It's stupid at face value. No pyramid required. You cannot intrinsically link real world items to tokens. The source of truth is the real world, not the token.
Add an unlimited supply of unique things, and how could anyone expect to make money from this?
> You cannot intrinsically link real world items to tokens. The source of truth is the real world, not the token.
This is also why every project do to X but with blockchain (like solving counterfeiting/authenticity, copyright, etc) is either stupid or a con using a buzzword to try and solicit investment or media attention.
The reason blockchains work for cryptocurrencies is because the source of truth is the blockchain itself. This breaks down in the real world where the state of the real world is the source of truth and you'd need a trusted, centralized entity to bridge the two worlds, but at this point why use a blockchain instead of a database if you're going to trust a single entity anyway?
Blockchain doesn’t need to make it impossible to counterfeit real-world items to be useful, it just needs to reduce counterfeiting levels by reducing the profitability. It’s more than capable of doing that. If you can only sell at most one counterfeit item per authentic item, that’s already a multi-trillion dollar innovation.
I still can't see how a blockchain here would do something that a database wouldn't. A DB of authentic serial numbers with a way to mark them as claimed is all you need. If your new widget's serial is already marked as claimed on the manufacturer's website then you most likely have a counterfeit, no blockchain necessary.
Somebody always host the NFT image, it can be taken down from ipfs or from a cloud service like s3 at any moment. Also NFT are only worth something because someone provides a frontend to serve the "NFT metadata".
NFTs are essentially sleek frontend UIs mixed in with a speculative volatile currency less juridicial than dollars. It also helps that blockchain assets led by bitcoin are in a bull run.
The innovation is now a company like Dapper Labs can provide a marketplace like NBA Topshot providing a digital experience with licensed content. This digital experience can be traded using Paypal but using a traditional method comes with tradeoffs. Dapper Labs created an in-house blockchain called Flow. The benefits of a blockchain is it is harder for double spends to occur. Blockchain makes it hard for race conditions to occur when the source of truth is distributed among computers in a network.
It would be easier to make a database of hash values but traditional databases are less transparent than blockchains. Blockchains are too expensive. Some digital experiences are worth it, most probably aren't, enough people care about the frontend.
I mean, this gives you all the control, you can charge for all sorts of services and "value adds". There's no reason you, as the maker of this software, would want this available as a block chain.
Unless you also create a token and start having people speculate on your anti-counterfeiting blockchain?
I am not really following you. The appeal of an nft is that it doesn't rely on a saas, it doesn't rely on a trusted third party that needs up time that needs to be available in the future.
Jacob Collier tried to sell an nft that granted lifetime access to his concerts.
The appeal of such an nft is that it can be traded independently of any third party, on the open market.
Of course it depends on Jacob's promise to honor it.
He went back on it when people raised environmental issues.
Most NFTs depend on trusted third parties to determine what they even are. Collier’s proposal makes a lot more sense; a promise to grant specific rights to the holder of a specific token really does make the token valuable. But in the typical case, an NFT is really just a dangling pointer to some content (encoded in the Ethereum blockchain to varying degrees of completeness). Nothing stops me from minting copies of any NFT I’d like and selling them as the one true SpicyNFT of the underlying media - and if my platform outcompetes the others, eventually the SpicyNFT will be the only one that matters. (Equivalently, nothing stops me from minting NFTs of art that has nothing to do with me and securing first mover advantage over its actual owners.)
You can't mint a copy of Collier's NFT because if you show up at Collier's concert with SpicyNFT they'll turn you away.
The arguments about SpicyNFTs is just kind of a distraction. It would be like if I argued against banks by saying, I could hang a shingle, accept deposits, and then just run with the money.
Do we really need to enumerate all the possible ways that a new, very limited, technology can be misused? We might be here a while, I'm pretty sure there are infinitely many ways that NFTs can be abused.
opensource the database (just as dying companies should opensource repair manuals and signing keys - have fun with your blockchain-authenticated John Deere). and regularly archive the state hash in a public archive.
For even better efficiency, sell the NFTs to yourself to pump the last sold price to $10,000+, with cryptocoin proof that the "last buyer" thought the price was worth $10,000.
Is it? The NBA is selling "clips" of Basketball plays. They make clear in the terms of the sale that the buyer does not have any rights to the video after buying the NFT. The NBA can do whatever it wants with the actual video including selling it again
And you fundamentally do not understand NFTs. It is perfectly fine and acceptable and within the contract of the NTF for the owner of the physical item to sell said physical item separate from that item's NFT. They are separate assets. An NTF was never said to represent the physical object, the NTF represents itself as the unique only NFT representing the physical object, but the two are wholly separate independent things. The owner and/or transfer of ownership of the physical object has no relation to the NFT beyond the claim of it being the one and only NFT of that physical object. The entire concept is a grifter's game for fools.
It's not linking to real world items, but to digital assets.
But it doesn't really.
I learned the other day that NFT standards don't even store a hash of the digital asset.
So, ransomware will wipe out a lot of NFTs one day, because the blockchain smart contracts dont know (have any cryptographic proof) what digital asset they hold.
That was my thought on it. What easier way to launder money than with virtual items of arbitrary value? "Man pays thousands for bicycle tire" would raise many eyebrows. "Man pays thousands for NFT picture of bicycle tire" just makes people laugh and shake their heads.
It takes authorities a long time to catch up. We still have ransomware attacks despite authorities having all the tools necessary to shut off the payment channels.
There is only one patent office per country and one trademark office per country. (It may be more complicated.) And if you ignore the patent/trademark office in your country, they can call some people with tanks to go to your home and ask nicely to follow the patent/trademark rules. (It may be more complicated.)
And there are rules about how the trademarks/patents from one country applies in other countries. (IIRC you must fill some paperwork in every country, but copyright is similar and easier to extend globally.)
Anyway, everyone can create a new chain of NFT, so the same object can be NFTed in many blockchains. Specially because some NFT implementations don't even ask if you are the creator of the digital object.
Those are (a) very heavily regulated by definition and (b) means to an end, which is to create societal good, ie, foster innovation (I don’t want to argue whether that’s actually the case - I’m just taking the statu quo position)
Yes. a) is very heavily regulated by the chain/protocol used to make the tokens work and b) would be to introduce scarcity to digital items, which possibly creates good and fosters innovation (I similarly don't want to argue whether that will actually be the case) in fields which benefit from scarcity.
b isn’t the case, because a is entirely self-referential. Anyone can any any time create a new private key, so you can only trust things signed with private keys you already trust. That trust can be another private key signing it, but ultimately the foundation of the trust is in the physical world where someone can lock you up for breaking rules.
