I must be getting old because I just don't get NFT's. They look stupid and I don't get why anyone would buy them. Declining tech companies and startups seem to be trying to crowbar them into their products much like Blockchain when it was new and shiny. Perhaps younger me would of seen something I can't anymore.
The thing about NFTs is that many people who buy them "don't get NFTs".
All an NFT is is a token that represents ownership, like if the title to your car or house deed was on a blockchain.
NFTs have some sane use causes like designating the owner of a valuable asset or creating electronic tickets that can be resold or transferred without some centralized entity like ticketmaster.
Prior to NFTs existing, would you purchase the ownership rights to a gif or tweet? Probably not. And that is what is dumb about the excitement around NFTs, some people with more money than sense seem to think that now that you can represent ownership on a blockchain some things, like crappy jpegs, have suddenly become valuable assets.
Thing is, NFTs don't represent ownership, absent some external legal documents which tie ownership to the NFT. (And even with such external documents p perhaps not; see e.g. the statute of frauds which restricts in what form land ownership can be transferred.)
I can sell NFTs of bridges all day long; doesn't mean anyone is buying a bridge.
An NFT is decent evidence in favour of the keyholder being the creator of a work, if there's no earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work.
When people first started talking about them I thought that was the idea - a kind of people's copyright registry on the blockchain. Which seems like a fairly reasonable idea, as far as it goes.
Edit: To be clear, I mean a copyright registry that is used for the sort of thing copyright registries are used for, ie. adjudicating copyright disputes. I am not saying an NFT of the Mona Lisa is good evidence you painted the Mona Lisa (unless you minted it in 1502), and I'm definitely not saying the current market in NFTs is sensible.
> An NFT is decent evidence in favour of you being the creator of a work, if there's no earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work
It's really not at all reliable. I could create an NFT for the "Joeboy" HN account right now, and ostensibly become the owner of your HN account since such an NFT does not already exist. Obviously, this makes no sense, the NFT is meaningless.
No, you could create an NFT that supposedly represents that but unless people buy into the idea, no is becoming the owner of anything.
If instead Ycombinator would release each user as an NFT, and allow people to buy/sell then, then yes you could become the owner of an HN account via NFTs. But until then, the one who knows the password is the owner.
People seems to have some sort of problem with trying to understand NFTs were all thoughts and logic go out the window as soon as NFTs are mentioned.
If there was no evidence of the account existing before you registered the NFT, I think that would be a reasonably credible bit of evidence in your favour.
It's not at all there is rampant fraud in the NFT market. So much so Deviantart made some detection software to help alert artists their work is being stolen.
All that can be definitively proved outside of other methods is who created the token.
It sounds like you're talking about cases where, as I said, there's "earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work". Intheabsenceofthat, I think the token would be a decent piece of evidence in favour of the token owner.
So would posting it anywhere online essentially. Twitter would work for the same usecase. Or the old sending it to yourself through the mail thing.
NFTs also don’t put the image on chain usually instead just linking from the metadata so a fraudster could register a bunch of placeholder NFTs and then later put stolen art where the link points to. Hey Presto you can steal art and “prove” the actual creator is the fraud.
Well, posting the actual content publicly would obviously make it public, which registering a hash on the blockchain would not. "Sending it to yourself through the mail" would probably be the competition, and I would say a cryptographic hash is at least as good as a postmark, as well as cheaper.
Anyway. I wasn't talking about NFTs as they exist today. I'm just saying the original concept (as I understood it) seemed basically reasonable, before everybody went insane.
> An NFT is decent evidence in favour of the keyholder being the creator of a work, if there's no earlier evidence of somebody else being the creator of the work.
The second clause shows why the first is not true: the other evidence is what gives you the information you need. In every context where it really matters it comes down to what a court would accept and … uh … I would not want to be the one having to tell a judge that something is proof of ownership when anyone on the internet could submit the same record.
I can't say for sure what a judge would make of a cryptographically secure hash of a piece of content that there's no record of prior to the hash's registration on a blockchain. I think if somebody tries to claim authorship of eg. a screenplay I've written, such a hash should be pretty good evidence in my favour.
> Thing is, NFTs don't represent ownership, absent some external legal documents which tie ownership to the NFT.
