NFT's aren't the answer to the problems of digital art

https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/writing/irl-problem-digital-art-nft

by iamacyborg • 5 years ago

224 758 5 years ago

joeberon• 5 years ago

People say NFTs open a huge new opportunity to sell art, but the only reason why the demand is higher is because of hype. Once that has died down, it will return to before: people not wanting to pay artists for commissions, no one contributing to their patreon, etc.

mushysteven4• 5 years ago

The author doesn't address the biggest issue: ensuring scarcity of digital artifacts. How does a digital artist create limited editions of their digital artwork?

temp102983853• 5 years ago

Lack of scarcity is the unique selling point of the digital. I think future generations will look back at the madness of manufacturing scarcity because society refused to adapt to abundance.

mushysteven4• 5 years ago

How does an artist get paid?

forgotmyoldname4• 5 years ago

NFTs don't create scarcity either. The image is freely available to anyone. Nobody knows you own an NFT unless you explicitly drop in and mention you own the image every single time it's posted somewhere, in which case people will mock you.

But the actual solution has been around for centuries. An artist can sign their work or tailor it directly for the purchaser. Artists have been doing commissions online forever now and you can have them write your name if you want. Anyone out there "stealing" work you bought is either saving something with your name on it, or they're modifying it to remove your name.

No artist views NFTs as a solution to an already solved problem. They're either seeing it as a scam and avoiding it, or they're seeing it as a scam that they can quickly cash in on. Countless artists are on twitter and various places online making rock-solid careers out of selling art commissions. NFTs were never a part of it. The people proposing it as a solution are the ones "investing" in NFTs.

capableweb16• 5 years ago

No artist views NFTs as a solution to an already solved problem. They're either seeing it as a scam and avoiding it, or they're seeing it as a scam that they can quickly cash in on.

Lord forbid there are artists who (somehow) see value in NFTs. Look, I myself have no interest in NFTs, and I think most uses are indeed scammy right now, but that doesn't mean the entire idea is void.

There are artists who see it as a modern way of managing usage of art. They might not be a lot, but some do see value in NFTs besides "scam I can quickly cash in on", otherwise the market wouldn't exist in the first place.

mushysteven4• 5 years ago

Quite sure this won't change your mind:

Individually owned, but free to share and use by anyone. When it’s freely shared and used it’s not detracting value from the original, it’s adding value. The Mona Lisa is an exceptionally valuable artwork that lives in the public domain, it is individually ownable yet publicly available for reuse. Mona Lisa Instagram posts, poster prints, remixes, reuses all do not detract value from the original, they add value to it.

Source: https://cryptomedia.wtf/

mattdesl18• 5 years ago

NFT is scarce by definition, hence their "non-fungibility."

Unlike traditional physical art, the economic value of an NFT is not driven by scarcity of access to the media that it represents (such as a JPG or GIF), as the token remains provably scarce despite the abundance of its associated digital media file. This is a rather interesting, albeit polarizing, new paradigm.

bni• 5 years ago

Today DRM exists that is quite hard and time consuming to crack (Denuvo). Some games exists that has not been cracked for 1+ year.

Has anybody tried to use this to provide scarcity for a digital artifact besides game developers?

A picture can always be screenshotted, so instead think more a 3D digital environment, sort of like a FPS but without the guns, instead a painting or sculpture you can walk around in.

islon2• 5 years ago

Denuvo is easily cracked for games people care about. It's not put in games to stop crackers, it's put there to allow the game to go through the first weeks (where 90% of the sales happen) without competition from pirated versions.

After this time some companies even remove the DRM because it already did it's job.

The whole game industry is based on hype in the hope people buy on day 1 or, even better, pre-oder the games. One reason most big games are released broken or in a very buggy state.

ninthcat• 5 years ago

A copy of digital art has (to an approximation) no value because it is infinitely reproducible. But an hour of an artist's time has value due to scarcity. The obvious answer — that the article doesn't mention for some reason — is that artists make money from commissions, not from selling copies of the art.

TaylorAlexander5• 5 years ago

Actually what we have found I think with the internet is that some things have value no matter how many copies you make. Computers can copy digital things at essentially no cost, and some digital things have great value. So we have a way to copy value for free. We can do a lot with that if we really try. For example, wikipedia has produced incalculable value but the users don't generally pay anything for it.

My personal economic theory is that we should try to maximize this effect. Make as much value as we can digital and try to make all digital value as free as we can make it. This should in theory create huge value in the world at very low cost. So to me, even if NFTs could prevent copying, it would be going in entirely the wrong direction. The whole desire to lock down digital goods in the first place seems like the biggest economic foot gun I can think of.

meheleventyone11• 5 years ago

On the whole I agree with you but the problem as ever is people wanting to be compensated for the work they do. They need to eat after all.

I totally understand artists jumping on NFTs as a potential meal ticket.

It's this paradox of seeing tremendous value in something but at the same time not seeing monetary value in it.

casi1812• 5 years ago

nfts dont prevent copying, the content is easily accessible by anyone with standards for doing so.

hence why us crypto people find the "but you can right click save" as pretty funny. yes, you can! its freely available to everyone.

"Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive, and that tension doesn't go away"- Stuart Brand, wrote this in whole earth catalog in the 70s. we're still learning what this means.

"wikipedia has produced incalculable value but the users don't generally pay anything for it."

and it is built on the back of free labour, and unquestionable authority. (ever tried to edit something that a wiki editor disagrees with- banned).

I think its better we find ways to pay people. if paying artists and musicians looks like nfts ,so be it. better than what we had before. The ceo of spotify is worth $5billion. The musicians get fractions of cents.

The musicians on https://zora.co/ and https://beta.catalog.works/ are getting paid decently, and are distributing the work to the whole world for free at the same time. Sounds great to me.

tonyedgecombe2• 5 years ago

A copy of digital art has (to an approximation) no value because it is infinitely reproducible.

Just like software.

easytiger• 5 years ago

I noticed Bonham's are currently auctioning NFTs for soccer football trading cards

One for Ronaldo with 2days left is 180k with an expected sale of 800k-1.2m (usd)

People have gone mad

d3nj4l• 5 years ago

Just as likely that it's a wash trade.

blue12• 5 years ago

I keep hearing this, but how is that supposed to work?

laurencei3• 5 years ago

One use case I was wondering for NFTs; would it make sense for photographers?

So if I took some "amazing" photos of stuff, whether it was art, landscape or 'stock' style photos. I could list them on a website to be sold, and sell the NFT of the photo.

Yes - anyone can "right click -> copy" the photo, but we are talking about the licensing side of the photo. This proves the person using the photo(s) in their product or website etc has the "right" to use that photo, in the same way open source projects have licences that people are expected to follow?

The person who bought the photo could on sell those rights at a later stage if they no longer wanted to use my photo (since anyone can sell the NFT).

Basically shutterstock.com or something, but with NFTs? Its about the only genuine use case I can think of...

schrijver2• 5 years ago

How does this improve upon copyright in practical terms? Because finding out who the rights holder is becomes more straightforward? I’m not aware how minting an NFT works exactly, but wouldn’t the person to whom the NFT points still have to prove they’re the rights holder and have engaged in some legal contract for that claim to be valid?

amalcon• 5 years ago

I think this is kind of the idea, but it has basically the same problems as other areas. You're relying on meatspace legal and copyright systems to associate "ownership" / "right to use" with the NFT, but you could just use that same system to associate those rights with the purchaser directly.

capableweb16• 5 years ago

The only tangible different is that once you've establish the meatspace laws, the ownership can be transferred on chain and still hold a valid claim, instead of having to result in meatspace in order to transfer it.

blue12• 5 years ago

One problem that I have noticed in the NFT space is that the platforms only deal with transaction between wallets, not persons. The association between wallets and persons is tenuous (by design). You don't know if you are buying from the real right holder (e.g. the author), and on the other side it is difficult to prove that the owner of a particular wallet is you.

KaiserPro5• 5 years ago

But we already have a mechanism for licensing, its copyright.

NFTs provide no new tools or even solutions for tracing, enforcing or indeed arbitrating licensing of a thing. Its just a hash. Photo stock sites already have perceptual hash tracing.

However for them its useless as they only ever sell licenses to use the artwork, not "ownership". They still retain the original copyright, which allows them to sell licenses to use the image/sound/thing

davidcbc4• 5 years ago

Its just a hash

NFTs aren’t even a hash, they are a URL.

jeffwass3• 5 years ago

Here’s a general issue I don’t yet understand yet for NFT’s.

Suppose you take an amazing photo (or create digital artwork), and pack it up as an NFT on platform A using token/blockchain technology Alpha. Alice buys this token, and has some sort of limited ownership of your picture.

I (a nefarious user) take the same digital photo you displayed on your website, and sell it to Bob on platform B with blockchain Beta.

I also take your digital photo, make some minor alterations and put it up again on Platform A with Blockchain alpha and sell it to Charlie.

Alice, Bob, and Charlie all think they own the picture, and while they do own their own versions, how do we know Alice is the “right” owner of your photo?

Especially in the future when you’re not around to confirm the version Alice has is the right one?

laurencei3• 5 years ago

Yeah - I wondered about this exact issue too.

Same as all the NFT "artwork" I see around. Why cant I just literally copy and paste the artwork, maybe change one single pixel, and re-mint it?

udbhavs• 5 years ago

You publish your public keys along with the original photo which correspond to the "true" accounts on any chain.

magicalhippo2• 5 years ago

Sign the pixels?

No crypto expert but I was thinking something like this:

Artist decides to make a run of 100 copies of the work, and generates 100 work signing keys and generates a list of "1/100, work public key 1" etc. Artist then signs this list with their artist signing key, gets a signed timestamp, and publishes this somewhere on their site, along with the public portion of their artist signing key.

Artist then signs the (uncompressed) pixels of each copy of the work using the corresponding work signing key. Signature is embedded in the image file along with the work copy details, "1/100", say as a PNG chunk or similar.

NFT is created for the work copy, and I'm presuming there's something akin to a signature of the image file in the NFT to link them.

If you then get a NFT you can verify that the image file is indeed what the NFT refers to. You can download the work public key from the artist and verify that the public work key is from the artist, and then verify that the work (pixels) is what the artist signed.

Then again I don't know the domain enough so might be completely silly and or flawed idea. And obviously it requires a non-lossy image format ala PNG.

bhaak4• 5 years ago

I also take your digital photo, make some minor alterations and put it up again on Platform A with Blockchain alpha and sell it to Charlie.

That's the same as making unlicensed prints from a manipulated copy. That's a copyright violation. The physical world doesn't protect you from that either. You need to sue either way.

nxpnsv4• 5 years ago

This happens all the time. What is worse is someone minting someone else's art, and then the buyers starts posting takedown requests to the original artist. Amongst others, this happened to Simon Stålenhag of Tales from the Loop fame...

kibwen7• 5 years ago

No, you understand it well. NFTs are completely divorced from anything that does not exist on the blockchain. All recourse for establishing ownership in the eyes of the law requires consulting external, centralized sources of authority, making the involvement of a blockchain utterly pointless.

kooshball2• 5 years ago

The simple answer is provenance and blockchain provided this much more than the physical world.

The old world analogy to your scenario is you go to a museum and take a picture of an Ansel Adams work, make a print and try to sell it to Bob. Why would bob pay for this. you have to convince him it's a real Ansel Adams.

Same thing with NFT. You would have to know artist on alpha is real and beta is not. It's non trivial but again I don't think it's actually that different from the real world today. NFT does not attempt to solve this part. Instead it let you check that the nft you're buying is from alpha and the original artist.

EarthLaunch• 5 years ago

Simple: Have the government recognize NFT ownership and enforce it. Perhaps that's the future of blockchains: Automated records for the masses enforced by central government, with courts to provide exceptions.

fnord77• 5 years ago

how does this help with enforcement of the license terms? There's no technological enforcement, so lawyers would need to be brought in... if legally the nft had the same standing as a regular license contract.

So I claim this is worse than a regular license because you have to jump through crypto hoops that most people don't understand.

ramijames• 5 years ago

Adobe just integrated this exact functionality into their suite. NFTs to prove provenance, and embedded in the child product. It's pretty neat.

soco3• 5 years ago

That proves that the published picture was run through Adobe suite and nothing else.

dahart• 5 years ago

Photographers (and digital artists) commonly already use something called a “Certificate of Authenticity” or COA, a physical document signed by the artist verifying that the item is one of a batch, and that the batch has a fixed, limited size.

NFTs aren’t providing anything beyond what a COA provides, and the COA comes with a physical handwritten signature. Neither is any actual protection against determined forgers. As an occasional artist and photographer, I wonder if the solution to authenticating and valuing digital art is to sell the copyrights along with only a single digital and/or physical copy of the art, and then delete it. Make it unique to the buyer the same way a sculpture or painting is unique.

miracle2k4• 5 years ago

Yes. Except NFTs, for one reason or another, have introduced a whole new set of people to the idea of paying for an COA; they are suddenly really easy to buy, easy to sell, and the ledger creates a community of owners who recognize each other's COA as meaningful.

That's incredibly powerful; because a physical COA in my cupboard that none of my friends gives a shit about is less interesting.

Kiro2• 5 years ago

CryptoKitties are cool. Art NFTs not so much. With art NFTs all you get is bragging rights that you bought X from Y. A CryptoKitty on the other hand actually has utility; not only in the game itself but also in other apps that are using them, e.g. HyperDragons eating CryptoKitties to grow stronger.

I think that's the only (if any) viable future for NFTs. A unique set of items or objects on the blockchain that follow a standard, making them interoperable between different apps. Since the blockchain is an open API by nature no-one can prevent you from building your own game utilizing the same NFTs. So when you buy a sword you can use it in all games that support it or, as in the case of HyperDragons, sacrifice it to get something else.

laurencei3• 5 years ago

I read this article just yesterday about why NFT + games does not really make sense: https://docseuss.medium.com/look-what-you-made-me-do-a-lot-o...

Kiro2• 5 years ago

I still think that the composability is intriguing. You don't need my permission to build an application that talks to my application, as with the example of HyperDragons eating CryptoKitties.

mattdesl18• 5 years ago

The irony of the article is that two of the highlighted artists (Anders Hoff, Lia) are now selling their work through NFTs. The market for generative art prints is extremely niche.