I’m equivocating if this is the is/ought problem or the Münchhausen trilemma, kinda feels like both.
In the case of artists the foundation of the trust relies on the fact that the token is only valuable if it comes from the artist. This doesn't involve locking anyone up, as tokens created by people who aren't the artists are simply ignored since they inherently have no value.
There's no reason to assume that in other domains what you said should be the case more often than what I said if we both don't know the details of said domains.
With NFTs it's just like getting rid of the "shackles" of a government-controlled fiat currency: you no longer can rely on the guns and legal system of that country to enforce any sort of exclusivity.
The extent that you can or cannot trust the guns and legal system of your country is utterly unchanged. They, for any value of “they”, can still roll up to your door, point a gun at you, and order you to do stuff with your tokens. If “they” have legal powers, sucks to be you; if “they” are criminals, you have the same opportunities as before to use the law to recover your assets.
So now we have no Banksy painting but someone has a crypto token that says “This represents a Banksy painting” in the code?
Since there’s nothing to own or even point to, what’s stopping a second party from claiming they actually have the original Banksy NFT and selling their own? Just the time stamps on the blockchain?
What a miserable destruction of real art to profit on a trading frenzy.
Yup. You understand NFTs. You are not paying for the product, because once it's minted into an NFT, it's right there in public for anyone to copy; so it can't be used to do things like protect digital art. What you're actually paying for is the ability to say "this person _definitely_ gave me this item". That's still potentially useful in some use cases, like proof-of-ownership of software or tickets, but the way it's being branded as "wow you can own a banksy on the blockchain" is absolute garbage. Somebody actually paid millions of dollars just to be able to say "the artists that burned a banksy gave me this scanned jpeg."
Private keys don't verify that an NFT was authorized by the owners of the painting. You're still relying on real-world trust and claims that the NFT you're buying was the "real" NFT.
If the owners of the Banksy came out a few days later and claimed that someone else sold a fake Banksy NFT, but they're now going to sell the real NFT, the private keys won't help.
I am not sure why I got down votes here. If you are buying a NFT for an artwork that is not confirmed to have been created by the author of that artwork then surely you are just stupid?
Only Banksy can mint an NFT for his artwork for it to be of ANY value. The same way that only Banksy can create Banksy art.
Public-private key encryption is how you verify that something was signed by the original author.
It's the same problem that always comes into play for crypto: either people have to accept the crypto as currency (which almost no institution that must buy things and pay taxes can do; the IRS doesn't accept bitcoin...) or there have to be gatekeepers to interact with the blockchain.
This can either be a crypto exchange (regulated on conversion to fiat, lest they get shut down by some SEC thing) or on those "vote on the blockchain" or "verified supply chain on the blockchain" things: eventually some non-blockchain entity has to be trusted enough to set state on the blockchain (e.g. "party A did indeed fulfill the contract to party B. please fulfill this smart contract", or "your food ingredient was prepared in accordance to your green/bio label's requirements").
Excuse my ignorance, because I haven't looked into NFTs too carefully, but how do you decide which blockchain (or even block) is authoritative for a given item? Seems like something like a painting could be sold on an unlimited number of chains? If it's time priority (oldest wins), what's preventing miners from copying artwork from slower chains before they're included in a block?
I'm sorry, but respectfully, you don't understand the modern art world: the destruction of the physical object and the creation of the NFT was, in this specific instance, the work of art itself. The art world has taken "meta" to extreme dimensions Internet Culture will not realize, perhaps ever.
True - if banana with tape is art. You are already deep into lala land. NFT is atleast sane and consistent on some level.
I mean aren't works of art exactly NFT in real life. Sometimes they also happen to look pretty to look at seems to be a archiach byproduct.
Look, if it's okay to buy limited edition numbered tins with the feces of an artist for 300k then it means anything goes. I don't understand where all these "Destroyed with Facts and Logic" people are coming from.
Its clown world out there already. Maybe, you're just too old to like the new clowns. Nothing wrong about that.
Please, stop calling any non-essential use of energy that you're looking to smear, "evil". Are movies, which consume energy in their production and consumption, also evil? Video games? No, because you personally see the entertainment they provide as redeeming?
If people want to expend their own resources on NFTs, that's entirely their right to do so, and calling it evil because the process consumed energy is absurd.
If you have a problem with CO2 emission, by all means advocate for laws requiring energy production to not emit CO2 as a by-product. But to single out some non-essential activity that you personally don't like because of the imagined motives of those behind it, while ignoring every other non-essential activity that uses energy, is disingenuous and irresponsible.
I really resent the community of grifters like yourself constantly pushing the stuff and defending its excesses.
I recently saw Twitter thread where a big pusher of NFTs was moaning on about how the real issue is we didn't create enough nuclear power plants and now we're blaming NFTs for this.
It's blatantly obvious that this is all a pyramid scheme capitalizing on people's complete ignorance and optimism with crypto. Enjoy your pyramid scheme and I hope you make out like a bandit and eventually develop a conscience for the people you're grifting.
I think he or she is saying that "climate change" is a ridiculously hyperbolic attack vector. And they're right. Of all the idiotic aspects there are to NFT's, Ethereum energy consumption may not crack the Top 100.
That has nothing to do with my point, which is that by no reasonable standard, can the people producing/buying/selling NFTs be singled out as "evil" for contributing to global warming.
You're obviously getting overly emotional, and throwing whatever you can at the people involved in cryptocurrency ("they're evil for using energy") to see what sticks.
I reiterate, it's a reckless and disingenuous way to conduct oneself, regardless of whether the underlying grievances motivating the hostility have merit.
This is basically a "what about" argument but in this case it does illustrate something valid. There are lots of things that benefit a segment of people and harm everyone. One I happen to notice regularly because I don't have one, is cars. They not only contribute massively to climate change; they also directly kill ~35,000 people annually in the US. Yet cars are beloved, sacred, unassailable to a majority of Americans. Are those people evil? No one alive can throw the word evil around without implicating oneself. The whole concept is just a religious overlay designed to try and mitigate a bunch of much older and ubiquitous human behaviors that suddenly became disruptive after we took up agriculture and settled in villages. (Which by the way, was itself "evil" in that it enabled a few to feed themselves, by taking land from "everyone" or at least all hunter-gatherers, and destroying the natural habitat that the land contained.)