NFTs are the ownership-tying documents - specifically, asserting ownership over some property, just like any other deed/title to some property (be it tangible or abstract/intellectual). NFTs, like any other sort of deed/title, require recognition, validation, and enforcement by society at large to have any real value.
That is:
> I can sell NFTs of bridges all day long; doesn't mean anyone is buying a bridge.
I can sell deeds/titles to bridges all day long (complete with thick paper and fancy seals); doesn't mean anyone is buying a bridge.
> All an NFT is is a token that represents ownership, like if the title to your car or house deed was on a blockchain.
No. An NFT is just a few bytes of text pinned to a blockchain. They are essentially useless, and every useful property of an NFT can be achieved using asymmetric encryption or digital signatures, the blockchain component is just wasteful hype.
If an external source - say the Twitter account of an artist - can authenticate that the holder of the NFT is who the creator of the art work wants to be recognized as the owner, then social consensus will lead to widespread value assignment to that NFT.
The ability to hold and trade the NFT on the public blockchain makes that asset accessible to a large number of autonomous on-chain markets, like dApps which allow a person to take out self-executing loans that use the NFT as collateral.
> If an external source - say the Twitter account of an artist - can authenticate that the holder of the NFT is who the creator of the art work wants to be recognized as the owner, then social consensus will lead to widespread value assignment to that NFT.
In other words, you don't need the blockchain because the actual value comes from a different system. The only thing it's adding is overhead and unreliability.
It fails to establish that this is unique to a blockchain: we do, after all, have decades of experience building distributed applications and it’s not like banks haven’t issued loans before and the hypothetical benefits have to be weighed against the added costs of relying a very slow, expensive database with no mechanism to correct bugs or fraud.
"makes that asset accessible to a large number of autonomous on-chain markets, like dApps which allow a person to take out self-executing loans that use the NFT as collateral"
What market undergridded by banks provides these features.
The blockchain provides extremely high assurances of up-time and immutability in its protocol rules - which assures accessibility and protection from third party interference. This is ideal as a digital asset registry.
NFTs don't sell ownership rights. NFTs are equivalent of buying photographs of a celebrity. You may own NFT that represents Taylor Swift, but she aint going on a dinner date with you.
Not to mention you are not the only one to hold it either as someone else can Taylor Swift NFT and sell it to.
It is exactly same as buying and owning cards of your favourite celebrity. They are worthless even compared to cowdung and have absolutely not practical value.
One has to be high on drugs to buy ugly gifs for thousands of dollars.
The NFTs that people are making their profile pictures are drastically different from the celebrity and athlete NFTs put out by DraftKings or topshot. The NFTs in profile pics on Twitter (like crypto punks) have randomly generated features making each and every minted nft completely unique.
I feel like there are two vastly different audiences with NFTs. The casual, celebrity/athlete NFTs that are selling multiple of some persons face for fiat currency, and parole who are actively participating in minting NFTs with web3 dApps made by developers with roadmaps and a strong community.
Yep. It's a completely made up problem. It's maybe useful in enforcing existing IP law (i.e., I can prove that that picture is mine), but even that is questionable (proof of ownership of digital IP has already been proven satisfactorily for courts of law to rule on it).
The fact there is a new way of proving ownership doesn't make the thing owned valuable.
As far as I'm aware, the NFT doesn't itself convey any transfer of copyrights (or any other form of IP). That has to be done by a separate document (and therefore it's that document that transfers the rights, not the NFT). So I don't see how the NFT is doing anything to help enforce existing IP laws?
NFTs don't actually prove ownership of anything but themselves. Owning a hash of a URL has no connection to the real world, and can't prove that the NFT was created by the author of the artwork.
It makes me doubly furious that NFT is advertised as caring for artists. In fact, NFT makes it easier than ever to sell stolen artwork. NFT itself doesn't contain any copyrighted material, and selling metadata/URLs is not illegal, so it's likely that fraud through NFT is de-facto legal if you just carefully word it as selling the NFT of the artwork, and not the artwork itself.
I'm not saying it does; I AM saying that it's an additional public record that can be used to bolster a case in the event of unclear ownership. And even that is "maybe" useful, hence my use of that phrase.