Importantly, what the technology gives digital artists (myself included) is a strategy to distribute, document provenance/ownership, and monetize primarily digital media in a primarily digital manner, rather than expecting them to rely on non-digital print media & spatial activations. It becomes yet another avenue for artists to earn revenue on their work.

It should also be noted that this article is several months old, which is basically a decade in crypto/NFT land.

LegitShady3• 5 years ago

The art has no value in digital space. I can even copy paste from wherever it's displayed, or take a screenshot, etc etc

The value is in a piece of blockchain which makes it speculation scam. That someone made money from a speculation scam doesn't make it less of a scam.

jakupovic2• 5 years ago

Imagine a world where all or most of our interactions are in the digital realm. When you wake up in this place you are naked, cannot show anyone anything about yourself, but you are very rich. Now how do you show others that you are rich? Simple, you buy Gucci nft clothes that other naked peasants can see. That's what's happening.

dorkwood2• 5 years ago

If that's what's happening, why are most of the Twitter-famous whale collectors completely anonymous?

Granted, it's probably happening to some degree amongst the rubes. But I'm more convinced by the argument that the main driver behind NFT sales is a kind of pyramid scam: artists at the top get paid by anonymous "collectors" (read: crypto investors), which causes swarms of smaller artists enter and the price of eth to go up.

podgaj4• 5 years ago

If that's what's happening, why are most of the Twitter-famous whale collectors completely anonymous?

Because it is an easy way to launder/hide money?

LegitShady3• 5 years ago

To pump the speculation scam.

5560675260• 5 years ago

They are not anonymous, they are pseudonymous, that's a very different thing. This allows them to participate in communities and engage in posturing with an added benefit of being able to dump their online persona if something goes really wrong.

Nowado• 5 years ago

Twitter-famous (...) anonymous

Now, I'm not agreeing with parent comment in sentiment that this is all, or most, of what's happening (although introducing scarcity for the sake of it has to be related to creating perceivable value through inaccessibility), but if someone is twitter-famous, they are not anonymous. They are twitter-famous. There's nothing stopping one from identifying strongly with their handles or wallets.

josefx3• 5 years ago

The other peasants would be running around in their own Gucci clothes since there is nothing to stop them from just copying them, and really, who even knows enough to check if your nft is for a Gucci as far as anyone cares it might as well be for a used roll of toilet paper.

antupis2• 5 years ago

How this differ from real life? Other hand you know that you have fake Gucci and getting caught especially if you some celebrity is at least embarrassment. NFT are like no brainer way to monetize games and some fortunate people are going to make billions when they nail platform which helps games to monetize NFT.

rasz• 5 years ago

CTRL-C CTRL-V I wear same clothes as you. Now what?

jakupovic2• 5 years ago

But yours are not real Gucci, as we can check.

islon2• 5 years ago

Nah... it's much worse: you're buying a banner that hangs over your head saying "I own gucci clothes", but you're still naked.

trissylegs• 5 years ago

The Emperors NFT Clothes

KaiserPro5• 5 years ago

The problem is that NFTs doesn't solve a problem that existed.

NFTs supposedly allow you to prove who owns something. However they don't actually form a contract for the thing that you think you are buying. You are buying the NFT, not the artwork them selves.

This is the main problem, so if you get scammed, or you try and assert what you think your rights are, you have no support.

To translate it to business, its like buying the sole share in some company, but its not actually the sole share, its a letter that says you've bought a receipt for a sole share from person x.

There is no assertion that you own the actual thing the bit of paper says its a receipt for, or indeed that the person selling it to you owned it in the first place.

latentpot• 5 years ago

Succinct and specific. Thank you.

mattdesl18• 5 years ago

Similar lack of rights when you buy a signed print. At no point in that transaction is a copyright transferred to you.

krsdcbl• 5 years ago

This is a very accurate perspective i think: NFTs are "digital prints" of an artwork, not originals

KaiserPro5• 5 years ago

Exactly, you have bought the image and the license to display that image as it was delivered to you.

You cannot then sell copies of it to someone else. (well you can but not legally.....)

threeseed7• 5 years ago

I have dozens of signed prints and it is true that all you get is an accompanied verification document and not any form of legal ownership over the original.

But what you do get is a guarantee from (a) the author and (b) the fact that prints are reasonably difficult to duplicate that there will only be a limited number in circulation. And this enforced scarcity is what makes it valuable even though it's just a print of the original.

If NFTs could limit duplication of digital art that would be something but right it seems like they are more akin to a payment system like PayPal only psuedo-public.

Ensorceled11• 5 years ago

Some important differences:

The print is beautiful and hanging on my wall.

The print won't evaporate when the url suddenly points to a server that was shutdown from lack of payment.

I know I bought a print, nobody was trying to trick me into thinking it was the original.

And, most importantly of all, the artist got paid.

Cthulhu_• 5 years ago

An NFT is a certificate of authenticity, but it applies to something easily copied. If you think the certificate of authenticity is worth something, great; if you think it gives you ANY kind of legal rights or protection, or any kind of DRM or digital anti-copying protection, you're in for a surprise.

TL;DR: NFT's are a money laundering and tax evasion scheme. There is no value for average consumers, unless the NFT appreciates in value over time and there remains a buyer's market for them. But that's highly volatile and uncertain.

sabellito5• 5 years ago

I get the possible tax evasion schemes, but how would one launder money with NFTs?

Tenoke2• 5 years ago

Everyone likes to talk about how NFTs are just 'a money laundering and tax evasion scheme' as it makes a good story but as far as I see most big investors don't treat it that way and nobody has shown if that's the case for more than a minority of sales.

jrochkind15• 5 years ago

An NFT is a certificate of authenticity,

It's like a certificate of authenticity that was just written on a napkin by some guy you found on the corner.

How much authenticity does such a certificate convey?

But then you make sure that napkin is really hard to copy! there's only going to be one napkin you got the guy on the corner to write on yesterday attesting to authenticity of something else. (There might be other napkins other guys on other corners wrote on, but only one copy of this one!)

Does it convey more authenticity by virtue of being really hard to copy?

Why does an NFT convey any "authenticity"?

From the OP:

Alongside platforms that make no effort to prove ownership of artworks for sale, artists are waking up to find that their digital artworks are being sold by fraudsters to unwitting victims.

What authenticity do these NFT's "prove"? Authenticity in what?

Zababa2• 5 years ago

The problem is that NFTs doesn't solve a problem that existed.

In a way they do, they solve the problem that crypto was only about fungible stuff (money) before, now there's also non-fungible stuff. I think the point of NFTs is not exactly to prove that you own something, but to offer people an easy and non-fungible token to exchange with other people. The goal is not ownership but exchange (some would say speculation). At least that's how I understand it.

auggierose• 5 years ago

How do you exchange something that neither of you own? Beyond bragging rights, you will need some way to establish legal ownership of something because you own the corresponding NFT. So why not sell that ownership directly without the level of indirection that is the NFT? I guess the reason is that you have decoupled ownership and the ability to sell that ownership, making it easier to speculate independently of legal domains like countries.

Really, it's just adding a level of indirection, as always :-)

acjohnson553• 5 years ago

Yes, this is correct. For now, people are willing to participate in the collective delusion that these tokens are what they claim to represent: real ownership of an off-chain asset. I don't think that's going to last.

It's possible to imbue an NFT, itself, with real value. Like if it was a legally recognized title. Or if ownership of an NFT could be used to produce an authorization token for access to some physical or digital experience.

bsedlm3• 5 years ago

because NFTs are built in (and for) digital artifacts. In the digital world the actual "artifact" (the object of art) is digital. NFTs 'solve' this problem by not caring about the fact that the artwork can (and will) be freely copied with no cost.

Maybe it is better to think about NFTs as public official (blockchain-backed) certificates of donation (or support) rather than assets.

brutusborn3• 5 years ago

If the NFTs don't care that the artwork can be copied, what is their use case? If I own the NFT for a digital file that other people have copies of, what do I actually use the NFT for?

The only thing I can think is proof of authorship, but private key cryptograph already solves that.

Edit: after reading some other replies I've come to the conclusion that NFTs provide a way to prove who put a file on the blockchain first. Thus the use case is trustless transfer of the ownership of this fact of "being first", which is where the scarcity of the NFT comes from and thus the value.

Jensson5• 5 years ago

There is nothing official about NFTs, and since they can be traded they aren't a donation log either. When I watch a youtube video they often display donors, that is official. If the artist himself posts about donors, then that is official. If the artist posts "these NFTs are official", then why couldn't the artist just post "these people donated" instead? It is the same thing, it is the same level of authority, the NFT itself doesn't make anything more valid or official or less likely to get corrupted or forgotten.

xondono2• 5 years ago

Except they really don’t. The tokens are blockchain-backed, the digital artifact itself isn’t.

To be what you define, I should not be able to copy-paste the digital artifact and then create a second token. The token should, in some way, behave like a hash, where the blockchain should complain that this digital asset has been accounted for already.

friendzis7• 5 years ago

NFTs do not solve a problem, period.

This has been said time and time again about each and every "blockchain/defi" project for the past 10+ years: all the guarantees of blockchain protocols are within the blockchain. The very moment you try to put literally anything relating to outside of blockchain all you have is extremely inefficient append-only database - nothing more, nothing less.

NFTs are datums with an URL. That is all there is to an NFT. It's not a receipt for art, it has absolutely nothing to do with an art in question. To translate it to business it is a receipt for an entry to the Louvre with a URL pointing to an image of Mona Lisa. It does not prove your ownership of Mona Lisa. Anyone can access said URL without the receipt. There can be unlimited number of different unique receipts with same/similar URLs to same/similar image on Mona Lisa.

It is merely an overly complicated way of transferring cryptotokens.

PretzelPirate• 5 years ago

The problem is that people don’t understand what NFTs are and talk about them with the idea that they are about representing digital art.

NFTs are about representing non-fungible digital assets.

For some reason, NFT art took off (which I don’t understand), but that wasn’t what NFTs were built for. NFTs can represent digital assets that exist fully on a blockchain and aren’t tied to off-chain assets. A digital ID, a in-game asset, a digital license, a ENS name, etc… are all NFTs and don’t need to reference any odd-chain URLs or images.

ncallaway2• 5 years ago

I haven't been following NFTs closely, but it seems to me that it would be much more interesting to use them not to create artificial scarcity out of digital goods (which seems to be all of the effort), but rather to track ownership of physical goods.

Like, a company could issue a bearer-bond where the owner wasn't the person who physically possessed the bond, but rather the owner of token XYZ.

So, reverse the pointer. Rather than the token claiming to "own" a good, have the good claimed to be "owned" by a specific token.

The thing that largely seems nonsensical to me about NFTs is that the underlying ownership is...not valuable. You don't "own" anything other than the token itself. If you were granted the rights of ownership of the digital good (for example, if a worldwide exclusive copyright license were assigned to the bearer of an NFT, then it would "own" something).

dnautics4• 5 years ago

NFTs supposedly allow you to prove who owns something

This is fundamentally wrong.

NFTs allow you to show off who "owns"[0] something.

[0] for some generalized, possibly meaningless definition of "own". I say possibly meaningless, then again, what is property really, just a government-managed, non-fungible, token? Don't gaze too hard at the abyss, unless you are willing to let the abyss to gaze back.

dnautics4• 5 years ago

oh wait, I forgot my proudhon. Property is theft!

lobocinza• 5 years ago

NFTs are synthetic scarcity.

cslarson12• 5 years ago

Property is social consensus. Blockchains offer a more convenient and useful way to record that social consensus.

tsss• 5 years ago

You are buying the NFT, not the artwork them selves.

You can not buy ownership of a digital artwork because the whole concept of owning a digital work is nonsensical. Ownership in the world of physical goods is not a law of nature but a legal concept. Ownership is essentially the right to control some resource. A collective of people agree that you have the right to control (by force) some physical thing, which is useful because otherwise everyone would be fighting violently for the possession of that thing. In the typical case the sovereign enforces the property rights. In the digital world this makes no sense because you can't possess information and you can't enforce property rights. Anyone can make a copy and everyone can have that information without anybody else losing anything. NFT is only a record that tells you who supposedly owns something but ownership means nothing without possession. NFT is like buying a land deed from a dysfunctional state: Yeah, everyone who beliefs in that state may agree that you are the owner but what use is it to you if a bunch of guys with guns are squatting on "your" land and you can do nothing about it? That is ownership without possession.

crypot• 5 years ago

NFTs, like bitcoin and other blockchains, are another step on the road to digital property rights. They don't work yet and no one has figured out how they will work.

One thing to remember is that the first stage of a technological advancement is the bubble stage that leads to an influx of capital to build out the infrastructure.

Eventually we will be able to use this infrastructure to build out businesses with more economic value.

rip_netrunner2• 5 years ago

Bitcoin IS a fungible token! NFT literally is "non-fungible token". Do you even know what you are talking about? Please go take a casual 5 minutes to google a topic you are unfamiliar with before spouting off about it.

snarf213• 5 years ago

They can't ever work. You can't prove digital rights to a non digital asset. It doesn't matter what the blockchain says owns a property when the county courthouse says you do. They tried the same thing for "produce on the blockchain". "You can prove that this crate of apples was grown organic in Kenya". But all you can really prove is that someone put that claim on the blockchain and attached the hash to some paperwork. You are still trusting something and someone not on the blockchain. And how do you make sure this crate isn't swapped for another crate of apples that this isn't true for. You are trusting that no one did that during its transit.

Blockchain can't work for anything that isn't a self-referencing currency. It only ever exists on chain so the chain can be trusted.

dgellow2• 5 years ago

And anyone can create their own NFT for the same artwork. Now we just need a (centralized) registry of "official NFTs" to know which one you're supposed to consider, from a trusted authority :)

crucialfelix2• 5 years ago

NFT art is basically meme culture. Everyone can see the art, but one person "owns" it. This makes ownership a spectacle.

The value inflation is a spectacle too.

So I would say this isn't about art at all, it's about monetising spectacles as a cultural artifact.

m00dy• 5 years ago

I second your comment.

LegitShady3• 5 years ago

There's a huge aspect of speculation scam involved as well.

drawkbox• 5 years ago

NFTs are also a pre metaverse type setup to get people used to digital goods, that you will need to see through an spectacles. Spectacles that require spectacles.

Much like an online game when you buy cosmetic digital goods to improve the look or performance of your game/player, to show off really.