Why don't you start printing these baseball cards and sell them?
Ha, but you say the baseball card is a real physical item, and a NFT is not. Well, an NFT is as real as the movie I watch on YouTube, the song I listen to on Spotify, and the numbers my bank shows.
But now you say the baseball card was part of a game, and so it's value is not from the person but from the collection game itself. Well, a lot of NFT's are also part of a collectible game.
Would love to hear the difference between a "physical" item and a "digital" item, or a "physical link to a physical item" or a "digital link to a physical (or digital) item".
> Ha, but you say the baseball card is a real physical item, and a NFT is not. Well, an NFT is as real as the movie I watch on YouTube, the song I listen to on Spotify, and the numbers my bank shows.
It’s not an issue of realness. Of course an NFT is real, it’s a long number and is just as real as 3 or PI or any other number.[1] The issue is instead ownership. When I own a baseball card I have a physical card no one can take from my house/vault/whatever without the police getting involved. When I own the copyright to a movie I can choose to let other people watch it or not.
When I own an NFT it means there’s a blockchain somewhere that says I own a particular number. As long as the blockchain is still in existence I can prove that the blockchain says I own the number and I can transfer that number to you.
That’s not exactly nothing but it’s pretty darn close. It smells like a scam. You do raise a good point that it smells like a scam in the same way that a lot of consciously created collectibles do. Once comic books, baseball cards, or stamp producing nations started pushing their products as something people should buy because they’d appreciate in value they started to feel a lot scummier (and not conincidently the items in question rarely increased in value the way organic collectibles had.)
So, sure if you can get someone to pay you a lot of money for the “ownership” of some 256 digit number in some blockchain somewhere by claiming it represents the star Vega, as long as you don’t lie I suppose it shouldn’t be a crime. But you can’t expect the rest of us to respect the way you’ve chosen to make a living. You are going to get downvotes because you are promoting a disreputable activity.
[1] Hope you appreciate the effort it took not to make a math joke here.
I will happily ignore NFTs, but look at money itself - it's a token too. It was supposed to represent and be coupled to real-world productive activity, but clearly there are many cases where the two have become decoupled. A price can be below the intrinsic worth of the item, and can be almost arbitrarily high. The source of truth is supposedly the item, the productive work that went into it, but in a heavily financialized economy, a lot of people make more money from mere price fluctuations than from productive activity.
It does seem really stupid, but I don't see how it's substantively different than (also stupid-seeming) physical collectibles like baseball cards or Bearbricks. The supply of the "special" versions of those two collectibles is also constrained in a totally artificial manner.
a) You have the physical card. It is in your possession, and the only way for you to lose it is for something physical to happen to it.
b) You can look at and enjoy the card in its physicality. You can show it to others, and the only reason that is the case is that it is physically in your possession.
Contrast that with NFTs, where all you "own" is the idea of owning a thing. If the thing your particular NFT says you own is a digital image, anyone can still see that image, and it can be deleted from the internet without your permission or any warning. You lose the exclusivity that's the main draw of owning something rare and special, and you don't have any practical control over the thing either.
I guess, but if the point is interacting with the physical card, why are "counterfeit" cards worthless? Can't you interact with them in the exact same way as the "real" baseball card the counterfeit is copying? It seems like the value is all in the idea of owning one instance of a limited run.
They're not worthless, they're worth less. I could easily hang up a counterfeit Mona Lisa on my wall and get a kick out of it. And if I stop getting a kick out of it, I can put it on Craigslist for $100 afterwards.
Of course, there's absolutely no history behind the painting as it wasn't painted by the renaissance man. No one would pay to see it because it would be about as significant as a JPEG of the Mona Lisa. However, that doesn't mean that it's worthless. Even that JPEG can make for a good phone wallpaper.
Right, but in the case we're talking about (baseball cards), the counterfeit is worth WAY less. I'd guess it's worth about as much as a JPEG of it sized to be a phone wallpaper. Maybe a dollar.
One of the problems is that by definition, digital assets can be replicated at a virtual zero-cost. There is no "original" copy to be owned, since a digital asset that is uploaded is already a copy of a copy of a copy of some bits. If it happens to be an image or movie, and you open it in your browser, you're already looking at a copy. A baseball card that was produced in the 60's cannot be reproduced atom-for-atom. And there is an original mona lisa. Sure you can have a copy or picture of the mona lisa on your wall, but that will remain just that: a copy. But in the digital world, EVERYTHING is a copy. So what exactly is it that you own with an NFT?
Ownership is based on the ability to have something tangible of a limited supply, but as I established before, digital assets can be freely copied. What are you trying to do? Artificially limiting this? Trying to push through a completely new idea of 'ownership'?
The only thing owning an NFT gives you is bragging rights of a perceived ownership. But if I say "I don't recognize this NFT proving anything", copy your asset, reproduce it and sell it somehow, you can't stop me. You claim to own some bits and claim to be able to prove that, but I can just ignore that completely, since there is zero legal grounds for this.
This is why it is absolutely moronic in my mind to have an 'ownership' idea on digital assets. It's already bad enough in online games to have in-game assets, which is in a walled-garden, under control of the company making the game, so yeah, there they can do this, it adds some perceived value. But to actively introduce this concept in an open digital world sounds absolutely crazy, counter-productive and conceptually against everything my ideal version of the internet would be: open and free as in beer.
What if in the future we have virtual reality merging more into our lives. In that world it would be different, having the real deal asset would be valuable.
the source of true is always concensous. the best example i can give you es bitcoin. nevertheless seeing NFTs as non-physical is also not true, every thing that operates in the blockchain is sustend onto de nodes thoso nodes are sustend by computers, and those computers are physical. it doesnt matter wheather fot the computers are 1s and 0s and the end of the day they are link to the reality
Particularly the "Number Go Up" section, which shows that the buyer also runs (and owns a majority of) a crypto token called "B20", which curiously enough, Beeple also has a 2% stake in.
That proves too much. There’s nothing inherent in the paper that grants any rights and privileges. It’s the legal system that does that. A digital token is either meaningless (if the legal system doesn’t recognize it) or massive overkill (if the legal system treats it the same as a wet signature).
Title companies are fading away with the advent of digital land registries (using plain old boring databases).
