[HN Gopher] Ask HN: NFTs legit or mania?
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Ask HN: NFTs legit or mania?
There's a lot of buzz around NFTs (non-fungible tokens) lately:
https://www.coindesk.com/what-are-nfts Some uses cases like NBA
Top Shot seems like they could have lasting value, essentially a
digital version of trading cards backed by the official sports
league: https://www.nbatopshot.com Other uses cases like buying
Jack Dorsey's first tweet for $2.5m seem a bit more like mania to
me: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/5/22316320/jack-dorsey-
original-tweet-nft-cent-valuables Do you agree or disagree? What
are your thoughts on this space and it's future?
Author : cloudking
Score : 14 points
Date : 2021-03-06 21:53 UTC (1 hours ago)
| superbcarrot wrote:
| People have been doing stuff like this for a long time - trading
| cards, the kid who was selling pixels on a web page
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage),
| astronauts were taking items in their personal kits with the
| intent to resell them later for high value etc.
|
| I suppose that we'll see things like these get more weaponised as
| people look for easy ways to make money. I'm not interested in
| participating.
| anm89 wrote:
| Just like everything else in the crypto space, it is both.
|
| This stuff isn't going to die out completely and the exact way
| that people interact with it is going to develop over the next
| years.
|
| On the other hand it is very possible that current prices are a
| mania although there is certainly some possibility, that in the
| long term, current prices will prove to be good buys.
| lf275 wrote:
| Long-term, I think it's legit. A few big-name artists and other
| popular figures (athletes, actors, etc.) will take advantage, and
| use it as another income source. It's pretty convenient to
| immediately get a large payday by selling a unique asset (think
| of an autographed copy), while also being able to mass distribute
| and sell it at scale. For example, most people don't know that
| rookie cards for NBA players can go for well over a million
| dollars. Same idea here, except it is hosted online and
| cryptographically proven.
|
| In the short-term, definite mania. Relatively unknown artists are
| getting ridiculous amounts of money, several magnitudes more than
| they get on the open market with a private commission, because
| the supply of artists that are currently active in this market is
| dwarfed by the number of rich crypto speculators that are
| throwing money around, trying to make a profit.
| bootyfarm wrote:
| Regardless of the premise, anything that so needlessly worsens
| the climate emergency by wantonly wasting energy isn't future
| proof.
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| Mania for now but long term it will bring scarcity to the digital
| realm something that's important to fully develop the digital
| economy. Right now digital has been very profitable for a
| relatively few since it takes lots of money to develop a product
| but scarcity will let many more people make a living.
|
| A simple example are artists. Artists have been mostly locked out
| of making a good living with their digital works but NFTs will
| fix that.
|
| We will also start to see new forms of products that aren't
| profitable now since there is no way to cover the costs to
| develop them but with NFTs there is now a way to cover the costs.
|
| I see the book market changing. Established authors will be able
| to sell their books and not have to go through publishing houses.
| They can sell them to the public and now the public will be able
| to resell the book and gain some of the money back and the
| original author can get some money too.
|
| The future is very bright, as they say. There's finally a way to
| monetize cyberspace for the everyman.
| carmen_sandiego wrote:
| I'm not sure I get it. If the art is digital, then copies can
| be identical to the original (apart from the NFT), no? So why
| would this model succeed over, say, a Patreon-like model where
| many people get access to the product?
|
| Even in the traditional sales model, I would think the typical
| PED for digital goods means that selling multiple copies
| provides more revenue than selling one copy for a higher price.
| Most things aren't Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.
| bredren wrote:
| I recall a few different attempts to connect vehicle-title-like
| rights to physical artwork using the bitcoin blockchain. One of
| them was being worked on by a partner at a hedge fund that
| invested in Gliph.
|
| I also remember some startups attempting to assign music
| licensing using possession of some secret connected to a public
| ledger.
|
| I had a family member refer a colleague who taught continuing
| education courses for insurance agents ask for information so he
| could speak to the potential future of insurance contracts being
| done on-chain.
|
| These are all examples from years ago, and included some form of
| the key characteristics of NFTs as described in the article: non-
| interoperable, indivisible, indestructible, verifiable.
|
| NFTSs seem put an emphasis on the items they secure being purely
| digital.
|
| I don't see NFTs as a new idea but possibly consolidation of pre-
| existing ideas into winning standards, (ERC-721 and ERC-1155
| potentially), and perhaps generalized buzz around bitcoin and
| crypto.