In the meta/game world there will be unique digital goods that could be built to use an ownership/db system that isn't proprietary to the game/app/world. This is almost a psychological operation or training mission for that type of setup from games to the "real" meta world.

Besides that, NFTs at the root were created as a product to buy with crypto that still essentially stores value. Like art today, they are a way to pass value, in some cases that will be to evade oversight, in other cases that will be to share, on other cases to own, in others to speculate. People buying actual goods with crypto would make it go down, so NFTs are a hedge to offset that essentially to keep speculation high.

Essentially cryptocurrency creators/developers wanted a way to increase circulation, but not decrease the value, so they chose art/interactives as that product. It was a product created for crypto and potentially the future. Whether NFTs are that solution or not, digital goods do need some way outside systems to share across other worlds/views/apps/games.

We have this already pretty much there with just the internet, but some want a large market within these systems with unique products being a way to create scarcity and potentially demand by limiting supply, but an external digital rights system.

In the end though the root cause of NFTs being created was increasing cryptocurrency circulation with a way to essentially "lock up" some value like a vault or staking would do.

crucialfelix2• 5 years ago

Memepreneur culture

cardamomo• 5 years ago

Should be labeled (March 2021), as it feels like the news about Beeple's record-breaking NFT auction was several years ago.

podgaj4• 5 years ago

NFTs, what a scam. I had no idea what the process was. I was a photographer in my younger days, published. Thought I could make a buck or two turning them into an NFT.

NFTs are the people selling shovels during the gold rush, a for someone to make money off of you during the process of making and auctioning the NFT.

If I cannot do the process without paying anyone, it's just a scam. Just like Bitcoin.

casi1812• 5 years ago

you can create nfts and have them minted upon sale, that way you dont have to pay anyone as its gasless. all you need is a signature, that doesnt cost anything.

its actually a really neat way to onboard users to chain without needing to go through a cex and spend money.

podgaj4• 5 years ago

People are still making money from the process whether I do it before or after the sale.

throw_m239339• 5 years ago

you can create nfts and have them minted upon sale, that way you dont have to pay anyone as its gasless. all you need is a signature, that doesnt cost anything.

by whom? What NFT platform/gallery allows the free creation of a NFT? As far as I know, artists need to pay to create NFT (buy ETH or whatever).

locallost• 5 years ago

so it's very much an old thing (possession of unique things) that people are trying to fit into the new world that no longer works the same way. There I say it will not work. Somebody needs to figure out new ways of making art that fit the new age instead.

NoblePublius• 5 years ago

Saying an NFT grants ownership of something is like saying the address on my drivers license grants ownership of my house.

CraneWorm• 5 years ago

WARNING, triggering content: lots of filthy swearing.

still, a nice summary of what NFTs are good for :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxaHugHihh0

casi1812• 5 years ago

if anyone wants some positive, optimistic takes from actual artists and musicians working in the space i'd recommend https://interdependence.fm

its not as attention grabbing as a sweary youtube video, but it isnt trying to enrage you for clicks, and has actual conversation on the issues artists face and how we might build alternatives.

people arent all evil, its not the end of the world. the sky isnt falling. the kids are alright.

nbzso• 5 years ago

As an artist I don't like NFT concept at all.

This is just another gaming "UX" (cards, skins, features) for kids created from scammers.

The digital realm has a function - to be connected to reality, to enhance and give communication channels.

Yes, someone within "NFT Realm" will "get lucky" and capitalize, but this applies to almost anything.

I invest in a different art future, the old one. Where genuine skills and materials create uniqueness for ultimate value - for the real world.

Tenoke2• 5 years ago

This is just another gaming "UX" (cards, skins, features) for kids created from scammers.

As far as I can tell every one I see talking about or collecting NFTs are adults. I doubt you are looking at them honestly if you think they were designed to take money from kids. NFT art could be bad or good regardless but you seem motivated by your ties to the 'old way' based on your comment.

Jensson5• 5 years ago

They are designed to take money from adults who thinks that they can resell them for significant mark-up to kids.

nerdponx2• 5 years ago

Because none of this is inherent to NFTs. It's just a way to encode on a blockchain that I own something you made.

All this other stuff is just weirdness borne of weird people being weird during a weird time.

davidcbc4• 5 years ago

It’s important to note that the “thing” you “own” is the receipt, not the art.

The NFT is not the art and doesn’t contain the art, it’s (in the vast majority of cases) just a link to the art. You have no ownership or claim to the art itself.

rvz• 5 years ago

The only type of NFT that has both utility and value is a domain name.

Other than that, all other NFTs have no utility and are absolutely useless.

folli• 5 years ago

The main problem of NFTs has been discussed in a recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29158348

The point is that digital art is hosted on a domain (relying on centralized authority) and the NFT barely links to it. There are ways to circumvent that (i.e. by uploading the actual artwork to the blockchain), but it's prohibitively expensive to do so.

mattdesl18• 5 years ago

This is indeed a problem with OpenSea (generally regarded as a crappy platform) using centralized hosting, but nowadays most new marketplaces and contracts will use IPFS to decentralize the hosting, ensuring it is not linked to a single point of failure.

casi1812• 5 years ago

i think you are underestimating reputation, legitimacy, and community.

sometimes this metadata matters, other times it doesnt at all. its just a handshake between two people.

relationships matter. if you mess up your metadata, rugpull your audience, remint the same works, break the trust with your audience, thnen your not gonna have a good time. but if you understand your community, be transparent and giving, and participate, you will have much stronger connections with others.

nft critics ironically cant see past the money.

AlexandrB4• 5 years ago

What happens if you rug pull after 5 years while being a model NFTer until then? If your customers are buying "real" art or products from you they don't just go poof at that point (with some exceptions, like IoT or some software). Many NFTs do because they hyperlink content hosted on real servers with real costs to run.

And no online community lasts forever either. How does an NFT community wind down? Does the value of those NFTs drop? Slowly or quickly?

It's easy to claim it's about the community when things are going well, but one day some part of the community will be left holding the bag of worthless assets. Is the rest of the community going to bail them out?

balsam• 5 years ago

NFTs are letters patent issued by NSA (Non-State Actor), which perhaps makes them just letters.

nxpnsv4• 5 years ago

I guess it is the answer for how to get paid for at least some aspiring artists...

smugglerFlynn3• 5 years ago

Two swindlers arrive at the capital city of an emperor who spends lavishly on clothing at the expense of state matters. Posing as art dealers, they offer to provide him magnificent clothes that would be backed by a digital token which proves value to those smart folks who understand digital. The emperor hires them, and they go to work in a special minting room. A succession of officials, and then the emperor himself, visit them to check their progress. Each sees that the room is empty but pretends otherwise to avoid being thought a fool.

Finally, art dealers report that the emperor's suit and its token are ready for release. They mime dressing him and he sets off in a procession before the whole city. The townsfolk uncomfortably go along with the pretense, not wanting to appear inept or stupid, until a child blurts out that the emperor is wearing nothing at all. The people then realize that child is very stupid, not understanding simple principles of digital DeFi-fueled web3.0 economy. Still smirking at the child, the emperor continues the procession, walking more proudly than ever.

ggoo• 5 years ago

I don’t have anything to add - I just really like this comment. Would buy an NFT of it.

gitfan865• 5 years ago

The trick here with Web3/DeFi is that there is so much indirection and abstraction.

What do these people do? They are involved in DeFi projects.

What do those projects do? They provide an infrastructure for DeFi.

But what does that infrastructure do? It allows the DeFi transactions.

But what are those transactions? Well it could be anything due to the open nature of smart contracts.

But what does it actually do today? It moves digital tokens around.

When is it going to provide real value? Many people have made a lot of money in Crypto already

And how did they make their money? By owning tokens that went up in value

And how is that not a pyramid scheme? Well the US Dollar is a scam. No one should be long US Dollar.

TLDR; Because the US Dollar is at risk of inflation, you should buy and hold onto a variety of digital trading cards. Somehow the Metaverse will include digital scarcity and those trading cards will make your meta rich.

smugglerFlynn3• 5 years ago

I really like the Metaverse cherry on top of this cake. Originally a strategy trick made to steer attention away from fundamental ethical problems of Facebook brand, it just adds so nicely to that whole situation.

“Why? Because we will need it in Metaverse (the illusory future I have just invented).”

casi1812• 5 years ago

here are a few web3 projects i find interesting and believe have real value beyond money:

https://creators.mirror.xyz/

https://holly.mirror.xyz/

https://snapshot.org/

https://radicle.xyz/

https://proofofhumanity.id/

https://www.klimadao.finance/

https://www.partybid.app/

and with DeFi I have taken out loans and bought "real world" things, all with trustless/permissionless contracts. I value that and so do many others. If you dont thats ok, its opt-in.

We are having fun, making things, and building community. At some point the critics have to show us what alternatives and new things they've been building, what their attempts look like, what they are offering that is so much better...

noetic_techy13• 5 years ago

Awesome comment. Took me a bit to realize it was the emperor has no clothing.

I think NFT's applied to art make only nominal sense, and I assume that's what you were going for. I myself had to come to the realization that NFT's are really just flexing for the rich, because as anyone realizes, right-click save-as is all you need to have the art to.

However when it comes to gameing, its a whole different story. Want to own some unique special edition sword with rare attributes in the Zelda-verse? Buy the NFT block chain address to it that says you and only you can have it. Want to own the penthouse apartment in the zucker-verse? Buy the NFT key that says only you have ownership rights. Want to be a unique character with unique pets in World-of-crypto-craft? Buy the NFT's to unlock these. Sell them if you get bored for more money, and the game developer gets a cut!

The gaming application scenarios are enormous. That's why crypto gaming will likely be huge and I myself have invested in it's foundations for the long term (Enjin, Seedify-fund, etc). It's one of the few applications that makes sense outside of rich snobs flexing.

delroth• 5 years ago

None of this requires NFTs, you're describing microtransactions. Diablo 3 in 2012 released with the infamous "real world auction house" that allowed players to sell random virtual loots to each other using real money, with Blizzard taking a cut of the transactions.

bpeebles• 5 years ago

What do NFTs add to gaming compared to the status quo of in-game purchases that already exists in many games?

iamacyborg15• 5 years ago

None of what you just described requires NFT's though.

nsxwolf2• 5 years ago

What does NFT add here that you can’t already do with DLC and a credit card?

gitfan865• 5 years ago

Lets say I buy the NFT the penthouse apartment in Zucker-verse. What is to stop Zuck from selling 100 copies of my penthouse on other planets in his second life clone?

2pEXgD0fZ5cF• 5 years ago

Buy the NFT's to unlock these.

- Central authority over your ownership (The game developer/publisher)

- The right flag needs to be set to check if you own a specific item

- You buy the item from a central authority, who grants it to you in the game world (and can just as well choose to take it away from you again, they might not be able to delete the flag, but they can certainly ignore it)

You discovered databases.

If you move to player <-> player transactions, you have a basic ingame/platform marketplace...which exists already. Again no value is added here by adding NFTs.

The gaming application scenarios are enormous.

The only way NFTs provide anything other than a slower, way less efficient database is if all publishers and developers somehow got together and agreed on a standard to carry your items across games from different publishers:

1. Why would any developer want this?

2. Why would developers want to develop and maintain a spec to make this work?

Nux• 5 years ago

Haha, excellent! Hans Christian Andersen would be proud.

k__• 5 years ago

I'm not sure that media NFTs have much merit besides being an alternative to things like Patreon/OnlyFans.

On the other hand I bought and traded many Magic the Gathering cards and people buy stamps, even if both are copied quite easily.

You can only view or listen to media NFTs "content". Here ownership doesn't give you much more "features". But I own non-media NFTs and here ownership gives me more "features".

I can change where my ENS domain is pointing and I can access a DAO community because I own these NFTs.

1cvmask• 5 years ago

A lot of buying decisions is focused on “bragging” rights.

That’s why paintings from dead artists are usually worth more simply because the supply is finite by definition.

Even all the clothings of Versace the designer were snapped up right after his death and that is not even “art”.

diveanon• 5 years ago

ITT: a bunch of people who are not knowledgeable about defi or NFT’s sharing their anecdotes and opinions about defi and NFT’s.

jcpham2• 5 years ago

The NFT space has already defined that NFTs and ownership is all about clout - which means absolutely nothing to anyone outside of the NFT space, who isn’t actively daily trying to gain internet points and/or followers.

lvl100• 5 years ago

NFT serves one purpose: to legitimize crypto.

pengwing2• 5 years ago

NFTs are not the answer to many questions. Maybe you should start asking the correct questions.

The one problem NFTs solve perfectly: How to do decentralized and pseudonymous proof of community membership.

Successful projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club are not about the fancy drawings, but about the exclusivity of a social club. You may find that silly, but that does not diminish the human craving for status.

NFTs are the digital equivalent of designer clothes, luxury watches, and fancy cars.

aj311• 5 years ago

So in other words NFTs are scams just like designer clothes, luxury watches and fancy cars.

dboreham• 5 years ago

In that context most human activity is a scam.

paulcole• 5 years ago

The definition of a scam is not something that other people like that you dislike.

kilbuz• 5 years ago

If you're talking about mass-produced watches sure. But visit, say, Rexhep Rexhepi's or the Gronefeld brothers' workshops, and you would be hard pressed to come away without an appreciation for hand-finished mechanical movements that border on art.

LogonType10• 5 years ago

Didn't some artist get his NFTs stolen through Discord screensharing and he begged his Twitter followers not to acknowledge the possessor of the NFT as the real owner of art?

pengwing2• 5 years ago

I do not know this particular story and do not see the relevance to the points I am making. That being said, you cannot steal an NFT via Discord screensharing unless you manage to display your private key on screen. In which case: Children gotta learn that the stove is hot.

Joeboy3• 5 years ago

I think maybe you're talking about this: https://futurism.com/person-furious-right-click-saved-precio...

Which strictly speaking is about the art being "stolen", not the NFT.

mherdeg• 5 years ago

I saw something like this described here: https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1455325800291397633

My personal view here is that your continued ability to own an NFT depends on your ability to tell an interesting story.

If 51% of the professional clout of the art world decides you don't own something any more, you ... might not?

If the metadata that denote ownership of beeple's first 5000 everydays are accidentally overwritten due to a small bug, probably everyone will agree to ignore that.

But if someone puts on a super cool art-thief costume and does a livestream where they write and execute software that resets the ownership so it's their art now, while they play "The Thomas Crown Affair" soundtrack in the background, probably everyone will go along with this, yeah?