As usual for “like X but with a blockchain” this is a solution in search of a problem. Because despite all the protestations to the contrary the real motivation for crypto is not providing useful goods or services in exchange for reasonable compensation, it is getting rich by being an early adopter.
That's a fair explanation. A crypto token with a supply of 1. But here's the problem.
And?
This takes the idea that anything has value only due to scarcity to such an extreme, it's laughable. So much so, people thus had to try redefining the idea of ownership to justify its existence. These NFTs aren't "free" in existence. While this is true of anything is digital and on the internet, the cost of an Etherum NFT is far more expensive and more worthless in its own existance (which is an amazing feat). If you post 1 piece of artwork on imgur, artstation or even deviantart, the amount of electricity used to upload and view is going to be difficult to sustainably measure since it's so low. A single Etherum transaction to create an artwork NFT takes 60kWh (https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption). 2 days of an average household's energy usage.
It's solutionism that's trying to create a false narrative of problems that it can "solve". But even a regular solutionist would be disgusted and demand a new word to be formed so they're not lumped into the same category. I don't have a grief with those trying to simply profit off a craze. I don't hate the player, I respect the hustle. I hate the game and the zealots. The zealots who drop on their knees and pray to the almighty crypto whitepapers are sucking in victims just like a cult. And just like cults, "Put all your money into us. We're far safer from those evil outsiders. Stay and never listen to the outside world. Don't participate in their social constructs of value. Our idea of value is far better because the elves from our DMT trips told us so."
I would argue that NFTs have very little scarcity, because you can create an infinite supply of them. It's kind of like posts on reddit. Yes, they are all more or less unique, but there's a never-ending supply of them. At some point, the novelty wears off and you stop scrolling.
Also, data is infinitely replicable. By trying to claim ownership over data, you're trying to swim upstream. You're paying for a certificate that says you own a piece of data that anyone can replicate and have a look at.
That belief is incorrect, but extremely common, so it's dubious to describe it as weird. Indeed, the fact that so many people hold that belief is at the root of the whole NFT situation.
What capableweb said is correct. NFTs do not confer any ownership of, rights over, or special access to anything else, real-world out digital. When you buy an NFT of an artwork, you aren't buying the artwork, you are only buying the NFT.
As far as I know, the inventors of NFTs do not claim that they do. But it seems like a lot of people talking about and perhaps buying NFTs don't understand that.
You can't even verify you donated money to an artist. Unless the artist confirms the public key used for the token, you have no fucking clue who made the token.
In your description, what's the difference between an NFT and a gag USD million bill with Bush, Obama, Trump or Biden's face on it? This makes it even harder to understand why anyone should care. Hell, it starts to make the people who thought Beanie Babies were a long term investment seem smart.
I think the point is that people believe NFTs are something other than that, so they buy them. Imagine there was a news story every morning about somebody different buying a gag bill for millions of dollars whose only important quality was that it would be very difficult to forge another. Literally the same situation. But also literally the art market, so there's that.
Physical art at last has the property that you can look at it and enjoy it, and that only the person who possesses it can decide who gets to do that.
How much of art's value stems from that enjoyment? You're right, probably a negligible amount. For investors, the only important property of physical art is that it's extremely hard to forge.
And yet people report less enjoyment from looking at art if they think it's a reproduction or forgery, even if they're told it's so close to identical that it fooled the experts.
NFT Art, imo: They are future contracts for ideas in the metaidea market. They have monetary value because crypto believers think and some work and some gamble to make it go HUGE and make all believers a lot of money. It's an emergent marketing scheme and donation mechanism. It's actually genius. Triple-entry accounting has a huge number of desirable real-world applications, not to mention it's a living part within the larger ecosystem of crypto, which people believe holds IMMENSE value for the future.
So you say that ownership should be kept in physical contracts? There are usecases when you are the owner of something which is not in your physical possession.
I don't care about that NFT stuff, collectible can make sense or not. What bothers me is to do it with so much energy consumption. When you are attracted to lose money, then just do it environment friendly.
https://medium.com/tqtezos/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake-t...
Tezos has what it needs for that.
NFTs on Tezos: https://kalamint.io/https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/ Minting a NFT costs about 1 cent
It’s like creating a contract that sells the contract itself. Then maybe you stamp a photo of Michael Jordan on the cover and call it a Michael Jordan contract, even though the contract doesn’t give the buyer any rights to anything Michael Jordan related, except the contract itself.
Then you can go out and make more Michael Jordan contracts, because there’s nothing in the first contract stopping you from making more.
So yes, actual ownership must be done with real physical contracts still if you want to enforce things in the real world. NFTs can only enforce things within the NFT itself, which is useless for real-world ownership.
The contract would give the buyer rights to use the content. When I'm the owner of a physical Picasso then I have the right to sell t-shirts with the motive on it. If someone else would do that, I could sue him. The same idea is behind this NFT hype, you buy the right to use the content. As far as I understand it.
It's theoretically possible that the contract could be structured in such a way that "The bearer of this token has rights X, Y, Z over this real or intellectual property", but that's definitely not what is being hyped right now.
More commonly, people are just buying an authenticated digital asset which confers no rights over the source material.
For example, An artist could sell unsigned instances of their digital art as .JPG files, and they could sell authenticated copies as NFT.
In both cases, you get a copy of the art. In neither case are you getting an implicit copyright to the work that would allow you to redistribute the work.
NFTs don't transfer real-world rights. They only transfer the NFT itself.
You could potentially create a real-world contract that ties ownership of the real-world asset to whoever holds the NFT, but that would introduce real-world legal issues like voiding the NFT in the event that it was transferred fraudulently and so on.
It seems a lot of people have been misled into believing that NFTs are something they're not. NFTs are like a special URL that points to some other content. You can trade that URL, but the content being pointed to still exists separately.
Thanks for this conversation. It is truly very misleading. There is no implicit copyright. There are mentions about ownership and also contradictions. This generalization I made, was wrong.
I think the picasso analogy is flawed. Works by picasso prior to about 1926 are in the public domain, works afterwards are still under copyright. There's nothing about the sale of an original piece that inherently transfers copyright, it depends on the terms of the transfer.
You can buy original animation cells from Disney movies, but try to resell that image commercially and you're probably gonna have a bad time.
AFAICT, NFTs are orthagonal to copyright. But it gets confusing because at least some sellers of NFTs are purposely trying to mislead, by omission if nothing else.
