HACKER Q&A
📣 hubraumhugo

Are NFTs a Circlejerk of the Rich?


NFTs are, depending on if you are talking to a zealot or a skeptic, either the second coming of TechnoChrist or the biggest scam to be invented in Crypto since the scam of Crypto was invented.[0] What do you think?

[0] https://every.to/napkin-math/nft-projects-are-just-mlms-for-tech-elites


  👤 rvz Accepted Answer ✓

   yes
They know it is a scam. That's why they want to find other richer friends (and fools) to buy into the scam before either the hype dies or the market crashes.

Which ever outcome comes first, either way the ones who minted and sold their NFTs to the richer fools that bought into it have already won (they get royalties from future sales) and guess who those folks are...

  the (rich) influencers and celebrities.

👤 zucked
People have literally run out of things to spend money on. What a time to be alive.

👤 arthurcolle
At present it certainly appears that way. However consider something like the deed to a house which could be digitally signed by a keypair that you control. When you want to resell it you could demonstrate ownership of the underlying asset and transfer it without even needing to be in the same country. This has lots of utility for scammers (selling a bridge that isn't yours) but if you could reliably link physical artifacts with a database of digital entities (representing the ownership) this could have a lot of interesting applications.

Another example - Urbit address space. I own two stars, ~sicbus and ~tipbus. Each of these can spawn 2^16 - 1 planets, which can be used by individuals to build software that is usable within Urbit.

Other than the NFT model, I don't know of a good way to resell these assets to others.

It is early stages and the current applications are certainly fairly gimmicky, but the idea of using cryptography to assert ownership and hold "real copies" is probably very valuable.


👤 gjvc
yes

👤 jacknews
Is anyone buying NFTs with actual real (legitimate) cash?

I assume it's mostly just diversifying existing bitcoin/ether holdings into something slightly more tangible, and with an additional speculative element.


👤 h2odragon
Count the layers of ephermerality. how many disks and how much network does it take to serve a "blockchain?" How many social structures and infrastucture have to be in place for an NFT "asset" to be extant? link rot is a deflationary economic pressure here?

People "paid money" for "premium" domain names by moving sums back and forth between shell companies. how much of the NFT market is the same thing with slightly different details?


👤 vadfa
That's like asking if buying art is a "circlejerk of the rich".

👤 paulpauper
just another status symbol. it is worth noting that the overwhelming majority of NFTs do not sell, or sell for little.