(Certainly the theft of the Mona Lisa increased its value!)

dktbs• 5 years ago

I'm assuming you're talking about this person: https://twitter.com/calvinbecerra/status/1454328591202721796

It was funny to see how they responded to losing their NFTs by being tricked on discord: they contacted the centralized storefronts (rarible, opensea) to have them marked as stolen.

breadbreadbread3• 5 years ago

"designer clothes, luxury watches, and fancy cars" all have understandable limits to production and have genuine scarcity (even if that scarcity is strictly controlled). NFTs have artificial scarcity... for little to no purpose other than monetary gain. Generally I am against the concept of artificial scarcity in any industry.

tantalor• 5 years ago

genuine scarcity (even if that scarcity is strictly controlled)

Scarcity can't be both genuine and artificially imposed.

Luxury sunglasses costing $3 to make are sold for $300.

tshaddox8• 5 years ago

In many cases the “limits to production” and “genuine scarcity” are functionally meaningless though, and surely have no measurable effect on the market price of the item. A cheap screen-printed t-shirt could be $7 if it’s printed with one design, and $100 if it’s printed with another design. It’s completely silly to point to “limits to production” and “genuine scarcity” as an explanation for this.

afoot4• 5 years ago

Many fashion houses literally burn their unsold products to create this scarcity or create limited runs. DeBeers have a heavy control over the diamond industry. If an artist says they'll only create unique pieces (a 1/1 collection) then while they could create more in future, they'll still have a market determined value.

egypturnash3• 5 years ago

There are a lot of people promoting NFTs as the solution to problems digital artists have, so it's worth spending some time talking about how that's not true, and how, in fact, many digital artists have been getting paid for their work ever since stuff like PayPal existed. Myself included, digital art's my job.

Your point that they are status markers has something, though! Especially given how most of the successful work seems to be operating under completely different aesthetics than those non-filthy-rich people enjoy looking at and funding (seriously all these randomly-generated things are ugly); the "fine art" world has had increasing amounts of work that you have to be trained to see as "good art" ever since photography made accurate depictions of a scene something everyone could have for very little effort.

sanderjd2• 5 years ago

Ignoring the NFT aspect of it, I disagree that all of the randomly generated art pieces are ugly. I think the vast majority are, but that some turn out great, and that this is the main reason it's an interesting medium. The artists who are the best at this are successful at upping the rate of outputs that look good, and that makes them good artists. It's very similar to how anyone can throw paint splatters on a canvas, but not everyone who does so is Jackson Pollack. And many of the individual pieces even from the most successful (artistically I mean) projects still aren't nearly as good as the best pieces, similar to how most Pollacks are not as good as his best.

This was long-winded, but all I'm saying is that I think generated art is an interesting medium, with both good and bad artists and good and bad pieces, like every other artistic medium. (Again, completely without taking a position on whether NFTs are the right way to create / sell these!)

zemo3• 5 years ago

BAYC is a community in the sense that it has members and non-members, but what binds that community other than having purchased some asset? Sure, that's one definition of community, but it's not a definition of community that I'm inspired to participate in, or a definition of community that I would be willing to stake my own money on.

nikk16• 5 years ago

There are a number of perks that a BAYC membership grants.

https://boredapeyachtclub.com/#/

Uehreka2• 5 years ago

NFTs are the digital equivalent of designer clothes, luxury watches, and fancy cars.

I feel like a lot of people (particularly on this site) see these kinds of things as shallow, uninteresting, and contributory to a lot of the worst parts of society. It feels… odd… to hear them invoked as a positive/useful thing.

Like, yes, I get it, a lot of people are shallow and want status symbols to fill the voids in their souls and give their lives meaning. But the idea of taking the clout-chasing mechanics that wreak so much havoc on society and going “what if we had more of that?”… well it feels a little like trying to invent digital junk food because real world junk food sells so well.

sanderjd2• 5 years ago

I totally share your vibe on this, but I also think we do ourselves a disservice when we turn our noses up at stuff lots of people actually like. I try to separate two different questions: "Is this something that people will find valuable?" and "Is this something I want to dedicate my scarce time and energy toward working on?". I think in the case of all this shallow stuff, those answers are "yes" and "no". But I think we have a tendency to conflate the two questions and since the answer to the second one is "no", assume the answer to the first one is also "no". I personally did that with Facebook for many years and really talked down the business because I considered it superficial and actively bad and not something I wanted to have any involvement in, but the truth is that it is a very valuable business that I just don't want to work on, and that's fine. I increasingly see a lot of this cryptocurrency stuff as very much the same. I may not like it, but that doesn't at all imply that it won't be valued by a large number of people.

CryptoPunk• 5 years ago

Status symbols became the first forms of money and may have increased the productivity of Homo sapiens many fold:

https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/C...

With NFTs, their functionality extends through programmability, where they can be used as collateral for self-executing financial contracts.

nikk16• 5 years ago

NFTs are the digital equivalent of designer clothes, luxury watches, and fancy cars.

I think this is a limited definition of what an NFT can be.

pjc502• 5 years ago

"Veblen Goods"

I've come round to the position that NFTs are not going away precisely because of this, despite not agreeing with the value proposition myself.

spicybright• 5 years ago

If it's pseudonymous, doesn't that make it easier to pretend to be someone else with their key?

If it's for exclusivity, why hide your identity? Is a list of members the club maintains not good enough?

dakom• 5 years ago

The actual problem is how society determines value. It's based on supply and demand, which can be gamed, rather than inherent value. For example, compared to jobs in the stock market, education is a low-paying sector, as is janitorial work and other fields that contribute disproportionately to the well-being of civilization because the focus is not about artificially gaming the system to increase financial reward.

I don't want to get too far into the weeds of whether or not some industries are worth their salt (e.g. entertainment, sports, etc.)- but the point is that financial value and real-world value are inherently disconnected.

This affects more than just raw economics. Just look at the MeToo movement- how many people are considered valuable due to their financial success as opposed to their inner psychological work and kindness towards others, and are therefore (wrongly) placed into positions of power.

Of course this affects the art world too. A painting of rare skill that stirs the heart and intrigues the mind is worth money, because it makes us more human and lifts the world up a notch. The other stuff is not worth it. Professional (as in its how they make their living) artists know this and game the system for financial rewards.

The NFT craze is just symbolic of the bigger issue. It works because it's a self-sustaining greed machine. Pure supply and demand, no inherent value. I would say it's a bubble but throughout human history, value and value have been unrelated, with no end in sight.

craze is an important word though. The mechanism of NFTs can be used for actual value, such as paperless tickets, real estate deeds, digital assets with utility etc. Even in a basic sense they can be an improvement over bespoke mobile apps and QR codes.

Anyway, what do I know, I'm barely making ends meet, and I'm one of the dummies who dabbled in BTC back in the day and lost my wallet carelessly because it seemed so worthless anyway.

Maybe I'm the problem and should just get on board with the whole greed thing. Maybe if I make enough money my opinion might be valuable.

moron4hire6• 5 years ago

The key problem with NFTs is that they are advertised as decentralized, zero-trust, proof of ownership.

But minting doesn't prove authorship and selling the tokens isn't exclusively transferring the data.

Say you want to prove authorship. Prove without a shadow of a doubt, prove mathematically, that you own this MOV of your indie film. You can't. You can't do it in the real world, you can't do it in the digital world. In the real world, we register copyright and then sue violators for damages in courts governed by laws put on the books by legislatures elected by citizens. That's the very system the NFT is trying to avoid.

And say you want to create exclusion for the data. You'd have to create a DRM system. But we can't even get DRM to work when we do have legitimate proof of ownership in physical media sales through authorized retailers. So even if DRM could, would, and should be implemented, then it's only as good as the teeth behind it. So now you're back in court, invoking the DMCA.

The concepts of Ownership and "decentralized, zero-trust" are incompatible. Ownership requires exclusion, exclusion requires a credible threat of violence if violated, and violence is monopolized by the State.

I would personally go so far as to say the entire concept of zero-trust is a boondoggle, it's really all just "shifting the point of trust", but that's a different argument for another day.

twox224• 5 years ago

It bums me out how the HN crowd lacks any creativity when it comes to anything Crypto. NFTs do solve a problem, and the problem that they solve is that creatives are getting paid for their creative output. Not every NFT is a flex, or used to launder money. Some folks use NFTs as Patreon -> to support artists who's work they admire. "Why not just buy a painting?" Well people who make digital videos and 3d renderings are artists too, aren't they? The promise of NFTs is that they offer a different way for people to interact. Ownership is always based on social constructs, so folks that are involved in this space need to have some consensus of what it means to "own" an NFT on whatever chain. From there these items can be gamified. NFTs run on top of what is essentially programmable money. What if we designate an NFT to an application (a smart contract) that in exchange issues tokens to designate fractional ownership of that NFT? Never in history has anyone been able to buy shares of highly coveted art... maybe now you can? Using smart contracts you can you can also conduct trustless exchanges of digital assets (NFTs). This is huge.

meheleventyone11• 5 years ago

Never in history has anyone been able to buy shares of highly coveted art... maybe now you can?

Umm, hasn't this been a thing since art has been seen as an investment?

Traster5• 5 years ago

I think people on HN react to NFTs perfectly resaonably and I don't think you make a good argument about their value for creatives. As far as I can see NFTs at the moment have done nothing for creatives getting paid. As you point out - we have solved the problem of creatives getting paid for their work, they can sell their work, they can take commissions, or they can use patreon or similar sites. I would bet that at the moment the commission that shopify or patreon are taking are much more creator friendly than paying to mint an NFT. You say that NFTs provide a new way to interact - but what is that interaction? What does an NFT give me that sticking a badge on a shopify store saying "Creative ownership of peice of work X" does not? And I don't see how that problem has anything at all to do with being gamified?

Never in history has anyone been able to buy shares of highly coveted art... maybe now you can

Well, firstly, let's be clear that it's highly contentious whether you meaningfully own the art if you own an NFT. But let's assume that's a solved problem. YOu can already buy shares of highly coveted art - https://www.masterworks.io . It's exactly the same model as NFTs - some individual buys the actual art, then they offering to sell "shares" of the art. The difference is that Masterworks doesn't carry all the risk of being scammed in the crypto market.

X6S1x6Okd1st3• 5 years ago

Just because patron exists doesn't mean alternative revenue streams are useless

twox224• 5 years ago

For one, NFTs for the most part have a perpetual royalty built in that's paid to the creator.

serverholic6• 5 years ago

NFTs are selling a much more personal connection with the artist. Buying merchandise or subscribing to patreon is much more impersonal. There is also a sense that you own something. You can show people your NFTs.

Masterworks is centralized. You rely on Masterworks for everything, whereas you can buy NFTs from a number of competing sources.

web2sucks4• 5 years ago

Are you serious? Artists aren’t getting paid? XCOPY a London based artist has made over $10 million on royalties from his NFT artwork. Please supply evidence to back up your bogus statements. NFT provide trust less royalties directly to the creators wallet with no middleman.

Source: https://xcopy.art/ https://superrare.com/artwork-v2/dankrupt-29757

Here’s another artist, Clon, he used to barely sell physical art at festivals, now he’s a multi million dollar art studio, because of NFT royalties. https://twitter.com/cloncast/status/1457425724860633090?s=21

Most people on Hacker news aren’t doing an ounce of research into the potential of NFTs and it’s clearly recognizable when i read all these comments. Reading a few articles by Bloomberg is not sufficient. You will all be left behind.

motioncuty3• 5 years ago

For me, as a creative, its the first and easiest way I have ever published my work.

phone8675309• 5 years ago

What stops me, technologically, from creating an NFT from an image that I didn’t actually create? If it was about creators getting paid then there'd be a better answer than "nothing, caveat emptor".

flowless2• 5 years ago

Nothing. Creators are getting paid because NFTs are associated with their brand, not just magically having a value because you minted one.

bnralt• 5 years ago

Someone mentioned hicetnunc.xyz here, so I went and took a look at their FAQ. I thought this was interesting[1]:

To make it easier for buyers, please leave a trace to any social profile or website in the description of your artwork, so potential buyers can validate the authenticity. If you can link the NFTs the artist is advertising on the profile with the NFTs on Hicetnunc, you can assume it is legit.

So NFT markets are relying on third party social media sites to prove authenticity. And I suppose artists would rely on the government an actual copywright law if they wanted to enforce anything.

[1] https://github.com/hicetnunc2000/hicetnunc/wiki/General

kall4• 5 years ago

Nothing. You are implicitly relying on centralized platforms like twitter for hardest part.

rip_netrunner2• 5 years ago

A few NFT marketplaces will verify identity but no where near thoroughly enough. Privacy and KYC are going to be the biggest crypto issue for 2022. More and more projects are looking to incorporate identity oracles like Global ID and are looking to provide no more data than is necessary for KYC inquiries using tech like Zero Knowledge proofs (ZKP).

Panther protocol is the most interesting of these projects I've come across, but every utility driven blockchain is making plans to incorporate identity verification in some way.

bsanr3• 5 years ago

Nothing. This is a canard, though, because the fundamental nature of blockchain technology allows a potential buyer (or anyone, really) to verify the provenance of an NFT. It's then up to the buyer to verify that the NFT originated in a wallet or account associated directly with the artist.

As a buyer, as always, it's your job to verify that you're not buying a counterfeit. As a seller, as always, the value of the NFT you hold is subject to its verifiable provenance.

PaulHoule3• 5 years ago

HN people are a wider community than crypto enthusiasts.

My mother-in-law would be as almost dismissive of NFTs as I am, except she doesn't understand technology so she won't be as articulate about it.

I think some crypto enthusiasts hang out with other crypto enthusiasts way too much and that is how they get HODler ideas and drive the price of things up like

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm

People on HN are mostly normies, except technically articulate. Crypto enthusiasts think we hate crypto, but it's because we're reflective of the wider community which feels like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogHtl6UFSSI

twox224• 5 years ago

This is a very good point, thank you for making it. I've always approached HN with my own bias, which is an interest in underground technology, hacking, and of course crypto. I never really saw the crowd as mostly normies, but I guess I never paused to reflect that there's a lot of content here I ignore, precisely because it is that.

nrjames• 5 years ago

Generative art (Processing, p5.js, etc.) has been a hobby of mine for 15 years or so. During that time, a handful of people were truly able to make a living out of it -- or even get paid for doing it. I ran workshops, taught people to code, helped students learn, etc. and it was all for fun, as a hobby, to get people interested in computer-based art and to learn a bit about programming. (Incidentally, p5.js is excellent for teaching programming to kids b/c of the immediate visual feedback.) Making a living or even getting paid to do this type of work was extremely difficult prior to the emergence of NFTs.