I wrote my first Fortran program in 1969. I have been active in the field of computing since then, both as an academic and as a programmer in industry. During this time, there have been several times when I first heard about something new, something potentially game changing. I remember some of them very clearly:
1. Around 1971: a Wang desktop computer. Imagine: a computer that fit on a desk!
2. Visicalc (spreadsheet). Wow! I remember thinking finally, a breakthrough for non-programmers.
3. Relational databases.
4. UUCP - a way to talk to remote computers.
5. HTML/HTTP - we knew from the start that this was big
And then there were many that were hyped but which I rejected as hype. Even when I was wrong, I still felt that there was something intrinsically wrong about this category of things.
These things either vanished, limped along (and still do), or which I rejected out of hand, but actually succeeded. Like Virtual Reality (back in about 1984), Fuzzy Logic, Proving programs correct, and, of course Bitcoin.
The latest in this category are NFTs which my intuition tells me is rubbish on so many levels. However, I think they will have some success, although I will never have anything to do with them (or Bitcoin for that matter).
Being a store of value is a tautology, not a use case.
Name one other store of value with zero use in its class. Even art and magic cards have them. You can look at art, and people play with their non collector’s magic cards.
Bitcoin is a pure faith enterprise. It’s only value is that people believe in it, despite the lack of use case and despite the ever rising waste of energy to power the network which rises inexorably with the market price.
It is a tautological network where people enjoy seeing it run in a distributed way even though it does nothing else. How long can that last as something storing value? As mining costs increase you need an ever increasing supply of new entrants at high prices who are similarly enamoured with the idea of the network.
> Bitcoin is holding pretty strong after 12ish years, you can't deny facts.
Speculators have kept money in, but that’s in part because there is no value other than that social consensus, and all of that energy has stayed inside the speculative community. Within far less time the web was transforming unrelated industries (news, investing, shopping, dating, travel, etc.) but if Bitcoin stopped operating tomorrow almost no business outside of the blockchain world would notice because they don’t use it for anything which matters.
At the risk of going slightly off-topic: I think it's interesting you mention "proving programs correct". My hunch is that formal proofs on code are currently too laborious to be useful in most business situations, but that they will become extremely useful as we start letting the machine/"AI" code for us. I might not have spent enough time in this field (so there might be some Dunning Kruger at play) but I think code proofs might be similar enough to Chess/Go that they can be automated, and I think they will be able to add guarantees to computer-generated code so that we can trust it more.
When it comes to formal proofs of code, once you have a proof it is generally straightforward to verify (in the same way that you could for example evaluate a boolean expression). The problem is in finding the proofs - that's what requires labor and intelligence.
So the way I imagine it would work, is you tell a programming system which conditions the code it's going to generate should satisfy, and then it generates the code + proofs that it satisfies those conditions.
It might be trickier than I imagine though (e.g. for Chess/Go the reinforcement signal might be more suitable for learning than what you'd find with proofs).
What legal force does an NFT bring to what it claims to authenticate?
Even a certificate of authenticity for a painting is still notionally a legal contract between the authenticator and buyers: after all, there will be consequences if they cannot show they could reasonably support the identity they establish for something.
What does an NFT do? Nothing. There are no consequences in the real world. You can make another blockchain with more NFTs. It doesn't even establish an interesting digital history for an item: they're tied to hashes, not data.
You misunderstood the point: it’s not physical versus digital but rather that they have no added benefits. Legal rights aren’t something only physical objects can have and ownership of a pure digital creation can be quite valuable but most NFTs don’t have that and you don’t need the expense and risk of using a blockchain to transfer them. If your goal is to show that you supported an artist, simple PKI or even a Tweet works better and is orders of magnitude less expensive because all of the value comes from a statement by the creator/rights-holder.
Since this occurs on the blockchain, it’s trivially easy for someone to create two wallets and then “sell” an NFT to themself for whatever amount of money they have.
If you have $10K in ETH, you can buy a $1 NFT and then trade it among your own wallets for increasing amounts of ETH up to $10K. Now your $1 NFT is “worth” $10K and you only spent as much money as the gas costs at the time.
Use that momentum to flip the NFT to an unsuspecting buyer who sees the value skyrocketing, and you’ve made a huge return by selling nothing at all. Or simply show your friends that you have an expensive NFT as a way to flex. Or talk to a reporter who wants to write a story on how people are getting rich with NFTs. Amazing.
Contrast this with something like eBay where the buyer would lose 10-20% on each sham transaction, limiting the profits. With NFTs, the transaction costs (gas) are fixed so the more money you wash trade, the lower percentage you lose. Some NFTs are designed to kick money back to the artist with each transaction, but curiously those aren’t trading at exorbitant prices in most cases. Of course, there’s nothing stopping the artist themself from using this scheme to pump up the price of their own artwork.
Sure you can do this. But keep in mind that "wash trading" is illegal, and you still need to declare where the money comes from when you want to cash out.
Yeah, any asset that can artificially propped up. Cryptocurrencies doesn't make this harder nor easier, they simply make it possible to do without a central authority. We still have laws people need to follow in their countries, and up to government to act against people who break the law.
If anything, blockchains makes it easier for local governments to spot things like this, because the centralized exchanges need to corporate, and all the transactions are stored forever. So if you have a IT department with even a small amount of IT knowledge, it'll be easy to setup a system to spot things like this and tie the data to actual individuals via the exchanges.
> Yeah, any asset that can artificially propped up. Cryptocurrencies doesn't make this harder nor easier
Cryptocurrencies and NFTs absolutely make this easier.
If I want to inflate the price of my product on eBay, I have to go through with a lot of expensive eBay transactions to register a lot of fake sales. At 10-20% cost each time (eBay fees + taxes) that gets expensive quickly, and eBay is going to catch on if I'm buying and selling from the same shipping addresses.
With crypto, none of that applies. I can create as many crypto wallets as I want from home. I can move funds around for the price of gas. I can buy my own stuff from my own wallets and shuffle the money around through exchanges so that no one can tell.
> If anything, blockchains makes it easier for local governments to spot things like this, because the centralized exchanges need to corporate
Obviously the scammers aren't going to prefer their local exchanges for criminal activity. They're going to use a foreign exchange or just use a distributed exchange protocol.
Sure, but none of those things are taking into consideration that there is only a few entry/exit points for fiat currencies, that is needed to actually buy things in the real world.