I imagine it could actually develop into a similar situation for physical art. There is an original work that is worth a lot because humans are weird like that, and an entire industry of experts who try to sort out the actual original NFT that was minted by the artist over the duplicates and fakes.
For example, we know the original creator of Nyan Cat came out of the woodwork to retroactively mint an NFT for it, https://foundation.app/@NyanCat/nyan-cat-219, which sold for 300 ETH. Obviously, anyone can create an NFT with the same gif, but we are reasonably certain that the actual created this ONE and declared it be the original.
Obviously, this is a very odd thing to try to wrap your head around, but is it really that different from valuing original physical artwork?
This is the equivalent of someone seeing how much a Picasso sells and wondering if they should become an artist. For every success, there are 10,000 failures.
That's true, but in the Picasso scenario I actually need to learn to do art. In the NFT case, apparently a 3rd grade level of photoshop skills would do.
Don't mistake extreme technical skill as being the sole reason humans value things. Sometimes, it's just about being the first to effectively convey a new idea, and the crudeness of the execution doesn't matter. And there are plenty of extremely skilled artists that spend decades mastering their craft whose work is effectively worthless, because they're not actually breaking new ground.
In hindsight, I was making a joke that seeing the value of an NFT has convinced me to make NFT's - and that this is the very cycle which has made NFT's valuable.
I was not actually implying that I would literally start making NFT's right now.
I did however forget that jokes and humor were against Hackernews rules, and for that I thank you kind sir for the reminder.
Exactly. If you think your beanie baby is still interesting in 2021, you can put it on a shelf. Showing off your NFT quickly devolves to "cool story, bro."
The only implementation of NFTs I've come across that doesn't look like a fly-by-night operation is NBA's Top Shot, where you can buy video NFTs of special moments in NBA history.
At the very least, you can buy a piece of IP directly from the IP holder, and receive a package that's nicely presented.
It's still totally overpriced, but I can see at least some value. It still needs to go a step further technologically. Like a special app that allows you to view the NFT with AR features artificially implemented. Or displaying it in a holographic form, especially for moments captured with 360-degree cameras.
> At the very least, you can buy a piece of IP directly from the IP holder
You're not really buying the IP in any meaningful way, though, you just get a non-exclusive, non-transferable (!) right to display it. They can still air it or license it to others without paying you royalties.
I understand that, I am likening it to purchasing a DVD of a game, which is something that used to happen. Maybe not in the NBA, but in soccer, some clubs do put out DVDs of famous victories.
And even then, I'd say those mass-manufactured DVDs with 90 mins of content are intrinsically more valuable than a GIF-length video clip.
Ah, I think we agree then. I guess someone could make the argument that even though the license to reproduce is limited (e.g. it must be non-commercial), you technically have more IP rights with a TopShots NFT than with a DVD. But yeah, I'd take the DVD myself (if I still owned a player).
My main complaint with Top Shot is that the moments exist only on the proprietary site. They also can't be traded anywhere but that site. This removes any value the nft aspect brings to the table as it's now single-point-of-failure.
There was talk about expanding off the one site, but I haven't seen any progress there.
TopShot is nice and I made some money on it — but it only takes fiat currency and can’t be sent to my cold storage or transferred off the marketplace. Nothing about it is in the spirit of an NFT or anything decentralized.
I'm still skeptical, but think of them as digital goods that you own, and that can follow you across applications. If you collect items in a game, you can have them in another place too.
The metaverse pitch is that you can create economies around these that aren't constrained to a single application. I can make and sell cool art, and you can buy that art and put it anywhere - and it's yours, in a way that a downloaded PNG just isn't.
I feel exactly the same way when thinking about the 90s. Telemetry and multimedia... two words that back then had exactly the same vibe to me. Both sounded as ambitious as ambiguous, raised millions and made zero business sense despite sounding glamorous and all-encompassing.
The writing was on the wall when the big newspapers gave stock tips for consumers on the hottest newest telemetry startups.
Out of the examples you gave, degrees, driving licenses, and permission to an API service are not suitable for NFTs, since they cannot/should not be traded. Presumably we do not want for people to sell their driving licenses or their degrees.