There's now an accessible marketplace for me to sell that work, thanks to NFTs. I do it as a hobby, not relying on the income, through Hic et Nunc, which runs on the Tezos blockchain. I do it for two reasons: it feels really good to sell my work, even if it's just for a few dollars. My entire family, including kids, get really excited when I sell something for just $3 or whatever.

The second reason is that it has vastly accelerated my ability to connect with communities of similar artists. For most of them, this has been a hobby for many years. Through them, I've joined some of the most positive, fun, and creative communities I've ever found on the Internet. Most discussion is not NFT related, but just about techniques, helping each other, fun and friendly weekly coding challenges, etc.

Say what you will about NFTs. I'm not blind to the issues they bring along with them. For a lot of digital artists, however, the accessible marketplaces and creative communities are truly groundbreaking. Honestly, the past 6 months of participating in these communities have been some of the best times of my life, full of new friendships and the occasional small financial reward. I'm very thankful for NFTs providing this because I know that, even if the marketplaces go away, the new creative communities will persist.

epinephrinios• 5 years ago

Anti-crypto folks around here remind of fast horses running around with a blindfold on. They have the power to run but complete miss the goal.

tedajax• 5 years ago

You have to be daft or a scammer to actual believe this.

twox224• 5 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

andrewla3• 5 years ago

Ownership is always based on social constructs

I mean, no? Ownership is always based on societal constructs; in the useful sense it means that the state is enforcing it. If someone takes it you can use violence or the threat of violence (legitimately, by proxy) to retrieve it. If someone else claims that it is theirs they can attempt to retrieve it through courts (with the the backing of legitimate violence or threat of violence by proxy again). You may exclude people from the use of the thing you own (with violence or threat of violence by proxy, or sometimes, by direct violence for which the state will excuse you).

It devolves always to the state having an effective monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. This is a social construct in a sense, but NFTs are a poor substitute.

Notably, most NFTs can be replicated bit-for-bit, and anyone else can emit a new NFT with the same exact payload, only lacking the traceability, but otherwise indistinguishable from the original. The only way to prevent that would be legal action, in which case you might as well dispense with the notion of the NFT itself.

In fact, a great business if you want to get in on this scam is to just sell counterfeit NFTs; even openly counterfeit! Call yourself "The Copy-Cat" and just resell Copy-Cat original copies of existing high-value NFTs. Even in the real life art world it has transpired that well-done forgeries have acquired a value of their own.

dandanua• 5 years ago

Any sane man understands this, but crypto people are too steeped in lies. They're detached from reality, just like their beloved crypto money.

Even if a perfect decentralized database will be invented, the violence, that enforces the rules under which the real world operates, can't be decentralized.

AlexandrB4• 5 years ago

Creatives I've listened talk about NFTs have said that NFTs are a terrible deal for them. "Minting" an NFT of their work costs a not-insignificant amount of money and there is no guarantee that anyone will buy the damn thing.

For the Ellens and Kanyes of the world, it's great, because their work is already in-demand and can fetch a huge price on the NFT market. For the 90% of artists in the "long tail" of content production it's probably a net loss over more conventional funding means like Patreon, commissions, and Bandcamp. Even if these collect a higher portion of their income as fees, there's less up-front investment (and hence risk) for the artist.

twox224• 5 years ago

I'm an absolute nobody in the art world. I started minting my art in early 2020. This year i have made about 2.5x my tech salary from NFT sales and royalties. NFTS are an amazing deal for creators.

You are right that there's a barrier to entry as far as minting costs, but it's a small price to pay to find out if you have an audience.

Furthermore, there are now thriving NFT communities on chains like Tezos and Solana, where it costs pennies to mint.

serverholic6• 5 years ago

This is new tech and costs will go down. Layer 2 tech is going to substantially reduce fees and make NFTs more accessible to your average person.

casi1812• 5 years ago

Plenty of people in art and music i know who are very happy with nfts. Theres thousands of people on https://beta.catalog.works/ https://foundation.app/ https://zora.co/

We also get royalties on resales which is great, rather than when i sell vinyl and someone buys a few and then re-lists them at a higher price on discogs and i get nothing. not to mention traditional distribution networks would take 50% of sales straight away.

The reason nfts exist in the first place is because so many in the art/music world are annoyed with what we have and are desperate for alternatives, art world has been building on crypto for years -> https://www.daowo.org/#artists-organise-on-the-blockchain

NicoJuicy9• 5 years ago

I see you're new and probably young. You're mistaking "lack of creativity" for realism.

Right-Click - Save image. Create an NFT, done. Work from an artist digitally is not unique and can be easily copied ( and even become more popular).

Creativity? Dogs, lost cowboy, punks, pigs, hungry aliens are the typical NFT's. That's not art, they mostly sell avatars.

ML models creating art => Not art and again the most technical knowledge person is getting paid.

Wash-trading has become the new normal. The people who pump and dump their own "art" see attraction and as usual, the average people are getting left behind with no piece of the pie. The most popular people ( not even artists) with the biggest following online win.

Nothing is legally backed. NTF's don't have copyright and you don't have a legal standing. BUT... You can cry on Twitter - https://twitter.com/RookieXBT/status/1421548360868286464?ref...

Mostly it's a technical person that steals artwork or just hires a digital designer for a couple of hours and then creates the NFT: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/20/22334527/nft-scams-artist...

That's realism.

twox224• 5 years ago

I'm neither new nor young - I'm just a guy that gave this thing a chance and really liked the results.

The right click save argument is boring. It's not the image that's the NFT, it's the entry on the blockchain.

I agree about the "typical" NFTs you're talking about, they are referred to as digital collectibles, and yeah they don't do it for me either, but within NFT land there are multiple eco-systems, including those that are centered around what you would traditionally perceive as art.

You are right that nothing is legally backed... but why does it need to be? The blockchain is immutable, so anyone who participates in it has no choice but to honor who the chain designates as an owner.

abraxaz• 5 years ago

NFTs do solve a problem, and the problem that they solve is that creatives are getting paid for their creative output.

This has been happening for 1000s of years already before NFTs.

Never in history has anyone been able to buy shares of highly coveted art... maybe now you can?

Yes, they have: https://www.masterworks.io/

jordanpg2• 5 years ago

I suspect that there is a strong relationship between distaste for anything crypto and lack of any crypto substantial assets.

The problem is that just about everyone here could be a multi-millionaire if they had just taken a few minutes to set up pool mining on their gaming rig back in 2010.

I think there is a tremendous amount of latent bitterness, embarrassment, and frustration about this. I include myself in this group. Folks should pause to reflect on this and determine how much these facts are clouding their opinions.

Crypto is just a new interesting technology. Maybe it will last, maybe not. But the amount of hate and skepticism on this forum is way, way out of proportion to the reality of the thing.

bsagdiyev• 5 years ago

Or, and hear me out, we’ve all seen our fair share of swindlers and con men in crypto and understand this isn’t much different.

kall4• 5 years ago

I think you are right that most people critical of crypto don‘t hold any significant assets. But that seems obvious and means nothing.

If you have a lot of crypto assets, you think it‘s a good thing. If you didn‘t, you would probably divest or would have done long ago. Even if you where ambivalent you may keep it to yourself or erase that doubt, because "you have to believe, wagmi“ seems to be pretty strong in the community (maybe thats too harsh, I‘m not in it).

If you don‘t think they are a good idea, why would you buy into them? Most people in tech aren‘t really strapped for cash and becoming a millionaire with something you think is bad for the world is something many people don‘t want.

But yeah, I also regret selling my 2013 era playing-around assets that would make me a millionaire today. It probably does color my opinion, and if for some reason I had kept them till now, I would have a very positive take, which is also self selecting and means nothing. If I had changed my opinion at any point in those 9 years, I would have sold at the next 10x. I still think that analysis and opinion is colored much stronger for those who hold then for those who don‘t.

rank02• 5 years ago

The problem is that just about everyone here could be a multi-millionaire if they had just taken a few minutes to set up pool mining on their gaming rig back in 2010.

You can say this about anything. Look at the stock market right now relative to 2010. If anyone had known the future, they'd be betting on sports and buying lotto tickets. Way OTM TSLA calls would've made me rich beyond my wildest dreams.

If the only response you have to the detractors is "you're jelly," then you're just falling for your own confirmation bias.

I have been using crypto since 2012.

But the amount of hate and skepticism on this forum is way, way out of proportion to the reality of the thing.

Crypto has enabled a staggering amount of fraud and criminal activity. Not everything criminal bothers me personally...but financial crimes and exploiting gullible desperate investors really rubs me the wrong way. Oh also, its insanely inefficient to have a global network of redundant computers perform trivial work which could be done by a single web app.

pjc502• 5 years ago

If I could take this week's lottery numbers back to 2010 I'd be rich as well.

The thing is, I saw a lot of this stuff happening back in the $400-$500 price range for bitcoin. A colleague ran an arbitrage bot and somehow managed to lose money. The value proposition has always been "you can sell this to others for more" and "you can evade all the existing financial rules", both of which are uncomfortable.

Where has all this crypto money come from?

sandworm1012• 5 years ago

> Never in history has anyone been able to buy shares of highly coveted art

What? Anyone can buy a part-share of any work of art. Want to own a 5% share of the Mona Lisa, just ask. If the owner want they can sell you a percentage of that object. Or you can buy a percentage without ownership rights. Or do anything else you want. Property law and the concept of partial ownerships has been around for thousands of years. Most every possible permutation is available should two parties agree.

twox224• 5 years ago

With NFTs you don't have to ask.

danShumway8• 5 years ago

Some folks use NFTs as Patreon -> to support artists who's work they admire.

No, I don't buy this. Patreon already exists. And when you factor in gas fees, people who use NFTs to support artists are picking one of the least efficient ways to do so. Etherium in its current form is not a scalable model for how to pay for content, the fees make micropayments unnecessarily cumbersome and inefficient.

The fact that none of these people who are using NFTs "to support artists" were interested in supporting digital artists through any of the multitude of existing ways that existed before NFTs leads me to cast serious doubt on their claims that they actually care about the art ecosystem.

So, let's say you actually want to support artists:

----

If you want to buy the digital equivalent of "shares" of an artist's work, use Patreon/Liberapay/etc and join the community of people who are regularly investing into their output. This is the preferable method for many indie artists, because many indie digital artists want predictable income, and Patreon allows you to commit to regular donations instead of one-off payments. Many artists will use Patreon as a way of soliciting early feedback and providing early access to their projects.

If you want to buy specific pieces, donate directly or just buy those pieces on any of the many art-selling sites that exist online (Gumroad, Itch, etc). This is the really straightforward way of saying "this thing that exists is worth money."

If you want to own something more tangible for supporting your artists, look into printing sites and physical products (Etsy, Topatoco, etc). This requires a little bit of setup from the artist, but not any more than NFTs would, and it allows you to somewhat "advertise" your support with physical objects in a more tangible/public way than NFTs would ever allow.

If you want to get something unique and personal out of supporting an artist, commission them. Commissions are often going to be more affordable than buying NFTs, they provide you with an actually unique product instead of just a unique ID number, they allow you to directly interact with the artist you're supporting, and commissions usually come with better IP assignments.

If you want to encourage investment into a piece of artwork, encourage the artist to set up a Kickstarter/IndieGoGo campaign. Kickstarter isn't just usable for funding theoretical products, artists can use Kickstarter to fund predictable work and specific releases. Krita for example used Kickstarter to fund development on specific features, even allowing contributors to "vote" on what features should be prioritized.

If you want status/clout for donating, and you want to be publicly recognized, sponsor artists. Many artists have systems where they'll give you public credit for sponsoring a piece of work. This is also a far better system than NFTs because that clout can't be re-sold or faked, and because the artist directly promotes you to everyone who sees their work; other people don't need to go find your digital wallet and validate it on the blockchain in order to recognize what you've done.

----

So what do NFTs provide that the above solutions don't? A tiny bit of standardization (although it's questionable how standardized they really are), and other than that, pretty much just speculation. NFTs are kind of awful at a lot of this stuff, they're expensive to create and trade, they're complicated to work with, validating copyright/legitimacy is annoying, they're more subject to regulation, they're less private, they can be traded around which devalues the original statement of buying them, a large percentage of them are subject to link rot, the "gamification" of them is laughably bad because gas fees make it impossible to do most interesting mechanics, and even their display/status value is underdeveloped and still in its infancy. But they allow you to gamble that the token you're holding will go up in value and that you can sell it later for a profit.

And that's why people buy them. Not to support artists, all of these people could have been supporting artists ages ago, and they didn't. They buy NTFs because they're a speculative asset. They talk about supporting artists because it makes them feel better and because that conversation feeds into the hype, and that helps their speculative assets grow in value. That's all that's happening here.

tata717• 5 years ago

I didn't read your wall, but, if I bought a $2M Jay Z art, or a deed to a famous house, and wanted to show that off on my Twitter page, web3 tokens allow me to do this — not Patreon.

Might be worth looking into as a Patreon feature — or a competitor.

egypturnash3• 5 years ago

Hi. I'm an artist who works exclusively digitally.

Getting paid for my work is a solved problem, I can draw a thing for a client and get money via PayPal or any of the other payment processors competing with it. I have a Patreon campaign to let my fans toss money in my tipjar for me to go draw whatever the heck I want to draw. So do people who make videos and 3d work. I see them doing it all the damn time.

Neither of these methods involve a system where huge numbers of people are converting energy into waste heat as they compete to be the one who gets the token reward for recording a pathetically small number of transactions.

"Proof of ownership"? How about "I have the source file and you don't"? How about "I have an email chain with the artist that goes from asking if they're open for work, through agreeing to a contract, and multiple WIP files, to a final rendering, source file, and settling up of the finances"? Why does converting energy into waste heat in competition to be the one rewarded for recording a tiny number of transactions need to be involved at all?