The trick with cryptocurrency (not cryptography) is that everything is always tracked. Creating addresses (not wallets) to spread out value you had in one address? That's tracked, logged and stored forever. Using a distributed exchange protocol? All those transactions are also tracked, logged and stored forever.
The only way you can avoid being tracked is by using centralized exchanges, and then you're only protected by the owner/employees of that business.
So no, cryptocurrency doesn't change anything here. In fact it makes it easier to track, as I said before. If you think it makes it harder, please look into how the technology you're talking about now actually works.
What seems to be happening is that people (including you) are guessing that it is happening. Where is the evidence at?
Rest assure, the arm of the law is long and slow working, but eventually people breaking the law (especially in blockchain-land) will feel the effects of it, sooner or later.
As I said before, blockchains makes it easier for law enforcement, not harder, unless you're using cryptocurrencies like zcash, but they are not widely used currently.
Disclaimer: I'm myself not into NFTs because it mostly seems like hype at this point, I own zero NFTs myself and have no interest in buying. But I also care about accuracy.
At first I thought Bitcoin and crypto currencies were bunk. Totally useless compared to USD or any other national currency. Although I still believe I'm correct, I've pretty much been shown that a lot of other people disagree with that premise because I've seen Bitcoin go from about $10 to $60,000. I still think it's a total bubble but have to admin there's a lot of other people who disagree. The one thing we can agree is that people who want to own Bitcoin do own Bitcoin and those that don't want to spend $60k on a coin dont.
But with NFT.... You don't have to spend any money at all. You can just download the item. Why would you pay any money at all. If Van Gough painted two "starry night" painting and sold the 1st for $10MM but offered me the 2nd one for free, I'd take the free one. Why would anyone pay money for something that you can get for free?
I think its because we're in a time of massive inflation of assets, probably brought on my the Fed's policies. We've inflated housing with low interest rates, stocks with QE and salaries for the lucky few in certain industries have risen much faster than the rest. This has lead to a group of people with excess cash chasing return. Once all the low hanging fruit has become out of reach in terms of value (ie: TLSA), money is seeking any other place to get returns - Crypto, penny stocks, SPAC's and now NFTs.
>I still think it's a total bubble but have to admin there's a lot of other people who disagree.
It doesn't matter if they disagree; a pyramid scheme is a pyramid scheme no matter how successful. And if it somehow still ends up as the world reserve “currency”, then it'll have made a lot of profoundly incompetent, undeserving, and shady people rich. We'd be no better off, even worse off than before. Bitcoin fuels the fire it was set out to extinguish: greed induced financial crime. https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/cryptocultscience.html
Agreed. It reminds me of diamonds. They're super expensive because the DeBeers family convinced everyone it's a sign of love and marriage. They're really not that rare and can be made in a lab. Aside from industrial grinders, there's really not much use for them.
It’s not anything like diamonds - diamond prices have slowly and consistently increased over the last 100 years and doesn’t see the crazy 20-30% swings in weekly prices that NFTs and even BTC sees. It’s considered a safe investment with a solid store or value. And dismissing them as “only useful for grinders” dismisses their value in jewelry. If millions find joy in having diamonds in their jewelry then I’d say there’s plenty of use for them.
DeBeers was essentially a cartel, serving in a role kind of like a central bank. They manipulated the supply to keep prices high and reasonably stable and also manufactured the demand out of thin air. Their power has waned some; diamonds aren't worth much second hand anymore, but they're still overpriced at retail and there's still the legacy of marriage conventions requiring a diamond, now with the additional caveat that it must be natural.
The idea of DeBeers is anathema to the ideals of crypto currency, even if the reality of it is far from perfect.
Which company is that?? You're probably referring to DeBeers, but your diamond knowledge is like 30 years behind the curve if this is the case. DeBeers does not have a diamond monopoly! This is a myth recycled over and over on the internet from people making some fake moral anti-diamond stance. DeBeers has less than a 30% market share, and aren't even the #1 producer of diamonds any longer.
The real reason diamonds haven't cratered is because they're a commodity that's always in demand - as long as people want to buy them they won't crater.
> The one thing we can agree is that people who want to own Bitcoin do own Bitcoin and those that don't want to spend $60k on a coin dont.
Almost right. Yes, the ones that wanted to own Bitcoin badly enough have Bitcoins by now. The ones that want Bitcoin but not badly enough don't. The ones that don't want to have Bitcoins don't have Bitcoins. The error in your statement is within "those that don't want to spend $60k on a coin dont" because you don't need to spend $60k minimum to buy Bitcoin, that's the price of a full Bitcoin, which you don't need to buy.
> But with NFT.... You don't have to spend any money at all. You can just download the item.
That's not how NFTs work. Yeah, sure, you can download the NFT metadata, or the multimedia that the NFT links to, but that's not "ownership" as defined by blockchains, where the owner is the one the blockchain consensus has said is the owner.
A bit like saying is the same to own the hosting of a SaaS landing page if you download the HTML file. Sure, now you have a copy of it, but that's the limit of your ownership there.
Disclaimer: I'm myself not into NFTs because it mostly seems like hype at this point, I own zero NFTs myself and have no interest in buying. But I also care about accuracy.
The point is if you want to own one, or a fraction of a Bitcoin, you have to trade USD for it. If I want to own an image of a cat with the body of a Pop-Tart flying thru space, I can just download it and have it on my desktop. I don't care if the blockchain says I own it or not. I just want that cat.
For the SaaS example you give, you're paying for the back-end service the SaaS company provides. That's real value. If all the SasS system did was download a Javascript file that did all the work locally, I think you'd see a lot of people download that item and run it locally, bypassing the SasS payment.
> I don't care if the blockchain says I own it or not. I just want that cat.
Of course, neither do I. I'm trying to help you to see the perspective of others though, where "ownership on blockchain" is valuable for them. I myself don't see the value in that, but obviously there is people who do.
And yeah, you're getting real close to getting it, a bit more thinking and I think you got it :)
i feel like everyday at this point (at least from the time i've noticed which started with the GME craze) there's some get rich quick scheme happening and i keep missing out. i'm still happy in life but there's a not so small part of me that is very FOMO-ey and disappointed/jealous with the concept of doing almost nothing and making a lot of money on what essentially just boils down to hype.
the other part of me is a bit intrigued/excited because there seems to be some amount of wealth transfer happening here. whether it is from richer to rich or rich to poor or poor to poorer is the primary question for me and what will define this movement to be dangerous (i.e poor to rich) or the start of something new and great
>there's some get rich quick scheme happening and i keep missing out
I had similar feelings. An acquiantance told me he didn't mind missing out on Bitcoin: he has all he needs, and he's happy to earn his money by solving people's problems. Actually, so do I! Perhaps there isn't much to be jealous of...