|
| Consolidation to a standard, endorsement from perceived sources
| of authority and a way for new people to still "get rich" in
| crypto might elevate this to something that goes the distance.
|
| But I'd expect a lot of folks to be burned in the meantime,
| "investing" stimulus money on things that go to zero.
|
| Anecdotally, when I was evaluating Clubhouse, one of the major
| detractors of the service was how much emphasis the communities
| put on scammy get-rich in real estate or other seedy business
| ideas. There were a lot of groups on NFTs and that was a few
| weeks ago.
|
| I'm most interested in how digital assets created on the fly on
| someone's phone can be quickly secured to allow fluidity in the
| transfer of rights.
|
| People are capturing more and more important events first hand.
| However validating authenticity, ownership and authority to
| license that content seems kinda messy right now.
|
| I suspect NFTs could play a role in standardizing assertion of
| rights over content, it doesn't have to be deliberately created
| but rather by chance.
|
| A more fluid market for opportunity-based "stringer" content is
| teased at in Neil Stephenson's "gargoyles" of Snow Crash.
|
| I don't know if NFTs will be the vehicle for this but something
| like them will be, and whatever that system is will probably
| consume these more shiny "assets" appearing so far.
| doopy1 wrote:
| I think it's both. IMO we are in a mania and this will ballon
| before it comes back to reality. After that it will just become
| "normal" and perhaps a de facto standard for "digital ownership".
| The applications are broad, and I'm not sure of the lasting value
| of individual "collectible" NFTs, but the world is on the cusp of
| embracing what it means to "own" a non tangible good, and that's
| really interesting.
|
| Full disclosure: I do sell art as NFTs on one of the curated
| platforms, and I do get to benefit from the current "mania", but
| I'm not one of the big name artists, to me the whole NFT thing as
| it pertains to art is more like patreon. It's a way for folks to
| support artists they like and to have a (non physical) piece that
| they can show for it at the end of the day.
| astlouis44 wrote:
| They represent true digital ownership for the first time ever.
| Incredibly empowering for creators, I'm personally very bullish
| on the overall category NFT's and think they're here to stay.
| Geee wrote:
| They're both legit and mania. Yes, you can cryptographically own
| a token that represents the first tweet. Is it worth $2.5M? Not
| really. Some rich kid is just showing off and wants to make news.
| You could say that the value comes from the stupidity of it. Art
| is not very easy to understand or value objectively.
|
| NFTs may have real applications in enabling markets for
| intellectual property like copyrights, patents, and what not. For
| example, it would be possible to automatically stream money to
| one or many NFT copyright holders from a decentralized Spotify.
| It is also possible to tie NFT in smart contracts, so that the
| owner is able to call special functions or change the state in
| the contract. For example, if an ad spot on a website is
| controlled by a NFT, the NFT owner would be able to change the
| ad.
| carmen_sandiego wrote:
| I'm personally at the stage where it seems like such obvious
| silliness that I feel like I must be missing something, and so I
| avoid expressing this opinion anywhere that I might be held
| accountable for it at some point in the future. But I still
| suspect that I'm right, naturally.
|
| Definitely interested to hear arguments to the contrary though.
| awillen wrote:
| Wow, only one comment on here and it's exactly how I feel, but
| articulated better than I would've.
|
| In a theoretical sense I can see how they'd be valuable -
| limited supply and high demand and all that - but in practice
| it just seems like the prices of some of these early ones are
| too bonkers for it to be sustainable.
| xpose2000 wrote:
| yeah, this is either a bitcoin like scenario that the initial
| boom is happening or we are a bunch of idiots that we thought
| this was a good idea. At this point I have no idea. The amount
| of money going around is eye opening
| superbcarrot wrote:
| I feel that way about so much of new technology that I'm
| wondering whether I'm working in the wrong field or I've just
| become a grumpy old man in my late 20s.
| jka wrote:
| Given that content creators retain copyright over work they
| upload to platforms, that platforms explicitly provide that
| guarantee, and that much of the current NFT craze is around
| speculation on already-potentially-valuable digital content, I
| agree.
|
| One possibility that occurs is: for decentralized
| infrastructure, where no organization can attest to the
| identity of an original author, then it might make sense for
| that author to 'claim' their content when they upload it (at
| which time, for most authors, it would have zero value).
|
| That could be a way for authors to retain and claim value for
| their work over time, while also making a public copyright
| claim.
|
| That's all conjecture on my part; I don't really understand the
| hype yet, either - or whether it will last.
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(page generated 2021-03-06 23:01 UTC)