Dumblydorr• 5 years ago

This may be a dumb question, but why should people pay to "own" the art if it can be digitally copied and given to others (can it?)? I understand the artists need money and support, but other than that, why would anyone want to pay a lot to own a file that's accessible for viewing in a free way?

koonsolo4• 5 years ago

bragging rights

015a5• 5 years ago

Most of the arguments against NFTs ultimately boil down to "centralized systems already do this".

Which to me is very sad and uncreative. The entire point just flew straight over-head at ten thousand miles per hour. Yeah, centralized systems already do this; what is necessary to create a world where they don't? Where people can transfer value without the help of a centralized authority.

Ok so: "How do you verify authenticity". Two responses:

1) What if you don't? What if the NFT itself is the value? We already see this with, for example, the Bored Ape Yacht Club; people can create duplicates, but the originals are cryptographically verified. They created value out of thin air, which is where all value comes from at the end of the day.

2) And in other situations, where the value comes from something real outside the blockchain like the original artist; use centralized systems! It's not all or nothing! Centralized systems are great at verifying providence. Use 'em! "This NFT was the one the artist tweeted about".

Then they follow up with: "Lol I can just copy-paste".

Yeah! Isn't that fantastic? NFTs create value for the people who want that value, by having a concept of "ownership of the original". But nothing is stopping all of us from also enjoying it.

Finally, the end-stage of any debate always arrives at "its destroying the planet".

This is, of course, typed as a comment into a website via a computer burning dirty coal power, through 3,000 miles of underground plastic fiber and fifty network appliances, to a beefy server running in a data center. Afterward, Captain Planet will hop in their gas-burning car to drive to work, drink a grande Starbucks coffee from a disposable cup, flush the toilet ten times throughout the day, pick up the newest iPhone from the Apple Store on the drive home, then watch an hour of Foundation on their 65" TV with 5.1 surround sound.

I'm obviously being a dramatic. More generally and accurately; humanity is destroying the planet. We're really good at it. People act like NFTs are destroying the planet, while every day doing far more to destroy the planet than NFTs ever will. It's a bad argument, especially when NFTs (and ETH in general) present a fantastically optimizable solution to the problem of value ownership; they'll get more efficient over time. Data centers can easily be powered by clean energy.

Here's the axiom I've noticed: the pro-NFT crowd has seen every single argument against them. I don't know if the people who post articles & comments like these think they're being original, like they're the first one to notice that verifiable providence is a difficult problem, but trust me; many people in this community have been thinking about this long before you first heard the word "cryptocurrency". Your inability to exhibit creativity in reasoning about a solution to the problems you present does not mean there is no solution, or that the technology won't continue to flourish.

saltminer• 5 years ago

NFTs do solve a problem, and the problem that they solve is that creatives are getting paid for their creative output.

It did not. There are already plenty of ways artists can get paid for their work. If you had said "this creates another way for artists to get paid," sure (ignoring all the NFTs that are blatantly stolen), but asserting that this is the only way is false.

The promise of NFTs is that they offer a different way for people to interact. Ownership is always based on social constructs, so folks that are involved in this space need to have some consensus of what it means to "own" an NFT on whatever chain.

I see "ownership" tossed around so often. But I just pulled up two recently sold listings on OpenSea (one from Bored Apes, the other from Cryptopunks), and unless OpenSea hides information if you're not logged in, there were no rights transferred for the original works themselves - you just own the NFT listing. What's the point of shelling out six figures for mass-generated artwork when you don't even have any IP rights?

Sure, there's the "exclusive community" of Bored Apes (though you can apparently have your NFT stolen but still be in the community, so...not sure how exclusive it really is), but other than that, it just seems like a way to flex on everyone.

I have more legally enforceable rights to a $20 drawing I commissioned (paid for on ko-fi) than many NFTs going for $100k+.

It's either a speculative bubble which will burst eventually, or the community is worth the price (plus the flexing privileges).

iamacyborg15• 5 years ago

What's interesting is that in the ~240 comments so far, no one has actually engaged with the topic of the article, which is the real world display of digital art.

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

The discussion of DRM has ended since the 00s , there is really not much to say about it.

iamacyborg15• 5 years ago

I'm not sure you read the article.

smoovb• 5 years ago

Real world displays for digital art, like photo frames, could be the next step in digital art enjoyment. But will the hardware manufactures enforce ownership of public keys so only the owner's NFTs can be displayed?

fny2• 5 years ago

I invite you all to open your eyes a little. Sure, NFTs are a little ridiculous... but there's an evolving marriage between crypto and IPFS which I find very exciting.

We've all been complaining about the dangers of centralization, censorship, and impermanence on the modern web for years, and now there's billions flowing into an absolutely ridiculous application of decentralized tech.

Crypto is currently a very expensive toy, but I think there's immense opportunity for those who can help it mature.

Edit: If you're still arguing about whether NFTs are useful or cypto is currency, you're missing the point. We have a new substrate. It's fun, it's interesting. Go play!

And yes, paying millions for a jpeg is dumb.

serverholic6• 5 years ago

Personally, I believe in the long-term applications of crypto and NFTs. The NFT craze is weird but if it leads to mass adoption then fine by me.

I'm more interested in things like CityDAO where you can buy land and get a city-minted NFT that represents land ownership.

zkldi5• 5 years ago

And who determines who can distribute those NFTs?

Can I mint my own land ownership token? Obviously not, which means there's still a centralised authority on who owns what.

The game client could just change how it interprets address 0x32c12... as a plot of land and point it somewhere entirely different. This is still completely centralised!

The client for the game still has to explicitly only acknowledge a set of NFTs. Why do you even need the blockchain when the client already has a hardcoded list of NFTs it's willing to accept?

An SQL database, some APIs for trading, and the same set of things you can buy solve the problem infinitely more efficiently.

nradov• 5 years ago

What's the point of that? I can already buy land and get the title deed recorded by the county. It works fine.

unclebucknasty• 5 years ago

We've all been complaining about the dangers of centralization, censorship, and impermanence on the modern web

This a social/economic problem, not a technological one.

The Internet itself is built on open protocols and could well be decentralized. Instead we've allowed corporations to build walled gardens on top of it.

Blockchains won't magically solve this. They're just infrastructure, like a cloud database. From a meaningful decentralization perspective, it doesn't matter who's offering their computing resources to make it work.

What matters is the applications and access points that are built on top of the infra. Like the modern Web, this is exactly where we'll see centralization, censorship, etc. happen. Again.

meheleventyone11• 5 years ago

And of course in the NFT space you already see this with the marketplaces and blacklisting NFTs.

packetlost2• 5 years ago

Sure. Let me know when crypto isn't consuming the energy of a mid-sized nation and then we'll talk.

motioncuty3• 5 years ago

Then can you appreciate take about the non energy abusing blockchains or will you paint them all with the same brush?

danShumway8• 5 years ago

If NFTs actually solved problems around centralization, FAANG companies wouldn't be interested in them.

Twitter isn't promoting Mastodon, it's promoting NFTs. Reddit isn't opening up its APIs to 3rd parties, it's minting tokens. The fact that the same sites that centralized the web in the first place are interested in NFTs is strong evidence that they don't see NFTs as a threat to their control.

fny2• 5 years ago

Stop being so fixated on NFTs.

Think about the ecosystem. Think about how you could potentially use it to do something real. We actually have real money flowing into a space that no one ever cared about. There is new possibility here.

Just brainstorm for a while. Maybe you get nowhere. Maybe you get somewhere. It's the wild west. Have fun, and stop being a grouch!

bodge50004• 5 years ago

This would be more valid if crypto didn't start as something accessible by everyone (I remember many years ago mining bitcoin, successfully, on a macbook) and become an expensive toy over time.

Sure, it might go back down to being a genuine decentralised currency as it was always meant to be, but the same could be said for the old currencies that became investment vehicles like gold.

As for NFT's, I'm steering clear of them for now, but from what I know they're actually quite centralised, even though from a technical standpoint they don't have to be.

kall4• 5 years ago

I actually agree about the fun new substrate part. It‘s a shame that was basically ruined by the huge value pop.

If ethereum was 0.001 as valuable and thus could be x1000 more resource efficient and x1000 more affordable to build on, it would be neat. At this point the only thing that seems worth building are things to further pump value, and POW is a monster that we will not be able to get back into it‘s cage.

zemo3• 5 years ago

the whole "centralization = bad, decentralization = good" argument strikes me as very half-baked. The assumption is that decentralization is inherently liberatory. That assumption isn't guaranteed.

Every cryptocurrency that exist is built on the same fundamental principle: people with the most existing wealth (hash power in PoW, existing crypto in PoS, storage space in PoST) make the most income (whatever crypto in question). All cryptocurrency fundamentally is built on the basis of enriching the already-rich. Yes, cryptocurrency is decentralized, but decentralization alone is not a magical recipe for something being of benefit to all mankind.

Take BAYC, for example. Tradeable membership to a "community" whose only significance is that you purchased membership into an ever-expensive community to belong to. We can say what the price of a membership is quite easily, but can we say what the value of that membership is? If the price of membership goes up, does that make the community "better"? It is decentralized, is it therefore good? The drug trade is decentralized, is it therefore good?

In non-crypto assets, what percentage of wealth is owned by the top 1%? How about in crypto assets?

as for IPFS: You put something on IPFS, what is the guarantee that it will continue to exist on IPFS? It's entirely consensual; there's no guarantee that such a thing will continue to exist on the network unless someone consents to store it. So if you want to actually deliver on that guarantee, what do you do, run an IPFS node that always hosts that file? Feels like you're back at square one, needing to run a server to guarantee that a given file continues to be available.

Now, that's not to say IPFS isn't useful at all! It's very cool! The promise of duplicability and the way in which frequently-accessed data will be more widely replicated is incredibly fascinating on its own, and has tremendous value. I'm a server operator, so the notion of setting up a node to permanently host a particular item in IPFS doesn't bother me. But we shouldn't pretend that IPFS is a magic solution that guarantees the permanent storage of everything put on it. It's a nice addressing and content replication system.

I'm really optimistic about the concept of NFTs in the long run, and about the applications of solutions to the double-spend problem generally. My pessimism is not in the concept of NFTs, it's in the concept of blockchains, which are fundamentally only capable of increasing inequality. The entire concept of what makes blockchains secure is "in order to attack it, you have to have a lot of wealth, so you'd be destroying your own wealth": the security paradigm is "a rich person would not elect to sacrifice their own riches". The entire system is based on this premise.

When we have non-blockchain solutions to the double-spend problem, or NFTs that can be implemented without this promise of increasing inequality, I'll be excited about the space.

kmeisthax• 5 years ago

The problem is that the blockchain substrate you're talking about is actually a very poor fit for decentralized applications.

Let's compare it to it's earliest predecessor technology: Git[0]. This is a very useful technology within the problem domain of how to store and synchronize source code repositories (although it's UI sucks). However, individual users still need to choose who to synchronize with and what commits to accept. What blockchains add are restrictions to this model that make sense for the problem domain of digital currency: namely, you need to burn energy in order to commit, and you have to follow specific validity rules in order for your commit to be valid. These rules are specifically crafted to ensure scarcity and control over the resource the blockchain ledger tracks.

The problem is that most decentralized applications do not need a notion of scarcity. The whole damned point of P2P is to punish artificial scarcity. If I want to communicate to someone else over a decentralized network, I don't need a Sybil-resistant ledger to do so. I just need a private/public key pair and some means to match interested recipients and senders. Same with a lot of other decentralized use cases, which also don't need to be able to track scarce assets.

noetic_techy13• 5 years ago

All those poo-pooing NFT's will miss NFT gaming and gambling like a freight train to the face.

Reading the comments, I see too many people focused on the art aspect (of course this is OP's articles focus). NFT's applied to art is a bit stupid and makes only nominal sense. NFT art is really just flexing for the rich, because as anyone realizes, right-click save-as is all you need to have the art too, just not the "key" or "ownership proof" to that art.

However when it comes to gameing, its a whole different story. Think of it more like a key to unlock something unique in some digital world.

Want to own the unique special edition sword with rare attributes in the Zelda-verse or the uber lazer in your favorite open world space game? Buy the NFT block chain address to it that says you and only you can have it (check out Phantom Galaxies). Want to own the penthouse apartment in the zuckers-verse? Buy the NFT key that says only you have ownership rights. There are already people buying up digital lots in VR games in development. Want to be a unique character with unique pets in World-of-crypto-craft? Buy the NFT's to unlock these. Want to own a special randomly generated horse in a horse race gambling game? Buy the NFT to unlock, and feed your NFT in with someone else to "breed" a new horse with chances of getting the same rare attributes (this is the concept of D-race). Want to own the rare uber-pokemon in the poke-verse to battle with others (check out Illuvium, same concept)? Buy the NFT to unlock. Sell them if you get bored for more/less money, and the game developer gets a cut!

The gaming and even the gambling application scenarios are enormous. That's why crypto gaming will likely be huge and I myself have invested in it's foundations for the long term (Enjin, Seedify-fund, D-race, etc). It's one of the few applications that makes sense outside of rich snobs flexing.

Tell me I'm wrong.

estel• 5 years ago

Want to own the unique special edition sword with rare attributes in the Zelda-verse or the uber lazer in your favorite open world space game?

Isn't my favourite open world space game ultimately managed by a centralised developer, creating a centralised game; and recognition of my "ownership" only as meaningful as the developer happy for it to be?

Put it another way, what difference is there for me as a user compared to "owning" a ship in my open-world space game today?

vimy2• 5 years ago

Other games or apps can import your ship.

noetic_techy13• 5 years ago

The keys to your unique ship (possibly with randomly generated attributes) don't accrue in value the more its traded.

I see your point, but I don't think anyone getting into NFT gaming is going to care about the centralized nature of it. Save that talk for the currencies. Especially if the dev builds the game on top of a existing NFT engine that multiple games are built on, then they can't really "control" the market and are forced to focus on the creative and unique aspects of the generation of the NFT to the uniques in thier game and create some hype and artificial scarcity to bring in more players, rather then just spam everyone with the same ship that you can buy in game for 1,000,000 space sheckles. Even if the ship is unique in game asset, you can only trade it in game. What if I wanted to trade my ship for a uber character in some other world, and some other guy wants to get into the space game and has keys in the game I want to sell to me. Deals are made.

nikanj3• 5 years ago

What happens when a dev says "Hey the rare sword is really cool! insert into character_inventory (player, item) xxx, yyy"?

The NFT is worthless bunk, because the company is free to print just as many of the items as they please.