> there seems to be some amount of wealth transfer happening here
Yes, from poor artists to the people operating the NFT marketplaces? I'm generally for people losing money on their dumb decisions, as it's the best way to learn, but I can't help feeling sorry for them.
He advertised his NFT experiment on a forum [1] (a French equivalent of 4chan) and it went viral there. Some people bought it as a joke (knowing it was worthless). Nothing prove he didn't buy the tokens himself to hype it.
Just in the last week, he started 2-3 weeks back I believe. I doubt the mania is going to last but this is a very low risk high reward market for artists.
This is, very literally, the old scam of selling a bill of goods. The mark has bought just a bill (list) of goods, not the goods themselves.
The author appears to be comparing it to a pyramid scheme because artists are being encouraged to buy other artists' NFTs, so earlier entrants into the scheme are being paid by more recent ones.
Someone once said that there's a sucker born every minute.
It doesn't matter who said it but if you look back at the time period when it could've been said by the person it was initially attributed to, PT Barnum, then you have an approximate period between 1835 when he began his sideshow of oddities tour and 1850 when he shifted focus to theaters and a new audience.
If during that time period it was true that there was a sucker born every minute, then today it is probably reasonable to expect that the number of suckers born every minute is firmly in the double digits and maybe higher when the difference between the number of women of child-bearing age available then versus now is considered.
Suppose I was someone with money to launder. I'd draw a cat's arse, and buy it with my anonymous BTC wallet "money". No one would ever know where the money come from, especially if I anonymise transactions with one of the many services (e.g.: from what i read, some buy mining services, pay with the dirty money and viola, "clean" coin, while other services just make thousands of transactions to distribute payments and lose one's trace).
If I wanted to be real clever, I'd buy Elon Musk's or Jack's NFT, and sell it for more because hey "it's made by someone popular" so its more credible.
That's one explanation I have for the crazy amount of money moving around NFTs. Sure there are naive people, or some genuine traders, swapping NFT but those are a small percentage, and as the quote goes:
"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?". Literally 90% of the coins and NFT's i dug into have no application and look at least dodgy if not outright scammy.
I have no proof other than my observations, just adding my thoughts to the conversation. The "it's rare" and "non fungible" arguments don't really stand in my view. There is a ton of rare stuff out in the real world that's simply useless.
I mean art has long been a money laundering favourite. NFTs are a useful optimisation.
Hell, buying "worthless" NFTs right now is probably moving some big crime bucks: pay someone a grand for a thing, the wait a week and claim "mania" coz it's now suddenly bring bought for 20 grand.
Seems plausible if you can cover all traces of where your crypto came from, and considering NFTs stay unregulated by legislation/governments.
If NFTs remain a thing after all the hype & fake demand fades then I am sure regulation for NFT purchases will come into effect to combat such practices.
Letting people in law enforcement, and the banks deputized by the AML enforcement agencies, monitor all private financial interactions, in a warrantless dragnet manner, to make a 1% dent in crime [1], is a terrible trade-off.
NFTs aren't money, by definition (they are literally called non-fungible tokens, and money, by definition, is fungible). From a financial perspective, buying/selling them is no different than buying/selling traditional art work, and thankfully there are no AML/surveillance law requirements to report these types of transactions to the government.
So sorry, there will be no warrantless mass-surveillance/KYC of NFT transactions that unmasks the parties to the transactions.
NFTs are paying for a signature in a blockchain that links to a random URL. If you're lucky, it's IPFS and it'll go down when people stop hosting it. If you're slightly less lucky, it's whatever platform you went through that's operating an IPFS tunnel because cryptobros can't figure it out, and it will go down whenever your flavor or the month NFT site goes out of business, which is any time between six months and 5 years. IF you're even less unlucky, it's just a random link to a website, and I can't wait for people's art to be replaced with penises because that's what happens to hotlinkers.
Heard about the 1970's gas crisis, that there was a move to ban auto racing, because of the "obvious waste" of racing cars circling tracka at <5miles/gallon, and stadiums full of people.
Some studies were done. It turns out that auto racing didn't even make the charts in terms of fuel usage. What had the greatest environmental/fuel impact?
Bowling. Yup, bowling. Competition leagues meeting daily in every micro-town and neighborhood, all the driving to & from the lanes... A couple dozen cars driving several hundred miles at 5mpg, once in the nation each week for the top series, even with 10K cars, doesn't make a dent.
I'd expect concert tours, with a few big concerts per week, compared to constant heat generation of ETH miners is similarly gnat-on-an-elephant scale.
He didn't make the comparison, but his figures would put his entire touring history at ~2000 token transfers worth of emissions.
Leaving aside, you know, the cost of performing -- this involves creating and transferring a lot more than 2000 'tokens' which grant people access to those performances. Thankfully venues just handle those with a database.
If each concert ticket generated the carbon footprint of a household for an entire month[0] then people may start asking questions if concerts are even worth it.
I think people are willing to accept the environmental impact of concerts. If you're not, then you'll quickly fall into the "no ethical consumption in a capitalist society" pit of despair.
People can see the value created by a concert: the socializing, the experience. And they can take steps to mitigate the impact.
How do you mitigate the environmental impact of a proof of work blockchain?
The technology isn't complicated, if you already know what a cryptocurrency is. An NFT is a "bespoke" currency that anyone can create, each instance of which has a single indivisible "coin" with an embedded URL that points to some kind of content. This coin can be traded, bought or sold for other kinds of currencies.
The baffling part is that people are willing to pay thousands or even millions of dollars for these things.
Beeple was just on a US Sunday morning political talk show "explaining" it.
One of his examples was that you can now go to an electronic dance festival, record it, and sell that as an NFT.
The fact that his NFT was sold to a business partner, this seems like a classic pump and dump. Hyping anything and everything NFT to pump blockchain tokens.
The problem with NFTs is that they're not linked to any real legal contract. You basically buy a pointer to a file, not the file. Not even usage rights.
For NFTs to become more than a Ponzi, they have to be bound to legal contracts.
It's a bot that tweets whenever someone "buys" a cryptopunk, which is apparently a pixel artwork of a face.