Do people remember what a blockchain even is, at this point?
A blockchain is a chain of transactions. You take away the transactions, and its not a blockchain anymore. Unless we really stretch the definition of a "transaction" or blockchain......
Cryptocurrency has lost the plot. People are talking about blockchains, that don't have mining, or transactions now apparently.
So you limit the types of transactions in your blockchain to "this thing has been issued to this person/id/hash/whatever" and do not have any transactions of the type "this thing has changed ownership to a new person/id/hash/whatever". A bank account that allows deposits but no withdrawals/transfers, its still a ledger, it just limits the operations you are allowed to do (not the operations you could theoretically do).
When a central authority is in charge of adding transactions to the blockchain, ie: DMV issuing licences, what's the advantage of blockchain over a standard database?
As long as it's done on a public blockchain, validation becomes possible without needing to contact the DMV itself to provide that validation. For example, if you have a California driver's license and I (as a Nevadan) want to verify its validity (say, because I'm running a bar and you don't look 21+), I could check whatever public blockchain to which California posts its ID NFTs, compare that to some reference on the physical ID you're showing me, and make sure the data (namely: name, DOB, etc. - or perhaps a hash of it) matches up; currently that would require either talking to the DMV directly or using some third-party service that does so on my behalf. This becomes even more useful when dealing with international identification, since that tends to involve even more red tape with current systems.
Also, it doesn't necessarily have to be a single central authority adding transactions; a whole bunch of DMVs could very well post to the same blockchain and only trust the validity of ID tokens issued by one another (i.e. with some out-of-band method to associate keys with actual DMVs, much like PGP's "web of trust" concept). This could even pave the way to things like drivers' licenses being partially or fully decentralized, with independent issuing authorities trusting one another based on some external certification process (e.g. "the California DMV has audited Foo Bar Licensing, Inc. and verified that it issues licenses in compliance with the California Vehicle Code, and therefore recognizes FBL-issued licenses as valid").
Or just skip the extra complexity and have it all handled by a central authority?
Yes, you can use a blockchain to implement it how you describe, but I still don't buy that it has any real advantages. Also, who would run the blockchain?
> a whole bunch of DMVs could very well post to the same blockchain and only trust the validity of ID tokens issued by one another
> with independent issuing authorities trusting one another
If they are the only ones who can issue tokens and they have to trust each other anyway, why does it need to be a blockchain anyway instead of some shared database? Or if you want to keep it distributed, a peer-to-peer distributed hash table or other peer-to-peer database of ID tokens that only the DMV's have write access to. No need for a blockchain.
> if you have a California driver's license and I (as a Nevadan) want to verify its validity
If all the states share a blockchain, then they could just as easily share a database and web interface that you can look up. If they don't share a blockchain, then I don't see how its any different from each having their own system. I mean, even if its a blockchain, how well it works is then up to each state and if there's a centrally mandated blockchain they should be using, then there could also be a centrally mandated database they could be using. It just moves the goal posts around, it doen't in itself solve it. The person checking (bar staff in your example) still need a website or app that they can input the data to derive the hash (as not to leak personal data) and check the hash against the blockchain, this could just as easily work against a central or state database and how well it works, in either case, is still very much dependent on each state.
It seems overly complicated to build this on or as a blockchain.
> Or just skip the extra complexity and have it all handled by a central authority?
Then every agency would have to trust some central authority. Maybe doable for interstate queries (with the associated federal bloat, but that's hardly anything new), but once you go international that becomes a lot harder.
> Also, who would run the blockchain?
Who runs Bitcoin? Ethereum? Cardano? Dogecoin?
> If they are the only ones who can issue tokens and they have to trust each other anyway, why does it need to be a blockchain anyway instead of some shared database?
The amount of trust required for "I'm reasonably sure this agency issued this driver's license" is far lower than the trust required for "I'm okay with this agency having control over my agency's records".
> Or if you want to keep it distributed, a peer-to-peer distributed hash table or other peer-to-peer database of ID tokens that only the DMV's have write access to.
A.k.a. a blockchain. You don't even need to restrict write access; DMVs can readily ignore transactions by non-DMV entities.
> If all the states share a blockchain, then they could just as easily share a database and web interface that you can look up.