Jxl1803• 5 years ago

If the developer can insert items outside of the blockchain, then it isn’t a decentralized game. The developers are free to mint more copies of the same item as they wish, just like the US government is free to print as much cash as they wish. If they do, the markets will react and it will devalue the items drastically.

Traster5• 5 years ago

Doesn't the gaming applicaiton seem to negate some of the core aspects of crypto-currencies - the decentralization. If you want a rare artifact in the Zelda-verse, why wouldn't you buy it from nintendo? And why would nintendo want to support a 3rd party market place. I've bought some NFT from some guy - why is Nintendo going to abide by that? Why wouldn't Nintendo just set up their own store and let you trade your items there, and while they're at it they can create new items and issue them and tweak the store to control in-world inflation?

What you seem to be describing is "Here's something you might want to do in a game, and here's how you could implement that with NFTs" but what you seem to be missing is I can do exactly the same thing without NFTs, and in most of your scenarios as the game developer the NFT solution gives me less flexibility, less control and potentially restrict my ability to monetize. As a game developer I need to be able to step in and fix the economy if it breaks.

What you need to be doing is demonstrate scenarios that we can't trivially solve through traditional methods. The steam store already exists, you're not solving a problem by re-writing it to use NFTs.

jcfrei2• 5 years ago

The steam store is very limited because Valve is worried about violating AML (anti-money laundering) requirements. With blockchains these worries can be alleviated because all transactions are visible. It could allow developers to create in-game currencies that can then be exchanged for currencies in other games: Imagine selling all your World of warcraft gold for some gold in Zelda.

015a5• 5 years ago

Its excitingly easy to imagine a Ready Player One-like metaverse that could only exist thanks to NFTs. The set of iron plate iron I wear is expressed as a cryptographically-verifiable token within the game's world, which is itself powered by a connected network of peer-to-peer servers.

Don't imagine Fortnite. Imagine Counter Strike. Old Counter Strike, back in the day, when Valve never ran any servers, and you had your Favorites list of the best community servers, the same crowd of people showing up every evening to play. Thousands of these servers existed. Valve produced the game, and (most of) the code these servers ran. But, they were ultimately independent entities; many would re-skin players, or have custom weapons, or even custom physics engines.

These items were cool. But they were ephemeral; they didn't have any intrinsic value. So, Valve added Official weapon skins, and the Steam marketplace where they could be purchased and sold. They "christened" the providence of these digital items (and, of course, produced many of them).

Now, imagine Valve's christening of that item isn't necessary. The alternatives you outline look more like "how our world works today, with linear extrapolation". It's a recipe for further centralization of control into entities like Nintendo and Facebook. Yes, if Nintendo built a "metaverse" they'd run a MySQL database in a data center in Oregon that registered your ownership of some cool weapon skin; but what does a world look like where not only you and I can run servers for people to play on, independent of Nintendo, but where the concept of ownership of valuable digital items is still maintained, and a vibrant economy can exist in the exchange of these items?

Blockchain tech is truly a "have your cake and eat it too" situation in this regard. Valve's argument is that, yeah public servers are awesome, but their authority is necessary in this marketplace of weapon skins existing. Most gaming companies aren't even this open; their authority is necessary in both the marketplace, and servers (think: Fortnite). Blockchain tech says that none of that is necessary; the role of the game developer is to "set the stage".

This also has the potential to significantly change how developers are compensated. Valve takes XX% of every steam marketplace transaction (not to mention, the disgusting loot crate system they helped to pioneer). It's a tax on every transaction in the network, which acts as a negative force against usage of the network. Reframe this to the dev's only significant role being to "set the stage"; they invent the currency that is used to make these transactions, so their compensation is in owning a large amount of this currency (what they don't distribute). Now, their compensation is in growth-in-value of the currency; proof of stake! This is a positive force; their compensation goes up when more people value the currency.

garblegarble2• 5 years ago

Want to own the unique special edition sword with rare attributes in the Zelda-verse or the uber lazer in your favorite open world space game? Buy the NFT block chain address to it that says you and only you can have it (check out Phantom Galaxies).

Where's the decentralised part there? A game maker can already add a row to their database saying your account owns the item with a lot less overhead. You already have to rely on the game maker anyway to allow you to use it in the game, whether it's a row in a table, a digitally signed message, an NFT or a paper certificate.

NFTs would add lots of complexity to the cases you mentioned, but I don't see that they're bringing any value other than buzzword compliance.

noetic_techy13• 5 years ago

If the developer was smart, he would build the NFT on an existing market place so as NOT to have control over its price, and in a sense de-centralizing it (even though all currencies have a foundation group pulling the levers at their core). Think Steam coins to buy steam NFT's, across multiple games. Focus on the unique aspects for your NFT to unlock whatever and create hype for your game. If someone wants to sell or trade the NFT for other NFT's in other games in said market place, then they have the ecosystem to essentially escape that in game asset to the real world and assign a real world fiat price to it. You suddenly have something that can accrue real world value the more rare/scarce it is. Like they do for in game loot, people will go nuts for it and keep farming / trading, especially if you keep adding features to someone unlocked item rather then take away from it. This also lets the developer create hype to attract players. Like owning a classic car only produced when the game launched or in the early years with long since nerfed overpowered attributes, and oh by the way you can put a modern engine inside if you want, but only if you have the NFT to unlock the engines for that type. If the dev does anything to screw that up like spamming an item or screwing with how its interpreted in game, they will have a lot of angry people deleting their game as their NFT values crash. Competition of eyeballs. I'm not saying its not going to be fraught with problems and people struggling to figure out what works and what doesn't. Some will choose to wall off their ecosystem, some won't, may the best prevail. Markets will evolve. Developer will lean the direction that makes the most money and I think that will be the direction where you have the least control over it once the NFT is in the wild. Its going to be the wild west, but so is crypto currencies in general. In fact I think crypto currencies is still in its infancy stages. Look at all the alt-coins struggling for unique aspects they bring to the table. At some point their may be one or a handful that do it all, but right now its a shit show of entrenched technologies and up and comers struggling to steal each others market cap.

dgellow2• 5 years ago

Everything you describe has been possible for decades, without the need of NFTs or other cryptocurrency concepts. Even the market aspect has been done in the past, you have for example Diablo 3's Auction House where users could trade for real money, and was a horrible gaming experience.

iamacyborg15• 5 years ago

I thought the AH was great in D3, certainly light years ahead of the trade experience in Path of Exile.

noetic_techy13• 5 years ago

That was mostly a walled garden trading something in 1 game for fiat. I think building your NFT on a platform that allows you to essentially escape that in game asset and let it accrue value and be tradable to assets in other games is the key. A competitor may even let your NFT from some other game unlock the equivalent weapon/item/whatever in their game. Competition of eyeballs. The dev does anything to nerf that asset or screw up how its interpreted, causing the value to crash and angry gamer, they lose the eyeball. Markets will evolve. I don't think anyone that walls off their garden will prevail. If Nintendo NFT's / coins only apply to Nintendo games, then who cares. Steam coin/NFT's for the win.

madeofpalk9• 5 years ago

Tell me I'm wrong.

Nintendo can do this all currently. NFTs, crypto, Blockchain all have nothing to do with it.

I myself have invested in it's foundations for the long term

Ahhhhhhh there it is.

Normally its etiquette to start the post off with *Disclaimer: I have financially invested in foo, bar, baz which are companies that do the idea im promoting"

noetic_techy13• 5 years ago

I think those who wall off their garden rather then make their NFT's open and tradable with other games on a larger market will lose. I can't trade my Nintendo unique items for a a ship in Eve Online. A dev could even play the competition of eyeballs game and say that one games NFT (built on a decentralized non-company controls platform) will unlock equivalent items in their game, so come jump ship!

And honestly I was not trying to shill. Just saying I think there is an application enough to invest a little see where it goes.

andrewxhonson• 5 years ago

Those exchanges with NFT's don't do anything different from storing that ownership information in a normal database, do they? The novelty in the situations you propose would be that the general public can verify ownership.

nikanj3• 5 years ago

And how is that any different from WoW Armory and similar open-to-public portals that let you check the gear for a player?

AlexandrB4• 5 years ago

You can do this too already. IIRC there's a web-based character viewer for WoW that lets you see equipment/stats/etc. I'm not sure what NFTs add here other than the remote possibility that you will be able to use the same NFT in a different game. The chance of this happening across franchises is vanishingly remote in my opinion though.

Using NFTs for loot like this also gives a great excuse for publishers to make more games online-only, which is a net-negative as far as I'm concerned.

AlexandrB4• 5 years ago

All those poo-pooing NFT's will miss NFT gaming and gambling like a freight train to the face.

This seems like a win-win to me. Gambling is a waste of money and NFT gaming sounds like an awful slog ("play to earn" indeed) combined with "pay to win" for those that can afford it.

No thanks.

noetic_techy13• 5 years ago

Gambing is gambling. Nothing to say there.

I think good devs will try to balance that pay to win aspect out. If me and my guild get together for a day long slog into level 50 of some dungeon for a guaranteed rare NFT loot drop worth $10,000 in real world fiat tradable on a open market for assets in other games, then it might be worth my while.

ufo2• 5 years ago

Saying in the open that cryptocurrencies are good because they allow gambling is an interesting development in the ever-evolving field of excuses for why cryptocurrecy is useful. What is next, saying that ramsomware is actually a good thing?

s-lambert3• 5 years ago

DLC cranked up to 11, that just sounds like it will make modern games even worse.

mch824• 5 years ago

How can Link’s sword be moved into another game?

How can the value of a t-shirt in Animal Crossing be preserved beyond the life of the game?

noetic_techy13• 5 years ago

You could easily say your NFT will unlock an equivalent in my come, jump ship and give me your eyeballs!

True, but then again that may have to factor into the price. A game like Eve has been running for years, if not more then a decade. The longevity of your game will just increase the price. But yes, as some point your NFT may go to the graveyard unless someone else picks up the ball and says their game will support it.

Its the wild west, may the best win.

zkldi5• 5 years ago

The fact that other games can refer to other <items> on the blockchain doesn't implicitly mean that they'll work in every game though?

The amount of effort it would take to support every item for every single game in every single game is impossible.

That means developers will:

1. Have to actually care about implementing items from many other games. 2. Have to choose a subset of items to implement (the valuable ones)

meaning that the only things worth owning NFTs of are the most valuable items in the game.

Also, NFTs are literally just pointers to data, there would be absolutely nothing stopping any game developer from inferring hash 0cd42e... as an entirely different item, or one with entirely different stats.

What appeal does this actually serve? Developers of different games and companies have to collaborate still, and they could just do that with an SQL database and APIs. Infact, that approach would be millions of times quicker, more efficient, and with no blockchain overhead.

noetic_techy13• 5 years ago

I dont think you need to support multiple games, but a dev with a similar game could say that some other NFT from some other competitor game will unlock equivalent items in my game, so come on over and jump ship! Competition of eyeballs. Expecially if those NFT are not in some walled garden and built on a common platform. You could then trade NFT's from one game for NFT's in another. I'll trade you my zucker-verse penthouse for a unique ship in Eve Online!

Yes, a dev could screw with interpretation, but that would likely create a lot or angry people and kill your cash cow as they move on. Zuck makes your pentouse smaller you are going to be pissed.

kall4• 5 years ago

Is it "missing it" when I see the train, I understand the train, I believe it will be going very fast, but I don‘t want to board because it‘s going to a terrible destination?

piva00• 5 years ago

So basically... CryptoKitties?

Nothing is really new under the Sun.

PaulHoule3• 5 years ago

My current #1 side project is "three-sided cards" which live in both the physical and digital worlds.

There was that time I got a "free" inkjet printer and discovered that the ink would dry out if I didn't use it regularly, so I challenged myself to print something every day.

I have been through a year of continuous improvement and thinking a lot about how to develop more physical-digital objects, performances, etc. I am still dismissive of Facebook's "metaverse", but my current work and planned work is all metaverse-ready.

hosh• 5 years ago

These artworks are infinitely reproducible and therefore hard to value, if anyone can own a perfect copy of the work with the click of a button, what value does it have?

From the perspective of non-dual Shaiva Tantra, the value of rasa (aesthetic, beauty, art), is its transformative experience of the consciousness as consciousness experiences art. From such a frame, it is uniquely valuable to the specific viewer and the art; no two experience are ever the same, not fungible or reproducible. The transformative experience can expand meaning and significance to one’s journey in life, how to better contribute to the world. It is not monetary value, and yet can have great value to both individuals and society.

On the other hand, modern art has spent an (imo excessive) amount of effort deconstructing classical notions of art, so it shouldn’t be surprising that among what gets deconstructed are the societal valuation of art itself.

btbuildem• 5 years ago

I don't know about this art stuff, but NFTs seem made for solving the problem of deepfakes. Say a politician does a speech, it is recorded, hashed, a corresponding token is generated and archived. We can all verify that the token exists and has not been tampered with. When someone posts a video of that speech, we can verify whether it's the original "as aired", modified in some way, or fully synthetic. The politician may very well be lying through their teeth, but we can at least verify that the recording is authentic, and of reality as it happened.

Jxl1803• 5 years ago

Can’t we just do that with a pgp signature verified by the public key of a politician?Blockchain seems like an unnecessary step.

casi1812• 5 years ago

Hmm, but where would we put the data that we know will be safe and trusted? We need a shared database we can all use. One that keeps a record of the changes of its state over time, and anyone can verify it and host a node!

Ah but it might get spammed. We could add a small fee for each write action. But if someone gets too many of the tokens could they alter the history by rewriting it? we need some kind of consensus mechanism, we could reward participation but make it expensive to lie? Make cooperation the winning move in the game. How do we give the tokens value? maybe some kind of natural scarcity to their issuance, or a fee burning mechanism. As more people use the database the value of the tokens will go up too as they are needed for writing to it, which in turn makes it more expensive to attack and safer storage.

That sounds like it might work.

apples_oranges• 5 years ago

true but to be fair a classic digital signature would be enough, as well. blockchain is a bit of overkill for this purpose

mch824• 5 years ago

How is this different from publishing the pgp signed sha for the digital file, which is an inherent property of the file?

