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Half of my Twitter feed is profile pics of NFTs being displayed prominently.

In a pre-digital pre-social media world you’re right. But in the modern world where people spend more time socializing online than in meatspace, digital goods become easier to display than physical ones.

I think a lot of HN doesn’t get this because they don’t spend much time on social media. But for someone like Steph Curry, putting an ape in his profile pic gets a lot more exposure than a Van Gogh on his living room wall.



>Half of my Twitter feed is profile pics of NFTs being displayed prominently.

And I could in 30 seconds, find the most expensive nft, copy the image and use that as my profile picture...


The part that still baffles me is that if you did that, the NFT community would just say "oh well that's not the REAL owner!" and pretend you don't exist

Similarly if you "stole" the blockchain receipt of an actual NFT, therefore gaining "ownership" of it, the NFT community would simply pretend the person you stole it from was still the "real" owner, despite having zero "verifiable" status to it, beyond having possibly tweeted it before you did

I have to use a lot of quotes because even in a hypothetical there's so many variables that applying real world properties to just make my head hurt


You can't steal a blockchain receipt. Here's a challenge for you: go right click a CryptoPunk and save it, or use this NFTBay to torrent the JPEG yourself. Then try and sell it.


And in a day or two, you could find the most expensive old Dutch master sold at Sotheby's and have a perfect digital replication.

Nobody would stop you from hanging it out up in your living room, or even announcing to everyone on social media that it's the original and you're the owner. Nobody would need to, because everyone in the art collecting community would recognize this as super cringe.

People purchase art for social status. What you're describing is the opposite of social status.


I still don't see how a digital copy can have the same brush texture as those of Dutch masters




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