That ain't anywhere near as easy, both politically and technically. This is already something they struggle do to, and distributed ledgers make that struggle entirely unnecessary.
> if there's a centrally mandated blockchain they should be using
There wouldn't need to be a mandate. States are perfectly capable of making agreements with one another, and could opt into a public blockchain at their leisure. CCW reciprocity is a good example of this; states have on their own come to recognize concealed carry permits issued by other states, and a blockchain would be a natural fit for recording and authenticating said permits under that dynamic.
Even assuming the need for a mandate, it's a hell of a lot easier for the federal government to say "hey, all states need to use this public blockchain per this standard" than for the federal government to roll out a whole central database that's scalable enough to handle queries nationwide and say "hey, all states need to use this central database".
> The person checking (bar staff in your example) still need a website or app that they can input the data to derive the hash (as not to leak personal data) and check the hash against the blockchain, this could just as easily work against a central or state database
Yes, and that would - again - require either:
1. a central authority that each state's agency trusts to be the record of truth, or:
2. 50 separate databases with 50 separate APIs.
A public blockchain absolves the need for either; agencies can maintain their licensing data autonomously (and, for that matter, data pertaining to those licenses; e.g. recording traffic citations, additional endorsements, etc., even for licenses issued by other agencies) without needing to deal with all that infrastructure.
> Then every agency would have to trust some central authority.
They already have to do that! The central authority has to issue the licenses in the first place. Unless you are suggesting some absurd, decentralized driver's license issuing? Even that is begging the question though, as there has to be some centralized process to decide who is allowed to issue driver's licenses.
> A.k.a. a blockchain. You don't even need to restrict write access; DMVs can readily ignore transactions by non-DMV entities.
Alright, you are really stretching the definition of blockchain. Like, lets say someone just mirrors the database. So there is a web interface, and someone else copied the whole thing down.
Does that now count as a "blockchain" lol? Having more that 1 copies, of a mysql database, is a blockchain now?
> The central authority has to issue the licenses in the first place.
The US federal government is not at all involved in issuing state drivers' licenses, last I checked. Nor is some international agency at all involved in issuing drivers' licenses within any given country. That's what I'm getting at with "central authority" - specifically, a central authority external to the issuer and/or validator.
> Like, lets say someone just mirrors the database. So there is a web interface, and someone else copied the whole thing down.
Is that person going to continually copy it down? What about data from other agencies? How many people are going to be using your web interface?
What I'm getting at there is that this all seems like an awful lot of work compared to just, you know, including some data in a transaction on any ol' existing blockchain (even Bitcoin or Dogecoin or what have you is good enough for this, let alone something that actually supports NFTs like Ethereum or Cardano) and using any ol' blockchain client/explorer to lookup whatever transaction got printed on the ID card.
> Is that person going to continually copy it down? What about data from other agencies? How many people are going to be using your web interface?
> What I'm getting at there is that this all seems like an awful lot of work compared
They are literally the same thing.
The definition of what a "Blockchain" is has stretched so much, that having 1 mirror of a database would now fit people's definition of what a Blockchain is.
Once we get rid of proof of work, and transactions, the only thing we are left with is "a database which has mirrors".
> Once we get rid of proof of work, and transactions
Neither of which I suggested getting rid of above (though to be clear, proof of stake and proof of burn both exist). Transactions are especially handy when you move beyond merely recording the drivers' licenses themselves and actually start recording things like, say, traffic tickets or new endorsements or what have you - and that handiness is significantly improved further when agencies are sharing a single public blockchain instead of trying to maintain umpteen different internal databases explicitly tracking each other.
Even taking your assumption that a blockchain and a database mirror are "literally the same thing", you're still missing the key difference: that the former gives you the benefits of the latter (or at least the ones relevant to this context) with significantly less effort. It's similar in comparison to, say, using IPFS v. mirroring an FTP server; yes, you can create a bunch of FTP mirrors, and reinvent a poorly-specified ad-hoc substitute for half of IPFS, but it'd be a heck of a lot easier and more robust to... just use IPFS.
Allow me to use your example if I want to explain the main advantage of Blockchain derivative technology. Most of people seem to mix up Blockchain and Bitcoin, and think that Blockchain is equivalent to Bitcoin.