For example, how Ububtu authenticates its Linux installers, https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/how-to-verify-ubuntu#1-overview

zwarag• 5 years ago

I'm not sure, but I think the trust part (münchhausen trilmma) is handled differently between pgp and blockchain. In pgp you have the web of trust and you choose your "entry" point and who you trust. With nfts you're on blockchain, and have the hole network have a consensus. Therefor the "entry" point for trust is different.

allenu• 5 years ago

That only really solves the problem of authenticity if all speeches are “NFTed”. If you see a video of a politician making offensive remarks outside of a speech setting, you can’t say it didn’t happen just because it wasn’t in NFT format.

hirsin2• 5 years ago

Or when the politician in question releases an edited video and "NFTs" it or signs it with their DID. Then you're just back to trusting a consensus of trusted media disagreeing with them.

pornel5• 5 years ago

NFTs struggle to authenticate even themselves.

NFT is just a JSON with a URL, and if the URL isn't guaranteeing immutability, then NFT isn't either.

kmmlng• 5 years ago

Yes, to make this clear: the actual image (or whatever other type of media) is not stored on chain, only a link to the image.

serverholic6• 5 years ago

This is why many NFT websites back the NFTs with IPFS.

ferdowsi• 5 years ago

There's actual serious work being done by cryptographers to address the gravity of this problem. NFTs aren't it.

https://c2pa.org/

zohch8• 5 years ago

Has this problem not already been solved by digital signature schemes, and are NFTs not built on these very digital signature schemes, and have the digital signature schemes not been utterly useless for solving the deepfake problem, and have deepfake problem not been completely exaggerated to begin with?

I'm actually unsure what you gain from NFTs over simple PGP except the buzzword factor.

DanHulton• 5 years ago

Audio doesn't work like this.

If you're speaking and two different news agencies record it, there will be two slightly different recordings, which will have two different files, with two different hashes.

Hell, NFTs don't work like this. They are a hash of an entire file. If I take a slice of a speech for a deep fake, that's a different "file" from the whole speech and will have a different hash.

Every defense of NFTs is always like this, flailing around, misunderstanding basic reality, human interaction, even their own technology, just to try to keep the grift going. It's frustrating.

aj311• 5 years ago

More importantly people don't work like that. In practice most "fake news" are based on quote mining which is easy to disprove without any knowledge of cryptography whatsoever by just checking the original source, but people share this crap without any verification because it conforms to their beliefs.

Technical solutions won't fix social issues.

naomeux• 5 years ago

I do believe in the potential of NFTs. There are different perspective and speculations about this technology, but it will help us as time pass.

015a5• 5 years ago

I'm not in love with NFTs, but many of these points are trivially easy to shoot down.

artists are waking up to find that their digital artworks are being sold by fraudsters to unwitting victims.

As the author attests; this is just a problem with art, not a problem with NFTs. The potential reward for counterfeiting an NFT isn't significantly higher than traditional art, especially given how much cooler the NFT markets have become over the past few months, and the degree to which we understand how prevalent traditional art counterfeiting is (you'll notice this as a theme; cryptocurrencies don't generally create new problems, they simply make the existing problems of our world much more open and obvious).

The vastly more correct criticism to lobby in this domain is that, generally, the systems and mechanisms to prove the providence of an NFT will fundamentally rely on some kind of centralized identity verification (maybe just a Twitter verified badge); this is antithetical to the goals of crypto, in general.

Though, in practice, it is not antithetical to the goals of most NFT holders. And that's far more important.

This comes hot on the heals of what feels like mania

History would remember "tulip mania" as a "tulip investment opportunity" if it had never crashed.

Point being, yes there are some signals which suggest that an investment domain is in "mania", and NFTs did relay some of those signals. At this point, the mania has died down quite a bit; but only time can say for sure.

A critical piece of information that many people fail to consider when seeing the prices these NFTs are sold for; they're purchased with ETH (or another cryptocurrency). CNN lists the price in USD. There are tons of people who, over the past five years, became "ETH millionaires"; they may have thousands of ETH, but that's different than millions in cash. There's nothing to spend ETH on. Converting it into USD, to go buy yourself a McClaren, would require a massive tax payment at best, and in many countries the laws surrounding this are so unclear, or straight illegal, that a fiat bank account suddenly receiving a $50M transfer may draw the ire of authorities. So; something comes along they can actually buy; they buy it.

You can argue against the utility of such a transaction. I'm not sure that's relevant, but I'd argue its actually massively utilitarian: Early adopters believe, one day, they will be able to buy a Big Mac with their ETH. Buying a random piece of art for $5M USD in ETH generates news headlines. Its an investment, both in an asset they can eventually, hopefully liquidate, and also in buzz to get more people into the system.

Transactions made through the Ethereum wallet of Beeple are responsible for 78,306 kilograms of CO2 emissions

One could, with some amount of validity, argue that securely transferring millions of USD in wealth while only creating the pollutive equivalent of six UK adults is actually an improvement on traditional systems, considering the massive amount of "hidden pollution" our traditional financial system consumes.

The bigger issue is that this is an argument of per-transaction scale, and similar carbon outputs are generated even with smaller transactions. Gas prices are the biggest criticism of ETH right now, and the best solutions the community has generated to date are mostly new sub-chains (like MATIC) which don't have the same marketing momentum ETH does.

there is still no clear timeline in sight for Ethereum

This is the big question. The timeline outlined on the official Ethereum site is quite clear; mid to late 2022. Whether they can stick to that timeline is another matter; democratic systems are messy, as anyone who has participated in the US government can attest.

Things are looking rather positive though.

nkrisc3• 5 years ago

Perhaps my understanding of NFTs is lacking, but what prevents someone from pulling a scam like in The Producers and simply selling multiple NFTs for the same work of art, apart from people finding out about it? Is simply the fact that the artist publicly states “this hash belongs to this piece”? So if the buyer wasn’t paying attention or didn’t validate the hash there’s nothing stopping someone from selling as many NFTs as they want?

tshaddox8• 5 years ago

I imagine it’s no different than an artist selling a painting they claim is one of a kind but isn’t.

lottin18• 5 years ago

Well, a painting is of one a kind. It can't be replicated with exact fidelity, unlike an abstract sequence of 1s and 0s.

bodge50004• 5 years ago

If I'm understanding you right, you can and its extremely common. I don't even think its a scam or frowned upon

nkrisc3• 5 years ago

If that’s true, then it leaves me even more confused than before.

cyber_kinetist5• 5 years ago

In current capitalist societies, ownership of property is fully secured by the military (police) and judicial (law) power of the state. NFTs provide you with neither of these (not even copyright protection), so yes: there's no one stopping from doing a right-click on your image.

Maybe if everyone was really "believing" that ownership really originates from the Ethereum blockchain (just like beliving that strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is a basis for a system of government), then the ownership could be recognized socially without any coertion or violence. But so far the only people really beliving in this system of values are elites and crypto enthusiasts, so if you really are one of those people who want NFTs to be a basis for ownership, you've be better off pandering to the government to enact laws to arrest people for right-clicking.

zohch8• 5 years ago

For context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ownership

Ownership is the state or fact of exclusive rights and control over property, which may be any asset, including an object, land or real estate, intellectual property, or until the nineteenth century, human beings.

In light of this

In current capitalist societies, ownership of property is fully secured by the military (police) and judicial (law) power of the state.

Any examples of non capitalist societies that actually governed more than just a city for more than just a couple of months where there were no enforcement of exclusive rights over anything?

Because if I can think of none, just for example, USSR would get real pissy real fast if you infringed on the exclusive rights which they thought existed over a whole host of things.

Sure, in most non-capitalist societies people had no exclusive rights to their own labor, or their own persons, but there were still many people who had exclusive rights over things that would be enforced by use of force. And the state did have exclusive rights over the person and labor of their subjects, which is a key differentiation from most "capitalistic societies" as you call them.

afoot4• 5 years ago

The market dictates the value. As a test, create and mint an exact replica of a Bored Ape NFT and try to sell it for the current minimum price of 32 ETH or around $150k.

lapetitejort• 5 years ago

You don't need to defraud people when you can just sell one with a primary color of #e0b0ff and another with #e0b0fe.

afoot4• 5 years ago

The marketplaces verify the collections. So if you're buying from a famous artist on OpenSea, you know the NFT is the one from that artist. There are copycat collections but it's no different from someone trying to flog a fake Banksy a the local shopping mall.

015a5• 5 years ago

Ultimately the system will evolve toward more centralized entities which can verify the providence of items. Whether that's an auction house, or a twitter verified badge. The sites which allow "viewing" and "transacting" the NFTs will display this "chain of authenticity".

Thus, its baked into the price; plenty of counterfeits exist, but the "real" one ("this is the one Deadmau5 tweeted about") will be worth the most.

The argument that this is antithetical to the distributed goals of blockchain are missing the point; its a marriage of old-school centralization and new-school peer-to-peer. Centralization is great for some things, like verifiable providence. It's been a negative force in other things, like limiting or taxing access to financial services & marketplaces.

Furthermore, if you're in the camp of "zero centralization"; it's great for that too. Imagine an artist publishing their GPG key, creating an NFT of a piece of art, then signing some part of the content of that NFT with their GPG key.

logiczero• 5 years ago

This idea of combining NFT and GPG to demonstrate both ownership and authenticity is very intriguing. Would the artist's public GPG key have to be something similar to a verified Twitter account, i.e. some kind of due diligence by a third party that the key actually belongs to a specific person/artist? How would the artist "sign" the artwork with the private GPG key in such a way that the signature wasn't simply duplicated when the digital artifact was copied? Is there a way to combine some identifier from the NFT with the GPG key such that there was a way to cryptographically demonstrate authenticity?

brightball2• 5 years ago

Nothing. Literally nothing.

I've just enjoyed watching my Solana go up so that I have a way to make money off of this silliness. Just need to time the exit before the fad goes away.

tata717• 5 years ago

Consider flipping it into Loopring, which strives to (and seems to be succeeding in) serving a much wider market, with custody staying on ETH network in case Loopring network eats shit.

nikk16• 5 years ago

Artists can already sell multiple NFTs for the same work of art. But this is information the buyer already knows.

Also to avoid scams as an investor, you'd typically want to invest in artists with a reputation.

tata717• 5 years ago

Or sell the NFT and then put the painting through a grinder, like Banksy!

bravura• 5 years ago

This is not unique to NFTs, and is based upon the trust you have for the artist / gallery that is selling the work.

If---in the traditional art world---you buy a $35,000 fine art photograph from a limited edition of 10 prints by the photographer, you also trust that the artist will not make a second run of 100 prints. Or if they do, that the second run will be denoted and priced differently, so that the original run retains most of its value.

nkrisc3• 5 years ago

Yeah, I understand that. That’s why I was wondering if NFTs solve that, if the uniqueness of an NFT provides any value.

stjohnswarts2• 5 years ago

It's a lot harder to fake and fool people with the Mona Lisa than a fake of the original jpg of the yelling lady/cat meme.

jrm4• 5 years ago

NFT's are a crap solution to a very important problem that needs solving.

The "shares" idea is a MUCH BETTER ONE; i.e. flip the model. Make giving money to artists a collective and inclusive thing that we can all participate in and reap the benefits of multiple works, as opposed to the silliness of fake exclusivity over individual works.

wombat-man2• 5 years ago

that to me is just patreon or something. Like sell me a postcard or a print or a book. I can get into that.

the NFT thing is fine, but I just don't think it hits the same as wandering around a friends house and seeing a cool painting on the wall. You having a NFT with a link to an image that's hosted on some site that's in some kind of NFT wallet or on your personal website just doesn't have the same effect.

Not sure why some NFT prices are so high, maybe some people are just very rich and are having fun.

dmonitor• 5 years ago

You can already do that. I already do that because I'm a furry. NFTs don't contribute anything here can't be replicated by a spreadsheet.

shadowtree2• 5 years ago

The Internet was designed and built by hippies (literally bearded dudes out of Berkeley). Open protocols, bits are free. Copying is a core function.

Open Source, BSD, GNU, ... all an extension of that thought.

While this was awesome for the spread and easy build out of the modern apps we all use, it had a massive "flaw" when it comes to property rights.

This was exemplified by what happened to music through p2p file sharing, e.g. Napster. Bits don't have copy protection.

The industry tried to roll back this fundamental freedom of the web via DRM schemes, with massive pushback from the old guard of netizens. But, freedom is never perfect, the devastating effect on artists is real. Streaming kind of solved the copy problem, but the amount you can charge for music now is miniscule. (Just using music as an example).

NFTs, web3, metaverse are all now being positioned to rollback this fundamental flaw of the Internet - copy protection, ownership on the bit level. Digital scarcity. There will be no Right-Click Copy in the metaverse, no screenshots in web3. The struggle with NFTs right now is that it is this idea of digital ownership on top of bits that don't support it, hence this mind-boggling maelstrom of crazy.

Personally, having grown up in HACKER CULTURE (see the name of this very forum, oh the irony) e.g. having spent time at copy parties in shady buildings, admiring the intros/demos on cracked games, the BBS scene ... this whole web3 thing creeps me out. I totally get why it's kids doing it, they don't know it better, and maybe this is just normal, the pendulum always swings.

Some VCs will get ultra-rich pumping this, big corps will be all over it (charging for bits? ironclad copy-protection? price arbitrage on premium bits?), even government will see the upside - no more anonymity, every bit is signed.

Bleh.

jayd16• 5 years ago

How do any of these technologies stop data copying, exactly?

NFTs seem pretty ineffective. At best you can argue a walled garden might end up being the most popular incarnation of the metaverse, but its not fundamental to it.

shadowtree2• 5 years ago

The metaverse will be built on closed protocols. Crypto is at odds with free bits.

both are trying to bring real world concepts into the digital.

they are at fundamental odds with the foundational tech and protocols of the current Internet.

people complain about Apple's "walled garden". Just watch what happens if the whole web3 is one big controlled ecosystem, pay for play. I can create bits out of thin air right now - I don't need to MINE them.

just insane how everything is going into hard reverse.

missinfo• 5 years ago

Imagine Kant had issued the “categorical imperative” as an NFT. It could be worth billions today. Other ideas such as hell or courage or irony are so old no one knows who invented them. But a market in ideas conceived as NFTs could solve this. I envision such a market as a powerful tool to determine the value and originality of ideas, while providing a powerful social incentive for the development of more and better ideas. Notice that because ideas are purely abstract, they are exceedingly fit to be represented by purely abstract entities like NFTs.

https://brunomacaes.substack.com/p/nfts-and-the-marketplace-...

NFT's aren't the answer to the problems of digital art

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