These have supposedly been being sold at a rate of around one per hour, for around 20 ETH each ($35k).
I could see a rich person buying one of these out of boredom. But it seems certain that insiders must be buying these to create a false sense of demand.
It's probably time for some sort of awareness campaign (which this article is doing).
This was my advice to someone: don't expect any returns. Do it as a fun experiment, not an investment
People piss away plenty going to casinos or clubs or amusement parks. So buy in with your for-fun budget, not your savings. Quit when it stops being fun
Just as we ban or should ban completely rigged televised gambling games, we should ban pyramid schemes such as bitcoin. It's not because people like the rush and addiction of gambling that we should just leave it be. People are being taken advantage of and doing nothing about it is immoral.
To advance as a human species, there needs to be an environment of equal opportunities (not equal outcomes) where everyone can lead a fruitful and satisfying life, devoid of pyramid schemes preying on the hopes of someday making it. In that sense, cryptocurrencies are not helping but exacerbating the problem.
The virtual reality social network would also need to be decentralized. Otherwise, why use NFTs when the social network host could just manage ownership through traditional means?
This is exactly same as art 99.9% of non-utilitarian art is wothless and people who buy any of it will never see their money again. But 0.1% is fasionable among wealthy. And people pour millions into it and gain and loose millions, same way they do on the stock market.
Many many many years ago an artist did a linoleum tile etching of Heisenberg ( yes from Breaking Bad) in blank & white, sold a limited number for Bitcoin, and then destroyed the original linoleum tile (supposedly)
It’s one of my favorite pieces because the niche and how I acquired it, directly from the artist.
I was on board with this article: a genuine criticism of the entire NFT/cryptoart scene without making use of the environmental impact retort... up until, of course, it was brought up. The impact is not insignificant but it's grossly overstated [0], and it's been used as a tool for harassment which I have to staunchly reject.
Where our parents would hedge with gold, Gen-x and younger who got a foothold on finance are hedging with digital.
Consider this: We have 2 generations who are digital native. They have digital relationships. They buy digital. They consume digital. The missing part has been to earn and spend digital.
No that digital natives have been handed $$$ in govt handouts which has caused an explosion of economic activity in crypto.
Now they can and will speculate in markets with digital. And do it with provable scarcity
eth2 (which is more than just proof of stake) aims to substantially reduce the fees by allowing the network to scale up (I think the current target is 100,000 transactions a second). This is partly enabled by proof of stake and partly enabled by other stuff like sharding.
Eth2.0 is actually filed under things_that_are_very_hard_to_research_develop_and_deploy_to_production_as_they_are_currently_supporting_a_200_billion_market.txt
A picture sold as NFT is akin a football ball signed by Ronaldo, it derives its value from 1) fame 2) scarcity. A ball is a cheap and easily replicated object, but with a signature on it, it becomes valuable.
NFT offers several advantages in this respect.
1) Ronaldo's identity is verified by the NFT site, and blockchain ensures authenticity for eternity. Let's remember, how many famous pieces of art turned out to be fakes. Can't happen with NFT. And no need to pay astronomical amounts to art experts for that.
2) Ronaldo must promise that he will sign only a limited amount of digital balls. Yes, the buyers should just trust Ronaldo on this, but Ronaldo has an incentive to keep his promise, because NFT contracts usually include "royalties": every time in the future, when the digital ball is resold, original issuer receives 10-20% of the price increase. So he is interested in objects retaining value.
So basically: NFTs are a scam since the early adopters are not very good artists. And there is no unique value in them since its just Pepe memes, which are stupid to be NFTed, since it's just Gifs?
Oh and let's not forget about the Ethereum fees and how shitty the tech is.
This really reminds me on how everybody perceived internet in early noughties, when everybody was telling me it's shit and it will never ammount to anything.
Man they were right, there was literally no value, just like there couldn't be value in standardized mode of exchange for digital goods - it doesn't have to be Pepe GIFs only.
ELI5: What can NFT achieve that a combination of Twitter + public key cryptography cannot achieve? As far as I can tell the only benefit is "decentralization" and just like BTC, the average user is beholden to bank-like entities for all their transactions anyway, so you get all the cons of existing monetary systems without the insurance.
Critical thinking says NFTs could work for say reselling tickets or something where you need to transfer the proof of ownership.
The NFT Art market as it is seems to be about equivalent to the real world autograph market. It is likely vastly overvalued and the current sales are just people buying and hoping they can sell for more later like a Beanie Baby
Ironic coming from a website like fstoppers. What exactly is the "value" of fine art photography ? Why do people pay exorbitant amounts for basically a few hours of photos during their wedding, given that a wedding might end up divorce ?
People pay for whatever has "intrinsic" value to them. If Digitally generated/cryptographic art is it, so be it.
People definitely aren't paying a lot for wedding photography because they think they can resell their wedding photos later for much more than they paid for the photography. And if they were, we'd think they were making a pretty strange mistake. Instead, they actually want the photography to exist that wouldn't otherwise exist if someone didn't make it.
Everything is valued economically at whatever people will pay for it. But true value is independent of the price. Van Gogh sold almost nothing in his short 10 years of producing and killed himself because he thought he had no value and didn't want to burden his brother (he had some mental issues of course). Now his art is priceless. Value changes over time, things that people truly love will go up over time, things that have no real "value" will go away. Most of the "art" NFT's I've seen have no real appeal beyond a few minutes; I would happily take the money though if people offered it, but not feel any real value was traded for it, so it would seem less than rewarding other than the money.
> Why do people pay exorbitant amounts for basically a few hours of photos during their wedding, given that a wedding might end up divorce?
That's about the worst example of people paying more for something than it is intrinsically worth that you could have come up with! People pay lots for wedding photographs because they want good photos, you're paying for an entire day of a skilled person's time - actually more because they usually edit the photos and produce some kind of photo book - and because there's high demand for wedding photographers.
People don't pay lots because of price speculation for their wedding photos!
A better example would be modern art, or maybe MTG cards.
Pretty bad example. A wedding photo has intrinsic value mostly to the people who pay for it and has about 0 value to about everyone else. (There is a small group of friends and family for whom it as some, lower value.)
Most NFTs don't have much intrinsic value to anyone specifically apart from the belief that it has value to others and thus it can be sold (i.e. converted back to money).
Add an unlimited supply of unique things, and how could anyone expect to make money from this?