something can't be or hard to forge it
| doesn't mean there's any value to it.
|
| That's the madness behind the current trends: I genuinely
| fail to see value. Unique is not a guarantee for
| valuable.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| It's not just a current trend.
|
| > Unique is not a guarantee for valuable...That's the
| madness behind the current trends...
|
| Not sufficient, but maybe necessary, as the
| mathematicians would put it.
|
| Why would anyone pay nearly $9.5 million for this?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Guiana_1c_magenta
|
| It's certainly not great artwork (it's a crude hack job
| cranked out by a local printer when the shipment of real
| stamps didn't arrive on time). It's never been owned by
| anyone particularly famous (edit: well, the DuPont guy is
| somewhat (in)famous, but the stamp was extremely valuable
| even before he owned it). None of the people associated
| with its production are particularly famous. It doesn't
| play any kind of pivotal role in world history, or even
| the history of the former British Guiana.
|
| The only reason it's worth $9.48 million is that there is
| only one of them.
| sp332 wrote:
| Yup, and it would waste a lot less electricity too.
| rektide wrote:
| What a sham. People are so desperate to turn the unlimited,
| powerful realm of computing into such a limited, restricted,
| constrained, zero-sum system.
|
| I'm already exhausted by NFT. There's going to be decades &
| decades of people insisting this petty silly act is meaningful,
| has value. They'll be right, but only because they recruit others
| to their small world thinking, to their narrowed horizons,
| focused on property & proprietary. Decades of endlessly hearing
| excitement about capturing the great & vast digital, about using
| society to make real, enforce their fabricated & fictitious sense
| of scarcity & limits & constraints.
|
| Decades & decades of listening to zero-sum mentality, watching
| just enough people get roped in, suckered into this concocted
| belief system. These jokers are going to make L. Ron Hubbard look
| both moral & amateur. This new religion gives me the creeps, this
| anti-use of freedom. This is such the opposite of hope, &
| capability, & democratic power that the internet represented, a
| closing of access, a system of restricting, not the opening of
| frontiers, the ever-expanding availability that shaped all my
| decades under Moore's law. This saga is such a sad one. And it's
| only just beginning, opening salvos like this: telling us that
| only the wealthy will own the digital.
| Klwohu wrote:
| This is silly.
| kore wrote:
| The article is misrepresenting the situation.
|
| Jack Dorsey isn't attempting to sell anything here. The site
| allows anybody to make an offer, unsolicited, on a tweet of their
| choosing. Jack can choose to accept the offer if he wishes, but
| he's not the one who initiated this.
|
| It's all in their FAQ.
| drewvolpe wrote:
| Jack tweeted a link to the page where you can buy the NFT, so I
| think it's accurate to say he's selling it:
|
| https://twitter.com/jack/status/1367990471759306752
| kore wrote:
| You're right, I stand corrected
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