Oh, I agree. See my other comment on this page, I said the exact thing you did! Most cases where blockchain is usable, alternatives are still simpler, unless you actually need it to be distributed and zero trust, blockchain probably doesn't make sense.
I was just pointing out how it can be done or how it might make sense, if you needed it for something where blockchain did actually make sense, but in the case of drivers licenses, I don't think it does.
How? Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.
Since drivers licenses are linked to individuals, and cannot be traded, the traffic cop that's checking your license will need to compare it to your government issued ID. Then they look it up to see that its valid and linked to you as a person.
How is doing this as an NFT (or other blockchain thing) any better than having a government database they look up?
This is a big problem I have with most blockchain tech: yes, it can be built on a blockchain, but it doesn't need it and alternatives tend to be simpler and cheaper.
I'm overall pro cryptocurrency and blockchain, but if we want people to still take it seriously in twenty years time, we need the use cases to actually make sense. I don't see how NFT's make sense here, unless I'm missing something.
> How is doing this as an NFT (or other blockchain thing) any better than having a government database they look up?
If it's an out-of-state (or worse: international) ID, then the traffic cop (or, speaking from experience, some clerical worker back at the station) would need to deal with some bespoke interface for some external government database - and thus be at the mercy of that external agency. Such interfaces do exist, but they're clunky and antiquated, and it's pretty difficult to get authorization to connect to it. Even for intrastate lookups, a centralized database entails a bunch of infrastructure that's rarely publicly-accessible.
With a (public) blockchain, this becomes a heck of a lot easier and more accessible, since anyone from anywhere can query it with a common and publicly-known interface. Likewise, any agency can post to it without necessarily needing prior authorization and without needing to be at the mercy of other agencies; while there's obviously still a need for agencies to communicate with one another to exchange public keys (and therefore recognize/trust each others' blockchain transactions), that's much less complicated than coordinating a bunch of ad-hoc API connections.
> With a (public) blockchain, this becomes a heck of a lot easier and more accessible
Only if you assume that every country will actually collaborate and use the same blockchain. Much more likely, in my opinion, is that each country will have its own incompatible blockchain and the end result won't be any different than what you described.
I mean, I get what you're saying and its more likely that an international standard would come into use if no individual country has control over it, but I still think its unlikely.
Which is a fair assessment. I guess what I'm getting at is that at least with a public blockchain such collaboration is actually possible (without every agency needing to trust some centralized provider - which might very well be technically and politically impossible when dealing with international agencies).
You think that a cop is going to download some custom app (that somebody would build… for some reason) so they can have a preferred interface for their id lookup and police departments are going to approve of this and state governments are going to prefer this so much that they’d choose to implement licensing records using a more complex system that they have less control over?
> You think that a cop is going to download some custom app (that somebody would build… for some reason)
It would more likely be something rolled out by the agency itself. That somebody could accordingly be the agency (preferably just a rebadged and customized version of some FOSS application) and "some reason" would be "not having to duplicate a bunch of effort just to maintain an ID database".
> using a more complex system that they have less control over
I think you're underestimating the complexity of building 50 separate databases and the connections between them, as well as overestimating the control an agency would have over 49 of those databases. And that's just for interstate lookups, never mind international.
Point being: in the grand scheme of things, a blockchain-based approach would be far simpler and offer more control.
> It would more likely be something rolled out by the agency itself.
I don't know police agencies well at all, but I suspect that if a local police force was deciding between "use the state system" and "use some frontend we built ourselves or needed to license ourselves and has no reason to have any tech support", they are going to choose "use the state system".
Why would a state issuing licenses want to use a distributed system to issue licenses? Licenses aren’t tradable so the defi attributes of nfts aren’t useful here.
There isn't much to get. It is a collectible and now, for a variety of reasons, all sorts of collectibles are gaining value. I have a pet theory that after art market got heavily regulated with AML laws, a lot of it moved to NFT, where it is very much free game for anyone with money to stake.
I think it's something you can make for free, and sell for money. I don't think anyone "gets" the whole thing; I'd be shocked if anyone selling these things was also a collector. You either get the money or you give the money.
