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braptoday at 1:45 PM6 repliesview on HN

At least in the tulip case, they actually had some minor value. You owned a pretty flower. You could also make the case for crypto money, I guess.

Any person with common sense and basic technical understanding could tell you NFTs were an incredibly dumb and useless idea from the very start. All you “own” is an entry on some ledger, which doesn’t inherently give you ownership over anything else.


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hoddertoday at 2:00 PM

Exact same argument for crypto though. It is all just supply demand. BTC has much more demand currently and likely more sustainably. Alt coins are just less popular. It is all just supply vs demand.

jbverschoortoday at 2:49 PM

No different than the us dollar, except for the fact that the dollar is backed by armed forces, which is paid by us dollars....

vmg12today at 2:16 PM

Using your reasoning a large number of collectible items should be worthless. What really makes an NFT different from a Pokemon card, a Birkin bag, or even an original Monet? My guess is that the seller has to have some sort of authority and established reputation for these kinds of artificially scarce luxury goods to maintain value.

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root-parenttoday at 1:59 PM

>> All you “own” is an entry on some ledger, which doesn’t inherently give you ownership over anything else.

No different from bitcoin...

jMylestoday at 2:16 PM

I'm not really convinced that people thought there was "anything else", it's just that people thought that the entry on the ledger was going to increase in value, even from some of the stupifying initial values.

I own several NFTs that are important to me, and they're worth every penny I paid. I never had any illusions that I owned anything other than a historical footnote; I think that this sort of ownership is meaningful and important.

It's much more realistic to me than "buying a song" from one of the corporate music distributors. "Owning" a song seems to be much more of a misunderstanding of how data works in a digital world than owning an entry in a ledger.

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